The pagers

Watching the State Department's press briefing today. Spokesperson Matt Miller confirmed that the US was not involved with, and did not know beforehand about, the explosion of pagers belonging to members of the terrorist organization, Hezbollah - Hezbollah vows retaliation against Israel for deadly pager explosions across Lebanon

Asked by a reporter if he thought Hezbollah was a legitimate target for the pager attack (about 10:15 in), he responded that he didn't have all the info about this specific attack yet, but in general ...

Obviously we believe that civilians are not legitimate targets for any type of operation and that no country should be targeting civilians. No country, no organization should be targeting civilians. Terrorist members of a terrorist organization are legitimate targets for countries to launch operations against, and those are the principles that we hold ourselves to, and those are the principles we expect other countries to uphold in their operations.

When asked by another reporter whether the US supported an action like the pager attack (about 19:05 in), Matt said again that he couldn't yet speak about this specific attack, but ...

[I]n general, yes, of course we support operations to target Hizballah militants, who continue to launch terrorist attacks against civilians. Israel has a right to defend itself against terrorism and a right to carry out legitimate attacks against terrorists – not civilians, but terrorists. So as a general proposition, yes, of course.

I'm not surprised that the State Department would take this stance, but many of the reporters did seem to be.

Hezbollah began attacking Israel the next day after the October 7 attack by Hamas. The leader of Hezbollah called the attack on Israel "heroic". Since then, Hezbollah has launched thousands of rockets, drones, missles at Israel. One of those killed 12 children in the Golan Heights. Tens of thousands of Israelis living in the north have been displaced for almost a year. Hezbollah remains in the south of Lebanon, on the wrong side of the blue line. And that is not even mentioning the tunnels - Gaza’s Vexing Tunnel Network Pales Beside Hezbollah’s Land Of Tunnels. What are the Israelis to do?