by eesmith | 2025-06-23 10:13:09+00:00
The authors are Amichai Cohen and Yuval Shany, two Israeli scholars. How much effort do you expect me to do to understand their biases?

"Hezbollah operative" is carrying a lot of weight in that paper. Are all Hezbollah operatives members of the military arm of Hezbollah?

No. Your link mentions they were also provided to "medical staff, who may or may not have had connections to military activities) and other allies (such as the Iranian Ambassador)." Is your claim really that medical staff and the Iranian Ambassador were specific targets in the pager bombing?

That essay lists several assumptions which must be true for its conclusion to hold. Are they all true?

Who is going to adjudicate the evidence and determine if those assumptions hold? If only there were an international agreement that would force the principal actors to provide evidence. /s

My country, the US, destroyed a hospital in Afghanistan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunduz_hospital_airstrike Oops! Sorry, it was a mistake. Here's $6,000 in compensation for each death.

Do you believe my government?

If Iran says "oops, we launched a cluster bomb by mistake", would you believe them? If they provide $6,000 in compensation per death, would that resolve the issue?

If Israel doesn't believe that cluster bombs should be used in war, why didn't they sign the anti-cluster bomb treaty when so many other countries have? Why was it okay for them to use some four million cluster bomb submunitions on south Lebanon in 2006, plus earlier uses in 1978 and 1982 (source: https://www.mineactionreview.org/assets/downloads/Lebanon_Cl...) but not okay for Iran to use them now?

(Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Lebanon_War, "They criticized Hezbollah's use of unguided Katyusha rockets, and Israel's use of unreliable cluster bombs – both too close to civilians areas – suggesting that they may have deliberately targeted civilians ... According to Egeland, 90% of [the cluster] bombs were launched by Israel in the last 3 days of combat, when it was known that a UN resolution was on its way.")

If Israel's stance is that conflicts must avoid disproportionate civilian causalities, explain their policy for destroying all the hospitals, buildings, and tents in Gaza. Is the bombing of Gaza non-discriminate? I'm sure you can find whitepapers justifying that decision. That emperor wears no clothes.

As I pointed out, those same Geneva Conventions say to not place military objectives in densely populated areas. Iran claim their attacks target the Ben Gurion airport, biological research facilities, command and control centers, and other military objectives.

Bnei Brak, the seventh most density populated city, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popul... (fourth according https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnei_Brak), is about 10km from the Ben Gurion airport. I don't know where those other targets are located. Do you?

How do you tell if Iran is lying and deliberately attacking a civilian target with no military objective, or is telling the truth and the missiles are simply not accurate enough?

I believe your point is that Iran should not retaliate until their missiles are accurate enough to pinpoint military objectives. I believe restrictions on technology exports to Iran prevents them from developing missiles which have that level of accuracy. Putting those two together means Iran should never retaliate, correct?

It sure seems to me like if you have no choice but to place military targets in or very near to densely populated areas, then perhaps you should work really hard at keeping peace with your neighbors, rather than pissing them off for decades because you have powerful friends to protect you.