[anigbrowl]

It is war, but I think there's a qualitative difference you're overlooking, which will inure to Israel's detriment. That difference is the use of asymmetric tactics traditionally employed by the weaker party, deployed by a logistically and technologically superior foe at scale.

Consider the incident a month or two back they assassinated a Hamas negotiator in Iran. That was also asymmetric (in that Iran is a super-hostile environment for any Israeli operations). But while people questioned the probity of assassinating a quasi-diplomat with whom you are ostensibly negotiating, and the Iranians were surely mightily pissed off, nobody serious was suggesting it was a war crime.

Here you're not only using something that feels like a 1950s idea of a remote controlled death ray, however selective, but also subjecting the civilian population who witnessed these thousands of parallel attacks to extreme psychological anxiety. The size of the HN threads on this indicate that a lot of people find it distressing because we live surrounded by such embedded electronics (I have 9 or 10 devices on my desk). Imagine how much worse it is for people who are out grocery shopping or whatever and see someone killed or horribly injured by an explosion right next to them.

[tptacek]

I'm not sure I understand why this is "asymmetric warfare". I think that's a term that actually doesn't mean a whole lot, and mostly means "the things weaker adversaries use to level the field against stronger ones". I think a lot of what USSOCOM does/trains falls under the definition of "asymmetric", or would if you discarded the part of that definition that said "weaker opponent". Almost certainly†, conventional military tactics would kill far more civilians in Beirut than will ultimately end up dead in this attack.

I have another theory as to why we have very long threads on HN about how distressing these attacks are, but we don't need to dig into it on HN.

† Again, I'm cognizant that we're still getting details about this attack.