I'm genuinely curious: how is this not considered terrorism on Israel's part? (or is it considered terrorism?)
From a tactical standpoint, this is very similar, and the only big difference I see is that this is technologically more advanced/more complex than just planting a bomb or something.
If it's not terrorism, what is the differentiating factor(s)?
*side note: I'm quite sure other western countries have used tactics that I would call terrorism as well. This isn't meant to be a callout or anti-anything post. I'm genuinely curious where the line is drawn.
I think it should not be considered terrorism to the extent that the attack targeted legitimate military targets during a time of war — broadly speaking, combatants and other parts of the organization that affect its ability to wage war. Terrorism, at least least in my view, is an attack that either intentionally targets civilians or is truly indiscriminate, and is aimed at producing political cha age by causing fear.
By those definitions, I think this is clearly not terrorism. (Though we might learn more information about who was targeted that could change this assessment.) Admittedly, my definitions only imperfectly track the way the word is used in the west, but I think that's only due to frequent misuse of the term for political ends.
I would worry about a definition of terrorism that creates an incentive to avoid this type of warfare in favor of dropping bombs.
According to the LA Times these devices are “not usually used by fighters, but by ambulance and civil defense crews and administrators affiliated with Hezbollah. The devices are unrestricted and can be sold to anyone, and as such are used by other organizations in areas of poor signal.” [1]
There is no question if an enemy set off hundreds of bombs in American ambulances we would recognize it as a mass terrorist attack.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2024-09-18/second...
Hold up, that skips over the crucial issue of triggering-logic.
It's reasonable to guess that these devices were made to only explode after a very unique code is is received, and/or only when traffic came over a radio channel known to be used by Hezbollah.
In contrast, an uninvolved civilian medical doctor buying a booby-trapped pager secondhand shouldn't be at significant risk, since before carrying the pager around all day they'll first configure it to use their hospital's radio network, which should only be broadcasting innocuous hospital messages.
> There is no question if an enemy set off hundreds of bombs in American ambulances we would recognize it as a mass terrorist attack.
However if those bombs were only triggered by the code "Immediate Mobilization" broadcast over a CIA/DIA pager network, then the real question would become why so many ambulance staff were holding down a second secret job as spies and soldiers.
> uninvolved civilian medical doctor buying a booby-trapped pager secondhand shouldn't be at significant risk
Pretty sure any doctor (or anyone else) owning one of those pager wouldn’t want to keep it, even if configured safely. Would you carry an hand grenade in your backpack all day long, as safe as it it because the pin is still in?
> why so many ambulance staff were holding down a second secret job as spies and soldiers
Hezbollah is a legal and popular party in Lebanon and is at war with another country, of course the medic staff is involved what’s else would you expect ? However "all parties must refrain from attacking and misusing medical facilities, transport, and personnel", what happens here is a crime for the Geneva convention.
> Hezbollah is a legal and popular party in Lebanon
Hezbollah is an Iran-backed militia whose sole purpose is the destruction of Israel.
> and is at war with another country
No, they're not. They're a militia.
Here is a timeline of major Hezbollah terrorist activities. Left out, of course, is the constant barrage of missiles rained down on northern Israel by Hezbollah. I copy-pasta'd this from another source for convenience:
1983: Hezbollah sends suicide truck bomb against US embassy and murders 63 people
Also 1983: Hezbollah murders 241 American soldiers and 58 French soldiers with another suicide truck bomb
1984: Hezbollah murders 18 American soldiers with bombing in Spain
Also 1984: Hezbollah murders 11 people with another truck bomb against US embassy
1992: Hezbollah murders 29 people with suicide bombing of Israeli Embassy in Argentina
1994: Hezbollah murders 85 Jewish Argentinian civilians in another suicide truck bomb
1996: Hezbollah murders 19 American Air Force personnel with bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia
2005: Hezbollah murders 22 civilians in assassination on Lebanese PM
2011 to present: Helped Assad murder up to half a million Syrian civilians, carrying out starvation sieges and ethnic cleansing against Sunni towns and cities
>Hezbollah is an Iran-backed militia whose sole purpose is the destruction of Israel.
This is the official position of Israel, yes, but the international community, including the US acknowledges that they are a political entity as well. You actually don't need to be on side with their positions to accept this fact.
> It's reasonable to guess that these devices were made to only explode after a very unique code is is received, and/or only when traffic came over a radio channel known to be used by Hezbollah.
Why is this a reasonable thing to guess?
Nobody that goes through all that effort of making secret customized electronics and then sneaking them into usage by your foes wants the plan to be ruined because one went off in an uncontrolled/unexpected way, blatantly alerting all the other targets to toss their pagers into a shallow hole.
Even if the engineering makes it's a choice of "all blow up" or "none blow up", they'll also want to have control when that moment happens to be, either to pre-empt discovery and defusal or to coincide with other events and factors.
I agree.
I'm often confused about the incoherent picture that paints Israel as having blatant disregard for civilian casualties while at the same time devises complicated and risky strategies to perform targeted strikes.
> In contrast, an uninvolved civilian medical doctor buying a booby-trapped pager secondhand shouldn't be at significant risk,
The end result is still that innocents are walking around with a bomb planted in their pocket.
Wars often result in innocent farmers having mines in their fields (at least temporarily). How is this worse?
Farmers having to worry about mines in their fields is also something that I would consider to be a bad thing.
Do you consider it worse than conventional alternatives, such as artillery strikes, even if the latter is likely to result in a worse civilian casualty ratio?
Also, if booby traps aren't considered a legitimate tactic in a military conflict, why does noone complain when, say, Ukraine mines a field?
Booby traps and land mines are legally distinct (and, within land mines, anti-personnel and anti-vehicle land mines are distinct), but its also not the case that no one complains about the use of mines, booby-traps, etc., by both parties in the Russia-Ukraine War.
> made to only explode after a very unique code is is received, and/or only when traffic came over a radio channel known to be used by Hezbollah.
The latest round is handheld radios, not even cellphones or even pagers. You are trying to stretch justification far beyond the breaking point.
I agree that if it is confirmed that these are primarily used by civilian ambulance crews, that would make a big difference. Of course, this isn't what the LA Times actually reported, but I'm not sure what "civil defense crews and administrators affiliated with Hezbollah" actually means on the ground.
> Of course, this isn't what the LA Times actually reported
This is a good point. The LA Times does not report incidents involving ambulances other than in the first half of the sentence that you quoted:
>They are not usually used by fighters, but by ambulance and civil defense crews and administrators affiliated with Hezbollah.
And the report of a video of an ambulance exploding
> Video from a funeral ceremony in the country’s south depicted an explosion inside an ambulance, leading bystanders to run away in panic.
So someone extrapolated one video to making an “usually” argument? Without a source or data this is poor journalism
LA Times notably does not report that Hezbollah has been recognized as a terrorist organization for many years by the US government. That fact alone makes their reporting suspect, IMHO.
I don't see how anyone can claim that the remote detonation of explosive devices hidden inside everyday devices can be called an operation against 'legitimate military targets'.
There's no way to know that 4000 devices are going to only harm their 'owner'.
Call it whatever you want, but these attacks are not responsible nor 'in the right'. This sort of tactic is reckless and evil.
Sure you can hold that opinion but Volume II, Chapter 1, Section F of Customary International Humanitarian Law[1] strictly disagrees with you.
[1] https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule1
It directly calls out Israel for its attacks against civilians in Lebanon:
> "Similarly, the UN Security Council has condemned or called for an end to alleged attacks against civilians in the context of numerous conflicts, both international and non-international, including in Afghanistan, Angola, Azerbaijan, Burundi, Georgia, Lebanon, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Tajikistan, the former Yugoslavia and the territories occupied by Israel."
That sentence doesn't "directly" call out Israel specifically for any attacks against civilians in Lebanon. It just calls out attacks against civilians in Lebanon - which yes, would include attacks by Israel, but would also include attacks by Lebanese militant groups, including Hezbollah (i.e. in the course of the various internal conflicts there).
It would also implicitly apply to attacks wherein civilians were actually the target; expecting military operations to have zero civilian collateral casualties is unrealistic. This exploding pager/radio attack seems to have been targeted at militants specifically, not civilians.
Are you an expert on this code? Because I’ve read quite a few interviews with experts in international humanitarian law, and they pretty much agree that what Israel did was criminal.
https://theintercept.com/2024/09/19/israel-pager-walkie-talk...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/9/18/do-lebanon-explosio...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/sep/18/the-gu...
Not to diminish your point, but to add to the discussion.
I would point out that landmines are also indiscriminate and allowed within warfare. If anything mines are slightly more indiscriminate due to you not needing to have accepted a device.
Although I think morally people are against the use of mines, we've seen widespread use of them in Ukraine. It would be good to see a global ban on these type of methods.
> landmines are also indiscriminate and allowed within warfare
That is an interesting angle.
I do see that there is a clear distinction that makes the pager/radio explosives worse ethically. Landmines are generally laid to prevent people from encroaching on a guarded area. Minefields can be labeled, which suggests that the idea of the presence of a mine actually helps them be effective in preventing encroachment.
In the pager/radio case, the explosives were distributed to individuals (both devices are usually worn on the body) with zero indication that there was danger. There is no 'protection' being done here, just murder, and loosely targeted. When the attacker is ready, they detonate 4000 devices without knowledge of the environment around it, meaning they are willing to deal with innocent people being killed.
It's a really evil tactic.
I think you nailed the analogy with mines and the distinction between legal and moral.
Putting morality aside and focusing only on language and semantica:
I agree that this action may be better described as military action with an associated risk of harm to civilians (like many military actions do) rather than a pure action against civilians with the purpose of terrorizing your enemy civilian population.
I don't think it's common to use the word "terrorism" to indicate acts whose purpose is to induce fear in your military opponent.
Perhaps "psychological warfare" or "intimidation tactics".
That doesn't forbid you from qualifying that act of aggression as exacting an unnecessarily high toll on innocent bystanders. You don't have to invoke the word "terrorism" if all you want to say is that an act is immoral.
> legitimate military targets during a time of war
Israel and Lebanon are not at war.
But Israel and Hezbollah are at war, and these are (reportedly) devices used by Hezbollah operatives.
A war Hezbollah declared, btw.
Yes, but these are more akin to bombings and not surgical strikes.
We’ll know more in the coming days on the impact, but I too feel uncomfortable even as someone who’s mostly supportive of Israel.
> Yes, but these are more akin to bombings and not surgical strikes.
Not sure why you think that? If reports are true, these were relatively small bombings that only impacted people carrying a pager that was specifically handed out to Hezbollah members, and presumably only military members. There was collateral damage, but far less than there would be by even the most surgical of surgical strikes (which usually refers to sending in highly targeted missiles to take out, say, only a single apartment).
Of course we might learn that that isn't accurate, but that's the story as I currently understand it.
And I guess like in Gaza, civilians are de facto complicit. Plus they are Arabs and not Jewish so can we really apply human rights to them? Are they even actually humans? I guess it’s not genocide when it’s done to animals. /s
Of course civilians aren't complicit, neither in Lebanon nor in Gaza. (Nor in Israel, for that matter, though few people seem to complain when Hezbollah targets civilians explicitly every single day.)
I never said otherwise, not sure why you think I did?
1. We are guilty by association. 2. When a guy makes a choice to join up with a terrorist organization he will bring that guilt home with him. It will affect those around him.
We may be free to choose but we are not free to choose the consequences of our actions. Even when they affect the innocent we associate with. If this is a new thought to you read a few more books.
Here are some suggestions... The Holy Bible Hillbilly Elegy The Narnia Series The Hobbit The Lord of the Rings
We are not guilty by association. Becoming a militant does make you are valid target though and terror organizations are mostly militant.
Hezbollah doesn't speak for all of Lebanon but it certainly is at war with Israel. Permanently for that matter because it exists to attack Israel.
The Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant, describes it as such. I imagine if pressed he'd argue that Israel is attacking Hezbollah and not Lebanon, but given the extreme civil dysfunction in Lebanon it's equally arguable that Hezbollah is the de facto government for a lot of the country.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-planted-exp...
Its not, but Hezbollah is in control of the hot border in the south.
Its a govt within a govt.
> Israel and Lebanon are not at war.
Maybe not, but the combatants holding those devices were at war, no?
> but the combatants holding those devices were at war, no?
The attack wasn't as targeted as you seem to think. It also hit health workers and bystanders. Approx half the casualties are civilians (including children).
According to Humans rights watch: https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/09/18/lebanon-exploding-pagers...
> Thousands of pagers simultaneously exploded across Lebanon and parts of Syria on September 17, 2024, resulting in at least 12 deaths, including at least two children and two health workers, and at least 2,800 injuries, according to Lebanon’s Ministry of Health.
> Approx half the casualties are civilians
Citation needed for that. None of the news reports, even the heavily biased ones, have reported mass civilian casualties.
The citation, as requested:
"two children and four health workers in a hospital in southern Beirut were among the 12 people who were killed on Tuesday."
- Public Health Minister Firas Abiad in a press conference
I expect more detailed reports will be shared over the next few days about the total casualty.
> So that's 50% of those killed, right?
Wrong. You claimed:
>>> Approx half the casualties are civilians
Casualties doesn't mean "those who died", it means "Injured or killed".
If you have to use a definition for a word that differs from the dictionary for your argument to work, it's your argument that is broken, not the dictionary.
Your entire argument in this thread is based on not knowing what "casualty" means.
> Your entire argument in this thread is based on not knowing what "casualty" means.
First let's acknowledge that at least 50% of those killed are civilians and many were also injured. That's a fact, you aren't debating that, right? When you mention `my entire argument` you just mean this part "Approx half the casualties are civilians" in my original comment, correct?
What is the criteria for the evidence to satisfy your doubts? If you're demanding the government of Lebanon (or any other party) to classify Lebanese citizens who were admitted to hospitals based on their political agenda, then making such judgment is not possible even if they wanted to. To be frank, in the eyes of the government, they are all civilians, since many other political parties have arms too, if that's what you want. But of course, you don't agree with that classification and at the same time you've no counter-argument.
> First let's acknowledge that at least 50% of those killed are civilians and many were also injured. That's a fact, you aren't debating that, right?
No, I'm specifically calling out your "50% of casualties were civilians" as pure and unadulterated nonsense.
> What is the criteria for the evidence to satisfy your doubts?
There is no way to spin this negatively: 3000 enemy combatants were targeted and 12 civilians were killed.
This must be the lowest percentage of civilian collateral in the history of warfare, and you're blithely trotting out '50% casualties' as a talking point.
I wanna see what percentage of collateral Hezbollah managed, because this is a war, you understand? Enemy action in war always has collateral, and I want to see what percentage you considered acceptable from Hezbollah.
> This must be the lowest percentage of civilian collateral in the history of warfare
It's not even close. And the only way it even seems like a reasonable ratio is equivocating "targeted" with "killed".
But attacks have had as low as 0% civilian collateral casualties, so even if it was 3000 combatants and 12 civilians killed, it wouldn't be the lowest percentage of civilian collateral in the history of warfare.
> I want to see what percentage you considered acceptable from Hezbollah.
War crimes on one side don't excuse war crimes on the other, and criticizing Israel for an indiscriminate attack does not imply accepting all, or even any, of Hezbollah's attacks as "acceptable". There is a good argument that at least one side must be wrong in war, there is no good argument that at least one side must be right.
> First let's acknowledge that at least 50% of those killed are civilians and many were also injured.
To be clear, this argument is more flawed. You don't know the total dead. Do you really think a militant terrorist organization in a non democratic country would immediately and/or accurately report how devastated their combat capacity is?
What are you talking about? Lebanon is a parliamentary democratic republic. Their last parliamentary elections were held in 2022, and nobody disputes the results of those election (which admittedly had a pretty low turnout). Hezbollah is a part of an (albeit weak) coalition government and has 15 seats at the parliament (with 20% of the votes). The reports are coming from the Lebanese Health ministry which is run by Firas Abiad from the Freedom Movement, a Liberal Sunni affiliated party in the ruling coalition with no army and no fighters. Hezbollah controls only 2 ministries in this government (Labor and Public works), neither of which reported on the casualty numbers.
casualties refers to injuries as well as deaths. I think the citation they were looking for was for the ~2800 number. I don't think it's reasonable to say that 6/12 killed were civilians, so half of all casualties were civilian.
We dont know until we get more reports, like you said, it could be higher... but it could also be lower.
This is a dumb position though because all logic would suggest the two ratios are proportional. Civilians are not significantly more likely to die of their injuries than non-civilians. While 12 is a bit of a small sample, it's not unreasonably small to make extrapolations.
Apart from the issue where this ignores how many people got injured (a much larger number), there's a very simple "survival bias" reason (ironically) why this argument doesn't work.
Children (and potentially health workers, as opposed to men of fighting age) are much more likely to die of such an explosion than men of fighting age. In other words, children will be significantly overrepresented here.
To just back up for a moment, your argument is that an attack that turned enemy combatants into unwitting suicide bombers in civilian areas with children doesn't qualify as terrorism, because children are easy to kill?
Would you hold this opinion if it was an operation by Taliban fighters on US soldiers at home on leave?
Sorry to burst you theory:
1. Hezbollah only mourned 10 out of the 26 killed so far, claiming them as members (one of them being a medic). So the 50% seems to still hold, even leaving some room for malice and mistakes.
2. Most of the explosion incidents and injuries are coming from residential areas in Beirut so statistically the percentage of civilians injured as "collateral damage" is likely high considering many of those carrying these devices were going about their life, either with family or in public places at the time.
My opinion of Israel inclines me to distrust reporting based on its claims, and believe your statements. But I still would require a source for these claims, if you would kindly provide them.
How many children do you expect to be combatants?
That still looks like a more targeted approach than "precise strikes" on schools and humanitarian zones like in https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyx9znxl4eo
> Israel and Lebanon are not at war
Hezbollah is not Lebanon.
Lebanon is not Hezbollah.
That said, Hezbollah and Israel have been in active bloody combat against each other since 1985.
Well, there’s been a (tense) ceasefire for nearly the last 20 years, that was eventually broken on October 8 by Hezbollah:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Counci...
> there’s been a (tense) ceasefire for nearly the last 20 years
True, but much of that was spent by Hezbollah fighting in the Syrian Civil War on behalf of Assad (their historical benefactor in Israel).
Now that the civil war is de facto over with Assad in control of most of the country except rump Turkish and de facto Israeli (Jabal al Deize) exclusion zones, Hezbollah returned to antagonizing Israel.
The Israel-Hezbollah conflict was bound to happen even if 10/7 didn't happen.
It’s obviously a terrorism strike.
The definition of terrorism is controversial and political, so there isn't a hard answer.
But I think a general distinction is the targeting of combatants vs civilians.
There is a difference between infiltrating military or para-military organizations or operations and intentionally targeting mass casualties of civilians for attention.
I don't know about that. When Al Quaeda attacked the USS Cole, a purely military vessel without a single civilian casualty, the US administration and the entire US military called it an act of terrorrism.
Sure. "The definition of terrorism is controversial and political."
How governments, media, etc. use that word is often politically loaded and not based on some agreed objective definition.
Al Qaeda isn't a nation-state so by definition it falls into terrorism. It's like if Greenpeace sunk a military vessel because the sonar was killing sea life that would be terrorism. It would have some serious side effects if it was OK for private non-governmental actors being able to target militaries and be seen as legitimate in their actions.
Of course, if we consider all actions by non-state combatants against state military actors to be terrorism, the US and Western Europe has frequently been a big sponsor of terrorism. A recent cause that many are sympathetic to of this nature that immediately comes to my mind are the Kurds in Syria during the Syrian civil war.
But by definition the founders of the USA were terrorists. And they knew it too, viz. Benjamin Franklin's famous line 'Gentlemen, we must all hang together or we shall most assuredly hang separately.'
Preemptively invalidating all non-state actors is just a way for people with power to avoid challenges to it. Every single oppressive regime describes rebels as terrorists and employs circular arguments to assert its own legitimacy. Using this to dismiss military attacks on military targets is, frankly, bullshit.
What Franklin said was true though. If the US revolutionaries had failed, they would have been rightfully hung for treason by the British. If you're some private actor attacking military targets in some country, you'd be a terrorist. I'm no fan of Iran for example but if somebody was caught launching rockets at an IRGC base the Iranian government could legitimately treat them as terrorists/traitors no problem.
Eh - that depends on how you do it, right?
If everyone in your ‘private actor’ group wears uniforms, acts in the open (ie marches in formation, operates tanks instead of setting boobie traps, etc), and then attacks military operations directly it’s going to require an extreme amount of squinting to call that group terrorists.
Whoever is running it would probably get a pretty fair title of warlord. But they’re different.
At the same time, it a gov’t organization runs around bombing civilian targets in a campaign to scare everyone in their opponents country out of their mind, pretty hard to not call them terrorists.
> But by definition the founders of the USA were terrorists
I don’t remember reading any attacks on civilians in the revolutionary war. The civilians would have all been Americans, so it wouldn’t make sense.
The British regarded them as traitors, and would have hung them for treason and sedition.
[flagged]
The entire US is going to freak out if a platoon of KGB soldiers flew into US and killed hundreds of bad guys. How objectively bad the "victims" might have been isn't going to matter.
You can't just walk across a recognized international border and do the "right" thing without a consent, regardless of how right or wrong it had been. That's an act of war, technically.
As far as I know in this case both sides have already attacked each other via bombs, airstrikes, rockets, etc. I'm not really making a judgement on whether this was ethical or justified.
There's just a distinction to be made from intentionally killing civilians for the purpose of causing terror versus targeting a group that you are in an open military hostility with. The second one, as you say, is basically just war. And war has historically also included civilian casualties.
Flying a plane full of civilians into a building full of civilians, or detonating a bomb in a public square full of civilians, are pretty clear examples of what "terrorism" is. They aren't actions meant to directly attack the capability of an enemy to wage war against you.
What governments and media choose to label "terrorism" or "terrorist groups" however is inherently political and not done following some agreed, objective definition.
Right, that is the (weak) counterpoint from that region
They’ve been at war for 50 years, like, officially the war declaration was never dropped.
So recent missile volleys can’t be treated in isolation, despite that making sense
the operation targets operatives of a terrorist organization, not civilians. they use it as secure communication over mobile phones to not be easily locatable. is that lost on you, that it’s targeting the communication used by combatants?
I haven’t said anything that disagrees with that. Might want to re-read my comment above in this thread.
You are aware that Hezbollah routinely fires missiles into Israel (and Israel fires Artillery and drop bombs)?
How would you call that?
There is already a war, so far it just has been avoided to become an all out war.
>You can't just walk across a recognized international border and do the "right" thing without a consent, regardless of how right or wrong it had been. That's an act of war, technically.
You might want to read up on the killing of bin Laden, Entebbe raid, and many other similar operations.
Notably, special forces are almost universally exempt from ‘fair’ POW treatment, and treated similarly to spies. Aka often shot on sight, can be tortured, etc.
It’s part of the deal when you’re a high speed, low drag type. Be good, or get dead.
National freak out levels quantification problems notwithstanding,
If a platoon of American CIA agents went around the US executing 'bad people' (definition problems notwithstanding),
That would be bad.
Hezbollah does specifically exist to attack Israel. Of course that does matter, even if I ignore them firing rockets constantly.
They could decide to build up their country and Israel wouldn't interfere.
Hezbollah is the government in southern Lebanon so when you throw around "combatant" you're including a lot of civil servants, doctors, teachers etc.
Were those people targeted or only the hezbollah military wing? So far it seems like there isn't much specific info out there on this point.
No info, yet. Still curious how they went from supply chain to the end targets. It's not like Hezbollah leaders met with a guy in a trenchcoat and were told "only hand this out to your top guys, these pagers/walkies are really good!"
Its not out of the realm of possibility something like that happened. In other countries, organized crime have been taken down using tactics somewhat like that (i.e. convince the person responsible for procurement in the gang to buy bulk cell phones from some black market dealer that was actually a cop and put listening devices in the phones)
In the same way that Los Zetas (and other cartels) are the unofficial government of parts of Mexico.
> But I think a general distinction is the targeting of combatants vs civilians
When Afghans took up arms against occupying American soldiers, they were routinely called terrorists in American press and media.
When Muslims fight America or Israel, they are called terrorists. When the situation is reversed, that label isn't applied.
Not only were they called terrorists, they were kidnapped to be tortured in Guantanamo like this kid (he was 15 when his father dragged him to Afghanistan, took part in a skirmish, and might have killed in action a US soldier): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Khadr
Right. "The definition of terrorism is controversial and political"
Although I mostly recall the word "insurgent" being used for local fighters in those cases.
You should read up about the difference between Muslims and Islamists and how bad the Islamists are for Islamic communities themselves.
Let me guess, the ones you term to be "Islamists" are those who fight America or Israel.
Most of the Afghan fighters who took shots at American soldiers weren't motivated by some sort of boogieman religious extremism. They were simply shooting at armed foreigners who invaded their country. They weren't terrorists by any reasonable definition of the but were called so anyway because they happened to be Muslim and dared to defy America.
I term Islamists the ones who claim themselves to be Islamists – Islamist Republic of Iran, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas. It shows you have no idea what are you talking about.
and supporting the narrative pushed by the Islamists is harming the Muslims, resulting in Islamophobia. The fact you are mixing the two terms to simply "mark these who attack America" is actually really bad for the normal people affiliated with Islam. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Islamism
> I'm genuinely curious where the line is drawn.
I'm the opposite, in that I think it is incredibly uninteresting to obsess over semantics and try to neatly sort everything into a terrorism or non-terrorism box.
Definitions are generally not universal and are inherently inexact. The definition will simply be stretched by the interpreting party to put things they do not morally approve of into the terrorism box and things they do approve of in the non-terrorism box.
So I think it makes more sense to just skip that step and instead directly consider whether something is morally justified or not and to provide arguments of why or why not.
I'm not convinced this was a terror attack and I think Israel is within its rights to target Hezbollah, but here's a question:
If the assailant and target were reversed, would Western media hesitate at all to call it terrorism?
Or, forget Hezbollah and Israel. If ISIS had detonated thousands of explosive devices all over, e.g., the UK injuring and killing hundreds of UK military personnel and some civilians, would that not immediately be condemned as an act of terror, by everyone in the entire world, East and West? And rightly so?
If the designation of "terror" or "not terror" depends on who's attacking and whom they are targeting, then there's not much point in talking about terror or not terror at all.
If the IDF were to detonate the rockets Hezbollah uses to explode before launch would this be different? What about gps devices or range finders?
Without a doubt it’s asymmetrical… and the common binary is military/terror but I fear this is a distinction left to the last century.
The loss of children is always unacceptable, but Hezbollah has a history of courting child soldiers… so skepticism is not unwarranted.
https://www.refworld.org/reference/annualreport/cscoal/2008/...
Mmmm...
Hizbollah
Hizbollah was the largest armed political group in the country with a base mainly in Shia areas. It said that it supported the country's ratification of the Optional Protocol in meetings with government officials.29 The group denied any use of children in the ongoing conflict with Israel, including the war of 2006.30 In 2007 there were reports that its military wing was recruiting boys aged 16-19. [...]
The US military accepts recruits at age 17, so I think you're really stretching the definition of 'child soldiers' here. The report goes on to mention that Hezbollah organizes youth camps and suchlike, and in turn we could point out that ROTC accepts recruits aged 14 and up. While I would not say they're exactly alike, as someone who grew up outside the USA, this society is very militaristic compared to a lot of others. I was genuinely shocked when I discovered that US schoolchildren are expected to recite a pledge of allegiance every morning.
I never thought hard about the last part of your comment here, but it really seems strange that it's been normalized to train high-schoolers in the USA to do military drills and such. There's not a lot of weapons training, I don't think, but I'm starting to realize at middle-age that things I've been told as I grew up (even in adulthood) are straight out lies or at least propaganda. I am too trusting.
It depends. If ISIS does it to scare the UK into a political decision because it has no way of matching its military in the battlefield (e.g to push out UK forces in Iraq) its a Terror attack in nature.
If it is actually done to degrade the capabilities of the UK military so ISIS could use its fighters to chase them out of Iraq, or maybe, conquer a part of England - its an act of war and is actually worse from a UK POV. Calling it a terror attack would be silly.
People are biased to treat wars as better then terror because wars have rules and often involve good people trying to defend their country. But from a country's POV a terror organization is usually way less dangerous than a competent enemy military attacking.
Terror is usually done because someone lacks military competence and is willing to play dirty to even the playing field.
The establishment is so aggressive in condemning terrorism, because its easier to deal aggressively with a small terrorist organization before it becomes an established military and carves its own autonomous place on the world stage.
ISIS is a good example, it used a lot of terror tactics, but its goal was to create a country.
The security council defines terrorism as "…criminal acts, including against civilians, committed with the intent to cause death or serious bodily injury, or taking of hostages, with the purpose to provoke a state of terror in the general public or in a group of persons or particular persons, intimidate a population or compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act, which constitute offences within the scope of and as defined in the international conventions and protocols relating to terrorism…"
the crucial lines is "provoe a state of terror in the general public." That is to say, terrorism uses arbitrary violence in order to cause fear and panic leading to political goals. By contrast, the targets of this attack were directly against the personnel and leadership of a militarized organization currently in a shooting war with israel. The goal is not to instill terror in a population, but to directly target the capabilities of a military organization.
Note that doesn't mean its not a war crime (I don't think it is but...)! It could still be a war crime for all sorts of reasons... it just means it's not terrorism.
> the crucial lines is "provoe a state of terror in the general public." That is to say, terrorism uses arbitrary violence in order to cause fear and panic leading to political goals. By contrast, the targets of this attack were directly against the personnel and leadership of a militarized organization currently in a shooting war with israel. The goal is not to instill terror in a population, but to directly target the capabilities of a military organization.
Doesn't have to be arbitrary, and a highly precise targeted attack killing high commanders can still instill fear in the general population - if the most guarded guys can be killed, nobody is safe.
If terrorism is violence against non-combatants to further political goals, this isn't terrorism.
From Wikipedia:
"Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of violence against non-combatants to achieve political or ideological aims. The term is used in this regard primarily to refer to intentional violence during peacetime or in the context of war against non-combatants."
There's a lot of disagreement about the international definition of terrorism, but most seem to agree that it is specifically violence against non-combatants and outside the context of a declared military action.
Terrorism targets civilian populations. This operation, as described, targets Hezbollah militants.
That feels like an oversimplification to me. Some of those devices have surely injured civilians. I think the question is how many. Broadly it's the same question that's plagued Israel's actions since last October: there will always be civilian casualties as a result of military action, but how many is too many?
If a bomb blew up next to me in a grocery store, even if I wasn't injured, I'd consider myself "targeted" and that the people who exploded it were my enemy. Imagine that actually happening while you were at Safeway.
You were by definition not targeted. You are collateral damage.
You'd be mistaken. If you shoot an arrow at a bulls-eye and miss, it doesn't change that the bulls-eye was the target.
To me it just looks like rhetoric, an us vs. them type deal. Call something terrorism so that you can justify using any kind of violence against them basically.
It isn't rhetoric... It is a specific combat strategy that small nations employ against huge ones. By targeting non-combatants and creating "terror" you can break the will of a larger nation.
If the USA in 2001 could have waved a magic wand that killed all the Taliban and didn't touch a hair on any non-combatants head they would have waved it and called it a day.
Completely agree. Similar things are happening in Egypt, Turkey and other places..
Not really. Not all violence is terrorism. Not all bad things are terrorism either. But terrorism is always bad. Ukrainians killing Russian soldiers isn't terrorism. Hezbollah trying to kill Israeli civilians is terrorism.
What would you call Russians killing Ukrainian soldiers and IDF killing Lebanese civilians then?
> What would you call Russians killing Ukrainian soldiers
War.
But terrorism is always bad.
Suppose some country occupies another country and the occupied country has no proper army to fight back, therefore they resort to methods of unconventional warfare to fight back against the occupation. Would some call this terrorism? Would this qualify as terrorism given some proper definition of the term and objective judgment of the situation? Would it be bad? What if they not only target the military of the occupier but also their civilians as it is them who voted for the government doing the occupation? What if they did this out of some kind of necessity because targeting the occupying military is not effective given the power imbalance?
This book does an OK job of examining those philosophical arguments.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/terrorism-and-the-right...
some kind of necessity in this case is the death cult of islamism - it should be clear that glorifying martyrdom and calling a suicide bomber a martyr is that type of necessity
Suicide bombers at least really have skin in the game compared to blowing up people half way around the world by drones at the press of a button. If you want to look down on people, then do it for their reasons to fight or the targets they pick, not for their choice of weapon.
absolutely. there are plenty of examples of what you described and not all are blowing cafes and buses with civilians
Considering Hezbollah is a designated terrorist organisation in many countries, this probably should be considered an anti-terrorist operation. The targets are enemy combatants.
Also notably, it clearly did not intentionally target civilians, although there may be civilian casualties which is uncharacteristic of a terrorist attack.
I assume by "many countries" you mean the US and its allies? Is that it then? Your definition of "terrorist" is whoever the West designates a terrorist? Ergo Nelson Mandela was a terrorist.
[There are a few](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_designated_terrorist_g...)
Surprisingly there are several Arab countries, including the [Gulf Cooperation Council](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_Cooperation_Council), and the UAE.
Hamas: European Union,[158][200] Argentina,[201][202] Australia,[17] Canada,[8] Israel,[203] Japan,[81][18] New Zealand,[162] Paraguay,[84] United Kingdom,[204] United States,[16] Organization of American States[205]
Yep, all western countries/entities, as expected.
You've misread the comments above. The above comments are all referencing Hezbollah, not Hamas.
I find it very difficult and out of place to discuss these kind of matters in HN. particularly because it is a very US centric forum, the user base share a lot of preconceptions and ideals that come from the education their society gave them.
It's expected, it's OK, but it just prevents discussion of certain topics.
What about The Arab League? They're designating them as terrorists, US or not...
Edit: Above is retracted - cjbprime found later information.
Do you have a source? I didn't think any of the 22 countries in the Arab League considered Hezbollah to be a terrorist organization (either its political branch or its militia!).
Many of the countries you mention consider the militia to be a terrorist organization, but not the political wing. I wonder whether the pagers were carried by both groups.
https://english.alarabiya.net/2016/03/11/Arab-League-declare...
I suspect it's somewhat inconsistent but they are a big problem for many states who are looking at political and economical stability.
Ah, this designation appears to be outdated -- it was rescinded a few months ago, according to https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-06-30/ty-article/ar...
Thanks for clarification - have retracted my original comment. Much appreciated.
Yes that is how "terrorism" is defined: one geopolitical entity's enemy relative to another
See here, even the US military can be labeled terrorists in the eyes of american people https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41578412
Terrorist organizations routinely use terrorist tactics against each other. There have been attacks on US military bases, and even military ships, which the media describes as terrorism.
In reality it becomes significantly more likely that an attack is considered terrorism if the attacker is Muslim.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
But it stops a third wrong.
It absolutely does not. The violence will continue with both sides dishing it out and feeling completely justified in doing so because of what was previously done to them.
Or one side accepts a two state solution and stops using its proxies to attack Israel. Unfortunately, there have been eight attempts to give the Palestinians their own state and its been rejected every time. In the 90's, Bill Clinton gave them practically everything they asked for and was still rejected.
The only condition they will ever accept is when Israel ceases to exist.
Which begs the question - who's really initiating and continuing the violence? Israel has offered peace. HAMAS and its proxies like Hezbollah have rejected it every time. It should be obvious there's only one side who wants peace and one side who only wants war.
Israel in no way offers "peace". Never have. Nor do any of the other "actors" in this tragedy.
Unfortunately, there have been eight attempts to give the Palestinians their own state and its been rejected every time.
Can we have a source for that claim? I do not know how you would arrive at the number eight and how any offer would qualify as giving the Palestinians all they asked for. The Oslo process was probably the best shot but did not even come close to resolving the conflict. A lot of the contentious issue were just deferred to be figured out within five years and that simply never happened.
Sorry, my bad. Its actually 5, not 8.
https://lawandsocietymagazine.com/how-palestine-rejected-off...
1st Rejection - The suggested split was heavily in favor of the Arabs. The British offered them 80% of the disputed territory, the Jews the remaining 20%. Yet, despite the tiny size of their proposed state, the Jews voted to accept this offer. But the Arabs rejected it and resumed their violent rebellion.
2nd Rejection - Ten years later, in 1947, the British asked the United Nations to find a new solution to the continuing tensions. Like the Peal Commission, the UN decided that the best way to resolve the conflict was to divide the land. In November 1947, the UN voted to create two states. Again, the Jews accepted the offer and again, the Arabs rejected it. Only this time, they did so by launching an all-out war. Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria joined the conflict. But they failed. Israel won the war and got on with the business of building a new nation. Most of the land set aside by the UN for an Arab state, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, became occupied territory. Occupied not by Israel, but by Jordan.
3rd Rejection - 20 years later, in 1967, the Arabs led this time by Egypt and joined by Syria and Jordan, once again sought to destroy the Jewish state. The 1967 conflict, known as the Six-Day War, ended in a stunning victory for Israel. Jerusalem and the West Bank, as well as the area known as the Gaza Strip, fell into Israel’s hands. The government split over what to do with this new territory. Half wanted to return the West Bank to Jordan and Gaza to Egypt in exchange for peace. The other half wanted to give it to the region’s Arabs, who had begun referring to themselves as the Palestinians, in the hope that they would ultimately build their own state there. Neither initiative got very far. A few months later, the Arab League met in Sudan and issued its infamous three-NOs, no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel. Again, a two-state solution was dismissed by the Arabs.
4th Rejection - In 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak met at Camp David, with Palestinian Liberation Organization Chairman Nasser Arafat, to conclude a new two-state plan. Barak offered Arafat a Palestinian state in all of Gaza, and 94% of the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as its capital. But the Palestinian leader rejected the offer. In the words of U.S. President Bill Clinton, “Arafat was here 14 days and said no to everything.” Instead, the Palestinians launched a bloody wave of suicide bombings that killed over 1,000 Israelis and maimed thousands more, on buses, in wedding halls, and in pizza parlors.
5th Rejection - In 2008, Israel tried yet again. Prime Minister Ehud Omar went even further than Ehud Barak had, expanding the peace offer to include additional land to sweeten the deal. Like his predecessor, the new Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, turned the deal down.
The first two do not count, Israel did not even exist. They had nothing to offer, they wanted to take some of the land from the Arabs for their own state. They owned less than ten percent of Mandatory Palestin that they had purchased from Arabs and the United Nations decided to give them more than half of the land - admittedly including a lot of desert - for their own state. None of the Arab nations and obviously not the Palestinians agreed to that. Ben-Gurion took the offer and established the state of Israel, not because he considered it fair - he said he would be mad if he was a Palestinian - and not because he was satisfied, he saw it as a step to eventually take over all of Mandatory Palestin.
I can not say much about number three but your quote says that it did not get very far, so I am not sure why this is on a list of rejected offers if there was not even an offer, only considerations.
The way Camp David is described also does not match reality. They failed to agree on several points and therefore there was never an offer that could be rejected. One point of contention was the right to return for the Palestinians expelled by the Israelis. You can not say one side blocked it, the Palestinians wanted more than what Israelis offered, they could have accepted less or the Israelis could have offered more.
Number five, the realignment plan, that was a proper offer, but the characterization in your quote is still misleading. Israel unilaterally proposed to withdraw from most of the Westbank and permanently annex six percent of it containing the major settlements. There was also some other stuff including some land swaps included. I am not sure if the reason for the failure are welk known, you find claims about rejections, claims about just not accepting, that story about not being allowed to look at the map before agreeing, ... And given that it was an unilateral offer, I am not sure that it addressed all points deemed relevant by the Palestinians, for example what happens to the refugees. I would love if someone could provide additional insights.
> The first two do not count, Israel did not even exist. They had nothing to offer, they wanted to take some of the land from the Arabs for their own state.
The Palestinian state also didn’t exist. Palestine was under British rule at the time, and prior to that they were ruled by the Ottomans, and prior to that they were ruled by Arab Caliphates and Christian crusaders, and before that the Romans.
That’s what makes the anti-Israel movement hypocritical. There have always Jews in Palestine, and in fact they predate the Arabs by centuries. And a Palestinian state would be just as much a modern creation as Israel is. The only way to legitimize a Palestinian state and delegitimize an Israeli one is a completely arbitrary set of rules. A two state solution is the only one that makes any sense of any kind.
The Palestinian state also didn’t exist.
Sure but even though I myself used the term state in my comment, I do not think that states are what matters. What matters are the people living in the region, it is their right to decide what should and should not happen, whether they are formally organized as a state or not. At the time of the Balfour Declaration the Jews were a five to ten percent minority in Mandatory Palestine. In the end it should have been the decision of the people living there - state or not - whether they want to accommodate the Jews that desired to settle there and even more so should it have been their decision whether they want the land split into two states.
The Israelis illegitimately took have of the land from the Palestinians with force and then occupied the other half when they resisted. Similar things happend all throughout history and they can not be undone. The people of Israel will not be forced back to where they came from just as we will not send all Americans back to Europa, Africa, and Asia to give the land back to the native Americans.
But the Palestinians deserve better than the status quo, they are the ones that were treated unjust. Israel should go out of its way to make good on past wrongs, if it does not hurt them, they are not doing enough. Israel now has a right to exist, they do not have to accept existential threats, but they owe the Palestinians a lot.
> The way Camp David is described also does not match reality. They failed to agree on several points and therefore there was never an offer that could be rejected.
You mean Arafat's refusal for to even define infinite "right of return" or participate in any way with the Summit? While every historian (including his Arafat's wife he told to hide in Paris) said he was preparing for the second intifada?
Also its widely known that the Summit was the closest they have ever gotten outside Taba. Its a hilarious statement to think there was no "offer".
I did not say there were no offers but that there was no agreement. Both sides made offers but none was accepted by the other side. To stick with the right to return issue, the Palestinians demanded a wider right to return than Israel was willing to accept, Israel offered a more restricted right to return than the Palestinians were willing to accept. But such a failure to agree can not be easily blamed on only one party, each party could have moved their offers closer to the other side. Only if one party is obviously unreasonable in their demands or refuses to even negotiate, then you might be able to put the blame on one side.
And let me add a note on the language. At least I but probably also others easily fall into a pattern of saying that Israel makes offers and that the Palestinians reject offers and have demands. This certainly reflects the power imbalance but it also has different connotations - making offers sounds much more positive than having demands and rejecting offers. I guess it would be better to talk about proposals and accepting or not accepting them. Both sides have made proposals and they have not been accepted by the other party sounds much more balanced than saying Israel made offers that got rejected by the Palestinians while Israel dismissed demands made by the Palestinians.
> They owned less than ten percent of Mandatory Palestin that they had purchased from Arabs
If relations between the two sides hadn’t deteriorated to the point of civil war then the split would never have been proposed in their first place. Left alone the Jews living in the mandate probably would have continued living there as a minority like they were in many Arab states.
The Palestinians fear of Zionism has turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The Palestinians fear of Zionism has turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Nothing mystic or prophetic at all about it.
Palestine is in the situation it is in due to the calculated policies of the various colonial powers and their "post-colonial" successors -- perhaps better described as "modern great power chauvinist states".
And due to its own mistakes of course (as with any society, especial). But these are generally overshadowed by interventions (far) beyond its control, emanating from these aforementioned interventionist powers. One can dissect the various aspects and subaspects of this dynamic, but that's the long and short of the situation.
In any case, "prophecy" as such has nothing to do with the current status quo.
> In November 1947, the UN voted to create two states. Again, the Jews accepted the offer and again, the Arabs rejected it. Only this time, they did so by launching an all-out war. Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria joined the conflict.
You are glossing over a TON of important events between January 1947 and May 1948. Primarily the destruction of Palestinian towns and rampant slaughter at the hands of the Zionist Haganah and Irgun militias. Israeli attempts to memory-hole the Nakhba have failed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_Yassin_massacre
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9To_P8gX9c
^GDF cites many western and Israeli sources in this video
Also, between what you list as the 3rd Rejection (1967) and 4th Rejection (2000), you are omitting that the pro-peace settlement Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated......by the Israeli far-right.....who are pretty much the same people now running Israel into the ground on a path of violence.
So what's your solution then?
Incidentally it does work. It's just horrible. Nagasaki / Hiroshima are a fine example of forced capitulation. Now I'm not suggesting nuking anyone but the best way this ends, with the lowest future body count is someone wins decisively at this point.
Who said I have a solution? The violence will continue, I just want my country (America) to stop involving itself by providing material/financial/etc support to Israel. I think this is likely to happen once baby boomers are fully aged out of the political process (because the synthesis of christianity and zionism are far less popular with younger generations.) I do not propose a resolution to the conflict but do anticipate America distancing itself from the conflict.
I don't disagree but if America distances itself now it will lose credibility, something which is somewhat low on the international stage at the moment. It has however done wonders for the defence industry here in Europe now we can't trust a traditional political ally. (This is not a criticism of the US, but a criticism of the UK and EU who should have military and political independence)
I think you miss that people tend to become less idealistic and further right as they get older. The "boomer" generation is just replaced by more of the same people. It's never going to change.
Defense of Taiwan is very important for the sort od reasons you're talking about. The defense of Israel though? That's a net negative which causes America a great deal of reputational harm around the world. With regard to Europe taking their own defense industry seriously again, I think that is ultimately a good thing for the American public, and in any case isn't caused by the trend of younger Americans disliking Israel. Rather, it is caused particularly by a certain baby boomer presidential candidate who simultaneously suggests that America shouldn't oppose Putin invading Europe AND that America should instead triple down on support for Israel.
As for people going "further right" as they get older, the younger American generations disliking Israel isn't a right/left thing. Young right and young left both dislike Israel, for their own reasons. Churches in America, particularly white evangelical churches from whom support for Israel is the strongest, are in a precipitous decline. They look like nursing homes now, younger generations aren't coming back and the boomers in those churches are in a panic over it.
You’re rewriting history to suit your point of view. The Japanese state was uninterested in capitulating after the nuclear bombs. It’s the declaration of war by the Soviets and rapid invasion of then-Manchuria which led the Japanese to accept unconditional surrender. They trusted the West to keep the emperor more than the Communists.
You’re making an exclusionary argument to discredit mine and use the rewrite history point. Come on. My point stands as do your secondary points. But that was a principal contributing factor.
GP's actually true that the nukes wasn't the decisive factor but the Soviet invasion was. The popular narrative that American nukes ended it is merely the most useful version.
The bomb was not a principal contributing factor. We're talking about fascist ideologues hellbent on every man, woman and child dying to stall an invasion of their homeland. Of course the thing they feared most weren't new types of bombs, which did not change their situation. The thing the feared most were those horrible communists.
Correction, the best way this ends now is that Bibi lives to a nice old age and dies of natural causes and not in prison. This is not the Empire of Japan. This is a poorly funded proxy war being kept just below a boil so certain members of Israel's political class are not found to be criminals.
I agree there to some extent, but believe me it's not going to be all roses if you change the leadership. It will just be different actors. And in the transition time, things will get worse. I think you are chasing the wrong solution.
It's not terrorism when you're on the winning side. That's how it's always been.
That's literally true, and I don't mean that in a snarky way. Everyone who ever had a history class should know this.
I'm disappointed that this thread has devolved into an angry and pointless political debate, when it could instead have been a cool technical exploration of how Mossad pulled it off. Come on, Hacker News!
What is “cool” in a conversation about how people were killed? This isn’t a movie. There is no novelty in death.
I'm against war.
But when there is war - well, I've picked my side.
You're probably American, as am I, and you're definitely from a country that has attacked and militarily dominated other countries. (Because they almost all have.) Get off your high horse.
> If it's not terrorism, what is the differentiating factor(s)?
Typically the differentiating factor is who the victims are and what the goal of the operation are - terrorists = victims are primarily civilian and the operation has negligible military benefit. Not terrorists = the targets are military. If there is collateral damage then it is not excessive (or not intended to be; intent matters) in relation to the military objective.
All this is subjective of course, and politics are involved, but that is what the difference is usually given as.
In this particular case - i would say it would be terrorism if it was random people's radios & pagers, but not terrorism if it was pagers/radios bought for military purpose that were primarily owned by soldiers. Initial reports suggest it is the latter, but i imagine more details will appear in time to better make that determination.
It would be terrorism if they celebrated the civilian casualties and wished there were more.
If they could have executed this without a single civilian injury they definitely would have. I guess intent is what makes it terrorism vs war in my mind.
Yes, they've shown such concern for civilian casualties up to the present time. Enormous, crushing, exploding, shooting deadly concern.
> If they could have executed this without a single civilian injury they definitely would have.
Why do you think that?
Look at what the leadership of the Israel government is saying when they aren't placating western audiences / media outlets:
Cabinet Member May Golan: "Proud of the ruins of Gaza" ( https://www.palestinechronicle.com/i-am-proud-of-the-ruins-o... )
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich: Starving 2 million Gazans to death is right and moral but the world won't let us ( https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-08-05/ty-article/is... )
Minister of National Security Ben Gvir: We should tear down the Al-Aqsa Mosque and build a synagogue in its place ( https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240826-israel-minist... )
It's not terrorism, as Israel is targeting their enemies during war. Terrorism is targeting uninvolved civilians not during war.
The Hezbollah attack that started this war was an act of terrorism.
The Ukraine placing bombs in cities where the Russians are about to march in is not terrorism.
Having that said: It would be better if the Hezbollah could be stopped by other less cruel means. But war is ugly. The Hezbollah has started it so Israel has all the right to defend themselves. Even if it's cruel.
One reason might be this is directly targeting Hezbolla personnel, and does minimal collateral damage.
First - from the 'technical' point of view - I can't wait to read books / documentaries about how it was all prepared etc. Fascinating.
I can't really wrap my head around it neither, is it terrorism or not ?
On one hand it sure is - we don't know if it was the main goal, but it sure did instil fear and terror. Even in people that have nothing to do with the region.
On the other hand, it's pretty much as targeted as it gets. From what we know, the explosives were really small, installed in devices specifically used by their targets. I have hard time imagining any other way one could eliminate or incapacitate thousands of legimitate (in their view at least) targets without firing a single bullet and with so few other casualties (and yes, of course even a single one is too much).
> how is this not considered terrorism on Israel's part?
Terrorism is variously defined [1]. People are debating whether this was "random or indiscriminate nature" relative to other terrorist attacks. But relative to any wartime strike on an enemy capital, it's been highly precise.
The reason it's open to intepretation is we don't know Israel's motivation. Is it to mark Hezbollah members? A prelude to a strategic strike? If so, it's not terrorism. If it's to scare Hezbollah and the Lebanese, on the other hand, it does start to look like terrorism.
i am wondering what is state doing with parallel non state actor hezbollah? how is the lebanan state allowing non state actor to wage wars with foreign nations on its behalf?
It's an intentional construct that benefits Hezbollah and Iran. Their Iranian funding has made them bigger and stronger than most nation-state armies but they can continue pretending to be a civilian Lebanese NGO with a strong political lobby in Brussels and Paris.
Simple, it has no power to stop them. So allowing is not the right word here, accepting what they cannot change is more fitting.
Wikipedia:
> Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of violence against non-combatants
"If it's not terrorism, what is the differentiating factor(s)?" The power structure in charge of labeling.
What's the old saying? "One mans terrorist is another man's freedom fighter".
Hezbollah is a militia, I think the goal of terrorism is to scare a civil population. Of course one mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter. But I would have problems to call Hezbollah anything of that sort.
Hezbollahs goal is to destroy Israel, so I wouldn't call any military action against them terrorism. They have a right to defend themselves and that right does include these tactics.
My opinion - it is fully intended to invoke terror and destabilise the target community. Thus it is a terrorist act whether or not it falls under the rules of engagement of the perpetrator.
Wouldn't every offensive action in modern war fall into that category? Airstrikes, artillery, ground troops etc..
The militant/civilian fatality ratio was 11/2 yesterday.
this is very hard to defend considering the lack of consideration for collateral damage.
however as already pointed out, even this happened in one instance, it all depends on which side you are on. being from a country that fought for its independence, we remember those who did the deed as "freedom fighters". during the time, from the "opressor's" point of view, however, they would have been seen as insurgents.
Terrorism is a matter of perspective. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.
Maybe we should all just try to treat others the way we want to be treated? That’s pretty much what that hippy Jewish philosopher guy said back in the day.
On each side they think the others are the terrorists but the fact is that they're terrorizing each other and have lots of non-military casualties. I think of them as terrorists on both sides.
Hezbollah is a military peer of Israel and the two are openly at war.
"Terrorism" is one of the most useful terms for dehumanizing and delegitimizing a group's actions. It's only a useful term insofar as it's applied only to the enemy.
Mental gymnastics will be in full force here and in the media/politics to recategorize it.
I have no doubt a headline saying "Israeli politicians' hand-held radios explode, killing three, one day after pager blasts" would receive very different responses in this thread.
And yes, politicians here is correct since
> Hezbollah is a Lebanese Shia Islamist _political party_ and paramilitary group
You should start by outlining the definition of terrorism, but by that point it would be obvious it isn't terrorism and such a post would have been unnecessary.
The difference is the target. Targeting non-combatants would make it terrorism. Hezbollah aren't non-combatants.
It's terrorism if "they" are doing it, and not if "we" are doing it. That's actually the real practical definition used by everyone all over the world.
While I don't want to get involved in a political and radioactive topic (and don't intend to participate in an ongoing discussion), it seems to me there is something important to be said here.
To my mind, there are two critical moral differences between war and terrorism. The first is that the soldier attacks those who are fighting him - if not exactly the guilty, at least the active and resistant. The terrorist doesn't care if he attacks the weak and innocent and in fact prefers it. The second is that the object of a soldier's attack is to break the resistance, and he minimizes evil and suffering in pursuit of that goal. The terrorist maximizes it as a point of strategy.
Of course, fighting is sometimes necessary - evil must be resisted or it will dominate the earth. And in a messy real world, fighting often unavoidably hurts the innocent and the uninvolved - or even the involved in unnecessary ways. The desire to do things perfectly has to at some point yield to the need to do something - insisting that only perfect actions be taken is the same as saying no actions can be taken.
So what makes a fighting action moral? There isn't a bright line. At the margins, this is a judgement call. What level of violence, of what sort, is acceptable is something good people will have differing opinions on. But to suggest that the existence of a spectrum and the necessity of exercising judgement erases the categories is to commit the beard fallacy. The fact that we cannot say exactly when stubble becomes a beard does not mean there is no such thing as a beard - it just means the edges of the definition are fuzzy. That's actually normal! Most definitions have fuzzy edges, and have weak meaning on those edges. If one person wants a clean shaven man for some purpose and another wants a bearded man, both may consider a week old shave unacceptable for their purposes. Definitional edges have their interests, but don't necessarily inform how we think about centers.
Most ethics in war and in fighting turn on these ideas of innocence or powerlessness and necessity. Soldiers take prisoners (and treat them well) because taking someone out of the conflict is the honorable goal of war, and causing suffering once that is accomplished is evil. Criminals in prison (should) still have human rights for the same reason. I once heard a federal law enforcement official describe a shootout with a criminal, stating that the criminal was shooting at him and didn't care who else he hit, while the LEO was unwilling to return fire against the backstop of an occupied apartment building because that would be evil.
It does cost something to do things right - you pay for it in the blood of your own soldiers and in your chances of victory. One reason to seek an overwhelming force is to have the luxury of doing things as cleanly as possible. In a more even fight, at higher stakes, necessity may look different. People do take capabilities and circumstances into account when they judge you.
Nonetheless, there is a very big difference between doing the right thing imperfectly or even badly and doing the wrong thing. There are matters of degree between going to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties and accepting more of them. That does not mean intentionally targeting civilians exists on that spectrum. That's crossing an entirely different line.
On a personal level, in a self defense scenario, you can be taking actions to stop a threat or to hurt a person. The first is moral and legal; the second is immoral and illegal. And while you sometimes do the second in the course of doing the first, the minute you are doing it for its own sake, you are over the line. While we may disagree over where exactly the line is, that doesn't mean you can put it anywhere you find convenient. There is a moral truth to the situation.
Every criminal says they're acting in self defense through some twisted line of reasoning. And every terrorist can tell you why their targets are legitimate and their actions necessary. It is entirely possible to argue along such lines and to be wrong. Further down the thread, someone argues that targeting civilians is justified when those civilians vote for the government you are fighting. This is an example of careless moral reasoning that seeks to justify evil - you cannot know who voted how, and we do not kill people for how they vote or we find ourselves in the position of killing huge numbers of people. This is a thin justification for violence as a goal in itself. Likewise, someone argues that targeting the innocent is justifiable in a very asymmetric conflict. Again, this is a very thin justification. It is true that you are judged by the precision of your weapons and the options available to you, but a tenuous relationship to some strategic advantage doesn't justify egregious and pointless violence. At some point, it starts to look like the violence is the point to you and you're just evil.
These lines of argument highlight why I feel the need to respond. This erasing of the line between war and terrorism, which has apparently happened in the minds of a lot of people here, has an effect that is doubly harmful. It has the effect of hampering necessary and legitimate war by miring it in endless criticism and confusion about legitimacy. This is bad - when we fight evil, we need to be able to have intelligent conversations about how to acceptably do it. Overly hampering our capabilities helps evil be a little more dominant - keeps the bad guys a little more in control on the margins. Calling war terrorism commits this evil. But perhaps a worse evil is committed by calling terrorism war - it has the effect of justifying it! There are people in this thread who think that targeting voters and children is okay because they are confused about the concepts of innocence and necessity and in their confusion are incapable of intelligently evaluating reasoning that involves those concepts. It is not a great leap between finding terrorism morally acceptable and being willing to support it.
The ethics and morals of violent conflict - whether writ small between individuals or writ large between nations - have been a topic of discussion for all of civilization. While we don't always agree, a lot of important, intelligent, moral things have been said on the topic - things worth learning. We have concepts like war crime and terrorism for reasons. Contrary to (apparent) popular belief, there are not merely ugly sounds, linguistic weapons wielded for power. They are important and specific ideas, given to us by generations of thinkers, that help us distinguish between good and evil and understand the moral meaning of things. You erase those in your own mind at the risk of supporting and committing atrocities. It is important to know when the price of winning morally obligates you to lose, and when the price of losing morally obligates you to win. The ability to tell the difference comes, not from erasing lines, but learning how they are drawn and why.
The argument is that the IDF is targeting enemy combatants, and not deliberately targeting civilians (unlike, e.g. Hamas). The existence of non-combatant casualties alone does not imply terrorism.
The IDF has killed orders of magnitude more civilians than Hamas.
It is Hamas who is to blame for these deaths. Launching rockets from densely populated areas.
How does bombing civilians stop rockets already launched? Most likely the person launching is already out of the area.
The whole thing of Hamas is embedding itself and its infrastructure in the civilian areas. If civilians are requested to evacuate, informed about the fact their houses are used by Hamas and the rocket launchers, rocket factories, tunnels and electric infrastructure to support all of that is going to be targeted, then perhaps it is not exactly fair to use words “bombing civilians” as a matter or fact?
not deliberately targeting civilians (unlike, e.g. Hamas)
This is not as simple as it looks. Hamas does indeed target civilians, but what really put the wind up Israel on October 7 was that they successfully overran 2 military bases and mounted a serious attack on a third, although that was repelled. Per Israeli media, the government there had significant prior warning (months or maybe as much as a year) but dismissed the intelligence in the belief that Hamas lacked the military capability and was just LARPing.
Terrorism, by definition, is directed against civilians. Hezbollah militants are not civilians. Hezbollah is recognized as a terrorist organization by US, EU, Canada and League of Arab States among others. The declared goal of Hezbollah is to fight US and Israel.
Pagers and radios are used for their communication. That means that it is a military equipment.
The US Federal government uses the following definition:
the term "terrorism" means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents
https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=(title:22%20section:...
And yet the same Federal government called the attack against USS Cole "terrorism" and its perpetrators "terrorists", and implemented a range of "anti-terrorism" measures in the Navy after that. And it was a military target, and all the victims were military.
So really, terrorism is what people say is terrorism.
I think the more relevant part in that particular case is "subnational groups". The USS Cole attack was obviously not an act of war by Yemen against the US, so it needed to be investigated as a terrorist attack instead.
> The extensive FBI investigation ultimately determined that members of the al Qaeda terrorist network planned and carried out the bombing.
[...]
> By the end of 2000, Yemeni authorities had arrested several suspects, including Jamal Muhammad Ahmad Al-Badawi and Fahad Muhammad Ahmad Al-Quso
(Source: https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/uss-cole-bombing)
You don't generally call in the FBI to "investigate" a military attack, or "arrest suspects".
If the nation of Yemen had immediately claimed responsibly for the exact same attack and declared war, it wouldn't have been considered terrorism, and rightfully so.
So from what I gather, we are observing either by accident or design a lack of a properly neutral term to designate non-state actors acting against a state's military. Because there is no shortage of material US support for such actors in recent history (I pointed out in another comment the Kurdish resistance in Syria), yet Anglophone media rarely consider US a state sponsor of terrorists.
Yeah, language can be a bit fuzzy around the edges. But when your objective is to overthrow your own government (or win independence for yourself, like the Kurds are), and you're not intentionally targeting civilians, I'd say that's more "rebels" than "terrorists".
If the USS Cole bombers were rebels trying to gain their independence from Yemen (which I don't think is even their stated objective?) and not terrorists they would have been prioritizing Yemeni military targets, not those of uninvolved foreign nations.
It's really quite bizarre how official history sources unironically talk about a 'terrorist boat' inflicting a surprise attack on a 'destroyer'.
I’m not too familiar with the story but the lead sentence is “On October 12, 2000, two suicide pilots of a small bomb-laden boat pulled alongside of the USS Cole at midship, offered friendly gestures to several crew members, and detonated their explosives.”.
Could this possibly fall under Article 37 c of the Geneva convention (“The feigning of civilian, non-combatant status”)? In that case, calling it terrorism wouldn’t be too bizarre in my opinion. I’m assuming the attackers didn’t wear any uniforms or insignia.
It's hard to say. Military deception is a bit of a grey area by definition. Faking as medics or burial staff is generally regarded as an absolute no-go, but deceptive use of uniforms and so on is sometimes excused. There is a fairly extensive history of this in naval operations, where practicality dictates a whole ship has to be disguised if a deception is to be effective.
But that would mean any attacks made by or involving spies are terrorism.
Yes, that would generally be defined as state-sponsored terrorism.
The soldiers on the Cole were "non-combatant targets" , so the definition is consistent.
Since they were in the US navy, they should count as members of the armed forces of a country, no? Isn’t that enough? How were they non-combatant?
Modern war obviously doesn't follow all the rules the Geneva convention assumed (Hezbollah militants don't wear their insignia and IDs) but in practice it seems fairly effectively targeted given the casualty breakdown so it'd be a hard case to make.
Isn’t Israel targeting militants or those associated with a terrorist organization?
I mean, maybe it meets the technical definition of terrorism, but at a certain point all military conflict becomes terrorism and the term becomes meaningless.
If you saw how many standing ovations Mileikowsky got last month in his speech the US congress, I think it is very clear.
Criticism of Israel here on HN will only earn you down votes and flagging. It's not worth it.
They’re not terrorists because they’re on a side we support. At worst, we might consider them rebels, though that’s usually reserved for people in this hemisphere.
It is terrorism. If Reuters is not calling it terrorism, it does not make it not terrorism.
Indeed, it's against the Geneva Convention, and a 12 year old girl was hurt.
I think it is considered terrorism. Whoever did it, nobody would say that this attack makes military sense, lebanon is not at war, and civilians have died. But since IDF didn't do it, we ll never know who the terrorists are.
Unfortunately, you are seriously uninformed. Israel and Hezbolla are in active war for more than 11 months now.
On a side note, I think people should strive to be more humble when they talk about issues they don't understand, or understand very little.
even though incidents happened on both sides, neither side has started an 'active war' against the other. plus, we don't know who tampered with those devices
Hezbollah has been firing rockets at Israel, how more active does it need to get? The notion that Israel just need to take it and can't go after the organization that conducts such attacks is absurd.
Terrorism is just a label to describe attacks by people that powerful governments don't like. If you have enough military power, you're a legitimate government conducting a war (even if you're lobbing hundreds of missiles and drones into civilian targets like Russia is). If not, you're a terrorist org or government.
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You've been breaking the site guidelines badly in this thread. Religious flamewar, in particular, is not welcome on HN. We ban accounts that post like this (or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41585013), so please don't do that again.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
> Terrorism is targeting civilians to further a politician or ideological agenda.
This is the old, pre- War on Terror definition. The definition of terrorism now, as used by most imperialist governments, is far less strict.
https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/terrorism
You will notice that the FBI's official definition of international terrorism doesn't mention either civilians or political goals at all:
> International terrorism: Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups who are inspired by, or associated with, designated foreign terrorist organizations or nations (state-sponsored).
Their definition of domestic terrorism is likewise unbound from civilian targets entirely, and is not only about political goals, but "ideological" goals (which is in fact any goal, by definition, i.e. "something you desire to see/ believe should be achieved"):
> Domestic terrorism: Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature.
Terrorism is now any act of violence that serves the goals of any group that is designated as "bad".
The rest of your comment is just textbook Islamophobia.
Ha, maybe this will be the turning point for international corporations becoming national-only? Or maybe make the big brands like Apple/Samsung the only trusted device manufacturers and completely wipe out the small ones?
No iPhones exploded so far but I wouldn't be surprised if the paranoia takes over everywhere and local supply chains and local producers become a thing. "Foreign social media platforms" was already a concern but this is "foreign hardware is booby trapped as you can see". Another nail for the globalized world, united humanity, citizens of the world etc. If a big brand has a supply chain is infiltrated too, then its all over.
Also, are those people blind? Don't they see that booby trapping large number of devices rhymes with poisoning the well? It wouldn't help with antisemitism but that's another discussion.
If they have the capacity to intercept the supply chain, they almost certainly have been implanting listening devices in electronics of all sorts. If you're not in Hezbollah or Hamas you probably don't need to worry about getting blown up by your phone, but if you've got a large platform and been very critical of Israel, it wouldn't be a huge stretch to imagine that you might get personally targeted by communication interception.
Israel maintains public lists of people criticizing Israel (if you publicly apologize to them and renounce your views you can be removed) so I wouldn't be surprised that they are also maintaining a large network of interception. Maybe even using multiple avenues to collect data like buying from data brokers.
Not so sure you need anything to do with Hezbollah to be afraid. One example of many.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/02/israel-opt-ne...
OK, also don't stand near Hamas fighters when they flagrantly violate international law and fight from designated humanitarian zones.
(Obviously, voting in Hamas was a huge mistake, but Palestinians probably didn't expect Hamas to make that the last election. Unfortunately, you only need to elect a totalitarian government once.)
I think the results of these that people or even businesses let alone governments will double check anything that was manufactured by their allies, will probably boost the Chinese and Korean markets in the future.
> make the big brands like Apple/Samsung the only trusted device manufacturers and completely wipe out the small ones?
It's not a question of manufacturing but one of intercepting devices in the transit / shipping network. The brands most likely have nothing to do with it except allowing repair manuals to fall into the wrong hands - which they can't prevent even if they wanted to.
I think the variety of consumer electronics is too large to be limited to only a few large manufacturers.
I'm pretty sure you could run an entire household on nothing but Samsung at this point.
Phone? Check. Watch? Check. TV? check. Washer? Dryer? Fridge? Dishwasher? All there. Laptop? Well, they at least used to make those, not sure if they still do.
"Someday you will drive your Sony to the sony to pick up some more Sony"
https://everything2.com/title/Someday+you+will+drive+your+So...
Why wait? Why drive, even?
Today, you can use an Amazon smart speaker to interface (via an Amazon-produced, Amazon-cloud-hosted voice-command interface) with the Amazon web store to buy an ebook published by Amazon, for you to read on an Amazon tablet, that you bought from the same Amazon web store, that was delivered by Amazon, from an Amazon fulfillment warehouse to your front door.
And soon, that book will be written by an Amazon-owned AI
Why limit yourself to only electronics? You can study at Samsung university, go to the amusement park of Samsung, take the Samsung metro, work at Samsung factories while living in a Samsung apartment, if you get sick you could go to the Samsung medical centre.
they make chromebooks, at least...
Yeah, I can't say I'm a big fan of this massive scale booby trapping devices all over civilian society and I suspect most nation stats are not very happy about this either. The EU is probably not going to be happy at all about Israel using an EU flagged company to do it either.
This is going to create a lot of distrust in the international supply chain.
Exactly it’s one thing to target operatives it’s another thing to target large number of people when they’re among the civilians.
Phone exploding in a market, doesn’t make it OK if the owner of the phone is a militant.
With that logic the Hamas terrorist attack last year isn’t a terrorist attack because many of the victims served in the IDF, which illegally occupies their territory.
This is getting ridiculous. Israel will loose the last drops of good will, which is a shame considering how much they achieved to do on that barely habitable piece of land. It breaks my heart.
Under International Humanitarian Law it absolutely does make it OK if the owner of the phone is a militant. This is black letter Law of Armed Combat.
No!
>Customary international humanitarian law prohibits the use of booby traps – objects that civilians are likely to be attracted to or are associated with normal civilian daily use – precisely to avoid putting civilians at grave risk and produce the devastating scenes that continue to unfold across Lebanon today. The use of an explosive device whose exact location could not be reliably known would be unlawfully indiscriminate, using a means of attack that could not be directed at a specific military target and as a result would strike military targets and civilians without distinction. A prompt and impartial investigation into the attacks should be urgently conducted.
Lama Fakih, Middle East and North Africa Director at Human Rights Watch
https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/09/18/lebanon-exploding-pagers...
These are not booby traps.
"Arguing over minutia to dilute and divest the focus from the main discourse" pattern detected again in this thread.
still: The use of an explosive device whose exact location could not be reliably known would be unlawfully indiscriminate, using a means of attack that could not be directed at a specific military target and as a result would strike military targets and civilians without distinction
>device whose exact location could not be reliably known would be unlawfully indiscriminate
Nope, artillery shells are not illegal and you can even miss where you are aiming! We once obliterated an entire French coastal village with naval gunfire on D-Day because information in war is imperfect.
Accidentally killing civilians is not illegal in war! If you have a "valid military target" who takes a cab from the airport, you can airstrike that cab and not violate the Geneva Conventions.
Consider that a nuke that you detonate in the center of a military base that also "just happens" to wipe out the entire city that base is in is not a war crime!
Yeah no you are targeting somewhere specific even if you miss.
This was a large scale indiscriminate attack. Which is entirely forbidden in Geneva Conventions.
It was a large scale extremely discriminating attack, from all available reporting, right? The Geneva Conventions and ICRC documentation on IHL are online, and have been cited repeatedly on these threads; could you cite the claim you're making, just so we're all clear what it is? People might agree or disagree, but a lot of pointless flaming is driven by people that don't even agree on what they're arguing about.
Article 51(4 a b c) of Genova.
I really don't see how it can be a "discriminating" attack when they exploded in shops; groceries; family homes (in the face of a child) etc.
4. Indiscriminate attacks are prohibited. Indiscriminate attacks are:
(a) those which are not directed at a specific military objective;
(b) those which employ a method or means of combat which cannot be directed at a specific military objective; or
(c) those which employ a method or means of combat the effects of which cannot be limited as required by this Protocol;
So far as I can tell, this strike clears all those definitions. I think you may be reading 51(4) to be a prohibition on civilian casualties as collateral to military strikes, but that obviously can't be its meaning --- that would ban virtually all air strikes, for instance, and I'm pretty sure that isn't something the victors of WW2 were going for.
Am I misunderstanding the argument you're making? It's not unlikely that I could have!
You cannot specifically target a military objective using a small explosive in a crowded area. It’s not possible other than by pure luck, which negates any assumed specificity.
The whole premise of this attack is that you can, which is what makes it unprecedented. We can disagree that it succeeded! I understand skepticism about this. I've seen the same videos everyone else has, and the explosions we're talking about are quite small, but obviously there have been civilian casualties.
I see two ways history might judge this:
1. History could decide that the Geneva Conventions and current IHL with respect to combatant status, collateral casualties, and proportionality were simply wrong, and so everything done under current IHL is indefensible. Could happen.
2. It could turn out that the military impact of this strike was dwarfed by the direct civilian cost (in deaths and injuries to noncombatants and property they rely on), which we'll know more about in the coming weeks.
I can kind of appreciate where you’re coming from (in a very morbid, cynical way) but I guess I just think the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Civilians died and I’m not willing to accept the grim argument (not necessarily yours) that “civilians die in conflict and we must abide by it.”
Just to be clear: I think that is very much my grim argument. There is no such thing as a modern war that doesn't kill civilians and anyone who claims otherwise is living in a dangerous fantasy. There are moral distinctions between conduct in war (for instance: Hezbollah has evacuated most of northern Israel by firing over 7,500 rockets at untargeted civilian areas, in one case killing half a youth soccer team). Israel presents a clear example of the continuum: if they're capable of remote-detonating the entire leadership structure of the Radwan Force in Lebanon, what possible justification could they have for flattening tent camps in Gaza?
The fantasy is dangerous because it creates the expectation that military force can solve problems at minimal civilian cost. It can't. Wars are fought in cities, not on marked battlefields; unless we reduce ourselves back to a pre-industrial state, they will never be fought on marked battlefields again. Factor dead children into every war that ever happens from now on.
I don't like anything that is happening in the region. I don't think morally scoring Israel and Hezbollah is productive. All I have to say is that Hezbollah and Israel are military peers, and they are extremely at war right now.
If we're getting to a point where two different cadres with a beef can settle their scores by liquidating each other's top guys instead of taking everything out on each other's pawns and unfortunately associated randoms, I say let's take this technology and run with it.
According to that definition they are:
"booby traps – objects that civilians are likely to be attracted to or are associated with normal civilian daily use"
That would hold true for something like a pay phone, but a personal electronic device, only used by the combatant, would not be associated with civilian use.
You're assuming your premise as your conclusion. I am not at all convinced about how many of those targeted yesterday actually qualify as combatants. Also, just because a combatant owns something does not make the thing military. Pagers are commonly used by people in emergency services, industrial technicians, and so on.
These pagers work only on Hezbollah's own military network. Lebanon literally had a civil war about this specific issue! People are doing a lot of axiomatic reasoning here about stuff they can look up.
I know Hezbollah operates their own telecoms, but I don't think it necessarily follows that this is exclusively military. This article (from an Israeli analyst) examines their communications infrastructure in more depth and points out that thanks to their political maneuvering they have de facto control of all telecommunications in Lebanon. I find it easy to imagine that at least some of the erstwhile pager users worked in an administrative or logistical capacity.
https://israel-alma.org/2021/03/09/hezbollahs-communications...
We'll see, but I think --- without claiming that anything we know right now is dispositive --- that this is going to net out as an attack that overwhelmingly impacted military personnel, for the simple reason that they were the ones who needed the pagers; so much so that the highest death toll from the attack thus far appears to be QF fighters in eastern Syria.
How would you even know which network a pager was on just by looking at it? They were thousands of bombs disguised as consumer devices in circulation in public. There are new reports that other consumer devices may also have been rigged with explosives.
I have no idea, but you could not use a Hezbollah pager for your job as an industrial technician, which was the claim made by the comment I'm replying to.
What if that industrial sector is managed by Hezbollah and you are responsible for making it run smoothly? They more or less run everything in south Lebanon so I imagine that includes key infrastructure like electricity, water, and telecoms. Staffers in those sectors might or might not be in Hezbollah themselves, but one has to assume a lot of the management is. I don't know about private industry.
It seems odd to me that random laborers would be issued military encrypted pagers, and it seems certain that you couldn't simply go buy one on your own (or at least, buy one and then use it on the Hezbollah military network), but we have reached a point of specificity on the thread where I'm comfortable that we're all talking about the same thing --- previously, I've gotten the sense that we were suggesting random workers who happened to need pagers might have these ones. My personal prediction is that everyone who had these things was a member of Hezbollah, based on the reading I'm doing, but that's all it is: a personal prediction.
That's not what they said. Pagers are used by civilians, no one would be on guard around them, they are not considered to be weapons. If you saw someone in a grocery store with a pager, you wouldn't distance yourself from them.
I don't agree but also don't care to litigate this point; the only point I'm on this thread to make is that no professional who routinely carries a pager could have mistakenly been carrying a Hezbollah pager. Also: it is interesting that Hezbollah literally fought a war over phone systems in Lebanon! The rest: these are some of the most complicated conflicts in the world and we're not going to settle anything on HN. I don't begrudge you your take, I just had those two claims to make.
Children were wounded and killed because they picked up these pagers (which they assumed to be safe). Explosives were distributed into public disguised as innocuous consumer devices, it's actually not that complicated.
I think the situation is much more complicated than that but can also, in rare circumstances, detect an intractable argument when it shows up on a message board. Does anything you're saying have anything to do with whether industrial engineers were unknowingly carrying Hezbollah military pagers, or whether Hezbollah fought a war against opposition parties in Lebanon to ensure that it had its own phone system? If not: there's not much productive for us to discuss here --- which is totally fine, there doesn't have to be.
A pager is a piece of consumer electronics definitely associated with civilian use. There's a story about a little girl who tried to hand her dad his pager from the dinner table and it blew up in her face. Civilians will not expect consumer tech devices to be bombs.
according to who? A little girl was killed today precisely because she picked up someones pager. On top of that solar panels (!!!) are blowing up across Lebanon right now, do those count? Are those somehow incontrovertibly "associated" with a combatant?
I think the solar panel thing isn't confirmed? And so far as I've seen, it's only reported to have happened in on place in Dahieh. If it is confirmed, you'll also be waiting for reporting and evidence that it was a supply chain attack on solar panels (seems unlikely), or a direct attack on that building.
(It seems unlikely to me because we have reason to believe the handsets and pagers shared a contract manufacturer or distributor. Mossad isn't like Gambit from the X-Men; they can't just make random things blow up.)
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You've been breaking the site guidelines badly in this thread, as well as using HN primarily for political battle over recent months. We have to ban accounts that do those things, regardless of how right you are or feel you are, and regardless of how other commenters are behaving. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Pretty telling that it is me, and not your top karma poster, who is getting this reprimand. You are welcome to ban me, and I'm not going to appeal or beg to stay here, its your site after all. But if all I had to do to make my account more palatable to you was mix in the occasional comment on a js framework, or cooking, or exploit development, while continuing to pour out anti-arab racism, as Thomas here has done, repeatedly, for months, than maybe you are doing me the favor. I have yet to see a single comment from you about that. For the record I have reviewed your the guidelines, and I stand by everything I've posted here. I don't use this site "primarily for political battle", in fact I have avoided "political" threads for years. If posting things like "all Palestinians belong in Jordan" as Thomas has done, in threads just like this, for months, isn't something worth responding to directly by you than your rules don't mean much. Or simply apply to less useful people.
EDIT: I forgot about the part where Thomas here tells pacifist jews they are "getting close to the blood libel". That didn't merit a response from you either. Classy stuff dang.
None of these are things I believe or have said. I don't blame you for thinking otherwise; I think message boards just suck ass for this topic.
Brother, I can link you to your own comments. For example here's your "blood libel" comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40067633 I'm actually working, and just logged in to see if I have actually been banned, but I can absolutely go through your own comment history in the last 11 months and pull out each and every example I mentioned. I used to respect you man, and if you read my responses to you, over these last 11 months, they start off annoyed but charitable, attempting to push you to examine your own position, exactly as you and 'dang and whoever are asking and expecting of commenters to do here, and you just keep posting absurd, racist statements and so they have deteriorated to today. I don't expect you to actually do anything about it at this point, but I want to leave a record on this site that I did what I said I've been doing, and you've been doing what I said you've been doing. Maybe you'll surprise me, I don't know.
EDIT: I'm actually really really glad I linked this exact comment, because right beneath it is one of the other highest karma posters on this site, who is of Jewish descent, making my point for me in the best way possible, in opposition to you, and you are continuing in the thread to do exactly what it is I've been telling you you are doing; speaking out of your own ignorance and giving it a patina of authority for example here by gesturing at the ADL and saying "just google it" which is absurd.
You've misunderstood that comment. I blame message boards. I'm comfortable with what that thread says.
I'm not going to litigate my political beliefs with you here, because I don't think it'll work. But I'll tell you what: if you want to know more about what I actually believe, please feel free to email me and ask. My only warning to you is that my beliefs are a lot more boring than you might think they are.
I don't have any beef with you. For what it's worth: I didn't mean anything personal by the X-Men thing. I don't know who you are or really anything about you. If that read personally snarky, I get it, and will try to be more careful.
Attacking millitatns while they are in the middle of civilians, especially when they are not doing that as part of some hostage/human shield operation, is not OK.
The existing conventions do not prohibit attacking militants while they are in the middle of civilians, even if they are not doing that as part of some hostage/human shield operation. It may be considered morally not ok, but doing so does not violate any obligation.
That's not exactly true; it would depend on how you attacked the combatants, and how much collateral damage you caused. Civilian casualties must be proportionate to the military value of the target.
Reporting is still coming in on these attacks so virtually every comment on these huge long threads could end up falsified one way or the other, but from what I can tell, it looks like these attacks will not only clear that bar, but that they'll do so in a way unprecedented in the history of modern warfare. But we'll see!
Most people are not judges in the international court of justice. The legal technicalities are irrelevant.
I don't know what that is supposed to mean. There are norms of warfare and these attacks fall within them.
It means that those behind it will get the same treatment as known criminal getting away from punishment by the law due to technicalities.
More precisely, the Israeli politicians will not get sentenced by the courts of law but the Jewish people will suffer from increased antisemitism, politicians supporting the country of Israel will get unpopular and Israel will lose support. Israeli business will be considered risky.
They may do so, but you know perfectly well what the reaction would be if this happened to people in the US pursuant to an ongoing conflict.
I do. We'd go completely apeshit. People would lie about their age to join up, like after Pearl Harbor. So? That's war. War is very bad.
It is war, but I think there's a qualitative difference you're overlooking, which will inure to Israel's detriment. That difference is the use of asymmetric tactics traditionally employed by the weaker party, deployed by a logistically and technologically superior foe at scale.
Consider the incident a month or two back they assassinated a Hamas negotiator in Iran. That was also asymmetric (in that Iran is a super-hostile environment for any Israeli operations). But while people questioned the probity of assassinating a quasi-diplomat with whom you are ostensibly negotiating, and the Iranians were surely mightily pissed off, nobody serious was suggesting it was a war crime.
Here you're not only using something that feels like a 1950s idea of a remote controlled death ray, however selective, but also subjecting the civilian population who witnessed these thousands of parallel attacks to extreme psychological anxiety. The size of the HN threads on this indicate that a lot of people find it distressing because we live surrounded by such embedded electronics (I have 9 or 10 devices on my desk). Imagine how much worse it is for people who are out grocery shopping or whatever and see someone killed or horribly injured by an explosion right next to them.
I'm not sure I understand why this is "asymmetric warfare". I think that's a term that actually doesn't mean a whole lot, and mostly means "the things weaker adversaries use to level the field against stronger ones". I think a lot of what USSOCOM does/trains falls under the definition of "asymmetric", or would if you discarded the part of that definition that said "weaker opponent". Almost certainly†, conventional military tactics would kill far more civilians in Beirut than will ultimately end up dead in this attack.
I have another theory as to why we have very long threads on HN about how distressing these attacks are, but we don't need to dig into it on HN.
† Again, I'm cognizant that we're still getting details about this attack.
When have thousands of consumer devices, in public circulation, been covert bombs set off in unison? This is far, far outside of the norms of warfare.
To the parent's point, I'm looking at my iPhone thinking that Israel would murder me with it if they wanted, and it absolutely does not make me support Israel.
Honestly, "norms of warfare" is just a rather ridiculous concept imposed by the winning side.
The international court of justice is irrelevant if you don't have nukes or guns to support your cause.
For those unfamiliar with terms:
"Black Letter Law":
In common law legal systems, black-letter law refers to well-established legal rules that are no longer subject to reasonable dispute.[1] Black-letter law can be contrasted with legal theory or unsettled legal issues.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-letter_law>
Searching for black letter and combat turns up:
International Institute of Humanitarian Law: The Manual on the Law of Non-International Armed Conflict With Commentary (2006)
Among definitions:
For the purposes of this Manual, fighters are members of armed forces and dissident armed forces or other organized armed groups, or taking an active (direct) part in hostilities.
(p. 4)
Civilians are all those who are not fighters.
(p. 5)
Military objectives are objects which by their nature, location, purpose, or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture, or neutralisation, in the circumstances at the time, offers a definite military advantage.
(p. 5)
<https://www.humanrightsvoices.org/assets/attachments/documen...>
(I'll note that one of the co-authors is affiliated with Tel Aviv University in Israel, though others do not appear to be Israeli.)
The US DoD publishes a law of war manual, last updated in 2023:
<https://media.defense.gov/2023/Jul/31/2003271432/-1/-1/0/DOD...>
Were the children militants? What about hospital staff? And, how do you know who these people are? You don't, but you're all over this thread running cover for a terrorist attack. I've already seen plenty of reporting that many of these targeted people were not, in fact, militants, but simply political members of Hezbollah. Would you be running the same cover if Hezbollah, or Iran had targeted Knesset staff? Disgusting stuff man, truly odious.
> This is going to create a lot of distrust in the international supply chain.
Is it? If your threat model includes Mossad (or really any nation state) then you shouldn't have trusted those devices in the first place. Even if you didn't have "tiny explosives" on your bingo card, certainly bugs (hardware or software) should've been on there.
Given that those pagers are commonly used by doctors and none of them have been reported to explode, I think we can guess that it was targeted to the batches delivered directly to Hezbollah.
For instance, when Apollo Gold lisenced their pagers to a little known hungarian company, having their brand used as a bomb delivery device in the middle-east was not something they would have had on their list of potential brand risks.
So now companies engaged in international business not only have to consider exposure to the usual fraud, but also if their counterpart is actively malicious.
It's also likely going to make nation states start thinking about supply chains they maybe didn't before. How do you know someone didn't put explosives in your mice, keyboards, monitors, headsets and various other things that were probably manufactured in china?
There were four ambulance workers and two children in the 12 dead.
I can imagine the EU is far more interested in an EU flagged company doing business with Hezbollah who are a designated terrorist organization and subject to sanctions.
If there's one thing you learn quick in fintech - it's you absolutely do not fuck with sanctions.
If it was a real company that would be the case. However from what I've read the journalists looking into BAC Consulting has found it to be a company in name only with no actual offices or hungarian employees.
It makes me slightly curious which company Israel convinced to actually produce these pagers and radios.
From the BBC [1].
BBC Verify has accessed BAC’s company records, which reveal it was first incorporated in 2022 and has a single shareholder. It is registered to a building in Budapest's 14th district.
As well as BAC, a further 13 companies and one person are registered at the same building.
However, our search of a financial information database does not reveal that BAC has any connections to other companies or people.
The same database shows no trading information about BAC. For example, there are no records of any shipments between it and any other firms.
However, BAC's website, which is now inaccessible, previously said it was scaling up its business in Asia, and had a goal to "develop international technology co-operation among countries for the sale of telecommunication products".
The website listed one person as BAC’s chief executive and founder - Cristiana Bársony-Arcidiacono - and does not appear to mention other employees.
Some more information on this: https://x.com/Osint613/status/1836331854913225172
These aren't civilian devices.
The claim isn't that they're "civilian devices", it's that they're "devices all over civilian society". That's relevant because bobby trapping them is liable to cause casualties.
It's like cluster bombs and landmines. You have no idea where all these things are. You have no idea how many of them exploded and which didn't and it's extremely hard to clean up the duds.
And neither are against the laws of war. The US has decided to reduce their usage, but Russia uses air deployed landmines with high dud rates and it is not a war crime.
Notably, these are not booby traps. (The defining feature of booby traps is that they are triggered by the victim.)
No. That's one definition, but not the only one.
I believe you are mistaken. Please find any source that defines it in a way that isn't victim-triggered. Every single one I've checked includes similar language.
this was a special shipment created for the terrorists. this isn't just putting a bomb into every pager.
>this isn't just putting a bomb into every pager.
I never claimed otherwise. Again, the claim isn't that innocent people are carrying the pagers, is that the pagers are around innocent civilians. It's not any different than drone striking terrorists at weddings[1], which also drew criticism from human rights groups. Even if we assume the targets are definitely terrorists, that doesn't solve the issue of civilians who happen to be nearby.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wech_Baghtu_wedding_party_airs...
the blast radius is much smaller. from the market video, the people around him were fine, and only the heznobollah guy was considering the impact of terrorism on future generations.
Were the kids killed also terrorists?
Any kids killed were accidental as opposed to the Hezbollah rockets shot at northern Israel. When those rockets killed 12 kids playing soccer those deaths were intentional.
what alternatives would you propose?
1. heznobollas stop firing rockets into Israel?
2. Israel sending smart bombs with much higher collateral damage?
3. an engraved invitation later to members (hehe) of heznobollas to come and be fired upon in an open space to avoid kids?
4. or are you suggesting instead that Jews should just get used to getting fired upon and let their cities be destroyed because you don't care about Jewish kids getting killed?
anything I've missed?
How do you know this? you can't know it. You have no idea how many people had these devices.
it was a shipment of pagers paid for by heznobollas to communicate because they thought mossad was able to listen and track everything else. it was never a general Lebanese market pager that happens to be used by heznobollas occasionally. they bought in bulk and handed them out to their soldiers.
Cool man, checked in on the story lately? Because literal solar panels are now exploding across Lebanon. I'm sure everyone within 20 yards of them is clearly a terrorist.
you know what? this is brilliant.
the news that I can find reasonable sources for is that the terrorists stopped using phones because Israel could track them and send spicy suppositories, so they switched to pagers - and the pagers immediately blew off things they were fond of. At this point, they panicked and went to their 2way radios to ask for instructions from their terrorist leadership..... and their f*cking radios blew up.
I love that now there's completely random stories of things blowing up (which aren't actually happening, otherwise there would be more serious reports and evidence).
So it sounds like they already have ptsd from evil western infidel technology - it's pretty much biblical in its magnitude - can you really trust that electric toothbrush? what about those hair clippers? those Nike shoes? shoelaces next?
it sounds like Israel achieved their objective, these people are now reduced to trusting only stone age technology. their attacks on Israel will now be much less organised and easier to defend against.
it's sad that Israel had to burn this phenomenal trump card, it sounds like they were saving it for a ground invasion?
Says who? Pagers are used by doctors and icom are used by pretty much anyone who needs that communication, like construction workers in a site or first responders.
Not the ones distributed to Hezbollah.
Being linked to Hezbollah carries certain occupational risks.
So if somebody turned the phones of all members of X army (say IDF) into bombs, and exploded them at mass when a lot of them would be off duty with their families, would that be ok? This is what happened here.
During wartime? Yes.
Technically that would be a targeted attack, and if “somebody” were able to pull that off it would be an absolutely massive win for that “somebody.”
I wouldn’t like it, but I certainly could not call that terrorism, as it explicitly targeted militants.
> So if somebody turned the phones of all members of X army (say IDF) into bombs, and exploded them at mass when a lot of them would be off duty with their families, would that be ok?
Yes. Because it would be an attack targeting active military personnel during a time of war, even if they happen to be around non-combatants at the time.
That doesn't seem correct. Israel's enemies are not justified for attacking Israel even if the majority of their "citizens" are military reservists during wartime. If we want to play the non-combatant tally game, then a strike on Israel becomes deeply justified as an attack on an entrenched dual-purpose position.
...but that's ridiculous, and we should apply the same standards of morality to our enemy even when they refuse to cooperate. Lebanon is not and cannot be treated as a zone including nothing but combatants, and neither can Israel. By crossing the line of terrorism (make no mistake: they were aware of the threat to civilians), Israel is further damaging international support and again blurring the lines between the IDF and their enemies. The UN just convened to tell Israel to renounce their occupied territories in the next year - the days of "lawn-mowing" civilian infrastructure without criticism have passed.
If we keep seeing the Dahiya doctrine and Hannibal directive proliferate, there will be no way for a morally defensible US administration to support IDF operations.
Fortunately for its members, the IDF is not an amateur terrorist organization and they do check their hardware. Also the exploding hardware attack did occur on a national holiday, but during business hours on a weekday.
> The EU is probably not going to be happy
Happiness is irrelevant, especially when it comes to geopolitics.
In the US, criticism of Israel is antagonistic to our Judeo-Christian values.
In the EU, criticism of Israel is tantamount to the rise of a Fourth Reich.
Germany, in particular, is scared shitless of this accusation, and will accept any and all actions by Israel. This is a country who can do no wrong, and will get away with whatever they feel like.
> This is going to create a lot of distrust in the international supply chain.
This reminds me of people who were legitimately shocked to learn about the Snowden disclosures. If you don't already know the supply chain is thoroughly poisoned, and has been for decades, there is no helping you.
Germany has pretty much halted weapon supplies to Israel, so perhaps you should temper your cynical posture with occasional factual updates.
https://www.reuters.com/world/germany-has-stopped-approving-...
Nothing new even happened. Agencies like CIA and NSA are able to intercept equipment and replace with bugged equipment with no change to ship time to you already. Most military or intelligence services are aware of this possibility and take steps to ensure their hardware is not compromised. I guess hezzbolah was obviously not, likewise with the internet community also surprised by this.
> Don't they see that booby trapping large number of devices rhymes with poisoning the well? It wouldn't help with antisemitism but that's another discussion.
could you expand on what you mean here? I don't understand either the argument or the conclusion. thanks!
Well poisoning is an antisemitic talking point, its used as an excuse to target Jewish people by claiming that Jews are secretly poisoning the well from who their people during water.
I’ve never heard that phrase before. Did you come up with it?
Obviously, otherwise you would have heard of it.
Jews poisoning wells was a common antisemitic accusation for centuries (and still - Mahmoud Abbas made a very similar, unsubstantiated claim in 2016) Also, accusations of murdering Christian babies to make matzo, generally worshiping the devil and desecrating communion hosts, etc.
what I didn't get was how the poster above was trying to make it sound like a bad thing ("don't they see") - making the enemy of Western values swear off Western infidel technology a perfect well to poison in my opinion.
Please note that this is distinct from yesterday's incident - these are for a different set of communication devices - from what I can see, they went off at 16:58 local time - notably 2 minutes prior to Nasrallah's planned speech on the first incident.
Apparently, these are ICOM devices --- you have in your head maybe like a police walkie talkie from the 80s, but these things are smaller than flip-phones, a little smaller than the palm of your hand.
Icom is a Japanese company. They make radios, including police walkie talkies (land mobile radios). The pictures I've seen look like bog-standard land mobile radios. Not particularly small, and larger than most flip phones.
The radio in question: https://rigpix.com/icom/icv82.htm
There’s a “live by the sword, die by the sword” reaction that I have to this.
I think we expect better of democracies, which is why these kinds of attacks shock us. But it is interesting that we are unsurprised when Lebanon/Hezbollah uses terror tactics but it quickly becomes a news event when Israel responds in kind.
Ironic because drone bombings like we did in Afghanistan would probably have a much more terrible collateral damage effect but be less newsworthy. But somehow boobytrapping radios and pagers pricks our conscience. Maybe because it feels more personal, intimate, and therefore retributive?
I think it's newsworthy because it's such a unique move, almost like it's from a spy novel. Not because 9 people died, that unfortunately happens semi regularly in this conflict.
My conscience was pricked when they killed probably 40,000 people in Palestine, so this extra 3,000 casualties is just more deaths from a terrorist state.
When the US wants to guide a remote bomb into a hut in a village, estimations of the potential collateral damage are at least made and considered. This is the issue that the military community has with this attack. It was sloppy basically and none of this sort of assessment was made.
>I think we expect better of democracies, which is why these kinds of attacks shock us
Israel conducts probably the most precise military action in the history of warfare and people still demand more.
This is easily disprovable.
See pages 10-30 of this report and the associated inline sources - https://www.academia.edu/112967602/Bearing_Witness_to_the_Is...
Targeting solar panels absolutely does hurt conscience.
I wasn’t aware those terrorists organizations had exploded devices in public spaces. Please share your source.
Just a few months ago, Hezbollah exploded a rocket in soccer field with children playing, killing 12 children. Doesn't get much more "exploding devices in public spaces" than that.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/11-killed-mostly-children-doze...
Very debatable. The local population seem to be under the impression that it was an iron dome missile that fell on the sports ground. Partly because they claim it is a regular occurance (malfunctioning dome missiles and detritus falling in the area).
Ask yourself, why would the Druze population be a target? It's almost unthinkable that Hezbollah deliberately targeted those civilians.
Are you kidding? Here's just one of many: 14 FEB 2005 Beirut, Lebanon Suicide bomber detonated a VBIED, assassinates former Lebanese Prime Minister; 22 killed, 231 wounded
> I wasn’t aware those terrorists organizations had exploded devices in public spaces
They've done much worse.
The UN found Hezbollah (on behalf of the Assad regime) guilty of massacring 700 civilians in Daraya in 2012 [0].
The Daraya Massacre is what ended the prospect of a negotiated end to the Syrian Civil War, and radicalized a significant wave of Sunni FSA fighters to join Jabhat al-Nusra and the then fledgling Daesh.
The same leaders in Hezbollah that Israel has targeted over the past several weeks are the same ones that lead the Daraya Massacre [1] as well as other human right abuses in Syria and Lebanon.
More recently, Hezbollah has been indiscriminately shelling Northern Israel, which itself has lead to incidents like the Madjal Shams attack, which left 12 children dead [2].
Israel absolutely has been indiscriminate in Gaza and Lebanon, but so is every other actor (Hamas, Hezbollah, etc) in this tragedy.
This is war.
[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/aug/25/t...
[1] - https://www.cnn.com/2013/05/25/world/meast/syria-violence/in...
Does truck count as a device? Here is a history refresher https://aoav.org.uk/2020/a-short-history-of-suicide-bombings...
The only way we'd find out how they did it is if some pagers didn't explode and at least one would get into the hands of someone willing to do a public tear-down.
In this video, we'll be cutting the explosive battery. Hit the like and subscribe buttons, and let us know what kind of explosive you think this is in the comments. Also, don't try this at home kids, we're what you'd call "professionals".
Listening to BBC News headlines earlier today, this seems to be exactly what's occurring. Multiple devices did not explode, and are being investigated by multiple parties. I cannot find a specific story detailing this presently.
There's some discussion of the mechanics of the modifications in this TEMPCO story, though how the information was ascertained isn't clear:
[S]enior Lebanese source said the devices had been modified by Israel's spy service "at the production level."
"The Mossad injected a board inside of the device that has explosive material that receives a code. It's very hard to detect it through any means. Even with any device or scanner," the source said.
<https://en.tempo.co/read/1917697/israel-planted-explosives-i...>
Presumably not by like-and-subscribe seeking YouTubers, however.
Edit: World Service broadcast, analysis note at ~52s: <https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w172zgf8tw4nqq5>
Next level "exploding capacitors" ... :-/
It seems overwhelmingly likely that this can be figured out by detecting traces of explosives - or lack of traces - on the fragments from a few of the devices?
If it was a US intelligence agency, we could just wait 20-50 years and ask politely and they'd probably tell us how. Say what you will about US intelligence agencies (and there's a LOT to say), but I always did kind of like that feature.
Except sometimes the document they give you is three words unredacted
I vote for Bigclive doing the teardown. Or maybe AVE…
If the mossad was able to plant explosives without being caught, I wouldn't be surprised if they also planted bugs (indiscriminately) in many electronic devices delivered to Lebanon such as TVs, computers, phones etc...
Similar to the spy chips implants within the Supermicro server motherboards.
Supermicro never happened. Zero evidence. The reporters and the paper (Bloomberg?) have never retracted it, which is a reflection of their crappy reporting.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/02/12/bloomberg-big-c...
Until a few hours ago there was "zero evidence" that thousands of pagers and walkie talkies had been tampered to explode via a remote command.
Was Bloomberg reporting that "thousands of pagers and walkie talkies had been tampered to explode via a remote command" for a decade? Without any evidence?
If Bloomberg had evidence of chips being tampered with, they could have produced that evidence.
That's not how any of this works. If you investigate extensively and fail to find evidence, then there's probably no evidence. If you weren't looking for any evidence and didn't find any, that does not mean there's no evidence.
I wouldn't be surprised if this went well beyond Lebanon. It's time to start really scrutinizing our tech supply chain. I won't use any Israeli tech going forward.
These things weren't made in Israel nor by Israeli companies.
If a state wants you dead you're cooked anyways
Glib defeatism and the automatic surrender to any entity more powerful than you is sad, pitiable even.
The main way states exercise power is by making large enough shows of force that people behave exactly as you do, and roll over in submission. State powers may be able to silence, extort, or kill anyone, but they damn sure can't get everyone.
>These things weren't made in Israel nor by Israeli companies.
Somebody must had put the bombs on these things
They didn't compromise anything that looked Israeli, and targeted other companies.
You assume. They've cracked down hard on anti-war protesters inside Israel. It's absolutely not a safe, nor even likely true, assumption that Mossad does not also surveil Israelis.
No they didn't? There's protests every day, "they" haven't "cracked down" on anything. Occasional arrests here and there on both sides of the protests. It's a democratic country, people have rights to express themselves.
Maybe still democratic, although surely dropped quite a few ranks in democracy ranking, moving ever closer to authoritarian dictator led state.
> They've cracked down hard on anti-war protesters inside Israel
huh? There's been weekly protests for almost a year now and last week's was the largest yet with around half a million attending
https://www.timesofisrael.com/organizers-claim-largest-ever-...
Protesters, not protests.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-human-rights/inside...
Based on your comment history that's not surprising at all. I suppose you already know that just about every large corporation in the world has offices in/business with Israel?
What history? I don't even normally comment but this was crazy and horrible. I'm aware that companies have offices in Israel. I think that's quickly going to become a bygone era though. In fact, Intel just canceled a new Israeli office.
Yes, the supply chain is very clearly compromised.
How much of it is an excellent question. It's remarkable that apparently (?) none of the devices went off prematurely and tipped off the targets. That implies a higher degree of QA than you'd expect from a more ramshackle organization.
I guess from now on they will fly it in directly from China.
How much money would it take to compromise a Chinese factory? Probably not a lot.
The Supermicro story was never proven to be anything but bullshit, though. The more you looked into it, the less it added up.
True, probably the NSA wanted to smear the Chinese when in fact they are the ones implanting bugs in hardware.
Maybe the Chinese wanted to smear the NSA by making it look like the NSA was trying to smear the Chinese when the NSA in fact were the ones implanting bugs in the hardware...
Given the embarrassingly bad security practices of hardware vendors (see recent secure boot key leak) do the spy agencies require deliberate backdoors anymore? I have lost count of the number of times Cisco has shipped a hardcoded admin password.
You are joking, but that's probably the truth... Or at least that's what the NSA wants us to think!
Maybe everyone was implanting bugs and blamed the other party for being too sloppy and getting caught.
Not just Lebanon. We should all be afraid, and assume any consumer device or software that has transited through Israel or countries hosting agents from Israel, to be compromised and potentially dangerous.
The original pager attack was triggered in the anniversary of World War II hero Folke Bernadotte assassination by Zionists, on September 17. See https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-...
I wonder if this was meaningful choice, or just a coincidence.
Most likely coincidence. From what I’ve read, Israel had to pull the trigger on the pagers early because some people (whom they were monitoring) had gotten suspicious that something was up.
I wonder what tipped them off? The battery wasn't lasting as long? One accidentally went off early and they were investigating? A leak?
That was Tuesday’s speculation
It looks more likely to just be a demoralizing psyop, expose a couple thousand Hezbollah members based on hospital records and to the Lebanese public, disrupt communications and attack south Lebanon
I strongly suspect the birthday paradox is making an emergence.
You'd be hard-pressed to find a day of the year without some plausible significance.
Confidence for sure. I grew up in Israel and never heard of this anniversary.
Countries often scrub their history books of things they're not proud of. I grew up in the US and not once was the 1921 Tulsa massacre covered in school.
I grew up in NYC and definitely learned about Tulsa.
You are in the minority. Huge chunks of society were surprised by the Watchmen episode.
My AP US History introduced the civil war section by saying despite his personal beliefs, he was teaching us to pass the exam and any discussion about the war being over slavery and not state's rights was a waste of class time as that would not get us a four or five on the test.
> My AP US History introduced the civil war section by saying despite his personal beliefs, he was teaching us to pass the exam and any discussion about the war being over slavery and not state's rights was a waste of class time as that would not get us a four or five on the test.
This is odd. When did you take the test? I was taught the civil war was about slavery in AP US History decades ago - including via primary sources - and got a 5 on the test.
I believe you, and I’m not happy about that.
My AP history teacher in high school was black, so that may have affected it too, or perhaps it was the NYC curriculum as compared to curriculums in the South. I’m not sure, but I definitely recall hearing about and reading about Tulsa far before HS. I wish I knew when.
But I totally believe you that is probably not true across wide swaths of the country.
Include me in that minority as well. I grew up in a small rural town and the massacre was covered in our history books. This was in HS in the mid 90s.
He was assassinated one day after publishing his peace plan: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernadotte_plan
In the other thread, HN said Israel can only pull this trick only once and they just did it the second time
I guess it could still be considered the same one, just the continuation of it. I was kind of expecting a ground invasion after such havoc in communications has been wrecked. I guess if the "electronic" attack is still going on, maybe something else will still proceed...
But the point of the argument was that Hezbollah would immediately never trust their electronic devices going forward until they could secure their supply chain. The argument didn’t depend on the semantics between same and distinct attacks.
One can argue that there is some temporary remaining vulnerability for Hezbollah members who either didn’t hear about the first attack or had some insanely urgent need to communicate (and this vulnerability wouldn’t exist once they secure the supply chain). But I think the much simpler story is that these attacks aren’t possible only once; supply chain security is a continuum, and people will continue to balance risk of repeat attacks against the costs of security.
I think you could still expect the ground invasion, possibly the day after tomorrow or early next week.
Tomorrow: "Hezbollah laptops explode across Lebanon, sources say"
That's got to be a reason why the attacks are staggered.
Separating them definitely increased the chances that somebody would check their radios - but taking out the pagers drove people to the radios. Now taking out the radios is making people worry what else might be compromised. Your enemy refusing to use their communication equipment is a definite win.
The pagers and radios were supposedly due to the worry that the phone system was compromised - but I'm guessing more people will be using it tomorrow.
the only safe option anymore is the cup and string
I mean, it has been only one day after the last attack. It's still part of the same attack plan IMO.
I really doubt Israel can pull this off again next month or year. Hezbollah (and Lebanon) will switch all their electronics to Chinese supply chain or something, and double check it.
At this point someone needs to run an SDR and start capturing as much RF spectrum as possible, especially on any communications device that has a 'selective calling' feature.
The pagers could have been set off with a page sent to a 'group' capcode in a hidden slot with a unique beep pattern that a little tiny MCU picked up and set off the detonator.
Radios -- same thing. Possibly a group calling feature of a signalling system was used with a "secret" group hidden away in the radio programming?
> especially on any communications device that has a 'selective calling' feature.
I wonder if it’s even dumber than that. Entirely separate from the paging network and tuned to listen for a pulse at a specific RF frequency and then blow up.
Also gives the ability to target certain geographic areas.
But even if listening to pager spectrum, the paging network is incredibly insecure. Anyone could send out fake pages with the right RF setup (e.g. from a drone).
#TIL: “Cap Code” stands for Channel Access Protocol code, which is the unique ID code assigned to a particular pager.
To what end? Capturing it would mean you are already too late
Unless they were previously timed with in internal clock (unlikely), that should be one of the things they should do.
For the first time ever since the beginning of conflict (pre-Hezbollah in fact) , native lebanese had been talking opening about partitioning the country into 2, and letting the Hezbollah group have their own fiefdom. This is because Hezbollah is a defacto government in the south.
This was before these surprise IDF attacks - i wonder how the conversation evolves.
If i understood correctly they were rigged with explosive. There is no way that a regular battery would explode like this right ?
Correct. The injuries are comparable or worse to what you get if you try to use a .50 BMG cartridge as a hammer.
Videos show outright detonations (so far with notably little fire), nothing like the fiery deflagrations you see in “battery explodes” videos while someone is doing a repair.
Yes. There's sourcing for the first attack that Israel implanted daughterboards of some sort with small (30g?) amounts of explosive. The battery may have been involved with the triggering, but it wasn't a battery explosion.
But if you wanted to put 30g of explosive into a device, you wouldn't just want it sat there looking out of place to any curious person with a screw-driver. My guess is that you'd want to put it inside a component like say a LiPo pouch that looks like it belongs there. Half-battery, half-explosive - and maybe hijack the BMS components to also allow it to be triggered.
Anyone care to appreciate how effectively the new CT X-ray machines used by the TSA could have picked up the explosive materials in these electronic devices?
That might be one way to restore faith in one’s supply chain.
My understanding is that they were extremely well concealed, and would have been difficult to detect with simple internal visual inspection.
>My understanding is that they were extremely well concealed
Source? I'm not sure how you can concealed any meaningful amount of PCB/explosive in a pager/radio, unless you're hoping that your target never opens the plastic casing, or doesn't know what the internals are supposed to look like.
Looking at this picture (assuming it's of one of the actual radios):
https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/09/18/17/walkie-talkie...
and a picture of the main board on page 5 of the Icom service manual:
https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/icom-v82-service-manual...
I'd guess the explosives were inside the "VCO can": the metal shielding around the VCO circuit. The picture of the radio shows the radio's metal casing bent away from the PCB, suggesting the blast came from that direction rather than the battery. The VCO can would have air-space inside it and is unlikely to be opened, even by a service tech. There will be an SPI serial bus running from the CPU into the VCO can, to allow programming of the VCO, which could be used as a conduit for a trigger command.
From the picture it looked to me like it was more aligned with the DAC, although I double checked and I don't think that any DACs of that size would be in the order of 20-30 grams. Could a discharge be angled like that within the confines of the can?
The most plausible theory seems, that the batteries were manipulated/replaced with smaller ones, from the outside still looking like normal batteries, but with explosive inside.
So a shorter battery life, but usually no one cuts open batteries.
(But now some will start doing it)
the amount of explosives would be about the size of a pencil eraser, easily concealable imo. Reports are that they could have modified the existing batteries and put them inside there.
If you had a known good copy, should be able to differentiate on an X-Ray.
Weights might not be right either but they maybe they corrected for that.
Centre of gravity may have changed.
You know what a LiPo pouch looks like right? silvery bag, some yellow tape at the end with some wires sticking out.
Less likely you know what they look like inside, as it's been drilled into us not to pierce the things. Also if your laptop battery only lasts a couple of hours you might suspect something is wrong. If your pager needs recharging every month instead of every 2 months... well nobody has a clue how often a pager should need recharging.
I've no idea if it was the battery, but just feels like the right approach.
> My understanding is that they were extremely well concealed, and would have been difficult to detect with simple internal visual inspection.
Obviously the mistake was forgetting to sacrifice a handful of units into a bomb calorimeter.
The joules would have been way off.
Some reports are saying the Icom-V82 devices were bought by Hezbollah 5 months ago, close to the time yesterday's beeper were purchased. However, the exploding part was the battery, imported to Lebanon only 2 weeks ago.
I wonder if this operation had two sides - implanting something in the devices that will allow remotely triggering the explosion, and then also tampering with the batteries to include explosive material.
If it walks like terrorism, and quacks like terrorism...
I struggle to understand how they're imagining they're obviating the optics of this, unless they don't care what the dissenting population in Israel thinks (or the world for that matter) until "it is done".
Can you explain how ultra targeted, small explosive charges quack terrorism? I have been reading comments like this yesterday, and I'm completely bewildered as to how any sane person could come to this conclusion.
Did you consider the US operation to take down Bin Laden an act of terrorism too?
Can you imagine being in a supermarket and detonations go off dropping people? At least 8 children have died in the pager attack.
The US did not detonate personal devices using a supply-chain infiltration, I am specifically talking about this tactic. If you feel the need to bring another conflict into this, you don't think you have an argument to stand on. Imagine this was Hezbollah detonating hundreds or thousands of devices in Israel?
> Imagine this was Hezbollah detonating hundreds or thousands of devices in Israel?
If these were devices used predominantly by IDF, I wouldn't consider it an act of terror either. However, Hezbolla prefers to indiscriminately target civilians.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/druze-shock-war-be...
Since we're bringing other conflicts into this... How come Ukraine is able to put in every effort to avoid civilian death when their opponent deliberately uses cruise and ballistic missiles on residential areas?
Because of the political will. Russia doesn't care, they never investigate nor prosecute their military for war crimes. Ukraine does.
My implication is that Israel is using tactics falling under the same umbrella as those used by terrorist organizations.
A targeted attack focusing on users of a combatants equipment? What terrorist has ever operated with such a fine tooth comb? Its quite a far cry from the usual mid east terrorist playbook of a child with a bomb vest walking into the market.
Because Ukraine was fighting on it's own territory, not the territory of the enemy. Just today, Ukrainians have blown up the Russian arms silo the size of a small town, and I don't doubt that a lot of Russian civilians have died. There's also been a lot of casualties around Kursk. There's been a lot of civilian casualties in different attacks on Crimea too. Quite a few people died when Ukrainians attacked the Crimea bridge.
And, of course, Ukranians are within their rights and do not break any laws of war. Just as Israelis.
What a Ukrainian settlement looks like when taken by Russia is predominantly on the scale of heavily damaged to totally leveled. Whereas Ukraine has taken localities without huge artillery and bombing preparation and have supplied locals hiding in the largely intact settlements with food and water, about whom Russia had forgotten - furthermore they shell and bomb towns with both Ukrainian soldiers and Russian civilians in them.
Ukraine targets exclusively war-fueling infrastructure including refineries, ammo/petroleum depots, military airfields and yes, key logistics routes like said bridge that was built by an invading country spanning over to occupied territory.
Israel has set off explosives with the knowledge that statistically many hundreds of bystanders will be in the blast casualty radius in public and private spaces. That is magnitudes more negligent and accepting of civilian casualties in comparison.
> What a Ukrainian settlement looks like when taken by Russia is predominantly on the scale of heavily damaged to totally leveled. Whereas Ukraine has taken localities without huge artillery and bombing preparation and have supplied locals hiding in the largely intact settlements with food and water, about whom Russia had forgotten - furthermore they shell and bomb towns with both Ukrainian soldiers and Russian civilians in them.
There is a lot of cities captured by Russia that have near zero damage, because UAF not used them as fortresses. There is even a mem inside UA about cities-fortresses.
> Ukraine targets exclusively war-fueling infrastructure including refineries, ammo/petroleum depots, military airfields and yes, key logistics routes like said bridge that was built by an invading country spanning over to occupied territory.
Belgorod has near zero military infrastructure. Yet missiles shell residential areas on regular basis. Death toll of civilians in this area is quite high already.
Just as Israelis.
Except for the 503,000 living in the West Bank, the 220,000 or so (post-1967) residents of the East Jerusalem, and the 25,000 living in the Golan Heights.
(Counting the Fourth Geneva Convention under the rubric of "laws of war").
In addition all the members of the IDF and settler groups committing war crimes currently in the West Bank and Gaza.
Literally every week there is a several civilians dead in Belgorod area from Ukraine missiles deliberately fired on residential area.
Do you have news sources for that? Had a look but all I can find is a couple of reports from 3 weeks ago totalling 6 civilians (which is still bad!)
I'd like to see sources also, please.
I won't defend Ukraine's actions in this case -- but the sum total of reports I've seen suggest a far lower total. You will also definitely need to provide support for the assertion of "missiles deliberately fired on a residential area" (as opposed to being intercepted and then landing in those places).
> How come Ukraine is able to put in every effort to avoid civilian death
Ukraine, which regularly shells civilian areas of Belgorod? That Ukraine?
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/belgorod-city-where-war...
To be ultra targeted you actually have to know where your target is when your bomb goes off. When you detonate thousands at once, you're simply accepting the civilian casualty risk.
"They are hiding behind civilians" (tm)
This risk is so low it is ultra targeted. Once again, the usual ratio of civilian casualties to combatant casualties in a modern war, per UN, is 9:1. In Gaza war, this ratio is 1-2:1, so even there, Israel is already producing 5-10 times less civilian casualties.
In this case, it's thousands of enemy combatants and (at the most, according to journalists in Lebanon and therefore under Hezbolla power) a couple of dozens of civilians. Can you calculate the ratio here? Where else have you seen a military operation of this scope and with this kind of civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio?
>Once again, the usual ratio of civilian casualties to combatant casualties in a modern war, per UN, is 9:1.
>it has often been claimed that 90 percent of the victims of modern wars are civilians,[1][2][3][4] repeated in academic publications as recently as 2014.[5] These claims, though widely believed and correct regarding some wars, do not hold up as a generalization across the overwhelming majority of wars
>In Gaza war, this ratio is 1-2:1
>The Palestinian Health Ministry has estimated for most of the conflict that around 70% of the dead are women and children; these numbers have been corroborated by the United Nations and the World Health Organization. [74][75][76]. On the other hand, according to the Israel Defense Forces, an estimated less than 1:1 ratio has been reported [3][4].
I guess it depends on who you are listening to.
> ultra targeted
How positive are we that by standards didn't get the same batch of devices?
Symmetrical warfare is still the preferred method of response. I think this qualifies as such.
I'd be eyeballing for anything that could still function with a couple cm^3 carved out & filled with HE. Next come the potatoes.
I'll be curious about what details emerge concerning connections between the hand-held radios and the pagers. Any overlap in the manufacturers? Were the radios new/recently replaced like the pagers? How was the explosive triggered?
These sorts of attacks are going to hurt a lot of innocent people. How do they control the munitions and ensure they limit civilian casualties? (I suspect they do not.)
It also seems to be lionized in the media as something "impressive" and not "contemptible". I'm not saying it cannot be both! It could be contemptible and impressive, but the media seems comfortable just being impressed.
If North Korea or Iran or Russia pulled this off against another military, would we all still be here discussing only the technical parts of the attack? I suspect not. Maybe I'm wrong, but I suspect there'd be a lot more condemnation.
Yes. If North Korea or Russia pulled this off we would all be suitably impressed. This is an impressive feat, as targeted as it gets (you could have been standing right next to one of these and walked away, as shown in many of the videos online), and while we would certainly retaliate, the very next step would be studying how it happened.
The explosives were in devices whose only functionality and purpose is communication between terrorists and their leadership. With No civilian functionality. With tiny amount of explosives.
> The explosives were in devices whose only functionality and purpose is communication between terrorists and their leadership. With No civilian functionality
Those devices are used still extensively by Hospitals, ambulances and first aid teams. The red cross use walkies. The firefighters and police also. They pose several advantages over the phone net, specially when managing sensible information from victims private life that you still have to custody and protect from internet. Nobody wants to talk on whasap about "somebody is being raped somewhere and we are on route to help, tell the other units that join us there".
They still work after earthquakes or on wildfires, and common people use it extensively on places without phone coverage like mountainous areas or fisheries. None of those people are terrorists.
But this does not matter, because the brands will stop making and selling this products to everybody. The risk as a company to became collateral damage in this new operations is too high.
If you are using a radio given to you by Hezbollah it is fair to say you are working with them, that's it imo. Even if you arent currently you likely will in the future, which is why they gave you the device.
Rockets launched by Hezbolla into Israel hurt a lot of innocent people.
Does anyone know, assuming this was a radio-triggered signal to detonate the booby trap, what range the originating signal or radio station could have?
I'm curious if this type of remote activation could be achieved with just a single radio tower, or if it would require a network of geographically distributed radio towers to transmit the signal to the affected area. How would isolation conditions, like being inside a building or in a garage, affect it? Also, what kind of radio towers would be needed? Could it be disguised as a regular HAM radio antenna on a building?
I would love to know that too. I don't know the frequency the walkie-talkie used: it could anywhere between 136 MHz to 900 MHz. To give you an idea, 135 MHz isn't too far from the FM spectrum. The antenna of your local radio can blast at several miles. If several cities were targeted, then multiple emitting stations were involved.
Several thousands of "modified" portable communication devices were distributed in Lebanon about half a year ago. I am curios how many of those explosive gadgets the unsuspecting owners were bringing to the airplanes through airport security without explosives being detected? Another proof that the airport security is a theater (at least in the Middle East).
You would think all devices would be checked ASAP after yesterday's incident.
Interesting that they chose to carry out this attack in two waves - presumably the thinking was that Hezbollah would assume only the pagers were compromised (single source/shipment) and thus increase their use of other communication devices. I suspect some did the opposite as well though (stopped carrying/using any devices).
I wonder how many of their telecom devices like routers, switches, etc. have bombs implanted in their power supplies
I guess they are taking a victory lap around yesterday's major embarrassment. I never thought that you could dismantle a terrorist organization so surgically by just booby-trapping comms devices.
This will certainly be made into a blockbuster movie in ten years.
I'll re-iterate my previous comment on this matter: this is an impressive supply-chain hack with absolutely oversized results, and you gotta hand it to them for pulling it off.
I think this will go down as being significantly more impressive than Stuxnet.
It doesn’t look very surgical to me given the civilian casualties and general disregard of what can happen to innocent people. If anything this looks more like a state-sponsored terrorist attack than covert ops with collateral damage.
Actual combat and conventional attacks on a guerilla force embedded in an urban civilian population is far more catastrophic and less surgical than the risk of being inside the ~0.5m lethal radius of these pagers.
It's a horrific attack with awful innocent deaths at the same time that any conventional attack that achieved the same impact on Hezbollah would have been even worse for those around them.
I'm not so sure. It certainly shook Hezbollah and no doubt some of the dead or seriously injured held sufficiently important jobs within the organization to cause problems.
On the other hand you now have a few thousand people who suffered unpleasant but not debilitating injuries who are now sadder, wiser, and very very pissed off. My impression is that many of those attacked could have been middle managers or mid-ranking officers. They're now veterans of a traumatizing national event, which will probably increase Hezbollah's standing among the general populace.
(The notion of Hezbollah as a mob of ak-47 wielding foot soldiers is a stereotype from movies and TV that seems to have taken root among many HN readers.)
I see it a bit differently, or at least I see a different possibility. Most of the injured were pager-owning Hezbollah members who were already pissed off in a way that has religious & ideological foundations unlikely to be changed regardless of events. The general populace might go either way, angry at the attack and/or angry at the Hezbollah members for attacking a much more powerful enemy and bringing the violence into their community.
I don't want to go on a pdf hunt for the one perfect paper now, but years of social science and historical reading inclines me to believe that external attacks almost always unify rather than divide a population.
Consider how Gaza has been pounded mercilessly for most of a year now, with the burden falling mainly on civilians, but they're not turning on Hamas.
Good point, but I'm also not sure it will cause a significant shift in positive support beyond anything already seen. Other commenters here have said 50,000+ rockets/missiles have been launch by Israel so far in this conflict. Those are much more damaging so I'm not sure support will increase base on this.
Hezbollah does exist to attack Israel, why would it matter that they are "pissed off"?
It is a militia. Sure, they also now formed a political party, but that doesn't really hide what their goals are.
It is targeted, by definition. Every pager was owned by a Hezbollah member or was about to be. Same with the walkies.
That there was collateral damage is unfortunate, but Israel was definitely not indiscriminately targeting civilians, which is what would make it terrorism.
This was a surgical strike that happened to have some unfortunate collateral damage. Well within the accepted rules of war.
It was not unfortunate collateral damage in the sense of unknown unknown. Civilian casualties must have been anticipated and nothing has been done to prevent them. It is not „accepted“ rules of war, but normalized disregard of human life.
Once again: watch any of the videos. The vast majority of them involve anyone standing around the operative walking away just fine. This was a targeted attack.
Some civilians got hurt, but the intent was not to harm them, and that is the point.
While it seems few bystanders suffered physical injuries, it's naive imho to think that this won't cause enormously elevated fear among the population at large. 'Koolaid' is still synonymous with mass cult poisoning in the US even though that incident happened ~50 years ago in a different country. Everyone in Lebanon is having nightmares about random electronic devices turning out to be bombs, even though they know that's logically not the case. Just like people in New York feel differently about seeing airliners than they did before 9-11.
Sure, that's true. They would have much worse trauma if these were air-dropped bomb or rocket. As strikes go, this was very surgical; but you're right, war is awful.
You'll never hear me say war is good. It's awful.
> Once again: watch any of the videos
What makes you think that I did not watch them? And why do you think a few videos circulating online are representative of a few thousands explosions?
> Some civilians got hurt, but the intent was not to harm them
What makes „some“ any different than a hundred or a million? How can you be certain of the intent if civilian casualties were/should have been anticipated?
Didn’t mean to imply you hadn’t watched them at all; was simply trying to use them as evidence.
> What makes „some“ any different than a hundred or a million? How can you be certain of the intent if civilian casualties were/should have been anticipated?
The point I’m trying to make is that there was a very small amount of explosive in each device. They could have added more material had they wanted to do more damage.
There were many ways to make this far more damaging, and they could simply have shot rockets or bombs from the air.
This was a targeted attack, focused on the specific users of these devices, who are Hezbollah militants. Bystanders were not intended to be harmed, which makes this, by definition, a discriminate and surgical attack on Hezbollah militants.
I’m not really sure what about that isn’t clear.
Do you have an example of a weapon of war that is more surgical? I think this is the typical Israel criticism that is devoid of any realistic basic to be honest.
Please spend some time reading this whole thread to understand better my arguments. Your question is based on flawed logic and does not require an answer in context of what’s going on.
Anything more surgical than this is actual surgery.
Agreed. Stuxnet was "surgical". Causing hundreds of explosions in proximity of civilians is not.
Given the videos showing explosions next to civilians (< 1m in one case) that walk away unharmed afterwards, I'd say that this is pretty surgical.
And very possibly in violation of the Geneva Convention's prohibition of "indiscriminate" attacks:
Rule 12. Indiscriminate attacks are those:
(a) which are not directed at a specific military objective;
(b) which employ a method or means of combat which cannot be directed at a specific military objective; or
(c) which employ a method or means of combat the effects of which cannot be limited as required by international humanitarian law; and consequently, in each such case, are of a nature to strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction.(a) Disrupt Hezbollah’s communications network and take out operatives.
(b) The pagers were specifically distributed to Hezbollah operatives, not civilians. It targeted, by definition, the owners of those pagers, supporting the military objective.
(c) It was limited, by definition. This contained tiny amount of explosives, focused very much on targeting the owner of the device, not “civilians or civilian objects without distinction” (from military objectives).
No violation here.
An explosive going off in a grocery store while people shop is "limited, by definition"?
A 30g explosive going off in a device that is owned by a militant? Yes, that is limited, by definition.
Once again, people in that grocery store who were standing near the militant mostly walked away - you can see that on nearly every video that has been released.
A non-targeted attack would have been a rocket hitting the grocery store. This was, by definition, a targeted attack. Even if a person had stood there and shot the militant directly, and there had been a civilian that caught a stray bullet, this would still have been a targeted attack.
As it is, eight Hezbollah militants have died, and the one civilian injury was a Hezbollah militant’s daughter; killing a child was clearly not the intent.
That’s a successful military operation.
Yes? Watch the videos, people 3 feet away were completely unharmed.
Not like they ever really cared for Geneva Conventions and such.
It's not a victory lap; this operation by itself is one of the largest and most intricate operations Israeli intelligence has ever executed, and would have been planned months in advance. Repeating from elsewhere on the thread: the reporting is that this is happening now because Hezbollah was on the verge of discovering the operation. I think it's likely both sets of devices came from the same manufacturer or distributor.
I agree -- "victory lap" is just a figure of speech. Yesterday's results were probably far outsized impact on their own, and today's are (apologies for another figure of speech) "icing on the cake".
I would imagine that they've been feeding these booby-trapped devices to the supply chain for at least a few months and showing that multiple devices are potentially bombs is just an even more powerful psychological victory. What devices can they even trust now? Will they need to go back to sneakernet?
Agree. If one device was booby-trapped the first thing I would be doing is disassembling all my others devices for the same.
disassemble? that would be too brave for me. I'd be burying them very quickly.
Nah, send in the new recruits to do it.
> This will certainly be made into a blockbuster movie in ten years.
If this didn't happen in real life, I would think that the scenario was too far-fetched and unrealistic. That's some seriously impressive attack.
Unlike reality, fiction needs to be believable.
Do we know the percentage of the total devices used by Hezbollah that got attacked? I guess even if all of them were destroyed, it hardly does any dismantling. But I would expect this operation to open a window of possibility to do some other actions.
Independent estimates peg Hezbollah membership in Lebanon to a wide range, 20k to 50k. Reporting says the pager shipment was 5000 units and so far ~3000 known targets. Figure some devices broke, hadn't been activated yet, didn't trigger correctly, etc. Figure not every member needed or had a pager, call it 50% to be safe but it might be reasonable to think only the equivalent of a team leader would have one. Either way this is a significant fraction of their contact capabilities.
No, definitely not a victory lap. Having completely blown cover on the explosive new feature they added to the pagers, the timer was ticking on Hezbollah checking all their other gadgets for similar extras. It was "use it or lose it".
Ten Years? Netflix is probably having a meeting about it tomorrow.
/s
"Netflix subscribed to Israel" became a common meme during the eventful last year.
Tomorrow? Contracts have probably been signed, casting has begun. /s
so how does one verify that the battery in their iphone doesn't contain explosives?
As long as it doesn’t say “made in Hungary”
And on a more serious note. Hizbolla is a blacklisted terrorist org, they can’t just order stuff from regular factories. Buying from an anonymous white label factory in Hungary with no address and little information is probably pretty normal from them - because anyone doing business with them in the EU will go to jail
As long as you’re not buying electronics from shady factories with no known owners you’ll be fine
> As long as you’re not buying electronics from shady factories with no known owners you’ll be fine
For now and to our knowledge so far.
Exactly. The EU designates Hezbolla as a terrorist group. It is illegal for EU to sell to them.
Well, are you a member of a terrorist group? If no, then odds are that nobody is going to go through the trouble of adding explosives to your phone's battery.
In this case the people responsible must have discovered where these terrorists were buying their devices. Since basically no one except for them was buying large quantities of these, they were easy to target.
The mechanism of action is unclear at this time. I’ve seen it written that the explosives were part of PCBs with electronics that mimicked the original.
It was an addon board with explosives on it which was attached to the existing normal circuit board.
Was there enough empty space in the device for this? Were other components removed or miniaturized?
It was a few lines in a news article, so unknown.
But you can see photos of the same model of pager and it's an LCD screen in a plastic shell, the kind that seems like there would be room on the inside for a little addon board to be attached to the existing board.
X-Ray image compared to known X-Ray of the exact same model
Bomb sniffing dog or chemical test of surfaces
Allegedly hidden well enough that a casual X-ray of the pager wouldn't have revealed it.
Interesting that it wasn't discovered by any bomb sniffing dog in Lebanon. They had thousands of devices. There must be at least a few bomb dogs in Lebanon right?
Simply because "bomb" dogs, like "drug" dogs are a scam to give the police a legal excuse to violate your rights. The dogs don't detect bombs/drugs, they detect cues from the controlling officer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detection_dog#Criticism
The law was reviewed in 2006 by the New South Wales Ombudsman, who handed down a critical report regarding the use of dogs for drug detection. The report stated that prohibited drugs were found in only 26% of searches following an indication by a drug sniffer dog. Of these, 84% were for small amounts of cannabis deemed for personal use.[27]: 29 Subsequent figures obtained from NSW Police in 2023 revealed that between 1 January 2013 and 30 June 2023, officers had conducted 94,535 personal searches (refers to both strip searches and less invasive frisk or "general" searches) resulting from drug detection dog indications, with only 25% resulting in illicit drugs being found.[28]Bomb sniffing dogs can't detect every explosive compound under the sun. They're trained on some of the most common ones but there are almost infinite variations of explosive chemistries.
"According to Sky News Arabia; Mossad was able to Inject a Compound of Pentaerythritol Tetranitrate (PETN) into the Batteries of the New Encrypted Pagers that Hezbollah began using around February, before they even arrived in the Hands of Hezbollah Members, allowing them to Remotely Overheat and Detonate the Lithium Battery within the Device."
This report came out 4 hours after the first attack.
I'm very skeptical of a report about a specific compound and method 4 hours after an attack - Its not enough time for analysis
If that's true, then does that make electric vehicles into potential car bombs if "the right thing" is injected into the battery?
If you add explosives to a car, it becomes a potential car bomb, yes. Doesn't matter what the power source is.
This wasn't something magical that turned the battery into an explosive, they allegedly injected an explosive compound into the battery which would be triggered by intentionally overheating the battery.
Like if you packed C4 into an electric car battery, it would be a bomb, much the same way if you packed it into an ordinary empty box. Sure the battery adds some extra energy, but the explosive is the explosive, ya know.
I am extremely skeptical.
High explosives rarely require only heat to detonate, and most can be quite literally set on fire by an open flame and burn without detonating. PETN is not terribly sensitive, and should require a detonator of some sort. What's more, that doesn't jive with the other claim that they added a daughterboard to the device.
how the hell is anyone going to be able to fly anymore?
the idea TSA security has always been a farce, detecting only the crudest methods of attack.
It might have looked like a normal pager under xray, but I bet it looked _different_ than an unmodified pager. Not suspicious on its own but suspicious because it was changed.
The supply chain for an iPhone is much stronger than for a Gold Alpha pager, and it's likely that the same thing will end up being true of these ICOM radios: they'll turn out to be designed and branded by ICOM, but actually manufactured and distributed by some random Eastern European outfit that paid to use ICOM as a skinsuit. That would never happen with an Apple device.
It is likely that they were authentic Icom devices. My understanding is that it is common for commercial radios to be programmed by distributor. Or Gold Alpha gave a good deal on pagers and radios and then were intercepted from warehouse.
I don't think Icom would ever put name on generic radio, they make all their radios in Japan. It is like Toyota putting name on another car.
There's lots of Toyotas in this list[1] in both directions. Toyota is happy to build cars with other people's names on them, as well as put their name on a car someone else built.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_badge-engineered_veh...
I read that Icom V82 is discontinued and most available are counterfeit.
Toyota puts their engines in other cars all the time.
> The supply chain for an iPhone is much stronger
Probably not strong enough to make it unreachable by a sophisticated agency like the Mossad.
I think the most likely outcome here is that all these devices were intercepted from the same firm.
With enough time, effort, and money? Sure.
But that would be many orders of magnitude more difficult that what they pulled off here, which was already very impressively difficult to pull off.
Have you angered Mossad? If no, you are almost certainly fine. If yes, you are already dead.
James Mickens explained this clearly a decade ago.
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf
You cannot answer any security questions without a threat model. Are you worried about your neighbor putting a bomb in your phone? Mossad isn't putting bombs in random phones.
Replace it.
As I understand, Hezbollah reactively replacing their phones was the exact thing that made yesterday's attack possible.
Replace the battery, not the device.
Imagine if the Russians managed to do something like this in the US...
Israel has shown us (again) that we cannot trust any device whose full supply chain hasn't been properly audited. Which you can't really do at this scale.
So yeah, literally anything you buy can apparently just be stuffed full of explosives waiting to kill you and anyone near you.
Yes. Explosives can be placed in any device that has a small cavity. This has always been true....
It just hasn't been likely.
Don't be a part of a terrorist organization and if you are - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bring_your_own_device
Start with "do I work for Terrorist organization?"
Looks like an ICOM IC-V82.
https://batteriesamerica.com/collections/icom-ic-v8-ic-v82-i...
Well that solves the eternal rivalry between ICOM and Yaesu.
Yaesu radio explodes when I throw it at the wall because the UI is so frustrating.
Ok I'll give you that. My 818 is horrid.
I'm impressed that Hezbollah was not using Baofeng.
I think they are better funded than Russia :)
It's probably much more interesting to see what else is happening while everyone is paying attention on communication devices and tending wounded.
Israel is moving an additional division of troops into the Northern Command, probably preparing ground operations to commence shortly:
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/new-wave-blasts-rock-...
Is this making anyone else really nervous about how much of our tech comes from China?
I'm thinking a scenario like this:
- China makes a rule that all cellphones leaving the country must go through an "inspection facility" (where the explosive hardware and the backdoor trigger chip will be installed)
- A year after the next big iPhone release, China sends a huge convoy of warships and troop transports toward Taiwan, telegraphing a major assault
- The US says "Stop!"
- China presses a button and a few thousand iPhones blow up in the US
- China says "That is just a small taste of our capability, we just pressed the small red button. If you tell us to un-hand Taiwan again, we'll press the big red button and un-hand a few million of your citizens"
Now that this kind of attack is frontpage news, every country in the world is by now aware it's possible -- and it appears to be super effective. So it seems entirely reasonable that some countries will start planning to do the same sort of attack against their enemies.
What I'm saying is, now that everyone's become aware this sort of thing is possible and effective, China might realize it has the means, opportunity, and possibly motive to attack the US this way on a large scale.
As I'd very much prefer not to be maimed or killed by my electronics, I hope the US government is actively looking into effective defenses against China or anyone who would try this sort of attack on US soil.
I'll just continue my tactic of never buying a new phone
Probably after the pagers yesterday, these Icom walkie-talkies were going to be discovered soon, leading to this subsequent trigger. Regardless, this is probably the first big worldwide event to bring the spotlight on supply chain attacks, and finally when we -nerds- talk about the possibility of bugging devices before delivering them or worse, detonating them remotely, it isn’t some sci-fi or conspiracy theory anymore.
It's interesting that both targets have been against non-cellular forms of communication.
I suspect for Israel they have advanced ways of intercepting text and calls and (probably) even MITM encrypted communications over cellular networks. And this could just as easily be about seeding fear about using anything besides a cell phone.
They are famous for selling notorious spyware to many governments
I'll be curious about what details emerge concerning connections between the hand-held radios and the pagers. Any overlap in the manufacturers? Were the radios new/recently replaced like the pagers? How was the explosive triggered?
I assume it was the same factory, that made the explosive containing batteries.
And then those batteries "just" had to be swapped with the intercepted original ones. Still requires effort, but less than building pagers and walki talkies for this purpose.
Anyone know how these devices may have been triggered that would be different from pagers? I imagine these radios would have to be modified to listen to multiple channels in case a radio was on a different channel than planned.
For both attacks, I've been seeing stories of a plane, the "EC-130H Compass Call" flying in the area. It's supposedly an electronic intelligence aircraft that hasn't been seen in the sky for about a year. I don't know much more than that though
An entire integrated explosive device + detonator + radio circuit that leeches off the host device's power supply, that you activate by blasting an area with some out-of-band signal on a frequency that propagates far and wide?
Takes some upfront work but you don't have to mess with the device, any firmware that might leave traces, and the comms network itself. You just fly a big antenna nearby and everything goes boom.
If the Israelis are as careful as they were with Stuxnet there might be a permanent kill switch baked into the implementation to prevent being triggered in the future. Without an initiating event, the type of explosive believed to be used here is very stable with respect to normal kinetic shocks or heat.
It's possible to send the trigger message on every channel.
I have questions:
- why not a larger charge intended to kill/destroy? restraint? or some technical limitation?
- why now, and twice? seems like a one-shot tactic, so what happened to make now seem like the right time?
while blowing up a one-way comm device might make sense to intel agencies and countries, I am curious about the decision to blow up hand-helds instead of listening in on them undetected.
Day one, blow up the pagers. Everyone stops using pagers.
Day two, blow up the backup device that Hezbollah had fallen back to using.
Perhaps on day three, now that Hezbollah has no effective communication and coordination and might even fall back to mobile phones, start ground ops?
Day 4, Hezbollah uses pen/papers disguised as recipes shared between women with token words and procedures.
It is a little odd. I feel like Mossad didn’t do this just for fun? I can only guess what they’re trying to achieve
Demoralization of the enemy. Every single Hezbollah member is now paranoid that every single surface they touch is either listening to them or trying to kill them.
Reportedly, these were in use for a few months. Maybe they got what they wanted, and used that to identify which devices to blow.
'U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. called for a "full accounting" of the attacks to Congress to determine "whether any US assistance went into the development or deployment of this technology."'
Are there any public records indicating the CIA is capable of pulling off something like this?
I wish the US had been involved, but I seriously doubt it, if only because the opsec requirements are so high. If anyone in Hezbollah had even a whiff of concern that this could happen, the whole operation would have been a bust.
Technically this attack is not overly sophisticated. The hard part is knowing right people, long chains of right people, motivation, timing, that kind of thing.
No agency in their right mind will even hint on whether they are capable of doing such things or not. Any whiff of information may put their people in mortal danger. They neither confirm nor deny. The fewer people know the better. The rest of the world learns about such operations by suddenly facing their results.
Why do you wish the US had been involved? Wouldn't it be better for us to stay clear of this?
I imagine there has to be hundreds of unexploded devices in Lebanon. I would expect to see some of those surface over the next few weeks, or someone get stopped at an airport with one
Remember the "end of history"? How times have changed.
The “End of history” was just a euphemism for western comfort and insulation from the rest of the world. A number of comments here can demonstrate that. There’s simply not enough proximity to death and destruction for these people to feel like it’s anything more than entertainment or an interesting topic of discussion.
The end of history will be over when we all recognize that this could just as easily be an operation against the Cartel or the Boogaloo Boys or whoever the fuck, with Feds blowing up pagers in a Whole Foods in LA instead of a market in Lebanon. Oh, but that could never happen here.
I wonder how many of their telecom devices like routers, switches, etc. have bombs implanted in their power supplies
Let’s put the question other way around If Hezbollah had chance to make similar trigers in Israeli reservists soldiers, and launched same exploding attacks on reservists israeli soldiers while not in homes and not engaged, knowingly all israely reservists are linked to IDF apps for in case call of duty
Should a triger to explode 50000 mobile devices in these hands considered terrorism? In time of engaged war from israeli side!!
I have to admit that, as a hack, the amount of planning, technical integration, and apparently flawless execution must have required an awesome amount of effort by very intelligent people.
As a human being though, this is revolting. A new avenue of mass destruction. I sure hope I am never around someone a Mossad-like organization wants to kill.
Saying this "further heightened tensions" between Israel and Hezbollah is like saying Jason "further heightened tensions" with the campers at Camp Crystal Lake.
Can you imagine what must be like to be a rank-and-file Hezbollah soldier at this point? What the fuck is going to happen tomorrow? I'd throw away my socks.
I know HN is not a place for political commentary, but why Israel would do it now when everyone tries to make them de-escalate?
Hezbollah has been firing rockets into Israel more or less continuously since October 7, and Israel has been firing back. I believe both countries have had to evacuate border areas, something like 100,000 Israelis living hear Lebanon are internally displaced.
In short, there's a war on. Neither side wants a full blown war but Israel doesn't want to let Hezbollah muster a larger assault, so they're doing what they can to cripple Hezbollah and disrupt their operations.
De-escalation is a goal that takes cooperation from both parties (or in this case, from Israel and the various Iranian proxies attacking them). Telling one party to "de-escalate" while the other party continues attacking is just farting in the wind.
Well, first, there's no de-escalation happening with Hezbollah. Israel, Hezbollah, and Iran are more or less openly at war. We don't talk about it much because the attack failed, but Iran launched a mass drone assault against Israel a few months back. Israel recently exploded Ismael Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, in Tehran. Hezbollah rocket attacks on Northern Israel, which killed half a youth soccer team, have more or less evacuated that whole region. Hezbollah is not Hamas: they are a military peer (a weaker one, but still) to Israel.
Second, the reporting I've seen (incl. "confirmation" from US intelligence sources) is that this was a use-it-or-lose-it situation: that Hezbollah operatives were on the verge of discovering it.
The Iran "retaliatory" attack was clearly not a serious effort, they mostly used old cheap rockets and drones. It was more to save face and they got a lot of information on Israel's defence systems out of it. And not to mention it cost the Israelis over a 1 billion dollars to thwart while Iran spend a few million.
To both you and the sibling comment, my only argument here is that these countries are openly at war.
> We don't talk about it much because the attack failed, but Iran launched a mass drone assault against Israel a few months back.
Note that this was a retaliatory strike, announced in advance, to Israel's illegal bombing of Iran's consulate in Damascus, Syria.
There really isn’t any de-escalation. Hezbollah continues to bomb Northern Israel and the IDF continues to strike back. There are still hundreds of thousands of displaced Israelis who can’t go back to their homes.
Because the current Israeli leadership are using external conflict to avoid facing criminal charges from internal political issues. Netanyahu was on the verge of being ousted before the 7 October attacks.
If the conflict stops, the current cabinet will be forced to face their own party, the opposition and the rest of their country.
Israel has been pressing the escalation as hard as they can. They've had people in positions of power saying it's literally ok to rape Palestinians in prison.
There's zero interest in de escalation there.
Hezbollah has been firing missiles non-stop at Israel since 10/7. 60,000 Israelis had to relocate from the North. This is not an escalation.
This is the most relevant point, yet downvoted. Hezbollah decided to pile-on and attack Israel (at Iran's urging, to support their other proxy Hamas). Prior to that, there hadn't been serious conflict between the two states in years.
De-escalation wouldn't solve the problem of an Islamic militia with the declared goal of destroying Israel and the military capabilities somewhere in the world top-20 armies sitting right on Israel's northern border. As far as Israel is concerned, Hezbollah needs to be removed and pushed back away. If this doesn't register with common sense alone, then this view is also backed by UN security council resolution 1701.
Israel is in their 9/11 moment and is not backing down due to international hand wringing. Ultimately it’s a test of the international institutions and US government support.
At this point, I wonder if Israel isn't intentionally trying to provoke more 9/11 moments. If they lose the direct support of the US or the tolerance of the wider international community, they can't fulfill their goals.
Or the flip side. Hamas promised to continue slaughtering Israeli Arabs, Jews, and Christians until they are all dead. Hezbollah has launched rockets into northern Israel for a year…with 100k+ Israelis forced to relocate south.
What exactly other option does Israel had. Peace talks didn’t go anywhere for last few decades
Even if Hamas hadn't eliminated the anti-semitic language from their charter in 2007, that argument would require one to accept that preventatively mass murdering whole families and generations of children is a moral means of dealing with a political opponent.
Options? Israel (the people anyway) has always had the option of finally dropping the ethno-nationalism and apartheid of their foundational principles, and accepting that the Palestinians have a way more material right to Palestinian territory than an American or a European who Israel brought over on a birthright trip.
Hamas was anti-semitic?
My understanding was that the language in the charter included the term "jews" as a metonym for Israel.
What you're saying is true. Israeli citizens have had enough and demand a military solution. The fighting doctrine of Israel's adversaries is attacking and then running for the cover of the international community, but post October 7th that doesn't really work anymore with Israel.
> Israeli citizens have had enough and demand a military solution.
Enthusiasts of Rhetoric or Logic may notice how interesting this sentence is, in that it is both true and false simultaneously.
They may also notice that is also true of a rather large percentage of discussion/cognition regarding these matters.
Gosh, how do people manage to understand what's going on if language is used this way???
They have the support of a state 30x their size. In a unique way few others do, almost in a parent child undying and asymmetrical way.
This is 9/11 but the US backed by an entire alien planet, unafraid to go in the direction of scorched earth even when totally surrounded because the aliens will bail them out.
The escalation is the point. Continuing war keeps Netanyahu and his right-wing cabinet in power. It may also draw the US into the conflict, which would, among other side effects, hurt the Dems chances of winning the presidency in November. (Netanyahu and friends prefer Trump over Harris.)
If there is a pressure to have Israel de-escalate, this must be it.
Zero accountability, forever. This is as grim as it gets.
GTA V did it first
Imagine the paranoia that must be flooding Hezbollah right now. You can't function without your electronics...but you can't trust them at all now.
You don't even know how many or which of your gadgets have been compromised to spy on you and for how long.
Massive, massive L.
The actual body count could be zero and it would still be devastating.
I could even believe the supply chain infiltration was fake and radios were manually replaced day of the attack with a crude timer. Anything to give the appearance of omnipotence.
replace all the batteries right now? remove it from every one of your devices and wait some hours to see if other devices explode?
On the other hand: isn't risk to this enormous? What if they just abandon all electronics and conduct their _business_ "off grid"? Good luck tracking that down...
I'm probably wrong but I think I remember that part of the reason the Oct 7 attacks worked so well was due to Hamas' avoiding known signals intelligence gathering operations by using hand-carried notes and keeping it all low-tech. They planned and trained in the open but never let it slip on commonly monitored media that they were about to do anything.
That was Hamas, not Hezbollah so maybe the latter didn't learn the lesson and left themselves open to this type of attack or retribution, depending on your individual perspective.
This may push things back to pencil and paper and sneaker-nets. It'll probably be a brief adaptation though since the temptation of technology is very real.
Unfortunately for them, pigeons fly slower than radio waves.
If that were better or as good, they'd already be doing it. It's pretty obvious that would massively disrupt them.
Massive, massive L for Israel. No one in their right mind is going to use Israeli tech or products going forward. They just devastated their own economy.
These weren't Israeli products. If I were Mossad, I'd compromise anything except an Israeli or Jewish-owned product.
That's beside the point, though. Imagine you are in some non-aligned/involved country with no real stake in MENA politics, idk Thailand or Peru. Corporate/national security is your job. Absent some specific need that can't be supplied by anyone else, would you want to do business with them?
Depends on which side you are on.
I mean regardless of which side you're on, you still wouldn't want to end up with a product that has a bomb in it by accident, even if it wasn't targeted against you.
A second day!
I can't believe the full up and down owning of the communications supply chain.
Makes Hezbollah look like a clown show.
Now we don't yet know which radios exactly these are. But more likely then not, wouldn't these be from the exact same supply chain attack and maybe even come in the same shipment?
I'm looking at pictures on my MidEast Twitter TL, with legit reporters RT'ing them, of palm-sized slim ICOM radios.
According to Routers, they were bought at the same time as the pagers 5 months ago. So I would bet on it being the same supply chain operation that targeted both devices and maybe other devices that were bought at the same time.
I mean just from a pure opsec perspective, you'd think they'd have popped them open to look right?
Thousands of civilians injured... very few Hezbollah dead.
Makes Israel look like a terrorist organization, IMHO.
There has been no statement or indication that the thousands of people injured were comprised in any significant proportion of civilians. Given that these pagers-- reportedly 5000 of them-- were purchased by Hezbollah directly and videos of their explosions show a minimal blast radius it is premature and, depending on motives, propagandistic to claim that the thousands of people injured were civilians.
Israel's bombing of Gaza made them look like a terrorist organization. I believe the majority of deaths and a significant fraction of injured in this attack are in fact Hezbollah members.
I doubt you would have been happy either way, but I think your statements about the injuries is also unsubstantiated.
There has been no statement or indication that the thousands of people injured were comprised in any significant proportion of civilians. Given that these pagers were purchased by Hezbollah directly and videos of their explosions show a minimal blast radius it is premature and, depending on motives, propagandistic to claim that the thousands of people injured were civilians.
>Thousands of civilians
You have absolutely nothing on which to base the claim that these were civilians and not Hezbollah members.
You can't take Lebanon's report on who the injured were at face value. I've not doubt that innocent people were injured by this, but it's not _thousands_ of innocent people.
Why would civilians have in their possession tactical communication devices of a military organization?
Hezbollah like most other similar organisations is not a primarily military organisation even though they are a paramilitary one. The vast majority of the members of Hezbollah have non-military roles of various kinds.
Civilians are shown to be in proximity of these devices when they are exploding. It appears that these devices were all triggered simultaneously, rather than waiting for individual targets to be isolated.
One reason is that Hezbollah is not a purely military organization, and has political, medical and educational arms. Another is that some of the reported casualties are the family of Hezbollah members.
I guess we now know what intelligence org had the know how for supply chain attacks we we're thinking impossible a few years ago... Thank god they are our allies. :)
Israel is not really an ally. They routinely spy on the US, and according the the CIA, spy on us as aggressively as the Chinese and Russians do. During the Cold war, they used intel as a bargaining chip and passed classified material to the Soviets. Their nuclear program was started primarily with stolen radioactive material that they exfiltrated from the US. These stories go on and on and on, and they're just the ones we know about. Jonathan Pollard was hardly the only spy, but it was the most high profile.
It's naive to call them an ally. It's an extremely complicated relationship, made more toxic by the extreme power that AIPAC holds over our politicians. Every president since LBJ has been duped, outwitted and embarrassed by Israel. Frenemy would be more accurate.
The USA spies all the time on everybody so by your own def they should be not really an ally of anybody.
I don't think the US is really first tier peer-allies with anyone, all friendly nations are on the spectrum of assets we utilize to cultural vassals that operate as reputationally independent extensions of the American empire.
Good thing the US doesn’t spy on allies. What hypocrites they would be!
The primary reason why Israel is widely considered an ally is their extensive intel network across Arabia and possibly half of Africa. No one matches the Mossad and the semi-private private intel industry of Israel in terms of capabilities.
Another reason is that Israel is a relatively stable, Western aligned democracy in a sea of dictatorships, kingdoms, fiefdoms and failed states... which are all organized in OPEC. The US needs a powerful Israel as a check-and-balance against OPEC - a credible threat that if OPEC ever repeats another Oil Crisis, they'll get putsched away.
> They routinely spy on the US, and according the the CIA, spy on us as aggressively as the Chinese and Russians do.
So what, I'm German, y'all spied on Schröder and Merkel as well, and it's only thanks to Snowden we actually know of that.
But OPEC is not a military organization. It is just minor countries trying to agree on a fair and just price of oil.
> It is just minor countries trying to agree on a fair and just price of oil.
Well, and that power can be abused as well, particularly for a military that relies on fossil fuels as extensively as the US. Additionally, there's not just the "classic" way of fighting wars (i.e. shooting stuff and blowing up stuff), but there's also economic warfare - and hiking the price of a vital good in war is an extremely effective weapon.
Don't all agencies spy on each other? Few years the BND (Germany) collaborated with the CIA (America) to spy on other nations
Except not in NATO, Five Eyes, or even a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. In real terms, they're definitely among the more problematic allies. Compared with Germany, UK, France, Australia, Canada, etc.
This is a blatant lie. For example, as part of operation Rubikon Germany and the US spied on Spain, a NATO ally, among other targets. It's commonplace to spy on each other.
Nothing they said was a lie though. Yes, everyone spies on each other, but what matters is the level of aggression. Israel ranks up there with China and Russia, and that's an issue.
And it's absolutely true that they did not sign the nuclear non proliferation treaty, and then went on to do nuclear tests off the coast of South Africa in the 1979 Vela incident. And that provided a huge motivation for Israel's enemies (which are absolutely anti-US) to seek nuclear weapons, which caused huge regional instability since then and threatened US national security.
Yes, you can talk about how it's hypocritical that the US gets to do these things and nobody else does. And in a sense it is, but the fact is that at the moment, the US effectively rules the world for better or worse. And it is a fact that Israel's behavior is causing instability that threatens themselves and the US.
I don't understand the 'lie' part here. How is what I stated false? The rest of what you said doesn't invalidate my points.
Israel is only Israel's ally.
"The hand that giveth taketh.." feelings. Planing atracks on the fab on a laptop whose core was made in that fab, should make one aware og consequences.
Hezbollah and iran do not seem to have somebody sampling hardware ordered for defects and alterations. Basic military and state ability . You couldn't do such attacks on functional organisations.
I've seen photos posted on X and Telegram (of course I can't verify) of what look like Baofeng and Icom UHF hand-helds that have detonated. Not sure how they can get them to all blow up in unison--these aren't devices that can receive a digital message--as they apparently did at a funeral today.
If one can modify a device to incorporate an explosive, then it's surely possible to add another receiver of some kind too.
Back in the day working on land seismic crews our blasting was handled by radio signal transmitted from the observer doghouse to the blaster at the shot-hole. You could hear on the radio when the recording crew began shooting for the day's production. There was a tone that triggered the shot while the blaster was connected to the blasting cap on the down-hole charge.
If someone placed explosives in a radio device I'm sure it would be quite easy to detonate them on command with a signal tone.
Those radios do decode some digital messages, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squelch#DCS for managing group convos (squelching others on the same channel who aren't part of the same group). There's also ANI identifiers and repeater codes, for example. So there's definitely firmware/software to work with SOME digital stuff onboard.
But I also think a lot of radios look like Baofengs, or are whitelabeled Baofengs, so who knows...
Besides, if Israel or whoever can modify the supply chain, they can add whatever receivers/chips they want into it alongside the explosives. Or just some sort of analog radio detonator/trigger.
They can detect analog tones for functions like CTCSS.
They could receive a radio broadcast.
Given apparently(?) none of them detonated prematurely, the arming device would need to be content aware so that a normal transmission didn't set them off randomly and warn the rest of the targets that the devices were compromised.
Impressive... but any collateral victim ?
I see a lot of comments here that seem to imply there is knowledge that victims were exclusively members of Hezbollah.
I have not seen that implication anywhere and most reporting cites 1 or 2 killed children. On the other hand, 5000 (per reports) of these pagers were purchased by Hezbollah because they were afraid cell phones could be implanted with bombs (there's precedent) and so the users would be predominantly Hezbollah members.
Despite this, there are a few persistent comments here that thousands of civilians were injured. That statement seems near to willfully wrong or intended to be misleading given the circumstances and lack of any more specific information about the people injured.
Yes, consider all the Hezbollah school teachers carrying Hezbollah ICOM walkie-talkies.
You realize these went off in supermarkets, right? In hospitals? In homes where children were near by? There has already been reporting on at least two dead children.
What alternative do you suggest? It's not as though a 250, 500lb bomb is less prone to collateral damage.
Hezbollah willingly joined with Hamas into a war. As far as war goes, this is just about the most precise form of targeting possible, especially in an urban area.
These were devices purchased by Hezbollah for their internal communications. There are cell phones in Lebanon and they are cheap, people use these devices to avoid Israeli tracking. Otherwise you would use a cell phone. Explosions were very localized so in terms of civilian casualties this was probably very low.
That's true but doesn't really respond there are three levels to consider regarding this and whether Israel truly did minimize civilian casualties.
1. Were the pagers/radios distributed to only Hezbollah members or was Hezbollah the main purchaser of the lots? Plenty of professions (doctors) still use pagers.
2. Did Hezbollah distribute these only to militants or did members of its civil service receive these as well? Keep in mind that Hezbollah is a legitimate political party in Lebanon and provides social services and operates hospitals. They have plenty of members and leaders who have never personally lifted a finger to harm Israel.
3. Did Israel verify that these devices were in the hands of Hezbollah members at the time of detonation and that those members were isolated to minimize collateral damage? The answer to this is clearly no, the logistics are simply impossible to track who is holding 3000+ passive devices. And we've seen reports of civilian causalities including a dead child.
Hezbollah is constantly firing missiles into northern Israel. Accounting for causalities is a luxury in war and Hezbollah is a militia that forces Israel into war.
It was an effective war strategy and I doubt you can name weapons of war that are more targeted. So I don't see how your criticism can hold up even if the questions were answered.
I would not want to answer them, because I believe you would not accept any answer anyway.
Hezbollah is not a mobile device distribution organization. From my understanding they bought these to avoid Israeli tracking for their own people. No civilian doctor would use these pagers but there are medics working for Hezbollah like any militia/army.
Due to the nature of the devices I doubt it's physically possible to verify every explosion. Just like you can't verify it with a bomb or even a bullet. It's tragic that civilians are hurt but that would happen in any case when there's a war.
Hezbollah themselves bootstrapped a phone in the past. They also recently fired on a football field and killed 12 children. Then they hide in tunnels while leaving the general populace of Lebanon to deal with the wrath of the war that they started while they keep shelling the northern part of Israel. These parts of Israel and Lebanon are abandoned now because of their war. For once, they actually got some consequences for their own actions.
Was it 100% perfect and surgical?
Hell no. Nothing ever is, that's fantasy land. But it's about the closest thing that you can get to an ideal attack in these specific circumstances. The fact that the attack produced less than 1% in casualties shows the concern for collateral damage in this situation.
> Hezbollah is not a mobile device distribution organization. From my understanding they bought these to avoid Israeli tracking for their own people.
That's exactly my point, if for example, Hezbollah just bought 2500 pagers out of a lot of 3000 armed pagers that means 500 were distributed to civilians.
> No civilian doctor would use these pagers but there are medics working for Hezbollah like any militia/army.
And why wouldn't they use these pagers? Doctors use pagers all of the time. As mentioned we know very little about who actually received a pager. Even if the doctors were all Hezbollah that doesn't make them all part of the militia wing of the party: they operate civilian medical services including 4 hospitals and 12 clinics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezbollah_social_services
I would think that a 2000 of the devices are sitting in a warehouse as spares or waiting for distribution. These are relatively new devices.
> And why wouldn't they use these pagers? Doctors use pagers all of the time.
These devices were specifically ordered by Hezbollah. An army buys its own equipment not in order to hand it out to the civilian populace. They don't hand out guns to doctors who carry. Why would they hand out their internal communication device?
> Even if the doctors were all Hezbollah that doesn't make them all part of the militia wing of the party
It doesn't make them a great target but it does put them in the valid line of fire. The fact that someone works as a civilian doctor isn't relevant. If they have a Hezbollah beeper they are probably an army medic.
Hezbollah put the entire populace of Lebanon at risk without a second thought, people acting as their "beard" trying to legitimize a terrorist organization (that killed many Americans/French too) are part of it. This is a military communication device, the only case where a civilian has access to it is if they took it from a combatant.
The fact is that if there were significant civilian victims they would have been paraded in front of cameras repeatedly. There were some probably, but not many.
> I see a lot of comments here that seem to imply there is knowledge that victims were exclusively members of Hezbollah.
Well a great many here also believe that raping and killing 1200 young civilians who were enjoying a music at a festival is an act of "resistance". I don't know about you but to me these civilians weren't Mossad agents.
War is messy: if you don't want to find out, don't fuck around. For example begin by not firing missile on another country.
And I see a lot of people who are fucking around at the moment, including in the EU and the US, thinking there shall never be any reaction.
They can keep fucking around: at some point they'll find out.
I mean obviously not, even if the radios were exclusively in possession of Hezbollah fighters or apparatchiks, they don't live in isolation. They go to coffee shops and restaurants and have dinner with their families.
It makes me wonder how Israel can achieve something like this while simultaneously not being aware of the Oct 7 attacks.
News reports say that Israel had copies of the Oct 7 plans but found it impossible to believe and were convinced hamas didn’t want all out war.
Similar to Pearl Harbor where we also had intelligence of the attack I suppose…
October 7th happened exactly because Israel was over-focusing on Iranian proxies like Hezbollah and underestimated Hamas.
Also on the expansion on the West Bank.
The same way usa can blow up any country in the world but was blindsided by 9/11.
When the element of surprise is involved, the attacker only has to get lucky once,the defender has to be lucky every day.
Offence vs defence.
Netanyahu has long supported Hamas, to his own political ends.
For the downvoters:
‘Buying Quiet’: Inside the Israeli Plan That Propped Up Hamas https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-q...
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up...
Preparation. Surprise attacks work… once. Then, you have to wait for a few years when the enemy side lowers their readiness again.
It seems like these attacks happened multiple times in succession, a day apart from eachother. Yesterday pagers exploded, today walkie takies and solar panels. What's next to come?
"solar panels"
That is news to me. Who reported so?
"home solar energy systems exploded in several areas of Beirut"
Sounds more like the battery exploded, not the panel. That would be a weird and difficult attack vector.
[flagged]
You started a hellish flamewar with this, even by the standards of this pretty hellish thread. Please don't do that again. Religious flamewar in particular will get you banned here, regardless of which religion you have a problem with.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41581653.
I certainly didn't intend it turn it into a flamewar. Posting the link was poor judgement on my part. My intent was to outline a particular branch of ideology, not a whole religion.
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No, it wouldn't. An interpretation of an ideology is not a race and conflating the two is disingenuous.
Discriminating against a group of people on the basis of their religion can still be racist.
There's legal precedent for that in the US, Canada, the UK, France, the European Council on Human Rights, etc... Not Saudi Arabia though. Are you Saudi?
why is terrorism most aligned with Islam? isn't it possible to frame any/every religion as "most likely to commit acts of terrorism" based on subjective interpretations of their tenets?
Only in recent times, with IS and similar organizations in the middle east. If you look at different historic periods you'd consider the Christians to be violent terrorists, even invading countries and starting lots of wars.
then we agree. personally i find the kind of terrorism associated with Christian Nationalism to pose more of an existential threat since i'm in the US and am exposed to a lot of it. despite that, i don't conflate christianity with terrorism.
the person i responded to thinks that Islam has a causal relationship with terrorism - what about the ideology leads you to believe that, besides the fact that the media you consume reports on it more often?
Very impressive. A months long operation culminating in an early new year's eve celebration with a bunch of firecrackers. I guess it's time to go back to pigeons
War and terrorism aside, for the rest of us, in practical terms, Israel can now never be trusted commercially for its software or hardware. Not only are they backdoored and exploited, but they also blow up and kill the user.
Do you think Israel is just randomly planting bombs in everything it makes? This was clearly a targeted op aimed at Hezbollah.
Yes, I actually do think that Israel is installing backdoors and explosives in 10x more things than they have activated in their current war against Lebanon.
A US forum talking about people they pre-consider terrorists of a country they surely can't pin point in a map. What can go wrong...