I realize that this is not widely known, attacks against Israel receive far less attention in the news than do Israeli retaliations.
Quick sampling of examples:
https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20240908-hezbollah-f...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/4/hezbollah-fires-reta...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw9y7wqn8j5o
https://apnews.com/article/lebanon-israel-hezbollah-hamas-ro...
It doesn't make a big splash in the news because it tends to be severely ineffectual, but it has been pretty widely and continuously covered.
Not only are there specific providers for specific worldviews, but major providers seem to spit out articles catering to every viewpoint. You can find probably find multiple pro Israel and anti Israel articles coming from a single news source on a single day.
So, I dunno maybe we need some kind of cumulative news app to get any kind of meaningful idea of how things are actually leaning. Like an AI summarizing sentiments of the 20,000 articles on Israel in the last week to determine if the news is slanted.
They advertise pretty heavily, and I’ma bit skeptical of their ability to make money. but it basically uses AI to summarize stories, and it groups stories from many media outlets, categorizes their bias, and shows the slant of the topic overall.
I think retaliations are pretty fruitless anyway. Both sides have been lobbing missiles at each other for decades. This eye for an eye thing keeps going even though both sides have run out of eyes a long time ago.
Maybe talking might be an idea? Just saying...
Well, one's hitting civilians with missiles, the other's hitting them with rockets.
Netanyahu seems to be very much against negotiations and keeps blowing the situation up because he doesn't want to 'look weak'. But this does nothing to actually help the Israeli people get safer. The only way they can actually be safe is to sit down and make peace. And of course not to keep taking more and more territory as Israel has been doing (and was even condemned by the UN).
Seriously, this shit has been going on since the founding of Israel. If they keep it up they will never feel safe. Neither side will ever be fully bombed into submission. Remember both Russia and the US tried that in Afghanistan, it didn't work there and it won't work here. All it does is keep the military industrial complex fed and wrecking lives in the process.
Someone has to take the first step and stop retaliating. And make some agreements which are fair to both parties. Then they can both build up a society and have less reason to upset things because they have a thriving society to lose.
I'm not defending Hamas nor Hezbollah. But this has to stop and 'responding' or 'retaliating' isn't going to help.
Israel widely acknowledges that they kill civilians - including Israeli hostages emerging from captivity (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/israeli-military-says-it-...).
There's disagreement on how carefully they try to avoid doing it, but even their closest geopolitical ally the US has urged them to do more to prevent civilian casualties.
this is false
the rockets in northern Israel have been going on for years (as are rocket attacks into Lebanon), so just not much news anymore
This is a "we've got you hopelessly compromised as an organization" sort of demonstration that's far more humiliating.
For a similar example, see the US response to 9/11 - two decades of war, taking shoes off at airports, etc. - versus the US response to COVID, which killed a 9/11 worth every couple of days, but resulted in a "but I don't wanna wear a mask" response.
It's easy to sit online and make bold and vague claims like there will be armed escalation in retaliation. If you are so confident, I would be happy to make a wager on a platform of your choice. What do you think constitutes a major escalation? I would happily bet against a ground invasion.
I mean, that's the pretty standard response in this conflict. Permanent tit-for-tat, back-and-forth, for decades/millennia depending on how broadly you count things. For a concrete example, Iran's April strikes.
> What do you think constitutes a major escalation?
Terror attacks on Israeli assets abroad - I'd be keeping embassies/consulates on alert - and rocket strikes against Israel. At least enough to try to save face, although the Iranian strikes offer a "good luck" for that.
> I would happily bet against a ground invasion.
By Hezbollah? Well, yeah.
As a concrete example, the last big Israel-Lebanon war resulted from the capture of two Israeli soldiers in a border raid; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Lebanon_War
I think that netanyahu would be very happy to see a de-escalation on the northern border and it would be a big win for his cabinet.
It's certainly part of the playbook, if they can manage some captures. Soft targets seem a lot more likely, though.
> That said, I don't know what a path to peace with Hezbollah looks like.
This conflict is creating the next generation of orphaned rage-filled extremists. Peace is a very, very distant goal at this point.
> I think that netanyahu would be very happy to see a de-escalation on the northern border and it would be a big win for his cabinet.
I very much disagree. Netanyahu is on a treadmill he can't ever let stop; ending the emergency means having to properly face his long-delayed criminal proceedings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Benjamin_Netanyahu).
They sure don't seem motivated to stop, if Israel's pre-planned response is still fratricide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal_Directive
Everyone has cell phones that they can use in addition to the pager, so I don't think it's very accurate to say the communications are hosed either
The idea that Hezbollah members have and had no means of communication other than pagers in a country full of cellphones and landlines is a farce.
Two birds with one pager.
Sure, theoretically one can detect a receive-only radio, but its massively more difficult than detecting something which actively transmits.
But the impossibility of any kind of location tracking is definitely a plus of one-way pagers. Not just for terrorists. I'd get one if there were still a network where I live. It'd be really nice to be reachable and not be tracked 24/7 for once.
The market closes at 5, dinner at the hotel, Grandpa will bring home the wine, bring your hat. Charlie 5 Alpha 2 4 7 3 Bravo. Maybe this is just discussing someone's evening, maybe its coordinating a group action.
They generally are!
Some systems required the sender to select a geographic region to increase bandwidth efficiency, or alternatively the pager owner to update their coarse-scale location with the operator after moving significant distances.
The latter is what the old Iridium satellite pagers did (do?), for example. (Not sure how the new GDB-based ones work.)
I think the service is finally being decommissioned due to the Iridium Next satellites not supporting it anymore. It has been supported for more than a decade without onboarding new customers though.
Apparently that's optional:
> Iridium Burst-enabled devices can be configured as receive-only so that no transmissions are made, a feature valued highly by some customer segments.
(from https://www.iridium.com/services/iridium-burst/)
> I think the service is finally being decommissioned due to the Iridium Next satellites not supporting it anymore.
If that's the case, it would have been inoperable since 2017 – they deorbited the old satellites immediately after confirming deployment of the new ones.
But yeah, you'd usually pay for service in a certain (large) geographic area, and if you wanted to take your pager out of that area while on a trip, or if you moved, you'd have to let the pager company know so they could start broadcasting in the new area.
It was cool to see that it was in fact an opsec fail (the guy buying the phones all over the country got lazy and bought too many from the same shop) to break through that. Pretty realistic. Like most of the wire in fact.
Although one thing in the wire I don't understand. Pagers are really easy to intercept, anyone with a scanner (with discriminator output) can do it and could do it in those times. I did it many times during the days when pagers were still in full swing. I really don't understand why they needed a court order for that (in season 1).
Paper mail and landlines are incredibly easy to intercept and tap, but that doesn't make it legal.
The show creator worked for years as a journalist on the crime beat in Baltimore, I expect most of the opsec seen in the series comes from real cases.
> really don't understand why they needed a court order for [wiretapping pagers]
As others said, you need it from a legal perspective rather than a technical one. This is particularly true in the US, where the "fruit of poisonous tree" doctrine is pretty strict: if your evidence was not gathered in the proper manner, it must be discarded and it invalidates any further effort based on it. In specific, wiretapping is illegal even when done by authorities, unless they've been authorized by judges - the relevant US laws were tightened up after it emerged (with Watergate) that president Nixon was eavesdropping on his political rivals.
And the 100k number seems quite exaggerated.
Even though the people largely supports their agenda, an action that targets three people but affects 2,700 people as collateral damage would not pass by their parliament.
I understand your point but synecdoche is the oil on the gears of discourse. This required a lot of people's involvement, from those issuing the orders to technicians at the bottom of the chain of command. It's not Netanyahu's cabinet that did the work of placing explosive charges in thousands of compact devices and then repackaged and shrinkwrapped them.
Obviously once could refer to the 'Netanyahu regime' or some other more specific term, but then someone else would complain that this was a mendacious mischaracterization of the country's political system or suchlike. To the extent that civilians there don't with to be identified with their political leadership or take on the moral responsibility for its decisions, they'd better step up their efforts to topple the government by means of a general strike or some other time-honored method.
I do think we can hold Israel as a country responsible. But what we can't do is blame Jewish or even Israeli people in general. Though I don't see anyone doing this. The current government is always quick to draw the antisemitism card when being criticised but I never see anyone actually doing that.
It's unknown how many were family members of targeted individuals, and whatever the number actually is, it'll be misreported.
I also want to raise an issue which I’m not sure you personally have, but I have seen elsewhere on this thread and echoed by state department spokesperson Matt Miller that the targets were somehow legitimate because they were members of Hezbollah, which they claim is a terrorist organization.
Hezbollah is a much larger organization with many different functions, including governmental function, but also education and health care. We know that the targets did not only include their military wing, indicating that the targeting was indeed indiscriminate.
If people want to legitimate this terrorist attack by claiming that any member of a group which does terrorism is a legitimate target, that opens the door for all sorts of targets which unambiguously should not be considered military targets, including politicians and workers for governments and their political organizations.
If your country says that the IDF is a terrorist organization (a claim rather easy to make) your country than has the right to target any members of the Knesset that belong to any of the ruling parties is a legitimate target in a terrorist attack, if their family members are hurt in the attack, they become a legitimate collateral damage. Any worker for any ministry in Israel who contributes to the IDF somehow would also become legitimate.
This is of course not true, and the only conclusion we can draw here is this attack is an unambiguously immoral act of terrorism.
As I've remarked several times on this thread, the standard I'm using for this attack isn't one in which no innocents (or even innocent children) are harmed or killed. I don't like war and would happily confiscate every firearm in North America, but that standard is one no active military in the world meets. Rather: the "state of the art" in targeted strikes is air-to-ground weaponry, which routinely kills civilian bystanders at ratios far exceeding 1:1.
Here, my guess is that the ratio is something far south of 1:100, making this strike --- I think? --- unprecedented in precision in the last 100 years of warfare. We'll learn more as the day goes on, and if/when I'm wrong, I'll certainly say so.
"Terrorism" has nothing whatsoever to do with my thinking on this. Hezbollah is a large, sophisticated, organized, well-supplied combatant force, a military peer to its neighbors, and it is in open armed conflict with Israel.
The claim that this is a well targeted attack with legitimate targets ignores this reality. The attack may be well targeted, but the targets are still indiscriminate and illegitimate. That is unless you count any Hezbollah members as a legitimate target. But like I said before that is simply ridiculous.
Note Reuters reporting on the concentration of reports of strikes here: it's not uniformly spread across the population of Lebanon.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/17/world/middleeast/israel-h...
We have every reason to suspect they had no idea who would be carrying these pagers. That they did consider any Hezbollah member to be a legitimate target, be they senior administrators at a hospital, media workers, politicians, etc.
At the very least they must have known that higher party members (i.e. politicians) would be carrying the pagers, and that they had no idea who was actually close when they detonated, and simply didn’t care if children got hurt.
An army who is on trial for genocide does not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
If it turns out that large numbers of non-military personnel were carrying pagers that blew up, I'll be wrong about this, and I'll say so. My belief that this isn't the case isn't because I have any particular faith in Israel; it's because of the previous reporting about why Hezbollah had people carrying pagers: because it believed Israel was going to target these people through their cellphones. Pagers suck! I think people are carrying these things (or were; nobody's carrying any pagers anymore!) because they have to.
I don't know what "benefit of the doubt" means in this situation. Israel and Hezbollah are at war. War is ruthless.
Anyways all this is to say: Hezbollah is a military peer to Israel (I mean, I think Israel would win, but it wouldn't be easy). "Terrorism" has nothing to do with this. The conflict to me is fundamentally amoral, bilaterally, in a way that isn't the case with Gaza. Israel doesn't occupy Lebanon or control Hezbollah's supply lines. These are two opposing armies doing what armies do during hostilities.
In most wars, war crimes are committed. When war crimes are committed they need to be condemned, and prosecuted, not excused and repeated.
> Why are senior administrators at hospitals and media workers carrying military command and control equipment?
These are pagers, and cheap once at that, I don’t know if you have ever been a part of any activist organization, but it is pretty standard to assume you are a target of state level intelligence, and that state actors (most likely the police) is spying on you. Any activist would know to try to protect them selves and their organization by minimizing opportunities of breaches. This extends to lower level participants, who are unlikely to actually confront the police or cause any civil disruptions, but participate in other ways.
I assume Hezbollah would take similar measure. That higher level members at non-military institutions still see the need to protect them selves—and their organization—from infiltration. At the very least, it is criminally negligent of Israel to assume that they don’t, and still detonate when there is some probability the innocent will be harmed.
Again: all the available reporting suggests strongly that Israel wasn't simply targeting every pager in Lebanon. These were specific pagers procured by Hezbollah for military operations, something widely reported months before this attack.
No, Israel rigged consumer electronics used by people during their civilian lives off the battlefield as they posed no threat to anybody. There is no definition of terrorism which doesn’t encapsulate this act.
And no, this act is not justified even if every targeted victim of this attack was a Hezbollah member. As I said before, there are more members of this organization than fighters and generals.
"Off the battlefield" doesn't mean anything here: if they're members of the armed wing of Hezbollah, they are black-letter IHL combatants whether or not they're actively engaged in combat, the same way everybody aboard a naval vessel is a combatant if you sink it, including the cook.
Put it this way: if it turns out that these pagers were widely used by non-military personnel, like school teachers, I'll absolutely say I was wrong, and that this attack was probably hard to justify. If reporting firms up that these pagers exclusively carried by military personnel, does that change things for you?
Israel has consistently lied about the military nature of their targets in Gaza. I see no reason to believe they behave any differently in Lebanon.
Also, even if they were all military—which they probably weren’t—they were still going about their civilian lives far away from the battlefield, as they posed no threat to anybody.
Now that some time has passed we know a little more about the victims. Including a press conference by Lebanon’s Minister of Health Firass Abiad. There have been 12 recorded deaths so far. Of those were 4 medical workers, one 8 year old girl, and one 11 year old boy. The press conference noted that many of those carrying the pagers were civilians. And made special mention of the toll this scale of an attack had on their medical system.
The best interpretation for Israel here is that they conducted a terrorist attack in a civilian against an armed group during their civilian lives, inflicting at least some civilian casualties. But we know how Israel conducts it self in Gaza and elsewhere in Palestine, and we have every reason to expect their intentions were far more nefarious.
But this question is irrelevant because this is very unlikely to be the case. The victims seem to be many civilians.
You can't guarantee the explode as intended. It is gonna be very difficult for Lebanon to find all of the unexploded devices and secure them. Very likely one of those booby traps will find their way to a thrift store in the next few years and unexpectedly explode when handled by innocent hands.
Shebaa Farms are currently occupied by Israel. Which is Lebanese, acknowledged by both Syrians and Lebanese.