I think the struggle here is that the combatants aren't on a battlefield in these modern wars. They're walking around a city full of civilians. Observing this it's hard not to feel like it wasn't a military target, however it clearly was.
Not only that, but from reports, it sounds like they deliberately sent an alert several seconds before detonation to ensure that the user of the pager would be the direct target. Or perhaps that was just the time it took for the fuse to detonate the explosive? Either way, some of the videos out there show the incredible precision that the owner of the pager was taken down and people in the vicinity were unscathed.
