I get going after your ‘enemy,’ but this is even worse than firing randomly into a crowd of Palestinians. They pushed a button not knowing who would die. This is low, even for them.
I can’t even think of a devil’s advocate argument for this.
I believe the devil’s advocate argument would be that, based on Hezbollah’s internal communications, they intercepted a shipment of pagers purchased to replace their (potentially compromised) mobile phones, which were being distributed exclusively to Hezbollah operatives. That would make it the most precise military strike of all time.
I feel like people are missing one of the more heinous aspects of this, which is that it injured thousands of people and only managed to kill ~10 of their targets. The outcome of this attack is going to be general terror and potentially hundreds of life altering injuries but very little military advantage.
The advantage is huge. 1000s of militants are now seriously injured and are no longer battle ready. Many will never be again. Massive success for Israel, and one of the most precision strikes ever used. Now there will be fear from any communication devise exploding, there will be 1000s of man hours wasted taking other stuff apart to check it, and morale will be down as well.
Killing civilians isn’t a war crime. Deliberately killing civilians, or not taking reasonable steps to minimize civilian casualties is a war crime.
“Small” explosive that is embedded in something passed to and likely worn by the target is unlikely to be a war crime. If they somehow snuck a 1000lb bomb into one it absolutely would be however.
Close - you’re looking at letter, not action and intentions.
Booby traps are banned for use in ways that are likely to be used by civilians and remove protections on the civilian population. Things like placing explosives on public transport, the side of the road, in marketplaces or protected places. Targeted strikes, like on a piece of civilian equipment that is likely to only be used by the target (cellphone, personal vehicle, laptop) are permitted as they are unlikely to be set off by a random civilian.
What is a question, however, is if the targets were actually combatants.
It’s literally a war crime to attack people who are not actively participating in combat. That includes people who are members of your enemy’s military.
That is absolutely not true. An easy example to disprove your argument would be the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. The American Navy was caught completely by surprise. At the end of the war, there were some Japanese tried for war crimes, but not for the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.
I’m willing to argue that the unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor was replete with war crimes by modern standards. I’ve cited some documentation above. Since doing that I’ve learned that there are also specific prohibitions against booby-trapping: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/ccw-amended-protocol-ii-1996/article-7 Turns out that Israel has violated many international standards for war crimes and terrorism. It’s simple mystifying to me that any of this is controversial.
I’ll quibble with you on ‘booby trap’. Booby traps are like what Russian is doing in Ukraine when they retreat: putting primed grenades next to doors that will be opened when Ukrainian troops come through. Or maybe later if the Ukrainian troops don’t find the booby traps: civilians who come back to the ‘cleared’ areas. This is why booby trapping is prohibited. The enemy might miss it and later on a civilian might come across it.
The Israelis modified devices meant for military purposes by a para-military organization. These pagers weren’t being sold in local markets to anyone who would buy them.
That means the term “war crimes” is meaningless because it would just mean war. The point of specifying some actions as war crimes is to denote things that even in war you shouldn’t do not just say that all wars are crimes
…and you know which telephone numbers send data to the pager and at which time. That is sufficient to track or identify individuals.
If this is a supply chain attack, the attacker already knows, which pagers are part of the organization they want to target.
What this thread here shows really well, is that the general population vastly underestimates the abilities of intelligence agencies and technology in general.
As I wrote, you can track which pager got paged when. And you can identify who uses that pager. The pager itself does not need to transmit anything for that.
Pager transmissions contain a sender and a receiver. That’s all the information you need. If a known Hisbollah sender sends to a receiver, that receiver obviously has some ties to Hisbollah.
A mobile tower will send it a message, but since there’s no two-way communication, theres no way to track where the pager received the message. (Even if it was a two-way one, you need at least three good points of connection to be able to triangulate it.)
So how exactly do you identify who’s using a pager you don’t even know the location of?
If you know the phone number of a Hisbollah member and they send messages to a set of pagers, these are likely Hisbollah pagers. If you do that to several phone numbers, you get a pretty comprehensive list of members. You don’t need to know, where exactly they are. That’s simply not relevant.
And again: if it’s a supply chain attack, you don’t even need these contacts. Just a single entry point into the supply chain of the organization.
And since tracking the devices is actually impossible, how would you know which pager is where and held by whom,
Say one of the pagers wasn’t delivered to the person who you “know” it to belong to. Say it got dropped in front of a school. Say another person who has one and even is a Hezbollah member, is visiting a children’s hospital, because they’re people too and usually have reasons to fight (even if their fighting style is immoral to some). Say another is eating dinner with his family. Etc. Etc. Etc.
There’s no way to verify any of that. It’s basically just as bad if not worse than carpet-bombing. Unless you implant a device like this on a person and then have surveillance on that person to know where they are and who with when you detonate the device, you’re probably doing a war crime.
This doesn’t constitute an armed conflict under international law. Israel has absolutely no right to target civilian areas in Beirut using explosive detonation devices with complete disregard to civilian casualties. But I see you’re German, so the psychosis doesn’t surprise me. Israel could probably start raping people (oh nvm that did happen) and you’d probably find an excuse for it.
So, what exactly do you think would be a proper reaction here?
Hisbollah is de facto a state actor in Lebanon. Lebanon is doing nothing against a group whose declared goal is the destruction of Israel, including shooting unguided rockets into civilian areas.
Now, how would you address that? Unless you have any idea how else to solve this, you’re simply talking out of your ass.
Maybe they should stop their genocide in Palestine. Hesbollah has said on multiple occasions that they’ll stop any hostilities if a permanent ceasefire is implemented.
I hardly think it is necessary to be an expert in Near-East conflict or politics in order to condemn what basically amounts to a terrorist attack.
Whether or not they should do something is a different issue all together. But dismissing criticism because they don’t provide an alternate solution to an intricate problem is hardly any more helpful. Israel has many more pathways to do this properly, one idea would be the ICJ.
You’re also falling into an overgeneralization fallacy. While Hezbollah is in the lebanese government, this doesn’t make all citizens of lebanon complicit. Hezbollah doesn’t represent all of Lebanon, neither do Hamas all of Palestine or Netanjahu all of Israel.
Then I guess Hezbollah attacking IDF servicemen wherever they might be, including civilian areas in Tel Aviv, is completely okay. Even if it comes to some civilian casualties.
Both of them are ‘wrong’ and ‘okay’ when they do this. But in some way Hezbollah is ‘more wrong’, because they (re)started it. The only result being a lot of useless casualties with no end in sight.
I get going after your ‘enemy,’ but this is even worse than firing randomly into a crowd of Palestinians. They pushed a button not knowing who would die. This is low, even for them.
I can’t even think of a devil’s advocate argument for this.
I believe the devil’s advocate argument would be that, based on Hezbollah’s internal communications, they intercepted a shipment of pagers purchased to replace their (potentially compromised) mobile phones, which were being distributed exclusively to Hezbollah operatives. That would make it the most precise military strike of all time.
I feel like people are missing one of the more heinous aspects of this, which is that it injured thousands of people and only managed to kill ~10 of their targets. The outcome of this attack is going to be general terror and potentially hundreds of life altering injuries but very little military advantage.
The advantage is huge. 1000s of militants are now seriously injured and are no longer battle ready. Many will never be again. Massive success for Israel, and one of the most precision strikes ever used. Now there will be fear from any communication devise exploding, there will be 1000s of man hours wasted taking other stuff apart to check it, and morale will be down as well.
How did the compromised pagers not trigger warnings at airport X-rays? I guess lithium batteries and C4 look similar?
They’re about as similar as a nuclear bomb and a portable garbage disposal system
Now westerners will worry when lining up for concerts or flights and the increased security expenditure will impact their economy
I guess you support ISIS terror attacks as a brilliant play too?
They injured thousands of their targets, killed a few, and only got very little collateral damage
Nasrallah would shit down his prophet’s throat to get this kind of outcome
How did something that only killed 10 targets injure thousands, especially when you are considering explosives.
I don’t think I could injure 1000s of civilians with only 10 targets killed with an explosive hidden on their person if I tried.
Correct.
Killing civilians isn’t a war crime. Deliberately killing civilians, or not taking reasonable steps to minimize civilian casualties is a war crime.
“Small” explosive that is embedded in something passed to and likely worn by the target is unlikely to be a war crime. If they somehow snuck a 1000lb bomb into one it absolutely would be however.
Booby trapping objects associated with daily civilian use is a war crime
These pagers were distributed to doctors and nurses, so I would also argue that they were booby trapping medical supplies, which are protected.
Close - you’re looking at letter, not action and intentions.
Booby traps are banned for use in ways that are likely to be used by civilians and remove protections on the civilian population. Things like placing explosives on public transport, the side of the road, in marketplaces or protected places. Targeted strikes, like on a piece of civilian equipment that is likely to only be used by the target (cellphone, personal vehicle, laptop) are permitted as they are unlikely to be set off by a random civilian.
What is a question, however, is if the targets were actually combatants.
There is no chance Mossad wasn’t aware that these pagers were distributed to civilians.
It’s literally a war crime to attack people who are not actively participating in combat. That includes people who are members of your enemy’s military.
That is absolutely not true. An easy example to disprove your argument would be the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. The American Navy was caught completely by surprise. At the end of the war, there were some Japanese tried for war crimes, but not for the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.
I’m willing to argue that the unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor was replete with war crimes by modern standards. I’ve cited some documentation above. Since doing that I’ve learned that there are also specific prohibitions against booby-trapping: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/ccw-amended-protocol-ii-1996/article-7 Turns out that Israel has violated many international standards for war crimes and terrorism. It’s simple mystifying to me that any of this is controversial.
I’ll quibble with you on ‘booby trap’. Booby traps are like what Russian is doing in Ukraine when they retreat: putting primed grenades next to doors that will be opened when Ukrainian troops come through. Or maybe later if the Ukrainian troops don’t find the booby traps: civilians who come back to the ‘cleared’ areas. This is why booby trapping is prohibited. The enemy might miss it and later on a civilian might come across it.
The Israelis modified devices meant for military purposes by a para-military organization. These pagers weren’t being sold in local markets to anyone who would buy them.
That would make every crime a war crime going back thousands of years where they would lay siege on villages until the citizens starved
Yes?
That means the term “war crimes” is meaningless because it would just mean war. The point of specifying some actions as war crimes is to denote things that even in war you shouldn’t do not just say that all wars are crimes
Now you are getting it! War is bad!
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Turns out they weren’t.
Not that I think the Israel is the good guy in this conflict, but your argument is pretty weak.
Pager are designed to be trackable. If you have such deep access to these devices, you know exactly who got called by whom and when.
Yes, there will be collateral damage, but that’s almost a given in any armed conflict.
If these were one-way pagers,they are not easy to track, as they don’t transmit messages, but only receive and display them.
…and you know which telephone numbers send data to the pager and at which time. That is sufficient to track or identify individuals.
If this is a supply chain attack, the attacker already knows, which pagers are part of the organization they want to target.
What this thread here shows really well, is that the general population vastly underestimates the abilities of intelligence agencies and technology in general.
You wrote a bunch of things that have nothing to do with my comment.
The terrorist organization Hezbollah used dumb pagers exactly because they don’t transmit anything, and therefore are very hard to track.
No, they are not.
As I wrote, you can track which pager got paged when. And you can identify who uses that pager. The pager itself does not need to transmit anything for that.
You obviously don’t know how tracking works.
You obviously don’t know how one-way pagers work.
You can’t easily track a device that doesn’t communicate outwardly.
Please track the location of my ceiling fan, it receives wireless transmissions from a remote and beeps in response. Kind of like a pager.
I don’t need your location.
Pager transmissions contain a sender and a receiver. That’s all the information you need. If a known Hisbollah sender sends to a receiver, that receiver obviously has some ties to Hisbollah.
These are literally one-way receivers. It’s like how I can’t track your fm radio receiver
I agree. Although in this case the receiver does that and only that. No delivery confirmation or anything. Good luck tracking its location.
How so? How do you track said dumb pager?
This is a reasonable point. But that doesn’t mean you can pinpoint the recipients location.
You can’t track a pager.
A mobile tower will send it a message, but since there’s no two-way communication, theres no way to track where the pager received the message. (Even if it was a two-way one, you need at least three good points of connection to be able to triangulate it.)
So how exactly do you identify who’s using a pager you don’t even know the location of?
Ditto
By tracking who sent what to whom?
If you know the phone number of a Hisbollah member and they send messages to a set of pagers, these are likely Hisbollah pagers. If you do that to several phone numbers, you get a pretty comprehensive list of members. You don’t need to know, where exactly they are. That’s simply not relevant.
And again: if it’s a supply chain attack, you don’t even need these contacts. Just a single entry point into the supply chain of the organization.
And since tracking the devices is actually impossible, how would you know which pager is where and held by whom,
Say one of the pagers wasn’t delivered to the person who you “know” it to belong to. Say it got dropped in front of a school. Say another person who has one and even is a Hezbollah member, is visiting a children’s hospital, because they’re people too and usually have reasons to fight (even if their fighting style is immoral to some). Say another is eating dinner with his family. Etc. Etc. Etc.
There’s no way to verify any of that. It’s basically just as bad if not worse than carpet-bombing. Unless you implant a device like this on a person and then have surveillance on that person to know where they are and who with when you detonate the device, you’re probably doing a war crime.
YoUrE ArGuMeNt is WeAk
So which armed conflict in the middle of Beirut are you talking about now?
Maybe the guys shooting rockets at Israel?
Don’t play dumber than you are.
This doesn’t constitute an armed conflict under international law. Israel has absolutely no right to target civilian areas in Beirut using explosive detonation devices with complete disregard to civilian casualties. But I see you’re German, so the psychosis doesn’t surprise me. Israel could probably start raping people (oh nvm that did happen) and you’d probably find an excuse for it.
So, what exactly do you think would be a proper reaction here?
Hisbollah is de facto a state actor in Lebanon. Lebanon is doing nothing against a group whose declared goal is the destruction of Israel, including shooting unguided rockets into civilian areas.
Now, how would you address that? Unless you have any idea how else to solve this, you’re simply talking out of your ass.
Obviously Israel should kindly ask that they turn themselves over a the border so they can have a fair trial
Maybe they should stop their genocide in Palestine. Hesbollah has said on multiple occasions that they’ll stop any hostilities if a permanent ceasefire is implemented.
They attacked one day after Hamas ‘to keep the IDF busy’. Their long term goal is to destroy Israel and install an islamic state, not keep the peace.
I hardly think it is necessary to be an expert in Near-East conflict or politics in order to condemn what basically amounts to a terrorist attack.
Whether or not they should do something is a different issue all together. But dismissing criticism because they don’t provide an alternate solution to an intricate problem is hardly any more helpful. Israel has many more pathways to do this properly, one idea would be the ICJ.
You’re also falling into an overgeneralization fallacy. While Hezbollah is in the lebanese government, this doesn’t make all citizens of lebanon complicit. Hezbollah doesn’t represent all of Lebanon, neither do Hamas all of Palestine or Netanjahu all of Israel.
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Then I guess Hezbollah attacking IDF servicemen wherever they might be, including civilian areas in Tel Aviv, is completely okay. Even if it comes to some civilian casualties.
Removed by mod
Both of them are ‘wrong’ and ‘okay’ when they do this. But in some way Hezbollah is ‘more wrong’, because they (re)started it. The only result being a lot of useless casualties with no end in sight.
I doubt if Hezbollah would attack the IDF directly. The IDF is armed and would shoot back immediatley.