From a tactical standpoint, this is very similar, and the only big difference I see is that this is technologically more advanced/more complex than just planting a bomb or something.

If it's not terrorism, what is the differentiating factor(s)?

*side note: I'm quite sure other western countries have used tactics that I would call terrorism as well. This isn't meant to be a callout or anti-anything post. I'm genuinely curious where the line is drawn.

By those definitions, I think this is clearly not terrorism. (Though we might learn more information about who was targeted that could change this assessment.) Admittedly, my definitions only imperfectly track the way the word is used in the west, but I think that reflects frequent misuse of the term for political ends.

I would worry about a definition of terrorism that creates an incentive to avoid this type of warfare in favor of dropping bombs.

They were blowing up in civilian areas like restaurants, grocery stores, all over the place. What else is this if not indiscriminate, and what else is its purpose other than to cause fear?

Rule 15:\

“In the conduct of military operations, constant care must be taken to spare the civilian population, civilians and civilian objects. All feasible precautions must be taken to avoid, and in any event to minimize, incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects.”*

*Provisions common to the territories of the Parties to the conflict and to occupied territories - Article 27*

“Protected persons are entitled, in all circumstances, to respect for their persons, their honour, their family rights, their religious convictions and practices, and their manners and customs. They shall at all times be humanely treated, and shall be protected especially against all acts of violence or threats thereof and against insults and public curiosity.”

*Article 51 - Protection of the civilian population*

“1. The civilian population and individual civilians shall enjoy general protection against dangers arising from military operations. To give effect to this protection, the following rules, which are additional to other applicable rules of international law, shall be observed in all circumstances. 2. The civilian population as such, as well as individual civilians, shall not be the object of attack. Acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited. 3. Civilians shall enjoy the protection afforded by this Section, unless and for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities. 4. Indiscriminate attacks are prohibited. Indiscriminate attacks are: (a) those which are not directed at a specific military objective; (b) those which employ a method or means of combat which cannot be directed at a specific military objective; or (c) those which employ a method or means of combat the effects of which cannot be limited as required by this Protocol;

and consequently, in each such case, are of a nature to strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction. 5. Among others, the following types of attacks are to be considered as indiscriminate: (a) an attack by bombardment by any methods or means which treats as a single military objective a number of clearly separated and distinct military objectives located in a city, town, village or other area containing a similar concentration of civilians or civilian objects; and (b) an attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated. 6. Attacks against the civilian population or civilians by way of reprisals are prohibited. 7. The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favour or impede military operations. The Parties to the conflict shall not direct the movement of the civilian population or individual civilians in order to attempt to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield military operations. 8. Any violation of these prohibitions shall not release the Parties to the conflict from their legal obligations with respect to the civilian population and civilians, including the obligation to take the precautionary measures provided for in Article 57.”

*Article 48 of the Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions (1977):*

“In order to ensure respect for and protection of the civilian population and civilian objects, the Parties to the conflict shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operations only against military objectives.”

Broadly speaking, the Geneva Convention calls for the use of "all feasible precautions" to be taken in protecting civilians, but does not require perfection in doing so. In the context of a world where wars are normally fought with missiles and bombs, I would have thought that Israel's decision to instead target Hezbollah via tiny explosives hidden in devices known to be sold to Hezbollah members would be an extreme way of complying with this rule. If not even this is good enough, how else would you advise a nation to defend itself without violating this principle? Surely any use of conventional weaponry must also be out of the question.

Beyond that, you are projecting a view or thing I haven't done.

EDIT: You've ninja edited your comment to something very different now.

Originally it said,

> This is wild to me. Wars are fought in cities all the time, by countries across the globe, with civilians killed by the thousands. But when Israel chooses to take a different path and attacks Hezbollah with small explosives hidden in devices known to have been sold to Hezbollah members people start citing the Geneva convention. The Geneva Convention calls for the use of "all feasible precautions" to be taken in protecting civilians, but does not requirer perfection. How else would you advise a nation to defend itself without violating this principle?

>You've ninja edited your comment

Sorry about that. I realized I could have expressed myself better just after I hit 'submit.' FWIW, I believe I made the edit before your comment was posted, but I guess you had already started writing it.

Fair game as long as it's wartime and the intended targets are military personnel?

I am not making assumptions about their intentions, only relating facts as I am aware of them.

Presumably that would be why they didn't use bigger explosives. Or -- taking a step back -- why they used this tactic rather than dropping bombs from the air.

But avoiding civilian harm and managing the international response are definitely interrelated goals here, to say the least.

Even the tiniest seeds of doubt can be sufficient to prevent certain parties from being obligated to go to war.

And the claim above was that only combatants were targeted, which is wrong, even if the political wing would be universally considered a terror organisation. The term combatant is clearly defined.

The purpose is to disable the communication infrastructure. That's a valid military target.

To be clear, I'm not saying this is a good thing. It does seem to fit within the rules of war though.

This is attack consistent with terrorist tactics, not warfare.

Yes, and?

They didn't just leave a bunch of attractive nuisance bombs all over Lebanon; they specifically targeted devices provided by Hezbollah to coordinate activities which were meant to be carried around on their persons. That seems like the opposite of leaving them where civilians might pick them up.

And fwiw, I heard of two tragic cases of children dying, which sounds remarkably low to me so far. If this were truly indiscriminate, this number would be significantly higher and we would've heard of it by now.

It may not, because the number of civilian casualties was way too low for that.

[1] https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/api-1977/arti...

[2] https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/api-1977/arti...

The targets here were, according to the reports seen so far, Hezbollah members - an organization currently at war with Israel. They were sent small charges in a format that could be reasonably expected to remain on or by the target, minimizing the likelihood of collateral damage.

This is not, btw, the same as saying "totally ok from a moral standpoint," or that the civilian deaths and injuries aren't bad, or that it wasn't irresponsible or evil or whatever you might think about it. I don't even necessarily think that the attack was a good move for Israel independent of the ethics. I just disagree that indiscriminate is an appropriate description - if anything, the discriminating and sophisticated way the bombs were delivered is part of what makes the thing disconcerting.

> Whitson said the high casualties of the attacks demonstrate that booby-trapped devices are “inherently indiscriminate”.

> “They’re incapable of being directed at a specific military target, and it’s very obvious from what we’ve seen and what was completely predictable that it would injure military targets and civilians without distinction,” she told Al Jazeera.

> Whitson added that the explosions were a “deliberate decision on the part of Israel” to create chaos in Lebanon. “This is exactly why booby traps of ordinary civilian objects are illegal – because not only do they cause physical harm and injury, they cause psychological and emotional harm.”

> Huwaida Arraf, a US-based human rights lawyer, echoed Whitson’s remarks, saying that the explosions violated the prohibition on indiscriminate attacks as well as a ban on booby-trapping devices associated with civilian use.

> That latter curb is laid out in the 1996 Protocol on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Mines, Booby-Traps, and Other Devices – a UN treaty.

1: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/9/18/do-lebanon-explosio...

Most of here on HN can only speak of our own morality on the matter. And it seems that quite a few HN users have no problems with this blatant act of terrorism, or at least deem that any problems they do have with it are worth it for some—in my opinion—twisted reason.

EDIT: As I was writing this, the Intercept emailed me the daily newsletter including this article which also cites experts in international humanitarian laws casting doubts on the legality of this attack.

https://theintercept.com/2024/09/19/israel-pager-walkie-talk...

> “I think detonating pagers in people’s pockets without any knowledge of where those are, in that moment, is a pretty evident indiscriminate attack,” said Jessica Peake, an international law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. “I think this seems to be quite blatant, both violations of both proportionality and indiscriminate attacks.”

War criminals never announce their targets as being anything other than "legitimate".

Terrorists also claim their targets are "legitimate".

>> intentionally targets civilians or is truly indiscriminate

That is the case in this incident. There is no evidence, whatsoever, that these were legitimate targets. Only propaganda.

These actions are crimes against humanity. There is ZERO evidence that those murdered and maimed by this heinous act are 'legitimate targets'.

Wearing a uniform and identifying yourself as a soldier of the state fielding a military is the only way to identify an individual as a legitimate target - thats what the uniforms and war paraphernalia are for in the first place .. to identify legitimate targets.

These were human beings, shopping in stores and collecting groceries.

Anyone claiming these murders were legitimate have ZERO evidence of that fact, other than pure, unadulterated propaganda from a state that has been murdering CHILDREN every day for a year. (Also not legitimate targets.)

That was a long time ago. The traditional international laws for armed conflict also make it illegal to wear civilian clothes as a combatant. The problem with organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah is that they're not state armies, often don't wear a clear uniform, but they do launch rockets and wage war.

You can't really claim that people in civilian clothes launching rockets at a neighbouring country are not targets.

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

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

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

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

Israel and Lebanon are not at war.

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-planted-exp...

Its a govt within a govt.

A war Hezbollah declared, btw.

We may be free to choose but we are not free to choose the consequences of our actions. Even when they affect the innocent we associate with. If this is a new thought to you read a few more books.

Here are some suggestions... The Holy Bible Hillbilly Elegy The Narnia Series The Hobbit The Lord of the Rings

I never said otherwise, not sure why you think I did?

Reportedly. But every ambulance, emergency staff, firefigthers and humanitary organizations use also walkies.

Which makes sense - I don't think the US Army is using the same walkies that a random hospital in the US uses, for example.

Also if the situation were reversed and Hezbollah carried out an attack like this on the IDF, I really doubt the Israelis would just suck it up and say 'oh well occupational hazard of military life, guess we'll retaliate somehow.'

Sure. Could be those pagers also went to civil Hezbollah administrators. It doesn't seem likely to me, given what we've seen so far. E.g. it's been two days, surely we'd have heard of the many innocent civilians with pagers blowing up; I've heard that, but only as speculation, with no concrete evidence that's happened, except for a few tragic cases of innocent bystanders getting hurt.

Also, it's fairly likely that beepers for the military wing of Hezbollah are kept separate from civilian Hezbollah administrators.

Of course, I come at this from a more trusting-of-Israel place than others. But we don't have to jump to conclusions - we can just wait a few more days as more details emerge.

> Also if the situation were reversed and Hezbollah carried out an attack like this on the IDF, I really doubt the Israelis would just suck it up and say 'oh well occupational hazard of military life, guess we'll retaliate somehow.'

I mean, what would Israelis do instead of retaliating? You're talking as if Hezbollah isn't constantly trying attempting to inflict damage on Israel. Hezbollah declared war on Israel, and has been firing rockets at Israel for the last almost year, causing several deaths, massive property and environmental damage, and the internal displacement of almost 100k Israelis.

Actually a better example than the cartels might be the CIA sponsored paramilitaries in South America. Except Hezbollah is sponsored by Iran obviously.

We’ll know more in the coming days on the impact, but I too feel uncomfortable even as someone who’s mostly supportive of Israel.

Not sure why you think that? If reports are true, these were relatively small bombings that only impacted people carrying a pager that was specifically handed out to Hezbollah members, and presumably only military members. There was collateral damage, but far less than there would be by even the most surgical of surgical strikes (which usually refers to sending in highly targeted missiles to take out, say, only a single apartment).

Of course we might learn that that isn't accurate, but that's the story as I currently understand it.

We don’t know at this time what percentage of these pagers were sold to and in possession of civilians.

So unlike a single phone, it certainly seems more indiscriminate.

Again, if we want to wait a bit more and see more reporting, then update, I'm all for it. But it's been a few days, and Hezbollah has already claimed that most of the people killed by pagers were their members, iirc. We also all know of the horrible and tragic death of one 9-year-old girl.

I haven't seen any reporting suggesting that there were many civilians harmed. I've certainly heard many people claiming that civilians could've been harmed, but I'd think that if there were many civilian victims, in this day and age of social media and instant communication, we'd have heard about them. I at least haven't.

Again, totally willing to change my mind. But my prior is to trust Israel to not do some kind of indiscriminate attack. Add to this reporting saying that this was targeted, add to this that several days later there aren't stories of massive civilian casualties - for now, I think it was a targeted attack.

Maybe not, but the combatants holding those devices were at war, no?

The attack wasn't as targeted as you seem to think. It also hit health workers and bystanders. Approx half the casualties are civilians (including children).

According to Humans rights watch: https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/09/18/lebanon-exploding-pagers...

> Thousands of pagers simultaneously exploded across Lebanon and parts of Syria on September 17, 2024, resulting in at least 12 deaths, including at least two children and two health workers, and at least 2,800 injuries, according to Lebanon’s Ministry of Health.

Citation needed for that. None of the news reports, even the heavily biased ones, have reported mass civilian casualties.

  "two children and four health workers in a hospital in southern Beirut were among the 12 people who were killed on Tuesday."

  - Public Health Minister Firas Abiad in a press conference

I expect more detailed reports will be shared over the next few days about the total casualty.

We dont know until we get more reports, like you said, it could be higher... but it could also be lower.

Children (and potentially health workers, as opposed to men of fighting age) are much more likely to die of such an explosion than men of fighting age. In other words, children will be significantly overrepresented here.

Would you hold this opinion if it was an operation by Taliban fighters on US soldiers at home on leave?

1. Hezbollah only mourned 10 out of the 26 killed so far, claiming them as members (one of them being a medic). So the 50% seems to still hold, even leaving some room for malice and mistakes.

2. Most of the explosion incidents and injuries are coming from residential areas in Beirut so statistically the percentage of civilians injured as "collateral damage" is likely high considering many of those carrying these devices were going about their life, either with family or in public places at the time.

Wrong. You claimed:

>>> Approx half the casualties are civilians

Casualties doesn't mean "those who died", it means "Injured or killed".

If you have to use a definition for a word that differs from the dictionary for your argument to work, it's your argument that is broken, not the dictionary.

Your entire argument in this thread is based on not knowing what "casualty" means.

First let's acknowledge that at least 50% of those killed are civilians and many were also injured. That's a fact, you aren't debating that, right? When you mention `my entire argument` you just mean this part "Approx half the casualties are civilians" in my original comment, correct?

What is the criteria for the evidence to satisfy your doubts? If you're demanding the government of Lebanon (or any other party) to classify Lebanese citizens who were admitted to hospitals based on their political agenda, then making such judgment is not possible even if they wanted to. To be frank, in the eyes of the government, they are all civilians, since many other political parties have arms too, if that's what you want. But of course, you don't agree with that classification and at the same time you've no counter-argument.

To be clear, this argument is more flawed. You don't know the total dead. Do you really think a militant terrorist organization in a non democratic country would immediately and/or accurately report how devastated their combat capacity is?

That's a lot of spooky keywords you got in there. Bless your heart.

You know these people have families and community, right? Do you truly think thousands of families are just mourning in silence and isolation in a country like Lebanon and no one knows? I understand your spidey sense might be tingling but you clearly lack basic understanding of the region other than the headlines you're fed. Contrary to your wild imagination, those are not some fictional 47 agents that are cloned in labs.

No, I'm specifically calling out your "50% of casualties were civilians" as pure and unadulterated nonsense.

> What is the criteria for the evidence to satisfy your doubts?

There is no way to spin this negatively: 3000 enemy combatants were targeted and 12 civilians were killed.

This must be the lowest percentage of civilian collateral in the history of warfare, and you're blithely trotting out '50% casualties' as a talking point.

I wanna see what percentage of collateral Hezbollah managed, because this is a war, you understand? Enemy action in war always has collateral, and I want to see what percentage you considered acceptable from Hezbollah.

It's not even close. And the only way it even seems like a reasonable ratio is equivocating "targeted" with "killed".

But attacks have had as low as 0% civilian collateral casualties, so even if it was 3000 combatants and 12 civilians killed, it wouldn't be the lowest percentage of civilian collateral in the history of warfare.

> I want to see what percentage you considered acceptable from Hezbollah.

War crimes on one side don't excuse war crimes on the other, and criticizing Israel for an indiscriminate attack does not imply accepting all, or even any, of Hezbollah's attacks as "acceptable". There is a good argument that at least one side must be wrong in war, there is no good argument that at least one side must be right.

Who's equivocating? 3000 combatants were targeted, 12 civilians were killed.

Where's the equivocation?

> War crimes on one side don't excuse war crimes on the other, and criticizing Israel for an indiscriminate attack does not imply accepting all, or even any, of Hezbollah's attacks as "acceptable".

Targeting enemy combatants does not in any way satisfy the criteria for "indiscriminate".

There was no "indiscriminate", there was no "mass casualties".

Hezbollah is not Lebanon.

Lebanon is not Hezbollah.

That said, Hezbollah and Israel have been in active bloody combat against each other since 1985.

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

True, but much of that was spent by Hezbollah fighting in the Syrian Civil War on behalf of Assad (their historical benefactor in Israel).

Now that the civil war is de facto over with Assad in control of most of the country except rump Turkish and de facto Israeli (Jabal al Deize) exclusion zones, Hezbollah returned to antagonizing Israel.

The Israel-Hezbollah conflict was bound to happen even if 10/7 didn't happen.

There is no question if an enemy set off hundreds of bombs in American ambulances we would recognize it as a mass terrorist attack.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2024-09-18/second...

This is a good point. The LA Times does not report incidents involving ambulances other than in the first half of the sentence that you quoted:

>They are not usually used by fighters, but by ambulance and civil defense crews and administrators affiliated with Hezbollah.

And the report of a video of an ambulance exploding

> Video from a funeral ceremony in the country’s south depicted an explosion inside an ambulance, leading bystanders to run away in panic.

It's reasonable to guess that these devices were made to only explode after a very unique code is is received, and/or only when traffic came over a radio channel known to be used by Hezbollah.

In contrast, an uninvolved civilian medical doctor buying a booby-trapped pager secondhand shouldn't be at significant risk, since before carrying the pager around all day they'll first configure it to use their hospital's radio network, which should only be broadcasting innocuous hospital messages.

> There is no question if an enemy set off hundreds of bombs in American ambulances we would recognize it as a mass terrorist attack.

However if those bombs were only triggered by the code "Immediate Mobilization" broadcast over a CIA/DIA pager network, then the real question would become why so many ambulance staff were holding down a second secret job as spies and soldiers.

Pretty sure any doctor (or anyone else) owning one of those pager wouldn’t want to keep it, even if configured safely. Would you carry an hand grenade in your backpack all day long, as safe as it it because the pin is still in?

> why so many ambulance staff were holding down a second secret job as spies and soldiers

Hezbollah is a legal and popular party in Lebanon and is at war with another country, of course the medic staff is involved what’s else would you expect ? However "all parties must refrain from attacking and misusing medical facilities, transport, and personnel", what happens here is a crime for the Geneva convention.

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

Hezbollah is an Iran-backed militia whose sole purpose is the destruction of Israel.

> and is at war with another country

No, they're not. They're a militia.

Here is a timeline of major Hezbollah terrorist activities. Left out, of course, is the constant barrage of missiles rained down on northern Israel by Hezbollah. I copy-pasta'd this from another source for convenience:

1983: Hezbollah sends suicide truck bomb against US embassy and murders 63 people

Also 1983: Hezbollah murders 241 American soldiers and 58 French soldiers with another suicide truck bomb

1984: Hezbollah murders 18 American soldiers with bombing in Spain

Also 1984: Hezbollah murders 11 people with another truck bomb against US embassy

1992: Hezbollah murders 29 people with suicide bombing of Israeli Embassy in Argentina

1994: Hezbollah murders 85 Jewish Argentinian civilians in another suicide truck bomb

1996: Hezbollah murders 19 American Air Force personnel with bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia

2005: Hezbollah murders 22 civilians in assassination on Lebanese PM

2011 to present: Helped Assad murder up to half a million Syrian civilians, carrying out starvation sieges and ethnic cleansing against Sunni towns and cities

This is the official position of Israel, yes, but the international community, including the US acknowledges that they are a political entity as well. You actually don't need to be on side with their positions to accept this fact.

The end result is still that innocents are walking around with a bomb planted in their pocket.

Also, if booby traps aren't considered a legitimate tactic in a military conflict, why does noone complain when, say, Ukraine mines a field?

https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/06/13/landmine-use-ukraine

Stepping back though, there are literally millions of mines hidden in Ukraine, creating a vastly greater danger for civilians. Legal or not, for the most part noone cares.

Why are we here scrutinizing Israel for a form of booby-trapping which is vastly smaller in scale, much easier to clean up (figuring out which devices are compromised vs demining 174,000 km^2), and more targeted?

(2) The scale is entirely different - but completely orthogonal to that: Do you see a difference between (per what Ukraine is doing) leaving devices around in areas which are mostly depopulated by now anyway, where people generally know that mines are likely to be there, and which will most likely be clearly enough marked on maps after all of this is over; and in a society where there is basically a solid social consensus that this war needs to be fought, and laying mines out on the frontlines is one of the many heavy costs that they will need to bear in order to bring the war to its necessary end --

And (per what the Mossad is doing) consciously triggering these devices, knowing full well (as they must have) that a 1:2 civilian-military ratio of fatalities and maimings (the current boxscore on this per WP) was not just possible, but entirely to be expected? In a population that definitely did not chose to be at war (or even to support a necessary defensive war like Ukraine is doing), and where the targetted/responsible party is but one faction among many?

I do.

We'll have to see how effective future demining efforts are, but historically, civilian casualties from unexploded mines have been quite significant. Despite the risks, Ukraine can't realistically stop inhabiting 20-30% of its territory indefinitely.

Where do you get 1:2 from? There isn't much credible information yet about civilian vs militant deaths. What we do know is that the 5,000 affected pagers were ordered by Hezbollah and issued to its members. Less is known about other devices.

In that sense we can say Ukraine's current operation in Kursk is operationally offensive, even though the war itself is entirely defensive on Ukraine's part of course. (One might still disagree that Israel's current adventure in Lebanon is overall "defensive", due to factors you haven't mentioned, but that is also completely orthogonal the distinction we are clarifying here).

Where do you get 1:2 from?

From the source I indicated ("per WP"), though the acronym may not have been clear:

  The total death toll from the attacks stood at 37, and included at least 12 civilians killed according to Lebanese authorities, including a 9-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy.  At least two health workers were also killed.

Which in turn cites L'Orient-Le Jour, ABC, AP, CNN, WSJ, and the BBC. I don't know what sources you might find more credible, but these do appear to be in rough agreement at least, and I'll take them as a decent enough approximation to the truth for the time being.

What we do know is that the 5,000 affected pagers were ordered by Hezbollah and issued to its members.

That was the theory, anyway. Mossad also knew that many of these devices would have been at the militants' homes when they exploded, thus directly targeting innocents and minors.

There's also an indication that some of the devices may have in use by healthcare workers (for whatever reason - perhaps the supply chain intercept wasn't quite as precise as the Mossad intended; or they know perfectly well that some of the devices would end up in non-militant hands, and per their usual MO just didn't give a fuck), though this will require further investigation. From the same section on the same page:

  Health Minister Firass Abiad said the vast majority of those being treated in emergency rooms were in civilian clothing and their Hezbollah affiliation was unclear.[119] He added the casualties included elderly people as well as young children. According to the Health Ministry, healthcare workers were also injured and it advised all healthcare workers to discard their pagers

I would take "12 civilians" with a grain of salt, given the fog of war and conflicts of interest at play, as well as Hezbollah's secrecy around who is involved in their military operations. As Abiad acknowledged, it's "very difficult to discern whether they belong to a certain entity like Hezbollah or others". It's similar to Gaza, where only Hamas knows how many fighters they lost.

> thus directly targeting innocents and minors

You're not using "directly targeting" in the usual sense. If a strike was aimed at a combatant but also happens to kill a random passerby, we wouldn't say that the passerby was targeted, let alone "directly". Conventional strikes always carry risks of civilian harm as well; that's why we have standards of proportionality rather than demanding guarantees of no collateral damage.

Which would make these deployments offensive, then (though the war itself is defense for them).

I would take "12 civilians" with a grain of salt

Yes of course, and indeed there can be fluctuations both ways as apparently a large number of people are still in IC, and may yet expire from the effects of their wounds after weeks or months of agony. By which time world attention will have shifted to the next atrocity.

You're not using "directly targeting" in the usual sense.

You are correct here, also. My phrasing was intended moralistically, in the sense of "They knew very well that the pagers would be noisily distributed, and that a large number of civilian deaths, likely including minors, would inevitably happen as a direct result of their actions.") In retrospect it was a poor choice of words.

The one alleged (with, AFAIK, strong evidence, and Ukraine just declined comment rather than denying it) Ukrainian use of anti-personnel land mines (others aren't banned by the treaty they are party to) was an operationally offensive use of rocket-delivered mines in and around Izium during the Summer of 2022.

Even if that is true, the fact remains that "Hezbollah members" and "combatants" are not, even to a first approximation, the same thing; Hezbollah is a political party that has an armed wing and also has a substantial civilian social services (including healthcare) operation.

Why is this a reasonable thing to guess?

Even if the engineering makes it's a choice of "all blow up" or "none blow up", they'll also want to have control when that moment happens to be, either to pre-empt discovery and defusal or to coincide with other events and factors.

I'm often confused about the incoherent picture that paints Israel as having blatant disregard for civilian casualties while at the same time devises complicated and risky strategies to perform targeted strikes.

The latest round is handheld radios, not even cellphones or even pagers. You are trying to stretch justification far beyond the breaking point.

There's no way to know that 4000 devices are going to only harm their 'owner'.

Call it whatever you want, but these attacks are not responsible nor 'in the right'. This sort of tactic is reckless and evil.

[1] https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule1

> "Similarly, the UN Security Council has condemned or called for an end to alleged attacks against civilians in the context of numerous conflicts, both international and non-international, including in Afghanistan, Angola, Azerbaijan, Burundi, Georgia, Lebanon, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Tajikistan, the former Yugoslavia and the territories occupied by Israel."

It would also implicitly apply to attacks wherein civilians were actually the target; expecting military operations to have zero civilian collateral casualties is unrealistic. This exploding pager/radio attack seems to have been targeted at militants specifically, not civilians.

https://theintercept.com/2024/09/19/israel-pager-walkie-talk...

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/9/18/do-lebanon-explosio...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/sep/18/the-gu...

I would point out that landmines are also indiscriminate and allowed within warfare. If anything mines are slightly more indiscriminate due to you not needing to have accepted a device.

Although I think morally people are against the use of mines, we've seen widespread use of them in Ukraine. It would be good to see a global ban on these type of methods.

Putting morality aside and focusing only on language and semantica:

I agree that this action may be better described as military action with an associated risk of harm to civilians (like many military actions do) rather than a pure action against civilians with the purpose of terrorizing your enemy civilian population.

I don't think it's common to use the word "terrorism" to indicate acts whose purpose is to induce fear in your military opponent.

Perhaps "psychological warfare" or "intimidation tactics".

That doesn't forbid you from qualifying that act of aggression as exacting an unnecessarily high toll on innocent bystanders. You don't have to invoke the word "terrorism" if all you want to say is that an act is immoral.

That is an interesting angle.

I do see that there is a clear distinction that makes the pager/radio explosives worse ethically. Landmines are generally laid to prevent people from encroaching on a guarded area. Minefields can be labeled, which suggests that the idea of the presence of a mine actually helps them be effective in preventing encroachment.

In the pager/radio case, the explosives were distributed to individuals (both devices are usually worn on the body) with zero indication that there was danger. There is no 'protection' being done here, just murder, and loosely targeted. When the attacker is ready, they detonate 4000 devices without knowledge of the environment around it, meaning they are willing to deal with innocent people being killed.

It's a really evil tactic.

As an attack on a huge terrorist cell this attack is as targeted as one can possibly be at this scale. Normal course of action for pretty much any other country in the world would be carpet bombing the areas with little to no regard of civilian casualties, it is only when Israel does it suddenly UN becomes concerned.

This is not indiscriminate explosion of thousands of random pagers that entered Lebanese circulation, it is explosion that is triggered on specific Hezbollah channel, you can't target any more directly than that.

Also notably, it clearly did not intentionally target civilians, although there may be civilian casualties which is uncharacteristic of a terrorist attack.

Edit: Above is retracted - cjbprime found later information.

Many of the countries you mention consider the militia to be a terrorist organization, but not the political wing. I wonder whether the pagers were carried by both groups.

I suspect it's somewhat inconsistent but they are a big problem for many states who are looking at political and economical stability.

See here, even the US military can be labeled terrorists in the eyes of american people https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41578412

Surprisingly there are several Arab countries, including the [Gulf Cooperation Council](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_Cooperation_Council), and the UAE.

Yep, all western countries/entities, as expected.

It's expected, it's OK, but it just prevents discussion of certain topics.

None of us knows their intentions, and intentionally or not it caused terror and injured civilians. Cut and dry terrorism.

> It killed and injured more than 3 thousand people, including children.

That can be rewritten with some academic honesty added if you try.

Well the number of killed versus injured is significant and not mentioned. The mention of children is bundled with the large figure. It could be interpreted that 3000 people were killed, 2900 of which are children, which is exactly how it will be quoted and portrayed.

This is pretty irresponsible use of language.

Check headlines and how this is portrayed and compare the statistical figures mentioned. Also who is being quoted and if they are in quotes or how they are quoted. There's a lot of ambiguity.

In times of war, which this unfortunately is, irresponsible reporting is dangerous and leads to further problems.

It is quite well defined.

[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/standards-editor/article-und...

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/08/venezuela-un...

But we know you understand this.

If not, then the definition might still hold meaning and Russia's appellation might be ridiculous.

There is a meaningful difference between collateral death and terrorism.

> According to paramedics and rescue teams involved in the recovery of the bodies, some bodies were found with hands tied, indicating possible execution. Other victims were found with bullet marks on their heads, raising suspicions of summary executions. There are also reports of torture marks on the bodies.[34][35]

>According to Palestinian government-run news agency Wafa, some bodies were found suspicious of organ theft with their stomachs open and stitched up, contrary to the usual wound closure techniques in the Gaza Strip. The mutilated body of a little girl wearing a surgical gown was also found, prompting suspicions that she had been buried alive.[34]

This does not sound like "collateral damage".

In all seriousness though why even engage this line of argument at this point? very few brain cells are required to understand the solar system sized gap between the standards used for a western country to label something terrorist and for Russia (or Iran, or China, etc...). The argument is either being made in bad faith or in fanaticism driven ignorance, neither of which words on the internet will change. The correct and only action for this level of argument is ridicule.

In reality it becomes significantly more likely that an attack is considered terrorism if the attacker is Muslim.

There's legal precedent for that in the US, Canada, the UK, France, the European Council on Human Rights, etc... Not Saudi Arabia though. Are you Saudi?

Yes, HN, saying that a Muslim is more likely to commit a terror attack is wildly racist. On top of the fact that it's extremely wrong, statistically speaking.

What tf is happening here? Are people that scared of calling out war crimes, atrocities, and terrifying precedents?

Why are so many forgetting that international law applies to all armed conflicts, even if you call one side terrorists?

What is wild is how you tried to defeat an argument by accusing someone of racism instead of citing statistics proving the OP is wrong. Further, "Muslim" isn't a race. Someone making a valid argument for racism would recognize this and correct for it.

If you have a read through the 2022 Country Reports on Terrorism [0] you'll see the GP is drawing a conclusion from valid data. It's not racist to see that the vast majority of terrorist attacks are caused by ISIS and Al-Qaeda spin-offs - both muslim terror organizations. There's also Hezbollah and other government back organizations - all muslim. The number of attacks committed in the Middle East and Africa are absolutely astonishing and dwarf any other number of attacks by any other religious group. A secondary conclusion, of course, is that muslims are also likely to be the victim of these attacks.

> What tf is happening here? Are people that scared of calling out war crimes, atrocities, and terrifying precedents?

This isn't a war crime. It's not even an atrocity. Terrifying precedent perhaps and will likely have a chilling effect on this type of stuff regardless. Though, anyone paying attention has been aware of this for a long time through the NSA leaks. There's a reason some companies provide anti-interdiction service.

> Why are so many forgetting that international law applies to all armed conflicts, even if you call one side terrorists?

Are you referring to the Hague Convention? The one that requires an actual war be declared before it even applies? Or the Geneva Convention? The one that doesn't apply to terrorist organizations and other guerilla combatants?

The most interesting conclusion you seem to be drawing is that this was also a terrorist attack - though you cite no actual evidence of such. This was a counter-terrorist operation by a group that has been at "war" (used extremely loosely here) for nearly the last year with Hezbollah. If anything, it's just another day in the war department.

[0] https://www.state.gov/reports/country-reports-on-terrorism-2...

Nobody needs to cite any statistics to proof that Muslims are in fact not more likely to commit terrorism. Claiming the need for such sources is hiding racism behind statistics, which is also a racist behavior. And on the flip-site citing any statistic to “proof” that Muslims to be more likely of terrorism is a fundamentally racist thing to do, and nobody should actually do that.

Terrorism is such a rare act that, and such an extreme act that any statistic is going to be dictated by either noise or third factors. If you find any group of peoples to be likelier to commit this act it is either because of random fluctuations or because of unrelated factors (including—and most likely because of—bias).

It is in fact a well known tactic among racists to hide their racism behind biased data. This goes well back to scientific racism of the 19th and 20th century, as well as among police districts justifying racial profiling (a deeply racist policy) in the 1980s and well into the 2000s.

I share your parent’s worry that we are having this debate here on HN, and that you are so willing to double down on an obviously racist idea.

    Violent white supremacists and anti-government, accelerationist, and like-minded individuals continued to promote violent extremist narratives, recruit new adherents, raise funds, and conduct terrorist activities in the United States and worldwide. 

The leading cause of domestic terrorism in the USofA is anti-government, anti-authoritarian violent extremists (aka coup d'état cosplayers)

~ https://www.gao.gov/blog/rising-threat-domestic-terrorism-u....

It is somewhat understandable why some people associate terrorist attacks with Muslims, as unfortunate as that may be. Not that I'm saying that Muslims commit the most terrorist attacks, it just so happens that the most well known ones in the west happen to have been committed by Islamic extremists. E.g, WTC 93, 9/11, London Bombings, Boston Marathon.

> It is somewhat understandable why some people associate terrorist attacks with Muslims

Racism can be 'understandable', especially when Islamophobia is pushed across corporate media [0]. It's still racism though, and harmful for all involved (even the people who own weapons stocks).

> In 2001, 2% of all news stories in Western media presented images of Muslim militants, while just over 0.5% presented stories of ordinary Muslims. In 2011, 25% of the stories presented a militant image, while the images of ordinary Muslims remained stuck at 0.5%. [0]

So, in an analysis of 975,000 news stories across the West [0], you were 50 times more likely to see a militant Muslim (0.01-0.03% of the Muslim population) than one of the 1.9 billion ordinary peaceful Muslims in the world. That's utterly indefensible, and a shocking indictment on corporate media.

Thanks for pushing me to dig into those statistics, I guess. Hope we all learned something.

0 - https://blog.oup.com/2015/12/oiso-islamophobia/ - Lots more sources linked here, proving Islamophobia is extremely intentional, and well funded across the West.

the person i responded to thinks that Islam has a causal relationship with terrorism - what about the ideology leads you to believe that, besides the fact that the media you consume reports on it more often?

The Christian nationalists are a rising problem as well.

I know the web site is a shit show. As for race, it’s not a race. Don’t conflate the two. An ideology should never be beyond criticism.

Islam is not an ideology, it is a religion. And members of this religion consist a group, or people. As such criticizing this religion is criticizing a group of people for whom they are, and it is racism.

What you are doing is muddying the waters of the argument by making that association. Are you not the racist then by suggesting the attribution?

If you can't criticise extremism without being called a racist, we are truly and utterly fucked as as species.

Nowhere was I talking about extremists nor any ideology for that matter. Either you misunderstood me or you have moved the goalpost.

Your racist propaganda includes this sentence featured prominently on the page:

> TROP is a non-political, fact-based site which examines the ideological threat that Islam poses to human dignity and freedom

Note they say “Islam”, not “Islamic fundamentalism” or “extreme ideologies self proclaimed to be based on Islam”.

It is entirely not clear it is talking about a specific ideology or extremism, something one would expect they would make abundantly clear if their purpose was not to spread hate propaganda. In fact it seems like they are actually talking about an entire peoples and judging them based on the actions of the few. In other words, racism.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41581653.

The only condition they will ever accept is when Israel ceases to exist.

Which begs the question - who's really initiating and continuing the violence? Israel has offered peace. HAMAS and its proxies like Hezbollah have rejected it every time. It should be obvious there's only one side who wants peace and one side who only wants war.

Can we have a source for that claim? I do not know how you would arrive at the number eight and how any offer would qualify as giving the Palestinians all they asked for. The Oslo process was probably the best shot but did not even come close to resolving the conflict. A lot of the contentious issue were just deferred to be figured out within five years and that simply never happened.

https://lawandsocietymagazine.com/how-palestine-rejected-off...

1st Rejection - The suggested split was heavily in favor of the Arabs. The British offered them 80% of the disputed territory, the Jews the remaining 20%. Yet, despite the tiny size of their proposed state, the Jews voted to accept this offer. But the Arabs rejected it and resumed their violent rebellion.

2nd Rejection - Ten years later, in 1947, the British asked the United Nations to find a new solution to the continuing tensions. Like the Peal Commission, the UN decided that the best way to resolve the conflict was to divide the land. In November 1947, the UN voted to create two states. Again, the Jews accepted the offer and again, the Arabs rejected it. Only this time, they did so by launching an all-out war. Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria joined the conflict. But they failed. Israel won the war and got on with the business of building a new nation. Most of the land set aside by the UN for an Arab state, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, became occupied territory. Occupied not by Israel, but by Jordan.

3rd Rejection - 20 years later, in 1967, the Arabs led this time by Egypt and joined by Syria and Jordan, once again sought to destroy the Jewish state. The 1967 conflict, known as the Six-Day War, ended in a stunning victory for Israel. Jerusalem and the West Bank, as well as the area known as the Gaza Strip, fell into Israel’s hands. The government split over what to do with this new territory. Half wanted to return the West Bank to Jordan and Gaza to Egypt in exchange for peace. The other half wanted to give it to the region’s Arabs, who had begun referring to themselves as the Palestinians, in the hope that they would ultimately build their own state there. Neither initiative got very far. A few months later, the Arab League met in Sudan and issued its infamous three-NOs, no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel. Again, a two-state solution was dismissed by the Arabs.

4th Rejection - In 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak met at Camp David, with Palestinian Liberation Organization Chairman Nasser Arafat, to conclude a new two-state plan. Barak offered Arafat a Palestinian state in all of Gaza, and 94% of the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as its capital. But the Palestinian leader rejected the offer. In the words of U.S. President Bill Clinton, “Arafat was here 14 days and said no to everything.” Instead, the Palestinians launched a bloody wave of suicide bombings that killed over 1,000 Israelis and maimed thousands more, on buses, in wedding halls, and in pizza parlors.

5th Rejection - In 2008, Israel tried yet again. Prime Minister Ehud Omar went even further than Ehud Barak had, expanding the peace offer to include additional land to sweeten the deal. Like his predecessor, the new Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, turned the deal down.

I can not say much about number three but your quote says that it did not get very far, so I am not sure why this is on a list of rejected offers if there was not even an offer, only considerations.

The way Camp David is described also does not match reality. They failed to agree on several points and therefore there was never an offer that could be rejected. One point of contention was the right to return for the Palestinians expelled by the Israelis. You can not say one side blocked it, the Palestinians wanted more than what Israelis offered, they could have accepted less or the Israelis could have offered more.

Number five, the realignment plan, that was a proper offer, but the characterization in your quote is still misleading. Israel unilaterally proposed to withdraw from most of the Westbank and permanently annex six percent of it containing the major settlements. There was also some other stuff including some land swaps included. I am not sure if the reason for the failure are welk known, you find claims about rejections, claims about just not accepting, that story about not being allowed to look at the map before agreeing, ... And given that it was an unilateral offer, I am not sure that it addressed all points deemed relevant by the Palestinians, for example what happens to the refugees. I would love if someone could provide additional insights.

If relations between the two sides hadn’t deteriorated to the point of civil war then the split would never have been proposed in their first place. Left alone the Jews living in the mandate probably would have continued living there as a minority like they were in many Arab states.

The Palestinians fear of Zionism has turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Nothing mystic or prophetic at all about it.

Palestine is in the situation it is in due to the calculated policies of the various colonial powers and their "post-colonial" successors -- perhaps better described as "modern great power chauvinist states".

And due to its own mistakes of course (as with any society, especial). But these are generally overshadowed by interventions (far) beyond its control, emanating from these aforementioned interventionist powers. One can dissect the various aspects and subaspects of this dynamic, but that's the long and short of the situation.

In any case, "prophecy" as such has nothing to do with the current status quo.

You mean Arafat's refusal for to even define infinite "right of return" or participate in any way with the Summit? While every historian (including his Arafat's wife he told to hide in Paris) said he was preparing for the second intifada?

Also its widely known that the Summit was the closest they have ever gotten outside Taba. Its a hilarious statement to think there was no "offer".

And let me add a note on the language. At least I but probably also others easily fall into a pattern of saying that Israel makes offers and that the Palestinians reject offers and have demands. This certainly reflects the power imbalance but it also has different connotations - making offers sounds much more positive than having demands and rejecting offers. I guess it would be better to talk about proposals and accepting or not accepting them. Both sides have made proposals and they have not been accepted by the other party sounds much more balanced than saying Israel made offers that got rejected by the Palestinians while Israel dismissed demands made by the Palestinians.

The Palestinian state also didn’t exist. Palestine was under British rule at the time, and prior to that they were ruled by the Ottomans, and prior to that they were ruled by Arab Caliphates and Christian crusaders, and before that the Romans.

That’s what makes the anti-Israel movement hypocritical. There have always Jews in Palestine, and in fact they predate the Arabs by centuries. And a Palestinian state would be just as much a modern creation as Israel is. The only way to legitimize a Palestinian state and delegitimize an Israeli one is a completely arbitrary set of rules. A two state solution is the only one that makes any sense of any kind.

Sure but even though I myself used the term state in my comment, I do not think that states are what matters. What matters are the people living in the region, it is their right to decide what should and should not happen, whether they are formally organized as a state or not. At the time of the Balfour Declaration the Jews were a five to ten percent minority in Mandatory Palestine. In the end it should have been the decision of the people living there - state or not - whether they want to accommodate the Jews that desired to settle there and even more so should it have been their decision whether they want the land split into two states.

The Israelis illegitimately took have of the land from the Palestinians with force and then occupied the other half when they resisted. Similar things happend all throughout history and they can not be undone. The people of Israel will not be forced back to where they came from just as we will not send all Americans back to Europa, Africa, and Asia to give the land back to the native Americans.

But the Palestinians deserve better than the status quo, they are the ones that were treated unjust. Israel should go out of its way to make good on past wrongs, if it does not hurt them, they are not doing enough. Israel now has a right to exist, they do not have to accept existential threats, but they owe the Palestinians a lot.

That's not something Palestinians are willing to accept, so any further peace talks until that changes are laughable.

Yet it is true. 100%, completely true.

There can be no peace, because others will never accept Israel's existence, even though Jewish people have lived in the middle east for thousands and thousands of years.

Israel could act unilaterally, they could decide to withdraw from the Westbank and then just do it, no need to make an offer or agreement and have it accepted by the Palestinians. The obvious drawback of that is that you have no idea how it will be received by the other side, will they be satisfied and the conflict ends or will they keep fighting because they are not satisfied?

So you probably want an agreement between both parties that codifies what both parties will and will not do if accepted. With that it is no longer about accepting an offer but reaching an agreement. If your offer is good enough, it might become an agreement without further negotiation, but as you want to offer as little as possible while getting as much as possible, this seems unlikely to happen. There will be a back and forth of offers and counteroffers and they will all be rejected until you reach an agreement that is acceptable by both parties or until you get stuck because of irreconcilable differences.

But even if you reach an agreement at the negotiation table, that does not mean you have succeeded. The agreement must also be accepted by the affected people on both sides and you have to be able to implement it. Agreeing to stop attacks is worth nothing if the people performing the attacks do not support the agreement and keep fighting and you do not have sufficient power to prevent this.

Long story short, what I want to say is that making an offer and complaining about getting it rejected does not make much sense. If you can act unilaterally, just skip the offer and do it, if both parties have to be involved, you have to reach an agreement and getting offers rejected during the negotiations is an expected part of the process. And unless one side has completely unreasonable demands, a failure to reach an agreement can not easily be blamed on one side alone, both parties have the ability to move their position towards the other side.

No one is complaining about it, they're pointing to the many generous and heartfelt attempts made, that were rebuffed, along with repeated statements that Israel should not exist.

This shows how unreasonable others are being, and how reasonable and open to resolving things Israel has been.

And that does matter.

With the support of the United Nations and violence Israel took half of the land from the people living in Mandatory Palestine and displaced hundred thousands of them. And then occupied the rest of the land when they were fighting back. And terrorized and killed quite a few of them in the course of it. They better make a generous and heartfelt attempt to make good for that.

And with that I can just ask a similar question as before, where are those attempts that failed for unreasonable reasons? And I mean attempts that actually had a chance of getting implemented, backed by sufficient power to follow through if an agreement could be reached.

[...] along with repeated statements that Israel should not exist.

A good part of the people in power in Israel - not all of course - would similarly prefer if there was no Palestinian state, from Ben-Gurion who hopped that Israel will eventually encompass all of Mandatory Palestine to Netanyahu who rejects a fully sovereign Palestine.

Israel belongs there too, Jews have lived in the region forever, and Jewish run states have existed for thousands of years in the region.

It's this simple. Israel exists, and is going nowhere.

People need to deal with it, drop historical hatred, and make peace.

In addition, tens of thousands of civilian casualties within the country, and ignoring ICJ rulings which Israel have signed up to, indicate effectively a rogue government, needing change.

There is a question over what defines Israel as a state, there's no reason why Palestinians and Jews should not be able to live together, with a shared government, but that's not the case here, and that seems to be because Israelis are taking land, making asymmetric laws, allowing anyone with 'Jewish' heritage citizenship regardless of their actual location, and so on. The issue is basically Zionism and the fact that Zionism effectively mandates ethnic cleansing, not Judaism.

You are glossing over a TON of important events between January 1947 and May 1948. Primarily the destruction of Palestinian towns and rampant slaughter at the hands of the Zionist Haganah and Irgun militias. Israeli attempts to memory-hole the Nakhba have failed.

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9To_P8gX9c

^GDF cites many western and Israeli sources in this video

Also, between what you list as the 3rd Rejection (1967) and 4th Rejection (2000), you are omitting that the pro-peace settlement Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated......by the Israeli far-right.....who are pretty much the same people now running Israel into the ground on a path of violence.

Incidentally it does work. It's just horrible. Nagasaki / Hiroshima are a fine example of forced capitulation. Now I'm not suggesting nuking anyone but the best way this ends, with the lowest future body count is someone wins decisively at this point.

I think you miss that people tend to become less idealistic and further right as they get older. The "boomer" generation is just replaced by more of the same people. It's never going to change.

As for people going "further right" as they get older, the younger American generations disliking Israel isn't a right/left thing. Young right and young left both dislike Israel, for their own reasons. Churches in America, particularly white evangelical churches from whom support for Israel is the strongest, are in a precipitous decline. They look like nursing homes now, younger generations aren't coming back and the boomers in those churches are in a panic over it.

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-police-cla...

Has Israel tried not constantly lobbing missiles and rockets at Lebanon? (yes, I know Hezbollah had launched many rockets at territories Israel are illegally occupying, something like 1/4 of the number Israel has launched).

Has Israel tried not dropping leaflets on Lebanese civilians, demanding they leave so Israel can steal their homes and land?

Has Israel even tried stopping harassing the Lebanese population with sonic booms and armed drones?

AFAICT the only thing Israel actually has tried, is more of the above.

The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/16/magazine/israel-west-bank...

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20230130-israel-data-shows...

Stop launching rockets at Israel, comply with UN Resolution 1701, and the conflict is over. Why are you overcomplicating this?

But I think a general distinction is the targeting of combatants vs civilians.

There is a difference between infiltrating military or para-military organizations or operations and intentionally targeting mass casualties of civilians for attention.

How governments, media, etc. use that word is often politically loaded and not based on some agreed objective definition.

Preemptively invalidating all non-state actors is just a way for people with power to avoid challenges to it. Every single oppressive regime describes rebels as terrorists and employs circular arguments to assert its own legitimacy. Using this to dismiss military attacks on military targets is, frankly, bullshit.

There is a reason why you choose to live in a democratic society, because it's the absolute best system we've ever had, and probably will for some time.

I think you're either trolling, really out of touch with reality, but here is an excerpt from the above:

2. We hate you because your secular, liberal societies permit the very things that Allah has prohibited while banning many of the things He has permitted, a matter that doesn’t concern you because you separate between religion and state, thereby granting supreme authority to your whims and desires via the legislators you vote into power. In doing so, you desire to rob Allah of His right to be obeyed and you wish to usurp that right for yourselves. “Legislation is not but for Allah” (Yusuf 40). Your secular liberalism has led you to tolerate and even support “gay rights,” to allow alcohol, drugs, fornication, gambling, and usury to become widespread, and to encourage the people to mock those who denounce these filthy sins and vices. As such, we wage war against you to stop you from spreading your disbelief and debauchery – your secularism and nationalism, your perverted liberal values, your Christianity and atheism – and all the depravity and corruption they entail. You’ve made it your mission to “liberate” Muslim societies; we’ve made it our mission to fight off your influence and protect mankind from your misguided concepts and your deviant way of life.

Is that enough for you? The part about "waging war against non believers caught my eye", how about you?

You're citing ISIS. I suggest you some research to see who funded (and founded) ISIS and their ilk, and their predecessors for the matter, and for whose interests it is that they remain. Plus, even they don't use the word "infidel" in your link. They mix truth (e.g. western colonialism and rules that Islam dictates) with falsehood, to push their agenda. ISIS and their ilk have always attacked other Muslims. Plus, I don't see the word "infidel" there.

If you want an in-depth understanding of Middle Eastern politics, including but not limited to the impact of religion, I recommend the late Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilization.

Incidentally, I can't help but observe that this hyper-conservative rhetoric is not a million miles away from current histrionics about the 'woke mind virus'. Relatively mainstream US think tanks like the Heritage Foundation advocate for the criminalization of pornography and I get the impression they're not too hot on 'sin' in general.

If everyone in your ‘private actor’ group wears uniforms, acts in the open (ie marches in formation, operates tanks instead of setting boobie traps, etc), and then attacks military operations directly it’s going to require an extreme amount of squinting to call that group terrorists.

Whoever is running it would probably get a pretty fair title of warlord. But they’re different.

At the same time, it a gov’t organization runs around bombing civilian targets in a campaign to scare everyone in their opponents country out of their mind, pretty hard to not call them terrorists.

I don’t remember reading any attacks on civilians in the revolutionary war. The civilians would have all been Americans, so it wouldn’t make sense.

The British regarded them as traitors, and would have hung them for treason and sedition.

Funny exemple knowing France sunk a Greenpeace vessel. That act has been called "state terrorism".

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

When Afghans took up arms against occupying American soldiers, they were routinely called terrorists in American press and media.

When Muslims fight America or Israel, they are called terrorists. When the situation is reversed, that label isn't applied.

Although I mostly recall the word "insurgent" being used for local fighters in those cases.

Most of the Afghan fighters who took shots at American soldiers weren't motivated by some sort of boogieman religious extremism. They were simply shooting at armed foreigners who invaded their country. They weren't terrorists by any reasonable definition of the but were called so anyway because they happened to be Muslim and dared to defy America.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40419659 (May 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20136151 (June 2019)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16788926 (April 2018)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15361112 (Sept 2017)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14509767 (June 2017)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12026794 (July 2016)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11060921 (Feb 2016)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10837332 (Jan 2016)

You can't just walk across a recognized international border and do the "right" thing without a consent, regardless of how right or wrong it had been. That's an act of war, technically.

There's just a distinction to be made from intentionally killing civilians for the purpose of causing terror versus targeting a group that you are in an open military hostility with. The second one, as you say, is basically just war. And war has historically also included civilian casualties.

Flying a plane full of civilians into a building full of civilians, or detonating a bomb in a public square full of civilians, are pretty clear examples of what "terrorism" is. They aren't actions meant to directly attack the capability of an enemy to wage war against you.

What governments and media choose to label "terrorism" or "terrorist groups" however is inherently political and not done following some agreed, objective definition.

They’ve been at war for 50 years, like, officially the war declaration was never dropped.

So recent missile volleys can’t be treated in isolation, despite that making sense

How would you call that?

There is already a war, so far it just has been avoided to become an all out war.

I mean, those Muslim countries are just going to slowly disappear if they don't "grow up". Maybe not in my lifetime but eventually. I personally don't mind it that much, literally other than that they make interesting architectures and lunch dish recipes, but it just grinds my gears that those groups of sentient human beings keeps ignoring that problem like sink full of dishes.

Also no, they largely don't accept it. The fanatics on both sides dream of the day of final victory over the enemy. And then there will be everlasting peace and paradise or something like it.

You might want to read up on the killing of bin Laden, Entebbe raid, and many other similar operations.

It’s part of the deal when you’re a high speed, low drag type. Be good, or get dead.

They could decide to build up their country and Israel wouldn't interfere.

If a platoon of American CIA agents went around the US executing 'bad people' (definition problems notwithstanding),

That would be bad.

Typically the differentiating factor is who the victims are and what the goal of the operation are - terrorists = victims are primarily civilian and the operation has negligible military benefit. Not terrorists = the targets are military. If there is collateral damage then it is not excessive (or not intended to be; intent matters) in relation to the military objective.

All this is subjective of course, and politics are involved, but that is what the difference is usually given as.

In this particular case - i would say it would be terrorism if it was random people's radios & pagers, but not terrorism if it was pagers/radios bought for military purpose that were primarily owned by soldiers. Initial reports suggest it is the latter, but i imagine more details will appear in time to better make that determination.

Its a hostile entity, that constantly regenerates and is for nurture reasons unable to become a equivalent non-asymmetric enemy to Israel. Like almost all other parties in the middle east- the separation of combatants and civilians is not held up. Means civilians switch into insurgent roles and back all the time. Retaliation always looks like indifferent slaughter- as the human shield is basically the default modus operandi.

Holding western values against it its horrifying. Holding there own standards against it, its acceptable to do for $TODAY - $FOUNDING_DAY_OF_ISRAEL and to use the cultural differences in western values known as hypocrisy as value is okay too.

Pretty sure history proves that to be vastly incorrect. And the modern state of Middle Eastern countries is inseparable from the actions outside (both western and not) powers have undertaken there.

the crucial lines is "provoe a state of terror in the general public." That is to say, terrorism uses arbitrary violence in order to cause fear and panic leading to political goals. By contrast, the targets of this attack were directly against the personnel and leadership of a militarized organization currently in a shooting war with israel. The goal is not to instill terror in a population, but to directly target the capabilities of a military organization.

Note that doesn't mean its not a war crime (I don't think it is but...)! It could still be a war crime for all sorts of reasons... it just means it's not terrorism.

Doesn't have to be arbitrary, and a highly precise targeted attack killing high commanders can still instill fear in the general population - if the most guarded guys can be killed, nobody is safe.

I'm disappointed that this thread has devolved into an angry and pointless political debate, when it could instead have been a cool technical exploration of how Mossad pulled it off. Come on, Hacker News!

But when there is war - well, I've picked my side.

You're probably American, as am I, and you're definitely from a country that has attacked and militarily dominated other countries. (Because they almost all have.) Get off your high horse.

That feels like an oversimplification to me. Some of those devices have surely injured civilians. I think the question is how many. Broadly it's the same question that's plagued Israel's actions since last October: there will always be civilian casualties as a result of military action, but how many is too many?

If the USA in 2001 could have waved a magic wand that killed all the Taliban and didn't touch a hair on any non-combatants head they would have waved it and called it a day.

Suppose some country occupies another country and the occupied country has no proper army to fight back, therefore they resort to methods of unconventional warfare to fight back against the occupation. Would some call this terrorism? Would this qualify as terrorism given some proper definition of the term and objective judgment of the situation? Would it be bad? What if they not only target the military of the occupier but also their civilians as it is them who voted for the government doing the occupation? What if they did this out of some kind of necessity because targeting the occupying military is not effective given the power imbalance?

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/terrorism-and-the-right...

By the way, I am not sure you understood necessity in the way I wanted it understood. I wanted to say what if they target civilians because they do not have the means to effectively target the military, i.e. if it is necessary to target civilians in order to have any impact at all. And you can target civilians in various ways, so martyrdom and suicide bombings are not necessary. It is, I would assume, however true that martyrdom and certain religious views about an afterlife make suicide bombings a much more viable weapon than otherwise.

Nonetheless the British continued their support of the Zionist movement as expressed in the Balfour Declaration and allowed - against the will of the local Arab population - more Jews to immigrate to Mandatory Palestine. When the situation became more and more unmanageable for the British, they handed the issue to the United Nations which decided - against the will of the Arab countries - to divide Palestine into two states. This decision caused a civil war in Mandatory Palestine that turned into a war with its neighboring states after Israel declared its independence. During the war Israel ethnically cleansed its territory and displaced hundred thousands of Palestinians.

So Israel went from not existing and Jews owning about ten percent of the land in Mandatory Palestine to encompassing about half of Mandatory Palestine because of the United Nations division plan, then three quarters of Mandatory Palestine which they got under their control in the Arab–Israeli War, to controlling all of Mandatory Palestine after capturing the West Bank and the Gaza strip - and the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights - in the preemptive Six Day War.

Reality is that Israel established itself in Palestine out of nothing with colonialism and violence against the resistance of the Arab population living there and the support of the neighboring Arab countries.

The point that arabs somehow have more right to that land is however absolutely bizarre.

Not in the least. All descendants of any reasonably fixed population anywhere in the world have a perfect right to keep living where they are.

Migrants from other places can ask for permission to settle there. If they can point to ancestry which left or were expelled the region many centuries ago, they can put that in their application. However this fact does not by itself establish a "claim", or a "right" to that land, beyond a symbolic or philosophical one.

In this context, the idea that a migrant population (having been for a very long time had widely dispersed from the region and mixing with other groups) should have not just intrinsic "rights" to a piece of land it wants, but more rights than the actual continuously resident population of that land -- is quite bizarre, indeed.

You conveniently omit any agency of the people, who refused most agreements on civil division or dialogue.

Aside from this being a warped narrative -- none of the interceding events, however you might prefer to spin them, have any bearing on the basic principle (and the categorical distinction between the types of claims) just outlined. Which of course applies to any continuously resident community of peoples, anywhere.

War.

> Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of violence against non-combatants

Mental gymnastics will be in full force here and in the media/politics to recategorize it.

I have no doubt a headline saying "Israeli politicians' hand-held radios explode, killing three, one day after pager blasts" would receive very different responses in this thread.

> Hezbollah is a Lebanese Shia Islamist _political party_ and paramilitary group

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

"Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of violence against non-combatants to achieve political or ideological aims. The term is used in this regard primarily to refer to intentional violence during peacetime or in the context of war against non-combatants."

There's a lot of disagreement about the international definition of terrorism, but most seem to agree that it is specifically violence against non-combatants and outside the context of a declared military action.

The thing about Islamic fundamentalism is they don’t view life with regard because all the fun is to be head once you’re dead according to their doctrine. It’s an atrocious belief system.

Islamic terrorist are smart and they use your morals against you.

This is the old, pre- War on Terror definition. The definition of terrorism now, as used by most imperialist governments, is far less strict.

https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/terrorism

You will notice that the FBI's official definition of international terrorism doesn't mention either civilians or political goals at all:

> International terrorism: Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups who are inspired by, or associated with, designated foreign terrorist organizations or nations (state-sponsored).

Their definition of domestic terrorism is likewise unbound from civilian targets entirely, and is not only about political goals, but "ideological" goals (which is in fact any goal, by definition, i.e. "something you desire to see/ believe should be achieved"):

> Domestic terrorism: Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature.

Terrorism is now any act of violence that serves the goals of any group that is designated as "bad".

The rest of your comment is just textbook Islamophobia.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

If they could have executed this without a single civilian injury they definitely would have. I guess intent is what makes it terrorism vs war in my mind.

Why do you think that?

Look at what the leadership of the Israel government is saying when they aren't placating western audiences / media outlets:

Cabinet Member May Golan: "Proud of the ruins of Gaza" ( https://www.palestinechronicle.com/i-am-proud-of-the-ruins-o... )

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich: Starving 2 million Gazans to death is right and moral but the world won't let us ( https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-08-05/ty-article/is... )

Minister of National Security Ben Gvir: We should tear down the Al-Aqsa Mosque and build a synagogue in its place ( https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240826-israel-minist... )

Israeli voters already tried the left dove approaches, resulting in suicide campaigns lasting over 100 days.

It would be crazy to stick with carrot when you are only getting hit with a stick.

The sad truth is political class of both sides has vested interest in prolonging the conflict.

Especially Palestinians ruled by terrorist org openly proclaiming they are only interested in 'wiping the jews out'.

On a side note, I think people should strive to be more humble when they talk about issues they don't understand, or understand very little.

1. all the devices will land in hands of legitimate targets

2. all those devices will be actually used by targets at the moment of explosion

3. there will be no civilians in the range of explosion

Because of that civilian casualties should be anticipated at unknown scale. Since Israel pulled the trigger knowing that, it means they deliberately targeted civilians along with legitimate targets.

This is actually insufficient, unless you think the bombing of Berlin was terrorism. If your attack is about primarily about reducing military capability then it isn't terrorism.

Bombing a tank factory staffed entirely by civilians is not terrorism. Launching an expensive cruise missile against a single apartment block is probably terrorism, but if that apartment block houses all the scientists of the Manhattan project, maybe it's not. Bombing a military base isn't terrorism even if you end up killing all the families of the soldiers stationed there.

The two countries are at war with each other. Hezbollah has murdered many civilians, kids and elderly, and has caused hundreds of thousands to flee their homes. After 12 months of this, and despite many attempts at diplomacy - something needs to be done.

The two countries are at war with each other. Israel has murdered many civilians, kids and elderly, and has caused hundreds of thousands to flee their homes. After 12 months of this, and despite many attempts at diplomacy - something needs to be done.

For example, get ready to have your entire military coms infrastructure blown up in a cyberattack.

Why are we sitting here debating what’s a war crime and what isn’t, when Hezbollah (a designated guerrilla terrorist organization) deliberately chooses to go into war with Israel, and drag all of Lebanon into it?

the term "terrorism" means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents

So really, terrorism is what people say is terrorism.

https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/uss-cole-bombing

Could this possibly fall under Article 37 c of the Geneva convention (“The feigning of civilian, non-combatant status”)? In that case, calling it terrorism wouldn’t be too bizarre in my opinion. I’m assuming the attackers didn’t wear any uniforms or insignia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-ship

> The extensive FBI investigation ultimately determined that members of the al Qaeda terrorist network planned and carried out the bombing.

[...]

> By the end of 2000, Yemeni authorities had arrested several suspects, including Jamal Muhammad Ahmad Al-Badawi and Fahad Muhammad Ahmad Al-Quso

(Source: https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/uss-cole-bombing)

You don't generally call in the FBI to "investigate" a military attack, or "arrest suspects".

If the nation of Yemen had immediately claimed responsibly for the exact same attack and declared war, it wouldn't have been considered terrorism, and rightfully so.

If the USS Cole bombers were rebels trying to gain their independence from Yemen (which I don't think is even their stated objective?) and not terrorists they would have been prioritizing Yemeni military targets, not those of uninvolved foreign nations.

As I'm sure you know, Hamas deliberately shields itself with the civilian population, and pursues a strategy of maximizing the civilian death toll.

Everywhere you turn, you will find that Hamas' explicit strategy is to maximize the humanitarian crisis in the region. They do this so that people like you will be their advocate.

Dont whatabout me. I'm not defending Hamas, merely critizing Israel.

One is a terrorist organization; the other is a nation state. One has orders of magnitude more innocent blood on their hands than the other.

You are telling me that Israel has the capability of pulling off this pager attack, but its only way to deal with Hamas was to raze Gaza? Pfft.

This is not as simple as it looks. Hamas does indeed target civilians, but what really put the wind up Israel on October 7 was that they successfully overran 2 military bases and mounted a serious attack on a third, although that was repelled. Per Israeli media, the government there had significant prior warning (months or maybe as much as a year) but dismissed the intelligence in the belief that Hamas lacked the military capability and was just LARPing.

Under what definition is an operation like this is terrorism?

Sounds like the tl;dr is that civilians aren't the primary target, therefore it is not terrorism.

If the assailant and target were reversed, would Western media hesitate at all to call it terrorism?

Or, forget Hezbollah and Israel. If ISIS had detonated thousands of explosive devices all over, e.g., the UK injuring and killing hundreds of UK military personnel and some civilians, would that not immediately be condemned as an act of terror, by everyone in the entire world, East and West? And rightly so?

If the designation of "terror" or "not terror" depends on who's attacking and whom they are targeting, then there's not much point in talking about terror or not terror at all.

Without a doubt it’s asymmetrical… and the common binary is military/terror but I fear this is a distinction left to the last century.

The loss of children is always unacceptable, but Hezbollah has a history of courting child soldiers… so skepticism is not unwarranted.

https://www.refworld.org/reference/annualreport/cscoal/2008/...

If it is actually done to degrade the capabilities of the UK military so ISIS could use its fighters to chase them out of Iraq, or maybe, conquer a part of England - its an act of war and is actually worse from a UK POV. Calling it a terror attack would be silly.

People are biased to treat wars as better then terror because wars have rules and often involve good people trying to defend their country. But from a country's POV a terror organization is usually way less dangerous than a competent enemy military attacking.

Terror is usually done because someone lacks military competence and is willing to play dirty to even the playing field.

The establishment is so aggressive in condemning terrorism, because its easier to deal aggressively with a small terrorist organization before it becomes an established military and carves its own autonomous place on the world stage.

ISIS is a good example, it used a lot of terror tactics, but its goal was to create a country.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Pagers and radios are used for their communication. That means that it is a military equipment.

I'm the opposite, in that I think it is incredibly uninteresting to obsess over semantics and try to neatly sort everything into a terrorism or non-terrorism box.

Definitions are generally not universal and are inherently inexact. The definition will simply be stretched by the interpreting party to put things they do not morally approve of into the terrorism box and things they do approve of in the non-terrorism box.

So I think it makes more sense to just skip that step and instead directly consider whether something is morally justified or not and to provide arguments of why or why not.

What's the old saying? "One mans terrorist is another man's freedom fighter".

Maybe we should all just try to treat others the way we want to be treated? That’s pretty much what that hippy Jewish philosopher guy said back in the day.

Terrorism is variously defined [1]. People are debating whether this was "random or indiscriminate nature" relative to other terrorist attacks. But relative to any wartime strike on an enemy capital, it's been highly precise.

The reason it's open to intepretation is we don't know Israel's motivation. Is it to mark Hezbollah members? A prelude to a strategic strike? If so, it's not terrorism. If it's to scare Hezbollah and the Lebanese, on the other hand, it does start to look like terrorism.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_terrorism

I can't really wrap my head around it neither, is it terrorism or not ?

On one hand it sure is - we don't know if it was the main goal, but it sure did instil fear and terror. Even in people that have nothing to do with the region.

On the other hand, it's pretty much as targeted as it gets. From what we know, the explosives were really small, installed in devices specifically used by their targets. I have hard time imagining any other way one could eliminate or incapacitate thousands of legimitate (in their view at least) targets without firing a single bullet and with so few other casualties (and yes, of course even a single one is too much).

I mean, maybe it meets the technical definition of terrorism, but at a certain point all military conflict becomes terrorism and the term becomes meaningless.

The Hezbollah attack that started this war was an act of terrorism.

The Ukraine placing bombs in cities where the Russians are about to march in is not terrorism.

Having that said: It would be better if the Hezbollah could be stopped by other less cruel means. But war is ugly. The Hezbollah has started it so Israel has all the right to defend themselves. Even if it's cruel.

however as already pointed out, even this happened in one instance, it all depends on which side you are on. being from a country that fought for its independence, we remember those who did the deed as "freedom fighters". during the time, from the "opressor's" point of view, however, they would have been seen as insurgents.

Hezbollahs goal is to destroy Israel, so I wouldn't call any military action against them terrorism. They have a right to defend themselves and that right does include these tactics.

To my mind, there are two critical moral differences between war and terrorism. The first is that the soldier attacks those who are fighting him - if not exactly the guilty, at least the active and resistant. The terrorist doesn't care if he attacks the weak and innocent and in fact prefers it. The second is that the object of a soldier's attack is to break the resistance, and he minimizes evil and suffering in pursuit of that goal. The terrorist maximizes it as a point of strategy.

Of course, fighting is sometimes necessary - evil must be resisted or it will dominate the earth. And in a messy real world, fighting often unavoidably hurts the innocent and the uninvolved - or even the involved in unnecessary ways. The desire to do things perfectly has to at some point yield to the need to do something - insisting that only perfect actions be taken is the same as saying no actions can be taken.

So what makes a fighting action moral? There isn't a bright line. At the margins, this is a judgement call. What level of violence, of what sort, is acceptable is something good people will have differing opinions on. But to suggest that the existence of a spectrum and the necessity of exercising judgement erases the categories is to commit the beard fallacy. The fact that we cannot say exactly when stubble becomes a beard does not mean there is no such thing as a beard - it just means the edges of the definition are fuzzy. That's actually normal! Most definitions have fuzzy edges, and have weak meaning on those edges. If one person wants a clean shaven man for some purpose and another wants a bearded man, both may consider a week old shave unacceptable for their purposes. Definitional edges have their interests, but don't necessarily inform how we think about centers.

Most ethics in war and in fighting turn on these ideas of innocence or powerlessness and necessity. Soldiers take prisoners (and treat them well) because taking someone out of the conflict is the honorable goal of war, and causing suffering once that is accomplished is evil. Criminals in prison (should) still have human rights for the same reason. I once heard a federal law enforcement official describe a shootout with a criminal, stating that the criminal was shooting at him and didn't care who else he hit, while the LEO was unwilling to return fire against the backstop of an occupied apartment building because that would be evil.

It does cost something to do things right - you pay for it in the blood of your own soldiers and in your chances of victory. One reason to seek an overwhelming force is to have the luxury of doing things as cleanly as possible. In a more even fight, at higher stakes, necessity may look different. People do take capabilities and circumstances into account when they judge you.

Nonetheless, there is a very big difference between doing the right thing imperfectly or even badly and doing the wrong thing. There are matters of degree between going to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties and accepting more of them. That does not mean intentionally targeting civilians exists on that spectrum. That's crossing an entirely different line.

On a personal level, in a self defense scenario, you can be taking actions to stop a threat or to hurt a person. The first is moral and legal; the second is immoral and illegal. And while you sometimes do the second in the course of doing the first, the minute you are doing it for its own sake, you are over the line. While we may disagree over where exactly the line is, that doesn't mean you can put it anywhere you find convenient. There is a moral truth to the situation.

Every criminal says they're acting in self defense through some twisted line of reasoning. And every terrorist can tell you why their targets are legitimate and their actions necessary. It is entirely possible to argue along such lines and to be wrong. Further down the thread, someone argues that targeting civilians is justified when those civilians vote for the government you are fighting. This is an example of careless moral reasoning that seeks to justify evil - you cannot know who voted how, and we do not kill people for how they vote or we find ourselves in the position of killing huge numbers of people. This is a thin justification for violence as a goal in itself. Likewise, someone argues that targeting the innocent is justifiable in a very asymmetric conflict. Again, this is a very thin justification. It is true that you are judged by the precision of your weapons and the options available to you, but a tenuous relationship to some strategic advantage doesn't justify egregious and pointless violence. At some point, it starts to look like the violence is the point to you and you're just evil.

These lines of argument highlight why I feel the need to respond. This erasing of the line between war and terrorism, which has apparently happened in the minds of a lot of people here, has an effect that is doubly harmful. It has the effect of hampering necessary and legitimate war by miring it in endless criticism and confusion about legitimacy. This is bad - when we fight evil, we need to be able to have intelligent conversations about how to acceptably do it. Overly hampering our capabilities helps evil be a little more dominant - keeps the bad guys a little more in control on the margins. Calling war terrorism commits this evil. But perhaps a worse evil is committed by calling terrorism war - it has the effect of justifying it! There are people in this thread who think that targeting voters and children is okay because they are confused about the concepts of innocence and necessity and in their confusion are incapable of intelligently evaluating reasoning that involves those concepts. It is not a great leap between finding terrorism morally acceptable and being willing to support it.

The ethics and morals of violent conflict - whether writ small between individuals or writ large between nations - have been a topic of discussion for all of civilization. While we don't always agree, a lot of important, intelligent, moral things have been said on the topic - things worth learning. We have concepts like war crime and terrorism for reasons. Contrary to (apparent) popular belief, there are not merely ugly sounds, linguistic weapons wielded for power. They are important and specific ideas, given to us by generations of thinkers, that help us distinguish between good and evil and understand the moral meaning of things. You erase those in your own mind at the risk of supporting and committing atrocities. It is important to know when the price of winning morally obligates you to lose, and when the price of losing morally obligates you to win. The ability to tell the difference comes, not from erasing lines, but learning how they are drawn and why.

Most modern countries terrorize people by design, because they can use the 51% illusion to justify any of their actions.

They also use the same illusion to teach you what's terrorism and what's patriotism, and they will for sure try to teach you young — if they don't, it will be kinda hard to distinguish later on

A terrorist org having their own ammo depo is probably a hint.

Lets then transplant the example to other ground lets say Poland lets a terrorist group operate within its borders and that terrorists org regularly sends rockets over to Germany.

What do you think Germany is suppose to do? Ask Poland to deal with an org that they openly support, and openly allow to attack Germany?

Similar to Pearl Harbor where we also had intelligence of the attack I suppose…

That is news to me. Who reported so?

Sounds more like the battery exploded, not the panel. That would be a weird and difficult attack vector.

When the element of surprise is involved, the attacker only has to get lucky once,the defender has to be lucky every day.

A blueprint reviewed by The Times laid out the attack in detail. Israeli officials dismissed it as aspirational and ignored specific warnings.

Published Nov. 30, 2023. Updated Dec. 2, 2023

<https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/world/middleeast/israel-h...>

Similar to the spy chips implants within the Supermicro server motherboards.

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/02/12/bloomberg-big-c...

If Bloomberg had evidence of chips being tampered with, they could have produced that evidence.

How much of it is an excellent question. It's remarkable that apparently (?) none of the devices went off prematurely and tipped off the targets. That implies a higher degree of QA than you'd expect from a more ramshackle organization.

If a state wants you dead you're cooked anyways

The main way states exercise power is by making large enough shows of force that people behave exactly as you do, and roll over in submission. State powers may be able to silence, extort, or kill anyone, but they damn sure can't get everyone.

Somebody must had put the bombs on these things

huh? There's been weekly protests for almost a year now and last week's was the largest yet with around half a million attending

https://www.timesofisrael.com/organizers-claim-largest-ever-...

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-human-rights/inside...

In this video, we'll be cutting the explosive battery. Hit the like and subscribe buttons, and let us know what kind of explosive you think this is in the comments. Also, don't try this at home kids, we're what you'd call "professionals".

There's some discussion of the mechanics of the modifications in this TEMPCO story, though how the information was ascertained isn't clear:

[S]enior Lebanese source said the devices had been modified by Israel's spy service "at the production level."

"The Mossad injected a board inside of the device that has explosive material that receives a code. It's very hard to detect it through any means. Even with any device or scanner," the source said.

<https://en.tempo.co/read/1917697/israel-planted-explosives-i...>

Presumably not by like-and-subscribe seeking YouTubers, however.

Edit: World Service broadcast, analysis note at ~52s: <https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w172zgf8tw4nqq5>

I think this is why they've been so aggressive in recent years. They know their window of opportunity is closing.

People, native Arabs which I am not, have ALREADY BEEN arbitrarily jailed or targeted for extrajudicial murder for being like me.

As younger Americans age, they will come to realize that they can have a beer on the beach in Tel Aviv in a bikini without the threat of imprisonment or murder. This happened with my generation, back then it was hip to love the PLO, and it will happen again.

They have been aggressive because, just like Vladimir Putin, the only thing Hassan Nasrallah or Ali Khamenei understand is force, the only thing they care about is appearing strong and retaining their grip on power, and the only fear they have is defeat.

I’m talking about apostasy and being outspoken on civil rights.

But good point about how they drag homosexuals from behind scooters until they are dead.

As far as fixing them? I really don’t give a shit. They are as fixable as the North Korean ruling elite.

Anyone who thinks they can be smiled and hugged into the modern age is a fool.

Yeah, I was guessing...

>As far as fixing them? I really don’t give a shit.

What would you suggest then? Kill them all?

I would think that moves like these, primarily affect fighters, destroy the comms structure which is used to wage war (Hezbollah have their own communications system in addition to Lebanon's), and damage the "Hezbollah Elite" image which causes them to be such a power.

Would bombing Lebanon be a better than what they have done? I think much worse on all counts.

I am genuinely curious when I see blanket criticism. How would you respond if you were in Israel's shoes?

I suspect for Israel they have advanced ways of intercepting text and calls and (probably) even MITM encrypted communications over cellular networks. And this could just as easily be about seeding fear about using anything besides a cell phone.

https://batteriesamerica.com/collections/icom-ic-v8-ic-v82-i...

Day two, blow up the backup device that Hezbollah had fallen back to using.

Perhaps on day three, now that Hezbollah has no effective communication and coordination and might even fall back to mobile phones, start ground ops?

You don't even know how many or which of your gadgets have been compromised to spy on you and for how long.

Massive, massive L.

I could even believe the supply chain infiltration was fake and radios were manually replaced day of the attack with a crude timer. Anything to give the appearance of omnipotence.

That was Hamas, not Hezbollah so maybe the latter didn't learn the lesson and left themselves open to this type of attack or retribution, depending on your individual perspective.

This may push things back to pencil and paper and sneaker-nets. It'll probably be a brief adaptation though since the temptation of technology is very real.

I mean Israel is really really good at avoiding collateral damage (according to Israel), so everyone who's on the receiving end of this was Hezbollah (according to Mossad). I mean, they do have the most humanitarian army in the world after all (according to the IDF casualty reports)

At that point, even the Russian military's figures might be more reliable. As there are a few instances of publically admitting to destroying a civilian-only target ("by mistake" according to them).

I haven’t seen anything like this from the other side. For them, every Jew is the enemy.

But I also think a lot of radios look like Baofengs, or are whitelabeled Baofengs, so who knows...

Besides, if Israel or whoever can modify the supply chain, they can add whatever receivers/chips they want into it alongside the explosives. Or just some sort of analog radio detonator/trigger.

If someone placed explosives in a radio device I'm sure it would be quite easy to detonate them on command with a signal tone.

It's naive to call them an ally. It's an extremely complicated relationship, made more toxic by the extreme power that AIPAC holds over our politicians. Every president since LBJ has been duped, outwitted and embarrassed by Israel. Frenemy would be more accurate.

Another reason is that Israel is a relatively stable, Western aligned democracy in a sea of dictatorships, kingdoms, fiefdoms and failed states... which are all organized in OPEC. The US needs a powerful Israel as a check-and-balance against OPEC - a credible threat that if OPEC ever repeats another Oil Crisis, they'll get putsched away.

> They routinely spy on the US, and according the the CIA, spy on us as aggressively as the Chinese and Russians do.

So what, I'm German, y'all spied on Schröder and Merkel as well, and it's only thanks to Snowden we actually know of that.

Well, and that power can be abused as well, particularly for a military that relies on fossil fuels as extensively as the US. Additionally, there's not just the "classic" way of fighting wars (i.e. shooting stuff and blowing up stuff), but there's also economic warfare - and hiking the price of a vital good in war is an extremely effective weapon.

And it's absolutely true that they did not sign the nuclear non proliferation treaty, and then went on to do nuclear tests off the coast of South Africa in the 1979 Vela incident. And that provided a huge motivation for Israel's enemies (which are absolutely anti-US) to seek nuclear weapons, which caused huge regional instability since then and threatened US national security.

Yes, you can talk about how it's hypocritical that the US gets to do these things and nobody else does. And in a sense it is, but the fact is that at the moment, the US effectively rules the world for better or worse. And it is a fact that Israel's behavior is causing instability that threatens themselves and the US.

At the superficial level of the news reports about this event, booby-trapping incidental items to render life and limb across a wide field and a diffuse population doesn't sound like legitimate combat under civilized conduct in warfare; it sounds like text-book terrorism in the lexicon of the U.S.

In my view the crucial question for a society is how does action represent our values and sense of responsibility. In such regards, Israel is far gone off its reservation.

* A west-aligned country is at war with a terrorist organization which is part of the Russian-Iranian-North Korean axis of evil.

* A war which the terrorist organization started unprovoked

* The ally country conducts the most precise strike against militant combatants in history (also completely legal by my understanding of international rules of war)

* Your suggestion is that they should've confiscated their walkie talkies instead