Comment on Wait a minute, we've been going about this all the wrong way!
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months agoThey were a shipment for general consumption that went to a dealer near the Iranian embassy.
yeah, that’s generally how products work. Even in the US military the government just walks up to a company and goes "can you make this? And if they say yes they pay them money, or times of war just go “hey i need you to make this”
the only difference here is that it’s not quite a formally established military, so it’s using off the shelf components and products, which is pretty common for these smaller groups.
although depending on the dealer, that dealer may have been the source of intrusion, so there’s that.
The target was the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon, and virtually everyone else was just collateral damage.
targeting one specific guy through the most broad means possible seems, weird. I doubt this was a highly specific attack. It would be a very, very odd way to do it, but then again this conflict has been nothing but odd, so i can’t really put it past them lol.
Regardless, i doubt they solely intended to target that one guy. While everyone else is technically collateral, it’s probably considered to be beneficial to the cause. At least by israel.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Not that weird, in the history of espionage. As another example, the CIA used a vaccine drive in Pakistan to target Osama bin Laden’s hideout.
When your government believes neighboring ethnicities are “bug people” who need to be exterminated, collateral damage is viewed as a perk.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
“The program was ultimately unsuccessful. It led to the arrest of a participating physician, Shakil Afridi, and was widely ridiculed as undermining public health.”
hmm. Also it seems this was to check DNA from blood samples. So not really a good comparison here.
i mean that’s a potential reason, but these are also pagers meant for military communications purposes right? Why wouldn’t you want to target military personnel if you’re already gunning for one person. Besides these are probably more dangerous left unexploded than what currently happened. Imagine what would happen in 20 years when these make their way onto the second hand markets. You could very well accidentally kill innocent people then. You can still do it now, but since they’ve presumably all been deactivated, it’s probably not a huge concern.
There are definitely concerns over war crimes and shit, but unfortunately i’m not the ICC or ICJ so i can’t comment on that with authority.