I think it's far more likely that Mossad has infiltrated whatever foreign (non-Israeli) supply chain they were using.
So this can happen regardless of whether you're using Israeli supply chains or not.
Who do you want to be able to spy on you and compromise your hardware?
Unless you can spin up your own fab (hint: you can't) you're dependent on a hegemon. US/EU/Israel isn't perfect, but pretty much as good as it gets.
This is another danger of letting these Israel swing its sword around without any sort of real condemnation from the US/West: the rationale for geopolitical multi-polarity increases in legitimacy. Pax Americana ends because allying with us doesn't save you from being used as a tool for ends like this. If speculation is correct that Taiwan is involved... Woof.
I buy chinese IP cameras. China cannot block my bank account / employment / communications.
All this fearmongering about telegram and tiktok is weird.
China can decide what it wants from me- I have no plans to visit or engage with regime; however my life is dependent on the US not thinking of me as interesting.
So, the less I give to US companies, the better.
Especially as, being a non-US citizen I have no right to privacy afforded to me in the constitution, and US companies can be forced to comply with the government in secret- much in the same way we consider that China does it to even part-owned China based companies.
Even if we start with the questionable idea that the US has the moral and physical might to be deciding where the borders are drawn in Asia; it isn't obvious that TikTok would be influential enough to matter. The military-industrial complex lobbyists in the US have a lot of actual power in pushing for war and experience in getting messages to the public.
All because China is saying: "Either you submit to us completely voluntarily, or you submit by force, but you will submit"?
That's imperialism.
Yep. Just because we don't like something doesn't mean that there are good alternatives. If I were in Tawian, Option A is status quo. Option B is to put the best and brightest into diplomatic posts. And they probably have a stack of other options they're thinking about. But all else failing Option Imperial-Subject is a much better one than Option Taipei-Becomes-A-Pancake-And-Then-Imperial-Subject. If there is going to be war it'd better be war with a credible good outcome to it.
The US could step in and police this back when it was 8x, 4x, 2x the size of China. I'd be surprised if it can now. China is pretty powerful.
China has no urgent or pressing self defence need to attack Taiwan. It also does not have a strong legal case to justify taking it over. In any rational sense the strongest case is for China to leave it alone.
Allowing the status quo to continue is better for the people of China, for the people of Taiwan, and for the rest of us around the world.
It's pure imperialist nonsense and we shouldn't seek to legitimise it just because China is powerful.
It’s like the CCP looked at what social media was doing to mental health and cable news to our political discourse and said “I can do something with that, I’ll take the extra large.”
You're thinking too literal about what to influence. The more internal divide that foreign powers can amplify, the more likely that US will not/can not intervene in other places around the world.
There's also general propaganda to make people more empathetic towards China/Russia prior to any events occurring.
Assuming the Chinese government is using TikTok for influence campaigns (they'd be foolish not to), they only way to stop it is to outright ban it in your country (which the US seems to be trying to do, with possibly-disastrous effects), or find a way to get your citizens to dislike it (good luck with that).
While Russia is doing pretty well at their influence campaigns on other platforms, those platforms can choose, if they so desire, to step up their detection and banning efforts. It's a constant cat-and-mouse game, of course, but it's at least possible to stamp out most of that crap if you're willing to spend the resources to do so.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-rt-employees-indicted-cov...
I'm not saying Ukraine is some golden child or whatever but they weren't the aggressor.
They would pretend to be Americans and pushing certain narratives by retweeting/following/commenting/etc.
I found one that claimed to be a single mother living in the midwest USA. It was using a cropped photo from the personal blog of an Australian woman (who had multiple kids and a husband). If you went far enough back in the history you could find accidental Russian language usage. The timestamp trends in the posting behavior were clearly not American. It followed, and was followed by, other similar troll accounts.
Most recently I found one that claimed to be a 26 year old woman from the US. No reverse image search hits on the English web. But reverse image search with yandex you'd get hits for a couple of vk profile picture databases. From there it was possible to find the actual vk account, which was a Russian woman who clearly was not the same person.
I could link you some of the accounts but the ones I've reported have been banned or deleted by now. I'm sure the US government is wrong on some stuff but there's too much evidence for stuff like the Internet Research Agency to be fake [1]
This is a comment I made on hackernews, replying to someone who (IIRC) claimed to be German but (in my opinion) was clearly a Russian astroturfing account.
After I mentioned it they deleted their comments, and they have since all been flagged by the moderators here.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/13/media/right-wing-media-influe...
If you believe in freedom of speech, you should also accept that people, including foreign people, may try to influence you. China doesn't believe in freedom of speech so they censor foreign sources of influence. Does America really want to go down that path?
But dynamic algorithms, targeting exactly you, knowing what mood you have in that moment (by analyzing what you have looked at, liked, disliked), what opinions you have etc. opens up a whole different world of influence possibilities amd I think those possibilities are just starting to get explored with AI. The data is already there.
Damn the education system, and it's penchant for teaching the history of colonialism instead of a revisionist policy. What's next, after Mandatory Palestine we'll teach our children about the Civil War and slavery too? What an anti-America sentiment, clearly we need our conservative lawmakers to... I dunno, rewrite history for both countries? Teach feel-good cookie recipes instead of international politics?
As long as America has anti-BDS laws there won't be any freedom of speech in the first place. Our first amendment rights are currently being suspended by international lobbyists that can't handle their share of due criticism. A shame, considering the US does so well to educate others on it's own embarrassing history, but is threatened with a lawsuit when anyone tries to meaningfully criticize Israel.
The medium is the message.
The bad news is that there is no explicit and broad right to privacy in the constitution. You are protected by the fourth amendment requiring a warrant for searches and seizures, but the court has ruled that, citizen or not, if a third party like Meta willingly hands over your info, it’s fair game. L
and all of a sudden, you're interesting.
Why do people engage in this sort of larping, like they're secret agents or intellectuals that may be hunted at any moment by the grey suits in western governments?
We know it's not true for this person in particular because one click on their HN profile tells you their real name. I stopped there, but I'm sure there is plenty of additional info available with 3-4 more clicks. If they were really so afraid of government reprisal like this larping suggests, maybe they'd attempt to be at least a little pseudo-anonymous.
The actual fact is that 99.9999999999% of us are boring and will remain boring no matter what kind of comments we write on HN. It wouldn't hurt to touch grass once in a while.
If you have something of interest to Beijing and you’re doing something shameful or illegal in America, and they have evidence, they have leverage. This is human asset development 101.
Most people don’t have skills or information relevant to a foreign state. But some do, and for them being mindful about not giving a foreign adversary blackmail leverage is prudent.
Scott was not saying "you should have no privacy"; he was making a statement of fact. That was nearly two decades ago, and he was prescient and right.
Hardly a defensible position to blackmail someone from.
I have super powers on both sides, one can influence the policies and politics of my country much stronger than the other[0].
Why would I choose that side, they don't give me more rights and they don't give me any capacity to complain.
Say what? Ok, there is no explicit "right to privacy" anywhere in the US Constitution, but that applies equally to citizens and non-citizens. Whatever is in the Constitution applies to everyone regardless of citizenship, with only a few exceptions. And those exceptions don't have much to do with anything you might refer to as privacy. (They're about whether state governments can mess with you. And were I a non-citizen, it's the states that I would be worried about, given that many of them are actively trying to make things harder for non-citizens.)
Unreasonable search and seizure, in particular, applies to everyone. The courts have repeatedly affirmed this.
Unless you're talking about non-citizens outside US borders, or crossing them? That's much murkier.
I imagine China is just as good in pretty much every way.
> The United States leads the world in total number of people incarcerated, with more than 2 million prisoners nationwide
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_...
Fun fact. There are more people in the US education system than there ever were in Soviet gulags.
Just as irrelevant.
There are also no laws against exposing crimes by the government. You’re just not allowed to break other laws just because you’re doing so.
People very frequently successfully expose corruption and abuse by governments in the US. It just doesn’t make significant news unless it’s a major national politician, and that happens multiple times a year.
That's just the government interring whoever it doesn't like, with extra steps. Or making a law that says "we have to like you" with extra steps.
So again, what's the difference?
The comparison would be the Japanese internment camps the US had in WW2.
There is nothing like that today where citizens are being locked up without breaking any laws.
Some of these talking points fall apart upon typing them, let alone posting.
Plainly speaking, China already took our iPhone manufacturing and our electric car business. They've got the chops, the supply chain and the export network to keep doing that for everything from the JSOW to the Harpoon missile. Unless the US makes a serious effort to invest in domestic R&D, our Bay Area vanguards are going to spend more time jerking off than participating in a healthy defense business.
It may well be coming back over time; from 4 hours ago:
Apple Mobile Processors Are Now Made in America. By TSMC. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41574844
Regardless of how you feel about it, the CHIPS act is a line in the sand the US has just crossed. We are heading back to cold-war style economics, because this is an economic cold war.
On one hand, you can claim that it's a well-known propaganda technique (e.g. the soviets using "...And you are lynching negroes" as a rebuttal to anything). But on the other hand, the most satisfying way to avoid that form of propaganda would probably be to fix our own flaws rather than calling whataboutism.
The average American is much more aware of our issues, not China's. Our own place isn't pretty bad just because we have past history nor ongoing problems. It's a matter of 'what are we doing to change and improve', and are we willing/free to bring up problems that need changing, and does our societies structure allow change? Or does society pound down those nails that dare stick out? Every society is a flawed human constructed stumbled into not intelligently/humanely designed. The American systems is the most dynamic/flexible of all the ones I have been exposed to. There are more liberal ones, but less dynamic and flexible (no free speech laws in the UK which might cause the lack of reflection that you lament). There are more conservative ones that are again less dynamic/flexible.
Regardless, I'm talking about competency. I don't endorse any particular state, culture, or ideology.
EU maybe, but US/Israel are as good as it gets? PRISM? Literally China/Russia are more trustworthy.
Why?
Just as bad in what way?
> Also because the US has gone into aggressive conflicts a lot more than those 2 countries put together.
How are you defining aggressive conflicts, and at what point do you start counting?
Only in the sense that, as a US citizen who has no desire to travel to China or Russia, I don't feel all that worried that either country is going to do anything bad to me directly.
But if I lived in either one of those places... whooooa boy. I'd have to be a different person to not get in trouble. And I wouldn't call myself much of an activist or pot-stirrer, really. I feel bad for people who want to show public dissent of their government in China or Russia but can't (or do, and end up in jail), and for people in marginalized groups that the government doesn't like.
I sort of get this PoV, but on the other hand…
If China had any information about you that was valuable for any purpose whatsoever (trade an intelligence tip to a corrupt businessman in a mafia state?) its government could do so with no legal or political safeguards.
The US government has legal safeguards against this, and would face _massive_ potential political risk for doing so against one of its own citizens.
The US government literally steals cash money from its citizens and faces no repercussions whatsoever. If you carry cash with you in the US, you're in absolute danger of having it confiscated by the police as "drug money" and never seeing it again. You can claim the US has "legal safeguards", but until they're actually tested, it's just a supposition.
You should look up how Israel actively fishes LGBT palestinian people using fake dating site accounts, and threatens to out them in order to force them to contribute intelligence.
The US is clearly not that compromised. But they're not exactly clean either, considering some of the stuff that happened in central America.
They have no free elections unlike US.
They have no free press unlike US.
They have no independent judiciary unlike US.
They both rank poorly on the corruption index unlike US.
You are about to have an election in which both parties are pro-Genocide, none would do anything about 99.9 percent of the issues on which both the republican AND the democratic voters agree on based on all the polls from the last decades. Drug prices, wages, rent costs, gun control, prison reforms, military spending you name it.
Independent judiciary? Bro, I cant wait till you look up news about the judicial body called Supreme Court of Justice.
Julius Nyerere
The US is a two party system with many hereditary politicians. How free do you think your elections really are?
> They have no free press unlike US.
How did the US news report on Snownden, Assange and others the US government does not like? The US press is an oligopoly that does barely any real reporting. Theoretical freeness does little here.
> They have no independent judiciary unlike US.
Which is more than happy to shield the executive from any consequences. Qualified immunity makes this separation meaningless.
> They both rank poorly on the corruption index unlike US.
According to western definitions of corruption that conveniently do not include corporate lobbying, revolving door relationsships between politics and industry, backdoor laws via trade deals and all the other shadyness that has effectively taken over so-called democracies. But sure, pat yourself on the back for being less likely to get out of a speeding ticket by slipping the officer some cash.
Huh, which fabs does Israel have?
Tower Semiconductor is based in Israel and runs two fabs there as well.
To the Chinese Communist Party, the Han ethnic group belongs to the Chinese State, and everything anyone of this ethnic background does is their business.
Edit: Why am I blocked from replying to the below comment?
China forcibly returned nearly 10,000 in overseas crackdown: report
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220119-china-forcibl...
The Disappeared - China’s global kidnapping campaign has gone on for years. It may now be reaching inside U.S. borders.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/29/the-disappeared-china-r...
Thousands of Chinese overseas forced home involuntarily: report
https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Thousands-of-Chinese-overse...
40 Officers of China’s National Police Charged in Transnational Repression Schemes Targeting U.S. Residents
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/40-officers-china-s-national-...
China’s abductions of foreign nationals should carry costs and consequences
https://www.politico.eu/article/chinese-abductions-of-foreig...
The US does the same thing and worse, just look for the very long arm of their FBI and Secret Service when it comes to what they allege to be “cyber-crime”. A decade or so ago I was visiting my company’s ISP one morning when I manage to stumble just as some US federal agents were doing their thing among the server racks. I live in Bucharest, Romania.
BTW, before someone screams whataboutism: adjusting your worldview according to facts and applying your moral standards to all countries is not whataboutism. Its a prerequisite to being able to morally condemn any action.
Examples of Extraterritorial killings and abuses listed (edited for more relevant source)
Not arguing, but I think China still relies on Russia for jet engines - though it’s making great efforts to become self-sufficient there.
(Edit: high performance / high technology jet engines)
https://www.twz.com/air/our-best-look-yet-at-chinas-j-20a-fi...
Russia is no longer a reliable supplier. They need all the engines they can make for domestic use, including replacing war losses and building airliners to service domestic routes. Production is down because all the foreign technical experts left.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/12/14/rare-earth...
A bit of a false bundle there.
The two groups are more like US+Europe+China on one hand and 'misc' on the other. Most people get by without depending on the technology from the 'misc' group at all.
This kind of incident will hurt the Israeli tech sector individually, not some imagined US/EU/Israel tech grouping.
Just because Slovakia is good at manufacturing cars doesn't mean that car manufacturing is dependent on Slovakia.
It's much easier to spin up your fab tech more so now -- than ever before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Counci...
A few observations:
1. This is an attack against Hezbollah, not Lebanon. The two entities are tightly coupled, but they are not the same.
2. Israel and Hezbollah are already at war. 60,000 Israelis have been displaced because of Hezbollah ongoing rocket and missile attacks. Israel has retaliated in various ways.
TLDR: you can argue that this is an act of war against Hezbollah. But it is not a declaration of war, and it is not against Lebanon.
Then imagine that France predictably shoots back, and takes great care to specifically target members of that terrorist group.
In this more accurate analogy, would you still say that France declared open war on Britain? I would say no - that the terrorist group is the one that declared war; and that France is clearly engaging in acts of war against that terrorist group, which happens to be embedded in a host country, like a parasite.
I think your comparison stops holding wage as,soon as you mention the Conservative Party. They just aren’t the same thing as Hezbollah.
I really hope you are wrong about the conclusion.
Is that what happened?
The modern supply chain is vastly deep. Iran can buy something from (IDK) India which might use software or hardware from Israel. As a further example, unless there's viable phone OS I don't know about, even Hezbollah will be using Android or iOS (and so buying from the US). etc.
I think it's far more likely that Mossad has infiltrated whatever foreign (non-Israeli)
Maybe that is more likely. But I don't think my or your guesses matter so much as public perception. IE, it would change the situation that a given customer may look skeptically at an Israeli software or hardware product. Or they may not given that price and features trumps security and quality for nearly everything these days.
The point is, would allies trust if it were China that pulled this off? Huawei/TikTok were thrown under the bus for way less.
Yeah. Wasn't there something in the Snowden leaks about the CIA intercepting servers in-transit to install implants on them? I'm sure Israel is doing something similar.
The correct analogy for espionage isn't crime. But even taking that framing, if everyone actually does steal, it doesn't do you any good to be naive and deny reality.
<https://www.npr.org/2020/03/05/812499752/uncovering-the-cias...>
You've got to remember that as internet people, we want everything to have a clever storyline to it. Intelligence services exploit that exact expectation though: the first thing you attack is trust within the organization itself, since it gives you more access, more easily and once people have talked themselves into "supply chain threat" there's a real danger they've ignored "actually the guy signing off on the paperwork is taking a payoff to ignore some delivery irregularities".
That guy got a deal and was evacuated with his family before events unfolded. Seems way easier than alternative plans.
From The Guardian [1]:
> Eight killed and 2,750 wounded
Was that a clever move if you're killing "only" 8 potential adversaries?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/sep/17/middle-ea...
"Among those killed is an eight-year-old girl from Bekka Valley, Abiad said, according to Al Jazeera."
This CCTV footage shows one of the devices exploding in a busy supermarket:
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/dozens-hezbollah-m...
Terrorizing your opponents is one thing, but indiscriminately detonating bombs in public spaces is just plain terrorism.
If the child story is true (which is always in question), presumably they were tragically playing with the pager or the like at precisely that time.
However the footage of the attack is overwhelmingly fighting-age males exclusively. As far as military operations go, that is remarkably targeted.
Maybe in the future they'll carry some emotional damage or something, but living in a country de facto in a state of war with a formidable nuclear-power neighbour, while governed by a terrorist organization that indiscriminately fires rockets into civilian areas essentially daily, carries that risk, right? I doubt such an operation was a surprise to anyone.
Just like the Americans decreased the safety of Americans abroad by spending two decades radicalizing the middle east, Israel has decreased the safety of its citizens by always choosing to escalate the violence.
These kinds of comparisons are frankly just nonsense and so devoid of context
that "someone" is an enemy combatant currently fighting a war
if they were wearing a uniform would you stand next to a soldier during an ongoing war?
if you were a soldier would you hide in a group of civilians?
there's a lot of blame to go around and Israel is far from clean, but the Hezbollah members are clearly also putting people in harms way by using them as a shield against attacks like this
I saw that video too and I'm happy the bystanders in that case were unharmed but that was 1/2000 (or 5,000?) explosions. I wouldn't necessarily extrapolate the supermarket video to the other several thousand explosions.
If you believe this tactic was just, then I trust that if Mossad obliterated your child in the process of assassinating an enemy of Israel who happened to be nearby then you would be able to forgive and forget, since it was for the greater good and they tried their best. Even if they were targeting the wrong person, as it sometimes goes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillehammer_affair
Incidentally when they later killed the actual target of that operation they did so by detonating a 100kg car bomb on a public road, also killing 4 civilians and injuring 16 others.
taking the moral high ground is easy when you are not the one making decisions, and while the lesser of two evils (in your car bomb example) doesn't make sense on a personal level, it does make sense on a macro level
How far back are we willing to go for that? Who evicted whom? When? How many times? In what order?
Indiscriminate attacks are those [0]:
(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.
The fact that the pagers were obtained by Hezbollah to be used for their communications, and consequently could be expected to be exclusively in the possession of combatants means the attack was not indiscriminate.
Causing collateral damage does not make an attack indiscriminate. The standard for permissible collateral damage is that an attack must not cause loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian property, etc. that is excessive in relation to the anticipated concrete and direct military advantage [1].
The fact that it was so specifically targeted, combined with the small size of the explosive charges means collateral damage could be expected to be minor. And the evidence so far suggests that to have been accurate. The death of a single child is tragic, but negligible in comparison to the military advantage gained by thousands of combatants dead or wounded.
[0]: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule12
[1]: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule14
In your scientistic rationalization using weaselwords like "expected to be exclusive", "the [subjective] standard for permissible..", "a death is [objectively] negligible", and so on, it is rather the case that your explanation is so laden with prejudiced pseudoreasoning that you are blind to it and unwittingly helping to spread ideological misinformation.
A country has a right to defend its citizens. It can go to war to do so. War is horrible and civilians die.
It's funny, everyone on Hacker News at least completed high school in principle. But there's so much brave conservatism that high school education should have infused students with enough critical thinking to make them think about what they're really saying, regardless of how complex or simple their version of words is.
Sadly these sorts of people don't realize (or don't care, end justifies the means and by any means necessary, after all) all they are going to weaken is the already weak consensus on how to make war a little more humane, not weaken Israel.
Wow- the lack of self awareness in your statement is flabbergasting
AFAICT the stock pager models are ~95 grams, and people are suggesting 3-5g of added explosives. If they used RDX, then 3g would be ~5.5 cubic centimeters, which seems like rather a lot to try to squish into a small pager unless the design also replaced the standard battery with a smaller one to make room.
In contrast, a M67 fragmentation grenade uses ~156 grams of explosives.
Basically I'm saying it sounds like the bombs are small enough that it's not quite fair to call them "indiscriminate", especially if the trigger logic involves a Hezbollah radio network that nobody else would be using.
A lot of people seem to think Hezbollah is purely military in nature because of the 'terrorism' label. The organization was founded to respond to Israel's invasion of Lebanon, and while it is a militant organization it also has seats in the Lebanese parliament, engages in a lot of non-military activities, and does not have simple politics - for example, it has condemned Al Qaeda and ISIS for terroristic attacks.
Labels such as 'terrorists' are as often designed to confuse as to inform. Reductionist categorization makes people easy to manipulate.
Regardless of your opinion of the IDF, their flag is clearly a very different vibe
More seriously, quite a few other countries have guns on the flag, reflecting a turbulent recent history. As I mentioned, Hezbollah was formed in response to the invasion and occupation of Lebanon just over 40 years ago, which was not a violence-free event. Let's not even get into swords on flags.
There's a tendency among some people to draw their conclusion first and then summon reasons for it afterwards, reasons which often lack consistency. Our violent history is glorious; theirs is deplorable. Consider, for example, the Irish Republican Army; like Hezbollah, it's considered a terrorist organization by US, UK, and many other jurisdictions. But due to the huge number of Irish American people and the subsidence of that political conflict in the last few decades, lots of Americans think the IRA is cool, while reflexively lumping Hezbollah in with other Islamic groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS.
In short, I think things like 'their flag has a gun on it' are the opposite of helpful or insightful.
I think anyone over the age of 30 probably does.
It's even got the bayonet fixed so there's no confusion about their terrorist intentions.
How does Israel know?
A lot of Israelis, Palestinians, and Lebanese are irreligious. Yet, a lot of Israelis, Palestinians, and Lebanese know people who have been affected by the conflict first hand (either refugees, civilian casualties, or combatant casualties), which makes it difficult to negotiate.
The 1990s-2000s was the last period where some sort of negotiation could succeed, because there was still a large 1st and 1.5 gen Mizrahi and Sephardic community that had some residual feeling for Muslim states, and vice versa. That's how Israel and Morocco, Azerbaijan, and Turkey pre-2012 were able to get their relationship back on track.
At this point, the peace process is dead. Even the secular opposition to Likud and the Kahanists in Israel supports a harsh military response, casualties be damned. Similar story in West Bank, Gaza, and Lebanon.
Any sort of peace process will have to be backed by internal repression for a generation by all participants.
Thus, choice of the optimal time could be influenced by a lot of things:
- knowledge of other Hezbollah imminent action making comms disruption right now of great importance
- recognition that the vulnerability had been discovered and was about to be remediated
- via other "eyes on" prime targets, knowledge that just one or two top leaders were briefly in especially-vulnerable positions (like sleeping alongside their pagers)
- etc
And, there will be a "long tail" of damage to Hezbollah's usual communications practices & trust in devices/suppliers. Some marginal recruits may even be deterred from joining a battle against an opponent which can carry out this sort of attack – though of course, others may be emboldened.
It appears pager use was a solid choice. Even on full supply chain compromise the amount of explosives fitted couldn't kill even 1% of targets. A cellphone would be packed with much larger payloads able to kill much more people. Their failure was the lack of proper inspection before distribution.
But on the other hand. They needed the pagers to work for half a year or more (and still only about 3k/5k seem to have been active). Think about tech-support-but-evil trying to fix one that a boss dropped and discovering the explosives inside
I'm surprised they used it out of such a concept. It is almost heartening, because it suggests no such attack is currently anticipated by Israel.
I agree with the disruption of communication protocols and psychological damage though.
Furthermore, after the Israeli entered Lebanon in 1982, they didn’t fully leave the country until 2000, which is what caused the founding of hezbollah in 1982, and the perception of hezbollah as a resistance movement since then.
Basically the Lebanese see Israel has having attacked then occupied a part of Lebanon for about 20 years, between 1982 and 2000 - this is recent enough for most people to relate to it.
The occupation came as a result of continued attacks. And after Israel left in 2000, more and more attacks happened, culminating in the 2006 war.
The fact remains that if no there were no threats against Israel from Lebanon, there would be nothing for Lebanon to fear from Israel. It's repeatedly sought and made peace with every sovereign country with which is has no ongoing disputes.
(There are, as I understand it, some minor territorial disputes along the border. I'm sure these can be quickly resolved through negotiation, if all parties are serious about it.)
Israel responds by targeting Hezbollah weapons, assets and militants.
That doesn't explain why the average Sunni Lebanese in Beirut would feel like they need to "resist" Israel.
Certainly Israel's invasion of Lebanon in the early 80s affected many inhabitants of Lebanon, not just palestinians.
The average Sunni Muslim in Beirut either remembers, or has family who remembers what happened during the (unprovoked by the Lebanese) Israeli invasion and subsequent occupation. Today, most of the Arab world supports Hamas in the Gaza war, considering that the large number of civilians being killed is essentially mass murder. Mix these two informations, and you will find very little trust towards Israelis. Add today’s attacks and things get even worse.
It’s very easy to destroy trust, and very hard to build it. None of this has to be perfectly logical - it’s not how people work.
(94)Chapter: Fighting against the Jews Sahih al-Bukhari 2926 Book 56, Hadith 139
(Part of Sunni Islam)
Actually they were conceived and rose to prominence in direct response to this rather substantial provocation:
The wounded people need care, medicine, rehab, therapy, and feeding during their recovery.
This occupies significant resources of your enemy.
I’m not commenting on this specific attack, but talking in general.
The effect of this "action" is the same as a bouncing betty. (I assume) The goal is to incapacitate and use resources.
Israel's history is decidedly chequered in this regard, and there have been killings, including quite recently of demonstrators / protestors, and within recent years of journalists, by Israeli forces.
But there are also practices such as "roof knocking" in which an initial nonlethal warning is exploded above a building several minutes prior to a much more destructive strike:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roof_knocking>
Video of a roof-knock strike: <https://xcancel.com/AJEnglish/status/1710690655091990644#m>
The explosion seen doesn't significantly damage the building, that occurs in a later strike, shown as the first set of explosions here:
<https://yewtu.be/watch?v=ZFTK9V_mEjI>
(That clip follows with the initial roof-knock.)
And to be clear, much of Israel's subsequent air and artillery assault on the Gaza strip has been far less surgical, with vast numbers of structures destroyed.
By contrast, both Hamas and Hezbollah make extensive use of highly inaccurate missiles (totally unguided in the case of Hamas, guided though low-ish precision generally for Hezbollah) which are effectively aerial mines, striking randomly largely within civilian areas. This reflects both tactics and available means, so again the picture is complex. As I've written in an earlier comment on this thread, most hats are at best grey in these conflicts, rather than clearly white.
The practice is decidedly impressive, and the video clips show a controlled building demo which compares favourably with teams placing explosives on site, with individual strikes to specific portions of the structure to bring it down. Simply as an exhibition of targeting precision that has its own messaging value.
At the same time, as you say, there are numerous examples of far more capricious use of force as well, and critics of Israeli military practices are legion, least of all within Israel itself and the broader Jewish community outside the country.
Israel have the technical capability to minimise casualties. In practice they've acted at best capriciously, and arguably to maximise them.
Though this differs from many of their counterparties who either kill indiscriminately or target civillians specifically (e.g., 7 Oct 2023; Qassam rockets, which are dumb steel pipes fueled with sugar and fertiliser and tipped with explosives, bus and cafe bombings, etc.).
And yes, Israel has its own history of capricious bombings as well:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_David_Hotel_Bombing> (1946)
Many people strongly condemn Israel's post-7-October-2023 actions within Gaza, and I am among them. Hamas are a legitimate target, the civilian Palestinian population and infrastructure are not.
I'm trying to convey that the situation here is complicated and that all parties behave, at least at times, quite badly. I am not partisan to either Israel or the Palestinians, though I often sympathise generally with their people's relative plights, both of them.
I would guess Israel would have preferred more lethal pagers, but the required amount of explosive simply didn't fit. So the resulting deaths are from the people who got really unlucky, whereas getting wounded was the modal result.
They would have preferred cellphones.
By now. The final value will be higher.
The wound patterns will emerge for the vast majority of victims: arms, hands, eyes and hips ? Time will tell.
The Lebanese army, and the IDF, now suddenly can tell between civilian vs combatant.
Look at this to understand how big part of Lebanon sees Hezbollah https://www.instagram.com/brigitte_gabriel/reel/CyT_RanK1gi/
Even some druze (historically neutral sectl were kidnapped and killed in the Oct 7th events.
Now, for the 1st time in 100 years, every single rival of hizbullah is able to instantly recognize enemies, in the open.
Obe thing im certain of, Israel has managed to reset the board in its conflict with Hezbollah.
The only people that share borders with Israel matter. That is Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt. 2 of those 4 have firm peace agreements in place, and have converging interests to control their extremist interests. Syria has its own issues and a defacto govt ban on extremists. Lebanon just had its entire terror contingent permanently labeled.
If you notice my statement, 3 of the 4 of israel's borders were more or less under acceptable control. Now, Israel has likely managed to reset the board for the 4th and final border.
Again, time will tell if the long term consequences you envision matter in any way. I contend they dont, in comparison to the gains they just made.
So, otside of those Hizbullah zones, its actually not common to see the Hizbullah yellow flags openly displayed. Or a car bumper sticker. It is for good reason. There was a civil war before, and memories run deep.
Absolutely insane. Imagine this many Israeli had been wounder by Hammas attack.
Disgusting move from Israel to keep civilian causalities minimum! This is no excuse for 'collateral damage'
Most modern wars see MORE than 1 civilian death per militant death. This pager bomb was nearly entirely militants.
These bombs went off right in front of civilian population with no regards to children or women.
Close to 3000 wounded. Wounded include children losing limbs.
That seems like an awful lot of explosive power for something that needs to be secretly added to a functional pocket pager without affecting external dimensions or adding perceptible weight.
Cautious skepticism is warranted, given how profitable some parties would find it to make such claims regardless of whether they are true or not.
I actually hired, and we later fired, a couple of 'engineers' from Unit 8200. They were technically quite weak, and when Oct. 7 happened, I wasn't surprised at all. If this was the cream of the crop, the defense community should seriously re-evaluate the efficacy of the IDF.
In other words: virtually every Israeli has been in the military, and for the technically competent ones, were likely to be recruited into their offensive intelligence unit. Coupled with a government whose industrial strategy has been to promote business development in this sector, we are in a situation where practically every single founder of an Israeli tech company has a military service background.
Those with (offensive) infosec mindset end up founding infosec focused businesses, knowing that there is readily available investment available for them. As a result, the Venn diagram between the unit members and infosec business founders is likely to show a pretty big overlap.
>> This is the second time israel has done this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash
Only if Hezbollah take steps to avoid it. Presumably they will, but presumably there is a cost, and so Israel will continue to benefit from them having to divert resources to doing that.
Random doctors in the hospital won't have these.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/pagers-drones-how-...
In July reuters was telling us how hezbollah was using pagers to defeat israel. Israel was smarter than them.
To put a slightly finer point on it: Even an uninvolved doctor somehow came to own a booby-trapped pager, they wouldn't be carrying it around every day unless it was configured to listen to the hospital's broadcast network of real medical messages, as opposed to leaving it tuned to Hezbollah High Command or whatever.
Question is how did Hamas slip by this same highly skilled org?
"You can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs" approach applied to armed conflicts.
it basically says: we can do whatever we want because we can. Now imagine what the other side is going to reply.
Also important to remember is that Israel evacuated the civilian population in the north of the country due to Hezbollah currently indiscriminately shelling/bombing that area for the past months.
much of the work of a CIA or Mossad agent isn't breaking in to this house or murdering that person. It's working as an executive in a shell company
No one is going to sell a terrorist organization thousands of new beepers. The hizbolla probably also created shell companies. Israel knew their cover and approached them as a foreign seller. Everyone is lying to everyone
In reality the supply chain space is probably full of shell companies from all different terrorist organizations and western countries
Did they? Supply chain attacks, intercepted parcels, none of this is new - the US, going by the Snowden leaks, has a long history of tampering with parcels in transit, which is why a few of the "libre phone" vendors offer to seal the parcel, the device and all screws in random glitter glue and take photos prior to shipping so that any attempt at tampering in transit is not hideable (there is no known way to recreate a glitter pattern).
It's pretty reasonable now to think a little harder about "huh, I wonder if our Israeli supplier..." but yesterday it would have been a bit paranoid, not naive, to spend more than a passing moment on the thought if you weren't in a member of the March 8th club, or Iran.
1 - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...
Made, or provided by?
War is over.
The long-term consequences are that we use our words instead of exothermic reactions to reach livable compromises.
Seriously though. Dynamite didn't do it, nuclear bombs didn't do it, but tiny precision bombs are going to work: just kill all the people who like to fight. QED
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycott,_Divestment_and_Sanc...
Absolutely. From today on, this type of attack will have to be considered part of the arsenal.
While building thousands of explosive communication devices and swapping a large shipment requires substantial resources and intelligence, the actual "sophistication" of today's attack seems to lie in the fact that the perpetrator managed to specifically target a clandestine adversarial organization.
If you don't care about that last part, I don't think it's completely out of reach for a hypothetical "state sponsored terrorist organization" to have a thousand smart phone explosives shipped into a target market, say the European Union or the United States. Such an attack, if successful, would be devastating.
I doubt that. It’s way more likely that from today on, every batch of devices used by VIPs will be tested for explosives, thus rendering such attacks moot. Finding such devices would also enable figuring out who your opponent’s operatives are.
This was a one-off.
They have more rights in Israel than they would in any Arab nation.
Gaza was handed back entirely to Palestinian rule in 2005. Everything Jewish was removed, even graves.
Both Jews and Palestinian Arabs have legitimate claims against each other. The levels of barbarity in pursuing these claims is not even remotely comparable.
You don't know even the most basic facts.
Israel left Gaza. It gave the Palestinians what they wanted. Their own area with no settlers. Israel forcefully removed all of its people from all of Gaza.
In exchange they immediately voted in a terrorist organization as their government and began to attack Israel over and over again.
Yes, very violently, and on a massively greater scale than before. Just ask the country's National Security Minister:
Backing settlement, Ben Gvir says he’d be ‘very happy to live in Gaza’ after the war
If ‘hundreds of thousands’ of Palestinians leave the Strip, ‘we will be able to bring in more and more people,’ minister says
https://www.timesofisrael.com/backing-settlement-ben-gvir-sa...
I have no words for the level of ignorance and racism on threads like these.
Israel gave Palestinians everything they wanted in Gaza. Full withdrawal. Every bit of territory. And was rewarded with massive repeated terrorist attacks. Never mind that Israel throughout gave Gaza electricity, water, food, and other aid even after leaving to help them rebuild. Palestinians didn't dedicate themselves to building a prosperous nation.
They immediately voted in a terrorist organization. Then they built a machine for terrorism which both Egypt and Israel had to over time isolate and try to stop.
Of course the guy's a lunatic. He also happens to have a lot of support within certain very powerful circles, not in spite of but because of what he's proposing to do in Gaza, and for his lunatic, outright fascistic worldview generally. That's why they made him National Security Minister, after all.
There was nothing remotely racist in my post, and I don't appreciate the smear.
That's like saying that during the us invasion of Iraq to replace the regime the US expanded into Iraq. It did not. The us didn't settle Iraq.
I stand by my statement that people here talk with authority without knowing even the most basic facts.
If we are talking about pre-globalization many countries are no longer have a majority “native” population. (US, Japan, Taiwan, parts of Europe) and that is just the reality of human history.
I think we have to decide on a time when the back and fourth geocoding between groups is no longer acceptable. Most of the world thinks it’s around the end of ww2 and the start of globalization, but are you contending that it should be later, and the Arabs should take back Israel?
You don't mention Gaza or Palestinians, yet it's right there (and been there for 75+ years).
Hezbollah states that their aims include destroying Israel, instilling a Muslim government in the land, and converting the people to Islam.
They have explicitly said that they will never coexist peacefully.
Hezbollah's founders writings at the time are available online, and that they are clear about their goal being the rule of Islam. Their slogan was 'The Islamic Revolution in Lebanon'. They were founded as an Islamic revolutionary group, that is very core to who they are. Highlighting that is hardly 'using Islam as a scapegoat' whatever that means.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebanese_Resistance_Brigades
You are trying to obfuscate Hezbollah's public statements calling for Islamic rule. Hezbollah wants Islamic rule and Sharia law for Lebanon, they are very clear about this. Currently realities that they have to put up with do not change that. They are also clear all of their actions and philosophy is consistent with and based on Islamic teaching. Again it is not deceptive to point out they are an Islamic organization.
It's a lot easier for Hezbollah or Hamas to radicalize someone when seemingly everyone in the region has a family member killed or maimed by the IDF. Then there's the separate issue of Israel directly funding Hamas specifically to foment the flame.
Edit: Israel's funding and promoting of Hamas to ensure radicalization and "justified retaliation" that could eventually allow them to settle all of Palestine is a decades long strategy that's finally paying off. The incomprehensibly incompetent intelligence failure last October is the turning point.
If Israel stopped assassinating journalists, blocking aid trucks, and blowing up refugee camps and hospitals, they'd probably have gotten away with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_support_for_Hamas
> Former Israeli officials have openly acknowledged Israel's role in providing funding and assistance to Hamas as a means of undermining secular Palestinian factions such as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, who served as the Israeli military governor in Gaza during the early 1980s, admitted to providing financial assistance to Mujama Al-Islamiya, the precursor of Hamas, on the instruction of the Israeli authorities.
> At a party conference of Likud in 2019, Benyamin Netanyahu said:
> "Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas... This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank."
Israel's strategy has always been the denial of Palestinian right to self determination.
It doesn't? Theocratic governments have been around for millennia. They're not some kind of modern invention; they're really just a reversion to how most societies worked in the past.
> The 1982 Lebanon War began on 6 June 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon. The invasion followed a series of attacks and counter-attacks between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) operating in southern Lebanon and the Israeli military that had caused civilian casualties on both sides of the border.
You asked "but what pissed them off so much". Maybe it was the PLO operating in Lebanon, not sure.
This is hasbara. Both are part of the same wider conflict in which Israel is aiming to eliminate Palestine from the map. There was never peace to begin with, including before October 7. Israeli gradual decade-long land grabs are an act of war in themselves.
Why, Israel sent them a page and they are merely returning the call, as would be the right thing to do among polite company.
This terrorist attack is just the latest provocation.
It is not a terrorist attack, it was an reaction of Hezbollah indiscriminately firing rockets into Israel. That are terror attacks. Something UN troops are supposed to stop, but that is another topic.
You can look up what Hezbollah wants and that is nothing else than the elimination of Israel. The terror is almost exclusively one sided here and it is sourced from radical fundamentalism.
And no, Israel doesn't not murder, rape and torture, that is purely projection.
It was literally a terrorist attack - it was designed to cause terror. If Hezbollah had done this to the Israeli government or even IDF reservists, I've no doubt that you would call it a terror attack.
And why might Hezbollah be firing rockets onto Lebanese land illegally occupied by militant Israeli settlers, I wonder? Could it also have something to do with Israel launching unprovoked airstrikes in Lebanon?[0] Israel is the occupier, Israel is the aggressor - Israel needs to stop.
> Something UN troops are supposed to stop
That's ironic, given how many UN staff Israel has murdered since last October.
> And no, Israel doesn't not murder, rape and torture, that is purely projection.
I'm sorry, but you're either incredibly misinformed, or an that's an outright lie - even the UN says Israel has institutionalised the use of abuse, torture, sexual abuse and rape[1][2]. Even B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, agrees with this![3]
I've read countless reports of Israel torturing Palestinian hostages - they are doing it on a huge scale, and in mind-bendingly evil ways.
Israel is a sick, apartheid regime that must be stopped.
[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/25/israel-launches-att...
[1] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/08/israels-esca...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_and_gender-based_violen...
[3] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-rights-gro...
Well, the obvious difference is that blowing up airplanes or launching rockets at residential areas intentionally targets civilians in order to spread a maximum amount of terror among the civilian population while blowing up pagers that were used for coordinating attacks against Israel very specifically targets operatives involved in such activities.
Some of the initial footage shows such a device going off while innocent bystanders remain unharmed. You can't get any more targeted than that.
Yes, such a pager might have ended up in the hands of a non-involved person, but given the facts known so far that's very unlikely, because there's a reason those people were carrying these devices on them: They were afraid of being tracked down by Mossad in the first place.
This is false. Many innocents are killed including children[1]. You can even see in the footage, the device exploded while someone was shopping in a busy market. You can't determine where the device is when the bomb is activated. This is an indiscriminate attack.
https://apnews.com/article/lebanon-israel-hezbollah-pager-ex...
It’s the opposite. They discriminated carefully.
Perhaps you mean to say innocent bystanders also were collateral damage, which certainly seems true also.
When they triggered the bombs, they can’t have known who or what was in the blast radius. Video shows one going off in a produce market. The fact that those variables are uncontrolled make it indiscriminate, by definition.
That article - just like all other sources - mentions one 8-year-old girl, not "many innocents" and not several children either. Hence, this is deliberate misinformation.
> You can't determine where the device is when the bomb is activated.
You absolutely can. It's highly likely to be in the targeted person's pocket. Where else would it be?
After all, people usually don't hand their phones to random strangers or leave them lying around - and those pagers aren't even mere personal devices used for private purposes. Why would any of those devices end up anywhere else but the pocket of the person using it?
> This is an indiscriminate attack.
Launching rockets at civilians is. Blowing up pagers explicitly used for terrorist activities isn't.
And even compared to a phone, the limited functionality of a pager means the owner isn't going to hand it to a friend to show them a funny video or sports highlight, or to a kid to let them play games on it.
However, since children causalties are "good anti-propaganda", any more would have certainly been reported, so I doubt there are more. Still, how successful targeting was is anyone's guess.
This seems intentionally avoiding the point. Duh, it's a pager. The real question is can the person donating the explosive tell if the pocket is completely isolated from innocents or if it's standing in a crowded line sitting very near to a childs head.
I do believe that Israel _tried_ to discriminate but its an explosive, you can only aim those to a point. Israel wasn't deliberately trying to kill children/harm innocents, Isreal did knowingly engage in a set of actions where it was possible outcome.
I want to be clear i am not trying to choose a side. These are actions of war in the 21st century.
I leave my phone all the time, my kids are actually playing games on it. Also, I can be on public transportation, I can be driving, near a flammable object, or boarding a plane. As demonstrated an 8-year-old girl died, it's enough proof that an innocent died.
The only person who would be likely to have such a pager is a Hezbollah militant who is deemed responsible for secret Hezbollah information (i.e. mid-to-high ranking members). While it is technically possible that such a pager would get into the wrong hands, that would be the fault of the person who left his pager on the table or let his family play with it.
What the hell? Why isn't it the fault of the one who detonates the bomb? This sets a dangerous precedent for attacking unsuspecting army personnel, even when they're off-duty. I don't think people's stance would be the same if this were done to off-duty IDF or US Army personnel and when they just doing ordinary things in public, for example. Moreover, Hezbollah is also a political party, and it's not just their military wing that's being targeted.
Israel and Hezbollah are at a state of war. Hezbollah is a paramilitary organisation that does not meaningfully distinguish between military and civilian staff. There is already a very clear legal precedent - being an unsuspecting or off-duty combatant offers you no protection under international humanitarian law. Unless you're hors de combat, you're a legitimate target at all times. Sabotage of this type is an entirely legitimate ruse of war.
Certainly you would not expect somebody in the military to leave a loaded gun around the house. But, also it should be obvious that they would not leave their radio device for transmitting top-secret information either due to the implications of having such information and how that would affect the safety of family members.
It is likely that nobody could have expected their pager to literally explode. But, military or merely involved in the "political" side, anybody who lets their family play with such a radio/pager is putting their family at risk.
Warzones don't have a day shift and a night shift...
Take a look at all the photos of B-17s taking severe combat damage yet returning home. Jetliners are a lot more redundant today than the B-17s were.
However, if the hole took out the flight controls, or set a fire, then the airplane has a big problem.
These are all fake news. According to Hollywood, a single bullet from a gun will cause an airplane to break apart in mid-air. You can't honestly expect me to believe Hollywood movies get physics wrong.
Similarly, as soon as a car's wheels leave the ground, it bursts into a fireball according to many TV shows I've seen.
/s
The bigger risk to the plane (and passengers) would likely be if the person carrying the explosive was working in the airport and the explosion occurred during a critical moment, like when a pilot is taxiing.
I take it you would have no problem being on a plane with one (or even multiple) of these pagers going off then? What kind of argument is this?
The comment implied Israel was risking blowing up an entire plane when we were discussing whether it was targeted or not.
Go play in the other room, the grownups are talking.
Receiving data from a network is a connection, no matter how you want to define it.
I think it's safest to assume Hezbollah are using strong transmitters, because they'll want to be able to broadcast across rather large areas and in a way that resists potential jamming.
On the flip side, I'm having a hard time imagining these as threats to an entire airplane, given the tight constraints on how much explosive power can be secretly snuck into a functioning pager.
I would think they would have that ability, not just to avoid a horrible accident like blowing up a plane, but also to gather valuable tracking intel on a terrorist organization.
Though it would be possible to add this ability when the hardware was intercepted, a transmitting device is also easy to detect.
That said, pagers don't continuously ping the tower like cell phones do. They can stay receive only until the moment you chose to send a message.
Somehow I don't think so.
Such a pager did end up hurting non-involved people, in great quantity.
I think this only goes out to show that criticism towards Israel waging warfare is not really about the way that warfare is fought, but really on the right of Israel to fight at all. As no one in history has achieved a more precise attack in urban setting towards a non-uniformed organization ever.
You are making that up and quoting yourself. There was not a single fire-control system onboard these pagers; there was no visual designation of the target, and no confirmation that it was being carried by it's owners. The target was broadly designated and not even discriminated on a case-by-case basis. A button was pressed, and consequences including the death of a child are now in play.
Israel has the capability to field targeted strikes on their own using domestic Litening and SPICE munitions (not to say they don't end up targeting civilians anyways). The unforunate bottom line is that this was an indiscriminate and presumptive attack that generally relies on a complete disregard for collateral damage. Innocent bystanders died, ones that would not be targeted by any morally accountable soldier in the command-and-control loop. That means an error was made, in civilized armies.
International law allows, to some extent, collateral damage during war (and Israel and Hezbollah are certainly at war). What percentage of collateral damage would you say is acceptable here? 50%? 20%? None?
Just as footnote, I think that mutilated is the correct word here. Having in mind that 2000 people lost fingers, or noses or a chunk of their hips.
If an enemy had exploded small remote controlled bombs in American supermarkets and homes targeting members of the American political parties, the sponsors of terrorism and oppressive dictatorships in many foreign countries, there is no question we would characterize it as a terrorist attack.
In your metaphorical scenario in America does the following also hold for the said American political party:
* It has a parallel illegal army that is stronger than the US army
* It started a war attacking a neighbor using rockets, mainly attacking the enemy civilian population
* It is controlled by a foreign government
* Its attacked members are in active combat roles inside the united states
* It is part of the US government yet the government refuses to disarm it or take responsibility of its actions
You're ignoring that and pretending they're accused of something else. Why?
This is basically just one step above a chemical attack, and can only be excused as "the end justifies the means" by the interested parties.
Aren't the pagers specifically for transmitting Hezbollah instructions / orders?
Why would a Hezbollah member sell/loan such a device to a non-Hezbollah member?
I mean, the reason Hezbollah switched to those devices was also because they're readily available in the country.
I'd be extremely, extremely surprised if this was a "targeted" shipment rather than a generic batch that was expected to a certain degree to be bought by hezbollah members.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-planted-exp...
Why?
Their supply channel is the same as the civilian population, they're not shopping for vibranium from Hydra.
It would be interesting if we could trace the local distributor for those devices and see where they were available at retail, it would probably match the areas in Lebanon where members of hezbollah are commonly located.
Are you talking about Hezbollah? If so, you're really wrong.
With the people next to the blast radius you have a point, but when targeting guerilla fighters that blend in with civillian populace it's hard to not inadvertantly target innocents too. But a small explosive device that is used by enemy soldiers and kept close to their bodies is the best way to avoid innocent casualties.
Also, Hezbollah hiding between innocents doesn't mean Israel shouldn't defend themselves. If you hide behind civillians you're the one to blame for casualties, not the party that defends against you
Without taking in consideration that "Hezbollah" as a loosely defined group ranges from conservative politicians and institutions to bona fine terrorists.
These devices were being shipped in equal measure from the guys sending rockets to Israel to the local equivalent of those preppers who like to spend their weekend eavesdropping the police radio waiting for WWIII.
Unfortunately real life is a bit messier than a Tony Scott movie, and we didn't harm 5000 evil terrorists ready to destroy America and Israel from their Cobra underground lair, just a bunch of random people - a few of them genuinely bad guys (how many? thousands? hundreds? less than ten?), and everyone else who may or may have not sympathized with a group that may or may be not considered a terrorist organization, depending on who you ask.
Are you claiming that these sources are wrong, and Hezbollah actually bought them from some retailer who happened to have 5,000 units of tampered inventory?
So, you're suggesting instead that a paramilitary group picked up their phone, called a company in Taiwan (I guess there's a taiwanese-arab translating terrorist branch), told them "Hello, I'm Hezbollah, Yes, I need 5000 pagers because...reasons, take my money", nobody batted an eyelid starting from payment processors (I can only imagine they used Bison Dollars from Street Fighter The Movie), to shipping and logistics from several countries.
Then, finally, they made a big long queue of all Hezbollah members and gave each of them one of 5000 pagers, all while saying "remember, never give this extremely common consumer device to no one else for at least five months!"
Instead of, you know, buying them locally from friendly wholesale resellers when new units were needed. (remember, it's radio and pagers we're talking about. Not guns. Not Missiles. It's basically stationery.)
I'm tempted to end this with some snarky conclusion, but I'd say no further comment is really needed.
I suppose the source could be lying, but what is your alternate theory exactly? Militaries don't tend to procure their communications equipment from the shelves of Radio Shack. Lebanon doesn't have a booming pager market, so it's unlikely that some local distributor just happened to have 5,000+ pagers sitting around.
This was clearly a special order (which doesn't mean no distributor was involved), and Occam's razor suggests that Mossad tampered with that particular order, rather than tampering with random pagers and just hoping that some of them might end up being purchased by Hezbollah later.
"Doctors and children are among the dead" isn't inconsistent with "this came from an order of devices specifically for Hezbollah" (it does cast doubt on "this was a precisely-targeted attack on Hezbollah combatants", but that's a very different claim.)
How many innocents would get harmed during a more conventional military strike against the same group of operatives?
I would be fairly surprised if Hezbollah opsec guidelines didn't say that you must have the pager at you at all times, and make sure it can't be accessed by others.
Why are you pretending otherwise? Is it the bigotry of low expectations? Arabs/Muslims can act very reasonable and humane too, so there's no reason to measure them with a different yard stick
They are a problem in both cases. Stop the whataboutism.
Carrying out an explosives attack across a large geographic area that includes public spaces, with no specific intelligence on the location of the devices, or who is within the blast range, is the exact opposite of targeted.
At some point the criticism really gets absurd. There probably was collateral damage, yes. This is what you have to account for if you start wars against another nation. Repeatedly.
Opposite of targeted are the missiles that hit northern Israel.
It's because they're not motivated by fairness but a pre existing idea of who is good or bad
We can nuke a dictator. It's going to blow up everything within miles, evaporating millions of people, but it can't get any more targeted than that. Deal with it.
Seriously, tho, it's infuriating that a government literally triggered explosion among general public, right in front of innocent eyes. This is an act of terrorism, harming the lives of innocent people who've been largely unrelated to the conflict.
Which is exactly what Israel has been doing for decades by
installing an apaitheid regime https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_apartheid
colonizing palestinian land https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli-occupied_territories
kicking hundreds of thousands of people off of their homes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba
putting guns on their head day in day out https://www.msf.org/palestinians-face-harassment-and-violenc...
running on them with tanks while their families must watch https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6385?s=35
destroy the graves in an attempt to dehumanize even more https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_razing_of_cemeteries...
and on and on and on since a time when none of us was even born. Let's not pretend Israel is the good guy here. There are no good guys, and while I don't accept the acts of Hezbollah, what is a colonized people being genocided to do when the world doesn't care about them being denied human rights ?
Wow. Just, wow!.
They run a tank over the mother until assassinate her in front of their four children? Really?
I'm speechless. This is an absolutely hideous act
Israel has utilized a rate of expected civilian to militant casualties in Gaza at the rate of 100:1 [1].
By that logic only the absolute number of (expected) civilian deaths matters... which can't be right.
If it were true, then exploding a city bus (1 soldier, 10 civilians) would be more moral than striking a military base (1,000 soldiers, 11 civilians.)
It would also suggest a kind of blame-shifting if one side decides to install their missile launchers in the playgrounds of elementary schools or whatever.
But to your point, Israel’s ratio in Gaza was as high as 100 civilians to 1 soldier in the shopping mall (or more accurately, refugee family shelters).
No, you've cut off the crucial second half of the sentence, which says a military operation with known risks of civilian deaths "is morally equivalent to targeting those civilians."
The phrase "those civilians" refers to a countable quantity of them.
Perhaps you meant to write "morally equivalent to targeting that proportion of civilians"?
_________
(1) zer0x4d: "Many people fail to see that morality depends on intent, there is a qualitative difference between deliberate and incidental collateral damage."
(2) abalone: "No, only people suffering from broken moral cores think there's a difference. An attack when they knew a predictable rate of collateral damage is morally the same as deliberately targeting those civilians who died."
(3) Terr_: "It's based on the number of civilians who die? That doesn't make sense. Consider these scenarios, where even though fewer civilians die, the intent/planning of the act makes us judge it as morally worse."
(4) abalone: "Incorrect, I said it was about comparing the two rates of death."
(5) Terr_: "Well, that's not quite what you wrote earlier, is this other version closer to what you meant to convey?"
(6) beedeebeedee: "What is being argued?"
(7) Terr_: [Error: Recursion depth exceeded]
> > Conducting a military operation that has a fully predictable rate of civilian casualties is morally equivalent to targeting those civilians.
>By that logic only the absolute number of (expected) civilian deaths matters... which can't be right.
Abalone (as well as myself, many others, including the signers of the Geneva Convention) is concerned about the use of force against a civilian population where it is predictable that there will be a high rate of civilian death. Abalone says that is morally equivalent to targeting those civilians and Abalone is correct (it is, in fact, a war crime). It is not necessarily about absolute number of civilian deaths, so your counterexample does not succeed.
if 100 die to get 1 soldier, that sounds like targeting civilians. If 1 dies to get 100 soldiers, that sounds like (to me and many others) a successful and targeted attack with minimal collateral damage.
The argument being made sounds like if you know there could be 1 death that you should not target the soldiers and that there is no difference in that case to the 100 civilians to 1 soldier and as such, if any civilian could have been estimated to be collateral damage then no military action should have been made.
I think that is supercilious and discounts reality. Civilians are going to get killed and war is terrible. There is a difference in targeted ratios.
and the terrorists deliberately place themselves in a position where attacks on them results in massive collateral - aka, they want a human shield.
This is anecdotal and misleading. There are reports of civilians maimed including the murder of a child. This is entirely plausible due to the indiscriminate nature of these bombs with respect to immediate bystanders.
If an enemy had set off thousands of small bombs in American supermarkets and homes, maiming thousands of whoever was nearby and killing children, we would undoubtedly call it a mass terrorist attack.
> This is anecdotal and misleading
I saw 5 videos and in every case only the person carrying the pager was hurt. Even people less than a foot away weren't harmed. Look at the video on the front page of nytimes.com right now to see what it's like. Highly targeted at Hizbullah soldiers, no bystanders hurt. The exact opposite of "indiscriminate".
You're working yourself up into some righteous anger about this, which is fine, that's your choice. But at least recognise that that's what you're doing. You need a certain narrative to be true so you're twisting facts to suit that.
This is incorrect. There are reports of maimed civilians and a murdered child.
There is no comprehensive information yet on the ratio of civilians to militants maimed by this attack, and any claims otherwise are propaganda.
I'd say it's pretty fucked.
https://www.kyivpost.com/opinion/33190
Either way, it’s pretty sick what countries do during war even today
Russia meanwhile... they just seem like they want to see the world burn. Given the fact they're fighting using convicted criminals, it doesn't seem all that far fetched.
Also including “off-duty” Russian soldiers on one side and “retired” NATO soldiers on the other side. I see this as a proxy war in which neither “superpower” wants to be seen conscripting their own citizens and troops, which has now escalated into 1 million dead in Ukraine when it could have been resolved w Minsk Accords or anything negotiated in Normandy or Turkey since then.
https://thecradle.co/articles-id/4420
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2018-07-09/ty-article/ri...
To me what Russia did with Strelkov isnt much different than what CIA or NATO did the other way … or what Iran did with Hezbollah or Houthis etc. It’s foreign arming of militants, and it inevitably leads to a tinderbox of escalation and many dead civilians:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-secret-cia-training-pro...
So mere hours after appearing in the WSJ, "1M are now dead or injured (but actually about 80k Ukrainian, 200k Russian dead)"[0] is being misquoted as simply "1M dead", and not so coincidentally in tandem with another misconception (that gets repeated on HN almost daily it seems):
when it could have been resolved w Minsk Accords or anything negotiated in Normandy or Turkey since then.
"Could have been resolved", that is, by granting to Putin permanent sovereignty over whatever territories he happened to be sitting on at the time, if not then some, and other non-viable concessions (with no guarantees that they would even work to stop him from simply grabbing more land and/or just keep bombing Ukrainian cities whenever it might suit his fancy):
I think the one thing I can agree with is that it’s debatable whether it’s ultimately worth it. Is Putin’s Russia so much worse that it’s worth 80k deaths to prevent it becoming reality in those regions currently occupied?
Lots of groups currently live as part of a larger country - Basques, Catalonians, Kurds, Tibetans etc. does this mean they have to lose millions of people fighting for total independence and sovereignty?
In Ukraine, for instance, Crimea was an unwilling particpant, ever since 1991 we know 94% voted to break away from Ukraine. Ukraine invaded them in the 90s, arrested their leaders and changed their constitution.
Going further back, Galicia was part of Poland, but then Ukrainian communists took it. And Poland used to rule Ukraine, which Ukrainians chafed under (Bogdan Khmelnitsky revolt).
Ukraine has been a tinderbox of many cultures, incouding Kossacks, Orthodox Christians, Greeks, Russians, Catholic Poles, religious and secular Jews, Red athiest Communists, and more.
In 1919 it was briefly a Cossack Hetmanate, if you can believe that!
Actually, communist Bolsheviks (except for Stalin) are the ones responsible for reviving Ukrainian language and culture, as part of their program of “korenizatziya” throughout the USSR. The opposite of what you’d expect:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korenizatsiia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainization
The culture of “hating Russians” was there among some nationalists, such as Petliura, Bandera and Schuhevych, who took the opportunities around world wars to try to fight for independence. But they were also deeply wrapped up with hatred of Jews, Poles etc. The two guys I mentioned are responsible for killing many Jews, Poles, etc.
After WW2, the Soviet Union had lost 30 million people but emerged a victor over nazis. The USA in a few scant years had made NATO with formerly-nazi Germany as a founding member, against USSR. In 1954 USSR formally asked to join, before starting the Warsaw Pact. Incidentally that same year Khrustchev’s Presidium unilaterally gifted Crimea from Russian SSR to Ukrainian SSR “in a spirit of deep friendship”.
USA and CIA preferreed to work with literal nazis against the eastern bloc. (Operation paperclip, Pinochet in Chile, etc etc.) Radio Liberty was a CIA-funded program to keep the opposition to USSR alive in Ukraine, usually among the far-right elements who sympathized more with the nazis who had lost, and whose grandfathers fought on that side. It didn’t matter to USA, because USSR was their geopolitical rival now.
Same as it didn’t matter about sponsoring jihadists (which is what “mujahideen” means in Arabic) in Afghanistan and getting 2 million civilians killed in a needless civil war, spending billions radicalizing and arming people together with Saudis and leading to the explosion of Wahhabist Islam around the world, ending up later ravaging Iraq, Syria, Nigeria etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwpR6ngoSjQ
It’s not about “preserving culture”. That’s the cynical explanation. It’s about proxy wars and weakening the rivals throuh endless quagmires. USA and its architects of proxy wars do not actually care about the people on the ground:
https://www.counterpunch.org/1998/01/15/how-jimmy-carter-and...
What did I say that was a lie? I try to be as accurate as possible.
You think US doesn’t have propaganda? “They hate us for our freedoms”… “weapons of mass destruction”… “unprovoked and unjustified”… whenever you hear the same line repeated over and over verbatim, it is propaganda
Like, I feel like the war has value for not allowing Putin (or any other leader) to just walk all over another country, but whether a specific place is called Russia or Ukraine, Germany or France? Maybe not so much. It just feels weird we're essentially fighting a war more for an ideology than a physical location/group of people. I guess that's always been the case though.
You are essentially saying “Shit is bad, give up on it ever improving.”
But as long as they're willing to fight we should give them everything they ask for. The Russian empire is bleeding to death in Donetsk. That suits our interests regardless of the ultimate outcome.
However, you are WILDLY inaccurate suggesting that the Minsk agreements would have ”granted to Putin permanent sovereingty over” Donbas. He was not “sitting over it”. The entire Donbas would have been an autonomous part of Ukraine. Kyiv officials didnt want to grant this autonomy, but more importantly, Angela Merkel admitted the West cynically “used the peace agreemnys to buy time and arm Ukraine!”
https://www.news18.com/amp/news/world/ukraine-war-merkel-say...
Now you may say that “Russia would have kept Crimea and that is why Ukraine must fight to the last Ukrainian to return it” but you don’t know the history of Crimea.
The vast majority (94%) voted to be independent of Ukraine every chance they got, starting in 1991, 1992, etc
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Crimean_sovereignty_ref...
They put it in their constitution in 1992
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Crimean_constitution
and referendums showed strong desire to be independent of Ukraine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Crimean_referendum
and they only agreed to be part of Ukraine if guaranteed autonomy (and Russia agreed to recognize it on that basis). After that, though, Ukraine broke the agreement, invaded Crimea with 4000 troops in the 90s, arrested their leaders, forced them to change their constitution, etc. But they got to keep Crimea anyway with not a peep from the “democratic West” (cause the West is biased):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Crimea_(1991%E2%80%...
Crimea has been an unwilling hostage to Ukraine but if Ukraine is doing it then it’s OK because the West never reports on it…
I mean heck, NATO integration was wildly unpopular among the Ukrainian public, it was only happening because Yuschenko was an unpopular stooge who was ramming it through anyway, since Bush vowed that Ukraine and Georgia would be in NATO:
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2010/03/29/ukraine-says-n...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/127094/ukrainians-likely-suppor...
And that was still the case years later
https://news.gallup.com/poll/167927/crisis-ukrainians-likely...
But Bush was vowing to get Ukraine and Georgia into NATO anyway, obviouly to flip Russia’s “red lines” neighbors against them, a sort of reverse Cuban missile crisis: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nato-ukraine-bush/bush-vo...
This came to a head in 2008 with Georgia when Medvedev - not Putin - was president. The war had the same EXACT elements: two breakaway Georgian republics (Abhazia and Ossetia) being shelled by Mikhail Saaakashvili hoping to be in NATO. They asked Russia for help. Russia invaded with tanks going to the capitol.
The difference is that it was over in a week because Nikolas Sarkozy (the French President at the time) negotiated a peace agreement. Georgia is fine now, I’ve been there. (Saakashvili is in Georgian jail now btw.) Abhazia and Ossetia are not just fine, they’re happy to not be under Georgian hegemony. Imagine that. The matreshka doll of self determination can go more than 1 level deep, which the West and NATO knows really well in the case of Kosovo. (But it’s an “exception” of course, cause it’s them doing it.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo_independence_preceden...
Anyway, that is the outcome you are told to “fear”. Russia didn’t go on to annex Georgia, or further, emboldened. They reacted to stated NATO expansion, and shelling of people on their border who asked them for help. They asked the government to cut it out, then intimidated them with tanks. If they backed down and stopped oppressing the two breakaway republics (same as Serbia and Kosovar Albanians) then they stopped also. It’s a valid approach and results in more peace for everyone.
And in fact, in the 2022 invasion, the role of Nikolas Sarkozy was played to the T by Israeli PM Naftali Bennett. He says in a tell-all interview that he was negotiating with Putin and Zelensky directly and could have had the war halted a mere 1-2 weeks in. But he was specifically told by the Western leaders to stand down and let it play out. That “Putin was not to be negotiated with, he was to be defeated.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yma0LxyVVs
So much for “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine”. Actually, the war must go on, so we can weaken Russia. Ukraine is the new Afghanistan (mujahideen, stinger missiles, a decade leaving 2 million dead civilians).
====
Speaking of the casualties:
If you want to go by official UN casualty numbers, this war has the SMALLEST civilian-to-combatant casualty ratios I have ever seen (something like 20 militants to 1 civilian!). Both sides want to avoid killing civilians, likely because 11 million Russians have relatives in Ukraine and vice versa.
By contrast, the urban warfare in Gaza has (in my estimation) a 4 civilians to 1 militant ratio, while the worldwide historica average is 9 civilians to 1 militant.
But militants are people too, especially if they are regular men being grabbed off the street and conscripted against their will. As a man, I understand that men are expendable in war, but as a libertarian, I have to count those deaths as involuntary in most cases.
The longer this goes on, the longer the Ukrainian nation is decimated. The women are abroad, the men can’t leave. The young women end up marrying successful foreigners. I know, I see them all over the place in USA, Canada etc. The children are half-Ukrainian. It’s not only that the men are being killed, but Zelensky’s war and policies of forcing the men to fight are reducing the Ukrainian nation as a while. If he allowed the men of Ukraine a choice, most would opt out of this war, even preferring to leave Ukraine than be drafted.
That’s why I am against wars as a libertarian. It’s politicians deliberately failing to avert a conflict, and the plebs have to pay the price while the politicians get rich and give speeches about how “we must all sacrifice”. Somehow the talking heads on TV never get drafted either!
You are WILDLY misquoting me already in the very first sentence of your riposte. I never said that that's what the Minks Protocols said. I can understand how it might sort of seem like I said that -- that is, if you're hastily skimming, but not actually reading. Just read my words again, carefully this time please.
He was not “sitting over it”.
"Sitting on it" I said. Either way, it's just another way of saying "occupying" it, which of course he was and still is.
As to the other stuff you're saying -- look, you're going off on way too many tangents here (many not even about Ukraine), and presenting way too many twisted mischaracterizations of the historical record along the way (including even more WILDLY inflated body counts, this time in Afghanistan). Like any other contorted, vituperative, ideology-driven libertarian rant.
Not something I have time for, or see any purpose in. You're free to make of the world what you want, though.
2 million civilians died in Afghanistan because we armed jihadists in a proxy war against the USSR, creating a “vietnam” for them
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Afghan_War
The CIA playbook was the same:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9RCFZnWGE0
And they admit it themselves, though hardly care about the civilian casualties:
https://www.counterpunch.org/1998/01/15/how-jimmy-carter-and...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwpR6ngoSjQ
I wish I was exaggerating. I dont think you read most of my comment or clicked the links, but just replied after reading the first 1-2 paragraphs.
Without going back to check the article -- I just want to know what's in your head right now -- can you actually tell me which estimate it was that gave you the 2M figure, and why you decided to go with that estimate and not the others? Did you ever get to the section in the article where it lays out all the conflicting estimates, in that big huge sprawling pile of footnotes?
Or was it more like -- you scanned the little Infobox at the top, saw 3 estimates in the range 1M-3M (including 2 conflicting estimates from the same author) and thought to yourself "Hmm, I know, I'll just average them!"
Something like that?
No judgements here. I just want to understand your thought process.
The first have the potential to do bad, the second have proven beyond a doubt that they’re evil.
Sure, there’s a bunch of drone footage of Ukraine dropping shit on barely moving Russian soldiers, but I’m not sure if that’s an indictment of Russia or Ukraine.
There were multiple cases of Ukrainians doing something evil or borderline evil that were swept under the rug. One of the recent examples is the cassette munition explosion over a beach in Sevastopol, which killed few children and wounded a hundred of people. I stopped following the war closely but it got my attention because that's my home town. And in this case I even agree that the rocket wasn't specifically targeting the beach (that would be stupid), it was likely targeting the nearby airbase; but that's not the point.The point is that every single time something like this happens, it gets silenced.
There are multiple high-quality videos of the explosion recorded from different angles. On Reddit, a high-quality video of an even like this, surreal and frightening, would otherwise have been upvoted to skies. But not when it puts Ukrainians in bad light! One the next day, as a random Reddit user, you'd never even know about this event (I wonder how many people know about this at all).
And again, this is just one example. I can probably collect few hundreds of cases likes this over the first two years of the war, where as a Western media consumer you would never know about something that could potentially change your opinion on the conflict. And just like this, you're being manipulated. Of course, so are the Russians who solely rely on Russian news sources. The only way to know the truth is to follow both sides closely, especially to what each side hides and silences. You'd be surprised.
Except it doesn't. Stuff like this gets reported all the time (for exactly what it is), also when Ukrainians do it. Like the EW-intercepted drone that hit that apartment outside Moscow, killing (according to local reports) someone inside. Even RFE/RL reported it.
Not every single incident of course -- but they do get reported, very frequently.
People tend not to dwell on it, of course -- because they know these things are bound to happen to some degree (and anyone with more than a completely casual understanding of WW II knows that inadvertent civilian casualties, even in allied countries, were extremely high). And because of course because the bigger point is that there are far too many perfectly deliberate atrocities happening, and at far greater scale (and except for a few isolated cases, all coming not so coincidentally from one side). And because they know at the end of the day, the war (and all the suffering that will be required to end it) is Putin's fault anyway.
But that's very different from the simple matter of these events being "silenced". Because plainly they're not. The reason they don't get more column inches or newsroom chatter is because, by any level-headed analysis -- they just don't deserve any.
And attempting to describe the state of affairs that way, when clearly it isn't, is well -- manipulative.
I'm not inclined to believe that, but even so Russia would scream it off the rooftops if there were the slightest chance that it would affect anything. Unfortunately it'd be lost in the flood of lies that they spout daily. At least western media seems to be mostly silent on things they can't be at least marginally truthful on (presumably because they have no need to be, I guess media in Ukraine is a bit more biased).
They were purchased by a known terrorist organizations that any westerner would go to jail for having a financial relationship with .
The types of people they deal with to buy anything at all - including black market weapons and machinery - are dubious
The US does these exact same things to infiltrate Mexican cartels
Your daughter is enjoying a cappuccino at a bistro when a cartel member walks by, the device detonates burning and scarring her face. You’re good with it.
Your oldest son has ordered a deli sandwich and is waiting for his order. He kneels down to tie his shoes. Next to him is a cartel member. The device detonates, destroying his ear drum. You’re good with it.
Your sister is shopping for produce at the market, as she walks past a cartel member to choose an avocado, the device detonates, maiming her left hand. She loses her fingers and is let go from her job as a software engineer. You’re good with it.
Your mom sits down in an empty seat on public transportation. The man next to her is cartel. The device detonates and shrapnel pierces an artery in her leg. She dies. You’re good with it.
Your brother, nephew, and youngest son are walking down the street. You were supposed to pick the kids up at 3pm but had to work late. You asked your brother to walk them home instead. A cartel member is driving a vehicle down the same road. Suddenly the device detonates and they lose control, the vehicle swerves up on the sidewalk striking all three. Your brothers leg is maimed and mangled, before he passes out from pain he watches his son die, trapped beneath the vehicle. Your son is flung into a wall and suffers a severe brain injury, he survives but never walks or talks again. You change his diapers for the next 40 years. You’re good with it.
Your dad is an ER doctor, a man comes in complaining of trouble breathing. As your dad is listening to his lungs, the device detonates, ejecting shrapnel into your father’s face. The man was part of the cartel, if he doesn’t work for them, they will kill his sister. Your father is blinded and can no longer practice medicine. You’re good with it.
2) This is precisely why every human, and every leader of humans, should avoid war at all costs. The image of a "clean" war is a myth. Even the Allies in WWII were not immune to this, see the bombing of Dresden[1].
Whatever you think of either side in this, it's clear that neither is doing enough to end this.
Becouse we don't do "eye for eye" in the West.
Becouse christianity formed our societes like this. With help of Romans...
Becouse we learned about separating religion from power, law, medicine, science, etc. Some tries to get rid of religion completly but that another subject.
And it is absolutely sure US agency would not do such thing on "USA soil".
But down there is a open battle in WW3 - Israel delivered something to Ukraine and next day rockets started falling on them, fired by suicidal ponies.
You can bomb an ordnance storage facility even if there's a hospital right next to it (or, in fact, right not on top of it).
They've made sure the pagers were used by Hezbollah first and foremost, tough shit if few were given to kids to play.
And yes if Ukrainians were able to blow up all drones within say 50km of the front lines on the Russian side they'd be justified to do that, even if some were in civilians' hands.
Why hasn't Israel allowed any investigations in Gaza, not showing evidence they're using to obliterate practically all of Palestine now, not allowing foreign journalists in either to document things?
You'd prefer we mostly only talk about Oct. 7th and afterward, right?
We'll sure find some occurrences of Israel chasing away Arab civilians early on, but that's beside the point. This attack, and the absolute majority of Israel attacks of the last decades, target enemy combatants, and civilians only ever suffer collaterally. Israel never mounted an attack on civilians, and went very far in reducing civilian casualties when attacking combatants - roof knocking and all that.
Due to your compassion for the displaced Palestinians, most of which who's homes have been obliterated - if they weren't "killed" themselves,
What % of your assets/land/property that you own will you be willing to give the Palestinian citizens to support them after this atrocity?
Remember, in this scenario you're not being forced to give this - it's out of the goodness of your heart. What percentage would you give?
How about 54% of everything you own?
And so in conclusion, I'm most curious if you will avoid answering because you'll see my point and your answer will out you as a hypocrite?
I'll have followup questions if you're willing to engage and not fearful to engage in discussion.
We both know how Palestinians repaid those who was kind to them- by Lebanon Civil War and Black September. Israel was ready to cede what it won in defensive wars, they got out of Gaza, built infrastructure and invested in businesses to provide jobs.
Palestinians had countless opportunities to make peace and live a better life. They choose war every single time, made Dalal Mughrabi their hero, dug up water pipes and made missiles out of them.
If your standard for engaging in military action is that they must be able to prove to you personally that their target is really a militant, you are completely delusional.
Why do so many people think this? If the US stopped "giving" them "military aid" which is actually just disney dollars to spend in the US military industrial complex they would be out a small percentage of their defense budget.
It's undoubtedly true the US supports Israel generally, but Israel is more capable of its own.
Please don't vote.
Netanyahu is trying to ignite a regional war. It's the only way he stays out of prison. If the genocide in Gaza ends, his government falls and he goes to jail. He wants to drag the US into this regional war.
Do you think that's smart from Israel's perspective? Will that improve that safety of Israeli citizens? Or will it subject them to counterattacks?
Is that smart?
You know who uses pagers? Doctors and nurses. Are they legitimate military targets? Let's just say that a Hezbollah or Hamas commander was killed. What's an acceptable civilian dead or wounded count that takes it out of the realm of a terrorist attack? How many is too many?
yeah, we can go a long way with that reasoning.
The CIA did something similar for the better part of 4 decades
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-...
It was just another Opsec failure (or success, depending on your perspective). I dont see israeli hardware devices being any more suspect. Same as china. They were suspect before and they continue to be. 1 is our ally and 1 ins not
I agree with you that there some pretty serious global consequences that will come back to bite them too, but, then, they pretty intentionally don't care, that seems to be the whole deal.
I have heard Trump supporters actually suggest that a similar thing is a winning strategy for Trump too. Of course he seems to be an irrational unpredictable guy who doesn't care about the consequences in foreign policy, that's great for the USA, everyone will be scared to cross him because he's so unpredictable!
This terrorism will hurt innocents and the winning strategy would have been to just not attack Israel.
It is not a question about which lives are worth more. There are a lot of indications that Palestinian lives are worth more in Israel than in Gaza for that matter.
To blame this attack on Israel is quite callous and I don't believe you that you care about any lives in that region. It just doesn't add up, but that is just my opinion.
If it wasn't fundamentalism, what do you think motivated the attacks?
I don't mean to be snarky, but I'm finding it very difficult to take you seriously when you make preposterous comments like "Palestinian lives are worth more in Israel than in Gaza" and "Israel left Gaza before".
Hamas is not a fundamentalist group, and indeed they have frequently called out Islamic extremist groups, such as ISIS, for their murderous behaviour. Probably best we don't discuss ISIS further in the context of Israel though...
I also suspect you know very well the reasons for the October 7th attack, which Hamas have been open about[0]: in essence, it's a battle against:
- Israel's blockade and control of the Gaza strip
- Israel's occupation and colonialism of Palestinian lands
- Israel's continued violence, murder and dehumanisation of Palestinian civilians
- Continued Israeli aggression and land theft
- Israel's apartheid regime
- Israel's complete disregard for human rights, international law and the UN
- Israel's inhumane treatment of thousands of Palestinian hostages, including institutionalised violence, torture, starvation, amputation, sexual assault and rape[1]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-rights-gro...
We can go back into history on who started the conflict, but even then I come back to the persecutions of Jews that fought for their independence and won. The result of that is the state of Israel. A democracy. Flawed, but in another league than comparable nations in that region.
A victory some are not ready to accept but they ultimately have to. Perhaps after they manage this first step there will be hope for a Palestinian state.
And yes, Israel did leave Gaza in 2005. That there were blockades was due to security concerns, which proved to be justified not only after the October attacks.
> Israel is a sick, apartheid regime that must be stopped.
This is a quote by you in another comment. Together with your excused for Hamas your arguments seem obsessive and misdirected.
You've offered no evidence to support this repeated claim, and haven't refuted the evidence to the contrary.
> your arguments seem obsessive and misdirected
Not obsessive, just consistent; I could just as well call you obsessive for your repeated excuses of Israel's destruction of Gaza and their murder, starvation, torture and rape of Palestinians.
You have a very Israeli view on history, and it's obvious neither of us are going to change our standpoint, so I bid you adieu.
I don't think I want to indulge in proving Hamas to be an extremist organization any further.
"Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity."[0]
[0] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/hamas-2017-document-full
I don't think I want to indulge in proving Israel to be an murderous, colonial, terrorist, apartheid regime any further.
Not the 2008 charter. The most anyone can point to is the passage that supposedly calls for the "annihilation" of Israel, but that's very clearly a mistranslation. (The actual phrasing predicts Israel will be "invalidated" by Islam, a lot more like Khrushchev's "We will leave you in the dust").
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
While Palestinians in both Gaza and West Bank live intolerably. And surrounding countries that promissed not to regularize relations with Israel until the situation were resolved were abandoning Palestinians and regularizing relations anyway (for, among other things, access to Israeli weapons and technology they could use to repress their own and other populations).
This is what motivated the attack, an attempt to find _some_ way to do what other things had not, get Israel to see this as a situation that was not in fact sustainable, that they coudln't just go on like this forever no problem.
I think it is a violation of international law and a war crime to intentionally target or kidnap civilians, which I think happened that day. But it was not "unprovoked", and it does not require resorting to the explanation of "they just like violence" to explain motivation.
In fact, I specifically said I thought it was a violation of international law and a war crime to intentionally attack or kidnap civilians. So I'm not sure what you are saying "no" to in response to me?
Talking about motivation is different than talking about if we approve of the choices.
Bad immoral choices that are war crimes and violations of international law do not somehow prove that the motivation is "fundamentalism", right? If the question is what was the motivation for the attack, saying the motivation is something other than "fundamentalism" is not to say attacking or kidnapping civilians is ok. You asked, if not fundamentalism, what is the motivation? We told you. Bad immoral choices that are war crimes on Oct 7th also don't erase the prior decades of history, involving many many violations of international law and war crimes. Which are as we described above.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Middle_Eastern_countri...
And good luck finding a Fortune 1000 company that isn’t using Monday or Akeyless or Zscaler or jfrog and I can keep going
Oh and remember Ilya sutskevers new AI company SSI? In their initial announcement they talked about opening with 2 offices, SFBA and Tel Aviv . You really can’t succeed without Israeli talent
You can like or dislike the government, but Israeli techs income and importance constantly grows YoY
https://www.timesofisrael.com/intel-suspends-planned-15-bill...
Israeli ports are going bankrupt ....
https://www.seatrade-maritime.com/ports-logistics/attacks-on...
Hezbollah of course is an entirely legitimate military target. They've been indiscriminately raining down missiles on northern Israel for months, forcing tens of thousands of Israeli's to abandon their homes. Israel has every right to put a stop to that, and it would have been perfectly reasonable for them to kill tens of thousands of Lebanese civilians in the process of killing the tens of thousands of Hezbollah members responsible for this.
The videos I’ve seen are of the pagers exploding and someone standing less than a foot away being unscathed. Incredibly sophisticated and precise.
(Also, even if you hit the intended target, it's a summary execution of people you may suspect, but who haven't done anything, yet, and may or may not have become active in any hypothetical future.)
And this is war, you are applying impossible peacetime standards. To put things in perspective, a rocket attack from Hezbollah killed a dozen Israeli kids/teens on a football field in July, with zero Israeli military targets impacted.
And it's not a full-fledged war, yet, as illustrated by the fact that the targets were still in their civilian settings. Generally, this may backfire quite a bit, as in a massuve influx in recruiting. (If the same happened to the US and reservists were blown up by some obscure vector amongst their families and while shopping, what would you expect? Awe and accepting defeat?)
(While areal bombing, sanctions, assassinations, surprise attacks, and the like, have never worked, and, to the contrary, have always proven to further cohesion, this time, it will be totally demoralizing, for sure! /s)
The death of that one girl, if it isn't entirely made up for propaganda purposes, is obviously very very tragic, but since almost all pro-Hezbollah commentators are referring to that one specific case that's a pretty clear sign that no other children died. Interestingly I'm now seeing comments where they're making her younger from 10yo to 9yo, now even 8yo. You can ask yourself why people are doing that.
While in their own attacks Hezbollah specifically targets Israeli civilians hoping for children to be among the victims.
> They took no precautions to limit damage to bystanders
The fact that those explosions were small enough to not kill even a single-digit percentage of several thousand targets who carried those pagers in their pockets near vital organs and blood vessels refutes your allegations.
> assuming that every person with a pager was a BadGuy™
These days, even in Lebanon, normal people simply own a cell phone so they can be called. When was the last time you even saw one? They are incredibly rare. The purpose of a pager is to receive (movement) orders and, in the case of Hezbollah, to make tracking more difficult. While it is possible that medical personnel may have used some of these pagers, it is highly unlikely that a new shipment of pagers would not primarily go to Hezbollah's "valuable" command staff, for whom being able to move and operate undetected is the greatest concern. According to Wikipedia, Hezbollah has more than 20,000 full-time fighters, and at 3,000-5,000 devices, this would not have been enough to resupply even a major part of the entire organization, so it is unlikely that any civilian outside the command structure would have received one, even less a random 10yo girl.
Ask yourself again if this is terrorism:
- if the attack was so specifically targeted at military targets
And collateral damage was minimized by:
- using a vector unlikely to be used by innocent civilians
- a sufficiently small explosion not to seriously injure people standing in close proximity to the target as indicated by the many videos floating around
She has been consistently identified as either 8 years old or simply a "young girl" from the very first news accounts; I've never seen her given any other age in a news media account. There's probably some confusion in second-hand non-professional-news accounts (like this HN comment thread), confusing her age with other numbers in the same articles (at various times, the total number killed has been reported as 8, 9, 10, or 11 in the same articles identifying her as a particular victim. It is fairly easy to swap her age with the total victim count if you aren't being careful.)
But a collateral from targeted attack people lose their mind. Much moral. Very righteous.
But Israeli leaders maybe decided Hezbollah's hesitation to escalate into all out war must mean that such a war must be good for us and bad for them? Let's try to really make em do it, so we can invade Lebanon again? Why Israeli government thinks it wants an invasion of Lebanon right now, I don't know, but it looks like that's where this goes to me and they must know it?
Israel have no reason to want a war. It's Hezbollah who want to conquer Israeli land. Israel wants nothing from Lebanon.
The larger issue is that if shipments of pagers can be intercepted and modified in this manner, then any electronic device can be subjected to other hardware-based attacks - eavesdropping devices, keystroke loggers, etc. What if large numbers of countries with developing tech markets start looking at the suppliers involved the way the USA looks at China's Huawei?
In general this boosts the open-soure model for both software and hardware, so the expected hardware configuration that can be checked visually and with other user-available tools. If any phone, pager, tablet or laptop can be physically hijacked and modified, the user should be allowed access to all the information and tools needed to detect it. This assumes the factory itself is not the bad actor.
Hardware security consultant firms probably have a bright future. Also robots for assistance with inspection.
It's well known that the NSA performs supply chain attacks by planting spyware on hardware which goes through the USA. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/12/glenn-greenwal...
Whenever the USA complain about something China is allegedly doing, it's a good bet that they know someone in the USA camp is doing that very thing.
Technical questions:
- Was the explosive in the pager detectable by the normal tests used at airports?
- Who gets to skip those tests? Are all devices carried by airline pilots examined with explosive tests?
- This is selective. Only the addressed devices blow up. That has implications for devices which know too much about their owners.
1. It's not supply chain attack, it's terrorist attack. 2. It's not a clever move, it's a prevocation move
Is the short term here a few days or maybe just hours? For the reasons you pointed out and more this is likely a strategic failure for a very short term military gain. The economics you pointed out. Politically this will not help them with any but their most extreme allies while enraging their enemies and giving them the moral high-ground with their peoples and the international community. Militarily this likely did little to actual readiness since the people wearing the pagers were probably mid to upper level people so they will heal and go back to desk jobs they were doing before. So an economic, political and military strategic fail. It would have been far better for Israel had this fizzled out or been found out before it triggered. Plausible deniability would have been easier and international outrage would have been minimal all while the C&C of their enemies would have gotten the intended message that they had deep capabilities that could cause disruption. Instead they actually pulled it off and now they get all the bad consequences with very few good ones. This was a bad idea executed, unfortunately, well.
Also, there is no country in the world that would refrain from doing the same thing to their enemies, if they could pull it off. (big if)
Meanwhile, you can be sure the U.S. and China are putting back-doors in every device they can manage, and have been doing so for decades.
It reminds me a bit of when after 9/11, some of the reaction in Israel (as well as shock and sympathy) was "Of course we have locked cockpit doors, marshals on planes and other security features on ElAl. We're not barbarians!"
Also, (Hagelin) Crypto AG. Just because it's in Switzerland doesn't mean you shouldn't be paranoid.
Permissible behavior normalized in this conflict is going to make future wars pretty ugly.
The main injury inflicted on individuals was psychological - we got into your supply chain this far. Also, your attempts to avoid us failed.
But at an org level? They just disabled the entire comms system, whether through explosions, or by making people scared of explosions.
What's the contingency plan for this in Hezbollah? And will it have credence, given their last grand idea of "let's use pagers to avoid the Israelis" ended with a large number of simultaneous explosions?
It's a very clever attack from a psychological POV.
Have you seen the footage(0) from hospitals? It's likely that hundreds of Hezbollah members lost hands, eyes, etc. That will degrade their military effectiveness significantly, especially the people who were blinded. And remember that Hezbollah is trying(1) to prevent more footage of the attack from getting out, so what we've seen publicly quite likely underplays the full extent of it.
Sure, maybe you could argue that the "main" effect in terms of total numbers was psychological. But we shouldn't understate how many Hezbollah members were directly given life-long injuries that will make them ineffective forever. That's a huge win for Israel.
0) https://x.com/Osint613/status/1836040863195029530 1) https://x.com/Saul_Sadka/status/1836039347210002899
Reuters even covered conversion to pagers two months ago
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/pagers-drones-how-...
it's an inefficient tactic that actual terrorists won't employ tbh. Infiltrating manufacturers just to place small explosives isn't terror inducing - and you want the recipient of the explosion to know who it came from for a terrorist attack to be effective.
Israel did it to limit the amount of collateral (instead of shooting a missile or bomb, which would require a much larger radius of damage).
Although it was aimed at harming Israel's adversaries, third-party countries may now hesitate to involve Israel in their supply chains. There's also the risk that other major producers could replicate this tactic, potentially leading to further escalation in the region or beyond.
In the short term, it's a smart strategy for Israel, but they've likely opened Pandora's box in the process.