Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon, sources say
(reuters.com)301 points by shmatt 10 months ago
301 points by shmatt 10 months ago
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Wrong on all three:
1) The victims of yesterday's attack were overwhelmingly terrorist soldiers and mid-level management which fits the definition of surgical. If the results of this operation are as good as suggested by all the early reports, they just carved a major hole in the upper ranks of the organization (not even including the major damage they've caused over the last six months with surgical strikes on leaders).
2) We don't have confirmation that's it's them (but it likely is), and we know far more than that: we know that it incapacitated thousands of members of a designated terrorist organization with minimal impact outside of them.
3) Well, that's just your opinion, man.
1) The victims of yesterday's attack were overwhelmingly terrorist soldiers and mid-level management which fits the definition of surgical. If the results of this operation are as good as suggested by all the early reports, they just carved a major hole in the upper ranks of the organization (not even including the major damage they've caused over the last six months with surgical strikes on leaders).*
2) We don't have confirmation that's it's them (but it likely is), and we know far more than that: we know that it incapacitated thousands of members of a designated terrorist organization with minimal impact outside of them.*
"We know for sure this was super-surgical and ONLY killed the 'bad guy club', and since they are in the 'bad guy club' it was done by good guys clearly. Also we don't actually know if it was the 'good guy club', but we know without a doubt they are surgical." -- as if the Hannibal Directive, ethnic cleansing, and colonization are all so super-surgical and precise. Preposterous.
*3) Well, that's just your opinion, man.*
Well it sure seems like the International Criminal Court, UN, and other world bodies are starting to open their eyes.
This isn't the 50's anymore -- media is not controllable in the same way. israels crimes against all of humanity are coming to light.
That's like, a matter of historical record man. With 'allies' like these, who needs enemies?
There is absolutely no way you can argue 'anti-bds' laws are not in violation of the first amendment and be serious. Especially given that for many government jobs you MUST sign them to get hired.
A foreign government that flatly refuses to registrer it's influence organization under FARA has taken away one of the most important rights of all Americans, whether they realize it or not.
Well I don't agree on (1) or (2). I think they are at least attempting to degrade the capabilities of Hezbollah, which is designated as a terrorist organization by the US and others. I don't really want to get into the depths of Arab/Israel conflicts as I don't think anyone really has a good solution to that, certainly not me.
However, I do find anti-BDS laws very hard to justify. It seems that many conflate antizionism with antisemitism, probably because some of the most vocal people are actually just dogwhistling against Jews in general. However, there is a large contingent of people, especially in the West, who are opposed to Israel's battlefield tactics and the current conflict, while simultaneously believing that Israel has a right to exist and defend themselves. Those people might reasonably decide that they want to boycott Israel or Israeli products to make their views heard (hit them in the pocketbook), but are prohibited from expressing themselves by these laws.
Are they unconstitutional in the US? One would imagine that if the Citizens United case says that money is speech, that would equally apply to people who want to boycott Israel. After all, we already tolerate much worse forms of antisemtic speech here. Why would we not also tolerate people voting with their money?
For sure, yesterday's was a terrorist attack, since it indiscriminately hit civilians (multiple children, healthcare workers, etc.)
That said, before more people jump on the rethoric of declaring a specific entity terrorist:
The decision is usually made by your state's authorities, and depending on where you live, Hezbollah might not be considered a terrorist organization, or its military wing might be considered terrorist, but not Hezbollah as a whole (like in the EU).
Since we've seen medics among the victims, it's pretty clear that this was not surgically targeting a the military wing, and thus few people would dare claim that this was targeted against terrorists.
Now that the pandoras box of mass booby trapping electronic devices has been opened, who is to say we won't see tit for tat retaliations with other supply chain attacks?
Will every teddy bear now need to be scanned for explosives before entering the country?
They already are.
We aggressively scan packages for drugs, explosives, certain precursors, etc.
And forms of this attack have already happened in the past, including intentional food tainting and anthrax.
Yes, you should scan your mail, physical or digital.
Mostly terrorists are dead and this killed far less civilians than the alternative ways of waging war (ground invasion or bombing campaign). This is the level of surgical operation that everyone was calling for since Hezbollah declared war on Israel on October 8th, and now that Israel is delivering that level of precision there's still some people complaining, it's unbelievable how naive some people are.
Please do teach us all how to wage a war on a jihadist organization, with zero civilian casualties. How would you do that? Apparently, extreme targeting by micro explosive devices is not enough. No matter what Israel would do, it will always be held at an enormously higher standard than other countries.
Why did Hezbollah start firing rockets into Israel in the first place? it was totally unprovoked. Now they are reaping what they sowed.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 idea TSA security has always been a farce, detecting only the crudest methods of attack.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Don't be a part of a terrorist organization and if you are - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bring_your_own_device
Looks like an ICOM IC-V82.
https://batteriesamerica.com/collections/icom-ic-v8-ic-v82-i...
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-...
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
'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.
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 wonder how many of their telecom devices like routers, switches, etc. have bombs implanted in their power supplies
"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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I doubt you would have been happy either way, but I think your statements about the injuries is also unsubstantiated.
Why would civilians have in their possession tactical communication devices of a military organization?
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 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.
Good thing the US doesn’t spy on allies. What hypocrites they would be!
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
It makes me wonder how Israel can achieve something like this while simultaneously not being aware of the Oct 7 attacks.
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...
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?
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.