Israel Used Palantir Technologies in Pager Attack in Lebanon

You seem to be holding Israel to an impossible standard of guaranteeing zero collateral damage, which IHL does not require because no military is capable of that.

and I interpret his analysis as that it was targeted enough to be legal.

You are, in fact, wrong.

Planting a bomb on each soldier would be even better.

If anything, it's the opposite.

Ignoring that it was Hezbollah, not Hamas, I would point out that many of Hezbollah members are civilians.

What? Hamas didn't have any of the pagers, Hezbollah did.

Otherwise there's no reason to use such a large bomb on some houses.

Causality in war includes people that were only injured. This was far, far more than a 50% casualty rate. More like a 9552% casualty rate.

I've never heard of "42 targets", and given 12 people died total, obviously 42 targets were not killed.

You should provide some sourcing for your numbers.

The Lebanon pager attack: 12 civilians (including 2 children) killed out of 42 total deaths (28.6% civilian casualty rate).

Gaza genocide: Leaked IDF intelligence documents show 8,900 militants killed out of 53,000 total deaths as of May 2025 (83% civilian casualty rate).

This is not correct. Each one that had this pager was connected to Hezbollah, i.e. a soldier of Hezbollah. This attack was meant to "disable" a very big portion of Hezbollah, which it did (4000 of them).

This is one of the most sophisticated attacks to avoid civilian casualty.

You specific argument though misuses even those numbers. 42 is the number of people actually killed. I couldn't figure out how many were targeted (how many pagers did explode), but I'd assume the number could be much higher than the number of deaths. Without that number we cannot determine how well targeted this was. I also don't think it is plausible that for every target you injure 100 bystanders. So I would assume the number of targets was at least an order of magnitude higher.

There's also another number from Hizbollah, that 1500 of their people were injured. But no idea it those would be included in the 4000 wounded number.

Here is Hezbollah boasting to Reuters before the pagers attack, about how it moved to using pagers and couriers to counter Israeli intelligence.

As you can guess, with the advent of mobile phones in the 2000s, pagers became obsolete in Lebanon

Yes, because these pagers were only used by Hezbollah and Israel was able to read the messages they sent on them so they could know if they were in use by a Hezbollah member.

Where you draw the line is complicated. If you look at what the allies did in WWII for instance, there are some decisions that are highly problematic (firebombing wooden Japanese cities or the RAF deliberately bombing German civilian populations) but there are also some decisions that I think were reasonable even with a very high civilian death toll (e.g. the US Eight Air Force conducting bombing raids on German industry with limited precision, leading to high civilian casualties).

I think this specific incident was lawful. Hezbollah was the aggressor here, and it spent the war launching attacks that were far less justifiable than this one (much more limited targeting). I think this was a reasonable act of self-defense. That doesn't mean that I think that everything Israel did in the war was lawful.

You might be. If it was Hezbollah's guns that exploded and not their pagers, I would expect most people to agree that you would be "off the hook" if someone else was handling that gun.

Not saying pagers = guns, but it's a spectrum surely.