Israel has vowed to retaliate after Iran launched a barrage of ballistic missiles at targets across Israel in a dramatic intensification of a conflict that appeared to be escalating out of control.
“Iran made a big mistake tonight – and it will pay for it,” Benjamin Netanyahu told a meeting of his security cabinet late on Tuesday. “The regime in Iran does not understand our determination to defend ourselves and our determination to retaliate against our enemies.”
The unprecedented Iranian salvo of more than 180 ballistic missiles came less than 24 hours after the Israeli prime minister ordered the largest ground incursion into southern Lebanon in a generation.
At least several children were killed. You’re missing the point though. A targeted attack means you want to attack a single individual and know exactly where, how, and when to attack. Israel just pressed a button and blew up a bunch of pagers without actually knowing who they would hurt.
Are you saying that the children were holding the pagers, or are you avoiding my question of how many civilians were holding pagers that went off?
A pager that out of necessity has to be on someone for it to work seems to fit that bill.
Single individual: targeting the person assigned to the pager
Where: right next to the pager
How: explosion
When: perhaps the weakest point, if someone was sleeping then the timing wasn’t right.
Again, my initial point is that it was targeted, but not precise enough. Targeted does not mean 0 innocents were hurt.
The where/how/when answers you provided need to be a lot more specific to fit the definition of targeted. A proper example of a targeted attack would be the US assassination of Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Great example to discuss! I’ll point out that the r9x used in that strike is considered a precision weapon. Again, targeting and precision are two different things.
It feels like you’re conflating the two - do you consider them to be the same?
They’re different things but they do complement each other. You can’t have a targeted attack without some high level of precision. I’m genuinely struggling to think of an example a “targeted attack” without some kind of precision applied in the attack.
So in this case, I’d suggest that it was a targeted attack, because there’s definitely credit due for setting up shell companies to infiltrate the supply chain to modify devices that are very much only for Hezbollah members to use for Hezbollah activities.
However, the actual method of killing wasn’t precise enough in the sense that there were too many civilian casualties. I’m talking out of my ass here, but if the payload was instead ye olde polonium poisoning on a needle that you’d get pricked when changing the battery, for example, that’d be a very precise and targeted strike.
I would say the polonium needle example you provided would be an example of a much more precise and targeted attack, yes. I still fail to see how you could define the blowing up a bunch of pagers as targeted. Even if the pagers were meant exclusively for Hezbollah. The only way I could kind of see your argument is if all targets were confirmed to be in military bases or something like that. The fact that these were blown up in civilian areas like homes, schools, stores, etc and that civilians actually died because of it, discredits the “targeted” claim in my opinion.