Saturday, September 28, 2024
Elder of Ziyon
Israel haters are claiming that this is a war crime because there were so many civilians presumed to have been killed in the strikes. They say that this violates the principle of proportionality.
They are obviously wrong. Nasrallah, his bunker and the people with him are as high value military targets as can be imagined, and nothing in international law says that the highest value targets cannot be struck - just that the attacker must do everything feasible to minimize collateral damage. International law (as codified in many nations' military manuals) says that the presence of civilians within or near military objectives does not render such objectives immune from attack. As I've shown previously, the latitude in attacking within the bounds of proportionality have been ruled to be far more generously than the "experts" claim for Israel. Hundreds of civilian deaths would indeed be proportional to the military value of killing the single most important decisionmaker in Iran's war against Israel.
But how many ended up dying from the airstrike?
Each building had about 7-9 stories, presumably with at least four apartments per floor; one can expect that hundreds of people lived there. So we would think that death toll would be in the hundreds, assuming no warning.
The Lebanese minister of health, Firas Abiad, held a press conference on Saturday detailing all of the deaths since the beginning of the war October 8. Here is what he said about Friday's airstrikes, according to LBC TV:
Regarding the toll of Friday's Israeli strike on Beirut's southern suburbs:Total deaths: 11.Total injuries: 108.
ELEVEN?
And out of that eleven, how many were Hezbollah terrorists and their partners?
For contrast, the health ministry says that 33 were killed Saturday in airstrikes across Lebanon. One would think that they would have been able to recover far more bodies by Saturday than only eleven if there were hundreds of casualties from the massive Friday airstrikes.. The hospitals would record the numbers.
How could the death toll be so low?
Maybe Israel did manage to obliquely warn the residents? According to Dearborn.org, the airstrike occurred two hours after residents in the area were warned to evacuate, but I cannot find that reported anywhere else. Maybe Israel calculated that a general warning for the entire neighborhood would be enough to get many residents to flee but not specific enough to make Nasrallah risk going aboveground, thinking it was a trap for him. However, outside this one source, I cannot find any reports of warning for that airstrike.
Somehow, Israel seems to have managed to minimize civilian casualties even when destroying four buildings. Perhaps the death toll will rise, but it seems unlikely to reach more than a few dozen. Which is absolutely mindblowing.
This also proves that Israel knows how to use 2,000 pound bombs in a precise way even in an urban environment - the exact opposite of how it has been framed by the media and Kamala Harris.
One other point. If you look at Google Maps you see that most of Beirut can be seen in Google Street View (blue highlighted section.) But large parts of the city have no street view, including the Haret Hreik area that was struck.
Those areas are controlled by Hezbollah, which probably instructs Google that some areas are off limits from open source photographs. Presumably the only people that live there either Hezbollah members, their families or otherwise linked to Hezbollah.
Not to say that any civilians linked to Hezbollah deserve to die, but they knew exactly where they lived and why.
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