I'm not at all convinced that's the case, unless it comes out that the targeting was extremely broad (like if Israel was just putting bombs in every pager going into Lebanon rather than targeting a specific shipment going to Hezbollah) I don't think there's really any new risk for other countries.
I'd disagree - this seems highly targeted. There aren't that many people with pagers but pagers were a specific way for Hezbollah to speak to operatives.
The news reports are saying a lot of explosions happened at hospitals. Considering that pagers are still in common use by Western doctors, I'm wondering if they considered hospital staff to be acceptable casualties.
these weren't random pagers. They intercepted a shipment of thousands of pagers for hezbollah and rigged them with explosives, and set them off likely using hezbollah's own command and control network.
> Random doctors in the hospital won't have these.
To put a slightly finer point on it: Even an uninvolved doctor somehow came to own a booby-trapped pager, they wouldn't be carrying it around every day unless it was configured to listen to the hospital's broadcast network of real medical messages, as opposed to leaving it tuned to Hezbollah High Command or whatever.
They probably run their numbers and reasoned that more than 75% or something of pagers from a specific batch were used by hezbollah or subjects close to them and decided that it was an acceptable casualty ratio.
"You can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs" approach applied to armed conflicts.
There are tens of thousands of Hezbollah members. If anything, the attack was on a much smaller scale than it could have been. Unfortunately for Israel, not every Hezbollah member had a new pager.
