The problem with explosions is that they injure everyone nearby, not just the person with the explosion in their pocket.
Agree, but the explosive inside is very low, so the damage is mostly going to be inflicted on the person who this pager belonged to. From the initial reports all the casualties were linked to Hezbollah and even the girl was a daughter of a member of Hezbollah.
Me personally, I don’t defend the actions of Israel, but still think it is a lot more targeted than dropping 2000lbs. bombs over densely populated areas. Another question is of course if this will achieve anything other than strengthening the resolve of those people.
Unfortunately, nowadays to win a war, you simply need to be the richer and more advanced nation, and Israel has the upper hand here.
That “even the girl was a daughter of a member of Hezbollah” part got me very angry.
Kids don’t deserve to get blown up, even if their parents are mass murderers.
Most would blame the mass murdering parent for endangering the child.
In this instance I’ll blame whoever planted a couple of thousand explosives on people all over the place and detonated them simultaneously without caring who was nearby.
Imagine one of them was on a plane carrying your mother, or one was dropping off their kid at the school your kid goes to, or at the supermarket with you behind them in line.
No one planted explosives all over the place in this scenario. We have videos of what happened, people standing nearby weren’t harmed.
Where were the explosives then? One central place?
In pagers explicitly for receiving messages from a Hezbollah controlled network. About the only thing more direct would be putting more explosives in the rockets, but that would cause significantly more collateral damage.