Comment by pdabbadabba

> 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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_neutrality

> 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?

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

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...

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."

> 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.

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.

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

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Its not, but Hezbollah is in control of the hot border in the south.

Its a govt within a govt.

> 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.

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...

My phrasing says exactly what it says - that this was indiscriminate. Do you think the IDF considered whether civilians would be harmed, or have a good possibility of being harmed? Surely blowing up thousands of devices in a major urban area would fall somewhere under this consideration.

Come off it, the design of an attack like this is absolutely designed to instil fear in the general populace as well as injure the people carrying the electronic devices. If something similar happened in a military base or a military administrative office, sure. But if you're setting off thousands of explosions in commercial and residential districts assurances that none of the bystanders need to worry about it are meaningless.

Hezbollah has a political arm, and a military one. Both were targeted, but only the latter consists of combatants.

People misconstrue (naively or purposefully) what it means to target as opposed to collateral damage.

I don't think it's reasonable to say that the purpose was to disable those electronic devices. The devices were compromised and modified to include explosives. They could have been modified with a remote kill-switch that destroyed the device without causing a large explosion. The purpose of the explosion was to injure humans, not to make devices inoperable.

idk, just bricking the devices or (as originally conjectures when the first reports about this emerged yesterday) causing the battery to heat up and melt would be equally disruptive of communications without turning them into mini-bombs.

The rules of war prohibit planting explosive in objects which are likely to be picked up by civilians. The rules of war also discourages fighting in civilian areas. Members of an enemy organization are not automatically valid military targets according to the rules of war. Especially when they are just going about their civilian lives far away from the battlefield.

This is attack consistent with terrorist tactics, not warfare.

> it makes you an illegal combatant

Technically yes. Unlawful combatant or unprivileged combatant is more accurate.

It isn't illegal for a soldier to not wear a uniform. It just means the Geneva Conventions don't apply.

They do, and have done so since the 1990s. You would know this even if from US TV news if you paid attention. I cannot help but wonder how many people's 'knowledge' of Hezbollah is based on pundits and the occasional movie with random 'terrorists' shouting in Arabic.

They are not part of the regular Lebanese army, but they are a straight up military force. The most obvious parallel I can think of would be the US Marines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezbollah_armed_strength