> If you attack a military target that is surrounded by civilians, and that attack injures or kills those civilians, then those civilians were also targeted.
They are not targeted.
You could say that depending on number of innocent casualties or the likely number the attacked could be reckless and/or disproportionate in attacking in a way that was likely to cause such injuries. In certain cases you could claim they broke the laws of war although the laws of war are practical (they're not meant to prevent all deaths of civilians, the countries who agreed to them didn't intentionally make it impossible to fight including in defense).
And even if something is not a war crime you could still claim it might be immoral but that is a more complex argument.
I agree with your last point, but tbh, the exact idea of "targeted" is splitting hairs IMO. I'm not arguing that civilians were the primary target, but not caring that they were around, and being fine with their death as long as the combatant was dead, in my view makes it seem that Israel's enemies are not the combatants of Hezbollah, but generally just the Lebanese people.
If someone droped a nuke on a city to kill 1 person, does it matter who that person was specifically targeting? Does the distinction if his intended target matter at all? I would think you and I would agree that obviously it doesn't matter at that point, but then I ask, at what point does that distinction matter?
It's not splitting hairs it gets to the point when people falsely accuse them of every single thing in the book. Weapons have always been imprecise but things that don't have any benefit to the war effort and target innocent civilian deaths are war crimes. You may ask how much the difference matters morally(it still does matter a lot intent it rule based vs consequences based morality systems I'd argue for somewhere in between) but yes targeting matters when it comes to usually false claims of crimes
They do care about not killing civilians the question is how much? And is that enough? There will almost never be any operation near cities without civilian casualties.
This particular operation was an extremely Targeted operation that included tricking Hezbollah into selling pagers meant for Hezbollah internal military use and only deploying small explosions minimizing any unnecessary casualties.
It's not a very good piece of rhetoric asking about nukes because Israel actually has nukes. They didn't use them.
They have carried out other heavier strikes on Lebanon that had worse ratios but were justified by military targets such as Hezbollah leader Nasrallah.
Your suggestion also seems to totally not understand how Israelis view Lebanon. Until recently and still Lebanon does not control violence within it's borders.
Hezbollah (a militia/terrorist group that takes orders from Iran) was more powerful then the Lebanese army and decided what happened on the ground. Iran which had a countdown clock counting down to the destruction of Israel.
Of course they were supposed to be disarmed after the Lebanese but unsurprisingly the UN resolution didn't have any effect so when they attacked and threatened to invade Israel did what they could to take them out. Israel would love to have peace with Lebanon but that's not likely if Iran and Hezbollah have anything to do with it.
That's ridiculous
> If you attack a military target that is surrounded by civilians, and that attack injures or kills those civilians, then those civilians were also targeted.
They are not targeted.
You could say that depending on number of innocent casualties or the likely number the attacked could be reckless and/or disproportionate in attacking in a way that was likely to cause such injuries. In certain cases you could claim they broke the laws of war although the laws of war are practical (they're not meant to prevent all deaths of civilians, the countries who agreed to them didn't intentionally make it impossible to fight including in defense).
And even if something is not a war crime you could still claim it might be immoral but that is a more complex argument.