> Now I'm struggling to see the differences between their activities and blowing up airplanes or launching rockets from schools and hospitals.
Well, the obvious difference is that blowing up airplanes or launching rockets at residential areas intentionally targets civilians in order to spread a maximum amount of terror among the civilian population while blowing up pagers that were used for coordinating attacks against Israel very specifically targets operatives involved in such activities.
Some of the initial footage shows such a device going off while innocent bystanders remain unharmed. You can't get any more targeted than that.
Yes, such a pager might have ended up in the hands of a non-involved person, but given the facts known so far that's very unlikely, because there's a reason those people were carrying these devices on them: They were afraid of being tracked down by Mossad in the first place.
Many people fail to see this. You can't compare a terrorist attack that intentionally targets civilians with no apparent military target to a legitimate attack on a defined military target that unfortunately results in some collateral damage.
Many people fail to see this because they have an intact moral core. Conducting a military operation that has a fully predictable rate of civilian casualties is morally equivalent to targeting those civilians.
Israel has utilized a rate of expected civilian to militant casualties in Gaza at the rate of 100:1 [1].
> Conducting a military operation that has a fully predictable rate of civilian casualties is morally equivalent to targeting those civilians.
By that logic only the absolute number of (expected) civilian deaths matters... which can't be right.
If it were true, then exploding a city bus (1 soldier, 10 civilians) would be more moral than striking a military base (1,000 soldiers, 11 civilians.)
It would also suggest a kind of blame-shifting if one side decides to install their missile launchers in the playgrounds of elementary schools or whatever.
You are simply incorrect. “Rate” is a ratio, not an absolute number.
But to your point, Israel’s ratio in Gaza was as high as 100 civilians to 1 soldier in the shopping mall (or more accurately, refugee family shelters).
No, you've cut off the crucial second half of the sentence, which says a military operation with known risks of civilian deaths "is morally equivalent to targeting those civilians."
The phrase "those civilians" refers to a countable quantity of them.
Perhaps you meant to write "morally equivalent to targeting that proportion of civilians"?
Assuming that's a plural "you", I would paraphrase the subthread like this:
_________
(1) zer0x4d: "Many people fail to see that morality depends on intent, there is a qualitative difference between deliberate and incidental collateral damage."
(2) abalone: "No, only people suffering from broken moral cores think there's a difference. An attack when they knew a predictable rate of collateral damage is morally the same as deliberately targeting those civilians who died."
(3) Terr_: "It's based on the number of civilians who die? That doesn't make sense. Consider these scenarios, where even though fewer civilians die, the intent/planning of the act makes us judge it as morally worse."
(4) abalone: "Incorrect, I said it was about comparing the two rates of death."
(5) Terr_: "Well, that's not quite what you wrote earlier, is this other version closer to what you meant to convey?"
Hi Terr, the "you" was singular (and in reference to you, in particular). You paraphrase the subthread well enough, but your first comment within it misinterpreted what Abalone said.
> > Conducting a military operation that has a fully predictable rate of civilian casualties is morally equivalent to targeting those civilians.
>By that logic only the absolute number of (expected) civilian deaths matters... which can't be right.
Abalone (as well as myself, many others, including the signers of the Geneva Convention) is concerned about the use of force against a civilian population where it is predictable that there will be a high rate of civilian death. Abalone says that is morally equivalent to targeting those civilians and Abalone is correct (it is, in fact, a war crime). It is not necessarily about absolute number of civilian deaths, so your counterexample does not succeed.
I think the argument boils down to "what does it mean to target civilians?"
if 100 die to get 1 soldier, that sounds like targeting civilians. If 1 dies to get 100 soldiers, that sounds like (to me and many others) a successful and targeted attack with minimal collateral damage.
The argument being made sounds like if you know there could be 1 death that you should not target the soldiers and that there is no difference in that case to the 100 civilians to 1 soldier and as such, if any civilian could have been estimated to be collateral damage then no military action should have been made.
I think that is supercilious and discounts reality. Civilians are going to get killed and war is terrible. There is a difference in targeted ratios.
Lavender specifically calls out NCVs as high as 100 for high level commanders not soldiers, and NCVS aren't minimums they are maximums. Where is the actual case where 100 died for one soldier?
There are many points on this grey line, and we often fail to recognise those in the middle. For example, between your two points is a very significant type of action that this one may well fall under: an attack on a military target that you are fully aware will result in significant collateral damage.
The act of modifying and/or deploying the devices was targeted. That’s it.
Carrying out an explosives attack across a large geographic area that includes public spaces, with no specific intelligence on the location of the devices, or who is within the blast range, is the exact opposite of targeted.
What on earth would be more targeted than compromising pagers that only Hezbollah military is using?
At some point the criticism really gets absurd. There probably was collateral damage, yes. This is what you have to account for if you start wars against another nation. Repeatedly.
Opposite of targeted are the missiles that hit northern Israel.
> Some of the initial footage shows such a device going off while innocent bystanders remain unharmed.
This is anecdotal and misleading. There are reports of civilians maimed including the murder of a child. This is entirely plausible due to the indiscriminate nature of these bombs with respect to immediate bystanders.
If an enemy had set off thousands of small bombs in American supermarkets and homes, maiming thousands of whoever was nearby and killing children, we would undoubtedly call it a mass terrorist attack.
2000+ bombs hurting 2000 fighters and one child? I'd argue that almost no war is without collateral damage, but this one action might be uniquely low in the amount of collateral damage done.
> This is anecdotal and misleading
I saw 5 videos and in every case only the person carrying the pager was hurt. Even people less than a foot away weren't harmed. Look at the video on the front page of nytimes.com right now to see what it's like. Highly targeted at Hizbullah soldiers, no bystanders hurt. The exact opposite of "indiscriminate".
You're working yourself up into some righteous anger about this, which is fine, that's your choice. But at least recognise that that's what you're doing. You need a certain narrative to be true so you're twisting facts to suit that.
Sure, there has been at least one civilian death, and others might be reported later. While we don't have numbers yet, the evidence so far suggests a low ratio of civilian casualties, probably much lower than what's possible using convention warfare against an enemy embedded in a civilian population.
I know there is a documented case of a non-involved person getting injured, but do you have evidence that this attack was not 99% effective? The attack vector was the device specifically used only by involved people.
A 9 year old child was killed, proving this attack wasn't as targeted as you think. However Israel is happy to accept any amount of collateral damage as long as it doesn't happen to them.
Any child death is tragic, but this is really one of the most targeted strikes in the history of warfare. It is safe to believe that everyone that was given a pager for secret communication by a terrorist group, is associated with such group, probably in a military capacity. Furthermore, videos show that extremely close bystanders are left unhurt.
I think this only goes out to show that criticism towards Israel waging warfare is not really about the way that warfare is fought, but really on the right of Israel to fight at all. As no one in history has achieved a more precise attack in urban setting towards a non-uniformed organization ever.
There is no comprehensive information yet on the ratio of civilians to militants maimed by this attack, and any claims otherwise are propaganda.
If an enemy had exploded small remote controlled bombs in American supermarkets and homes targeting members of the American political parties, the sponsors of terrorism and oppressive dictatorships in many foreign countries, there is no question we would characterize it as a terrorist attack.
Yes. If China detonated several thousand bombs in Idaho civilian locations on the premise they were targeting militias, some of whom fought in Syria and/or against Chinese oppression of the Uyghurs, this would absolutely be an act of mass terrorism.
Thousands were injured, yes. How many of the thousands injured belonged to Hezbollah? It’s a safe bet that the majority of injuries were sustained by owners of these Hezbollah-supplied pagers.
International law allows, to some extent, collateral damage during war (and Israel and Hezbollah are certainly at war). What percentage of collateral damage would you say is acceptable here? 50%? 20%? None?
Hezbollah are also terrorists. You might think it is ok to fight terror with terror, all I am trying to point out is that this is indeed a response in kind.
Hamas may be the “legitimate” government of Gaza (or at least the most recently elected one), but Hezbollah is not the legitimate government of Lebanon; it’s a minority party with outsized influence in parts of Lebanon due to its militia and intelligence services.
> but this is really one of the most targeted strikes in the history of warfare.
You are making that up and quoting yourself. There was not a single fire-control system onboard these pagers; there was no visual designation of the target, and no confirmation that it was being carried by it's owners. The target was broadly designated and not even discriminated on a case-by-case basis. A button was pressed, and consequences including the death of a child are now in play.
Israel has the capability to field targeted strikes on their own using domestic Litening and SPICE munitions (not to say they don't end up targeting civilians anyways). The unforunate bottom line is that this was an indiscriminate and presumptive attack that generally relies on a complete disregard for collateral damage. Innocent bystanders died, ones that would not be targeted by any morally accountable soldier in the command-and-control loop. That means an error was made, in civilized armies.
Almost 3000 wounded are not a problem if they're Hezbollah, no? The child is tragic of course, but one dead child when targeting enemy soldiers is more ethical than the dead children in deliberate attacks on civilians, which is what Hezbollah is doing.
Why are you pretending otherwise? Is it the bigotry of low expectations? Arabs/Muslims can act very reasonable and humane too, so there's no reason to measure them with a different yard stick
Anyone who got resold / loaned those devices, those who were next to blast radius of those devices while going with their lives, any relatives who were unfortunate enough of having an hezbollah member in their family.
This is basically just one step above a chemical attack, and can only be excused as "the end justifies the means" by the interested parties.
Why would you use 80s technology that allows you to circumvent Israeli tracking, and get that from Hezbollah if you're not in cahoots with them? People in Lebanon can afford smart phones.
With the people next to the blast radius you have a point, but when targeting guerilla fighters that blend in with civillian populace it's hard to not inadvertantly target innocents too. But a small explosive device that is used by enemy soldiers and kept close to their bodies is the best way to avoid innocent casualties.
Also, Hezbollah hiding between innocents doesn't mean Israel shouldn't defend themselves. If you hide behind civillians you're the one to blame for casualties, not the party that defends against you
I guess you've never been in most of middle east. Pagers, shortwave radios and "80s technology" are still widely deployed among the general population.
This isn't about pagers generally, this is about a particular batch of 5,000 pagers ordered by Hezbollah. They weren't distributed to random Lebanese citizens.
Hezbollah employs doctors (heck, it runs hospitals) and Hezbollah personnel (in any of the political, armed, or social services parts of the organization) presumably fairly often live in households with children.
"Doctors and children are among the dead" isn't inconsistent with "this came from an order of devices specifically for Hezbollah" (it does cast doubt on "this was a precisely-targeted attack on Hezbollah combatants", but that's a very different claim.)
We'll need to await more info about the second wave of explosions from other devices, but the first wave was widely reported to be from a specific order of 5,000 pagers for Hezbollah, see e.g. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-planted-exp...
Again, these guys don't go to distributors saying "Hello, we're evil Inc, we want your devices for our nefarious plans!" - they were coming from a batch imported trough local resellers like...basically every other consumer retail channel.
Without taking in consideration that "Hezbollah" as a loosely defined group ranges from conservative politicians and institutions to bona fine terrorists.
These devices were being shipped in equal measure from the guys sending rockets to Israel to the local equivalent of those preppers who like to spend their weekend eavesdropping the police radio waiting for WWIII.
Unfortunately real life is a bit messier than a Tony Scott movie, and we didn't harm 5000 evil terrorists ready to destroy America and Israel from their Cobra underground lair, just a bunch of random people - a few of them genuinely bad guys (how many? thousands? hundreds? less than ten?), and everyone else who may or may have not sympathized with a group that may or may be not considered a terrorist organization, depending on who you ask.
Mainstream sources are saying it was a specific shipment of 5,000 pagers, which Hezbollah ordered from Gold Apollo (a manufacturer, not a local reseller), that was tampered with.
Are you claiming that these sources are wrong, and Hezbollah actually bought them from some retailer who happened to have 5,000 units of tampered inventory?
Per Reuters, "The senior Lebanese security source said the group had ordered 5,000 beepers made by Taiwan-based Gold Apollo, which several sources say were brought into the country in the spring."
I suppose the source could be lying, but what is your alternate theory exactly? Militaries don't tend to procure their communications equipment from the shelves of Radio Shack. Lebanon doesn't have a booming pager market, so it's unlikely that some local distributor just happened to have 5,000+ pagers sitting around.
This was clearly a special order (which doesn't mean no distributor was involved), and Occam's razor suggests that Mossad tampered with that particular order, rather than tampering with random pagers and just hoping that some of them might end up being purchased by Hezbollah later.
"Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah says the group’s leadership was mostly spared during Tuesday’s attack targeting pagers that killed several members in Lebanon as they were using older devices while “new ones were sent elsewhere.”
Beacuse it's a pager, and they're rather common in most of Egypt, Turkey and middle east countries for medical support and first-time responders.
I mean, the reason Hezbollah switched to those devices was also because they're readily available in the country.
I'd be extremely, extremely surprised if this was a "targeted" shipment rather than a generic batch that was expected to a certain degree to be bought by hezbollah members.
> I'd be extremely, extremely surprised if this was a "targeted" shipment rather than a generic batch that was expected to a certain degree to be bought by hezbollah members.
Because they're not S.P.E.C.T.R.E. It's a separatist group whose more extreme members resort to terrorism, not much differently than IRA, Basque Nationalists or Bosnian Indipendentists.
Their supply channel is the same as the civilian population, they're not shopping for vibranium from Hydra.
It would be interesting if we could trace the local distributor for those devices and see where they were available at retail, it would probably match the areas in Lebanon where members of hezbollah are commonly located.
I'm confused, how do you know the 99% of those wounded aren't Hezbollah operatives?
How many innocents would get harmed during a more conventional military strike against the same group of operatives?
I would be fairly surprised if Hezbollah opsec guidelines didn't say that you must have the pager at you at all times, and make sure it can't be accessed by others.
This is likely the most precise large scale military strike of all time. You can't control for everything - some pagers might have been in the hands of innocent people - but it sure seems like an ideal attack vector.
I wonder if it would endanger the plane. A 20g explosive sitting in the pocket of a person will clearly cause serious injury, but I am unsure if it has penetration power to actually go through the plane body. I am reminded of mythbusters experiments with small amount of explosives to block up doors, but I don't recall how much they needed in the end.
Poking holes in the fuselage of a jetliner isn't going to take down a plane. Consider the cases of a turbine fan blade taking out a window, the case where the MAX door panel blew off, the cases where the cargo door came off, and the 737 "convertible" case. You'd have to take out a large part of the structure to bring it down.
Take a look at all the photos of B-17s taking severe combat damage yet returning home. Jetliners are a lot more redundant today than the B-17s were.
However, if the hole took out the flight controls, or set a fire, then the airplane has a big problem.
In some of the cases you mentioned, there were passenger deaths due to being ejected from the aircraft. I'm on mobile or I'd link exactly which incidents but I remember at least two cases from when I was bored in a lecture and read through most of Wikipedia's "list of deaths in aircraft incidents" list or whatever it's called
>Poking holes in the fuselage of a jetliner isn't going to take down a plane. Consider the cases of
These are all fake news. According to Hollywood, a single bullet from a gun will cause an airplane to break apart in mid-air. You can't honestly expect me to believe Hollywood movies get physics wrong.
Similarly, as soon as a car's wheels leave the ground, it bursts into a fireball according to many TV shows I've seen.
Naturally the close quarters will results in multiple people being harmed. The question is more about the physics and if the explosives has enough penetrating power to go through the walls of the plane.
The bigger risk to the plane (and passengers) would likely be if the person carrying the explosive was working in the airport and the explosion occurred during a critical moment, like when a pilot is taxiing.
Most of the flight would be out of range and I’m not even sure that explosion would take out a plane. Plus it would probably be powered off because Hezbollah is serious about flight safety.
I was thinking about this, but then it probably wouldn't even get past a security xray scan. Which makes me think, in the 5 or so months these were reported to being in the wild, one never boarded a plane?
Do we know whether or not they embedded gps tracking into the bombs?
I would think they would have that ability, not just to avoid a horrible accident like blowing up a plane, but also to gather valuable tracking intel on a terrorist organization.
My understanding is that pagers are typically radio Rx-only, and that it is not possible to track their location like a cellular device -- which is likely why Hezbollah chose to use them.
Though it would be possible to add this ability when the hardware was intercepted, a transmitting device is also easy to detect.
The AR924's in question are POCSAG pagers; broadcast from base stations and receive only at the pager end. Two way pagers are a thing but use an entirely different protocol for communications.
From what I can find, the targeted pager-model can receive UHF messages in the 450~470MHz range. That could reach passenger jet cruise altitudes if the transmitter is strong enough.
I think it's safest to assume Hezbollah are using strong transmitters, because they'll want to be able to broadcast across rather large areas and in a way that resists potential jamming.
On the flip side, I'm having a hard time imagining these as threats to an entire airplane, given the tight constraints on how much explosive power can be secretly snuck into a functioning pager.
Penetration of 450-480MHz through the shell of an airplane would, on the ground,require a transmission strength of approximately .4dB/m at a distance of 1 kilometer, which is doable by most measures, but would quickly become unrealistic as the plane gained altitude.
What do they do, then? Are you implying that connections can only exist as a two way relationship? Are rivers not connected to streams, tributaries, etc?
Receiving data from a network is a connection, no matter how you want to define it.
The towers resend the message for a while so that they get through - some guy might be in a plane on approach to Beirut right now his pager coming into range as they land ....
> blowing up airplanes or launching rockets at residential areas intentionally targets civilians in order to spread a maximum amount of terror among the civilian population
Which is exactly what Israel has been doing for decades by
and on and on and on since a time when none of us was even born. Let's not pretend Israel is the good guy here. There are no good guys, and while I don't accept the acts of Hezbollah, what is a colonized people being genocided to do when the world doesn't care about them being denied human rights ?
Israel also do bad things. Maybe it flies under the radar of being called terrorism by the west - but look at west banks settlements, jailing kids forever for throwing stones, turning Gaza into something that makes Mad Max look like a dream in the name of self-defence, appartheid conditions in Israel and the occupied territories. Offensives on Gaza before Oct 7 - 2023 was particularly bad, and the general embargo aroudn Gaza that made life pretty rotten before the current war - etc.
Israel do enough operations that ticks the "look we killed soldiers guys!" box and they really like to get media attention on that. Otherwise it is "Hamas was hiding there". Hard to verify - they may be right sometimes, but I bet not all the time based on the the number of deaths and the amount of destruction in Gaza.
This isn't happening. Kids are being jailed for throwing stones, yes. Just like you or I would be jailed if we threw a rock at a cop. But it is not "forever".
They may have discriminated carefully on which devices were modified, but any care or intelligence ends there.
When they triggered the bombs, they can’t have known who or what was in the blast radius. Video shows one going off in a produce market. The fact that those variables are uncontrolled make it indiscriminate, by definition.
> This is false. Many innocents are killed including children
That article - just like all other sources - mentions one 8-year-old girl, not "many innocents" and not several children either. Hence, this is deliberate misinformation.
> You can't determine where the device is when the bomb is activated.
You absolutely can. It's highly likely to be in the targeted person's pocket. Where else would it be?
After all, people usually don't hand their phones to random strangers or leave them lying around - and those pagers aren't even mere personal devices used for private purposes. Why would any of those devices end up anywhere else but the pocket of the person using it?
> This is an indiscriminate attack.
Launching rockets at civilians is. Blowing up pagers explicitly used for terrorist activities isn't.
>After all, people usually don't hand their phones to random strangers or leave them lying around - and those pagers aren't even mere personal devices used for private purposes
And even compared to a phone, the limited functionality of a pager means the owner isn't going to hand it to a friend to show them a funny video or sports highlight, or to a kid to let them play games on it.
TBH, toddlers and younger kids would find pagers extremely fun: if you are at home, I wouldn't think that too far fetched.
However, since children causalties are "good anti-propaganda", any more would have certainly been reported, so I doubt there are more. Still, how successful targeting was is anyone's guess.
> You absolutely can. It's highly likely to be in the targeted person's pocket.
This seems intentionally avoiding the point. Duh, it's a pager. The real question is can the person donating the explosive tell if the pocket is completely isolated from innocents or if it's standing in a crowded line sitting very near to a childs head.
I do believe that Israel _tried_ to discriminate but its an explosive, you can only aim those to a point. Israel wasn't deliberately trying to kill children/harm innocents, Isreal did knowingly engage in a set of actions where it was possible outcome.
I want to be clear i am not trying to choose a side. These are actions of war in the 21st century.
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
> After all, people usually don't hand their phones to random strangers or leave them lying around - and those pagers aren't even mere personal devices used for private purposes. Why would any of those devices end up anywhere else but the pocket of the person using it?
I leave my phone all the time, my kids are actually playing games on it. Also, I can be on public transportation, I can be driving, near a flammable object, or boarding a plane. As demonstrated an 8-year-old girl died, it's enough proof that an innocent died.
I think the part you are missing is that this was not an ordinary cellphone. These were pagers handed out by Hezbollah to the militants in their organization so they could communicate, specifically because they did not want to use ordinary cellphones out of fear of being tracked.
The only person who would be likely to have such a pager is a Hezbollah militant who is deemed responsible for secret Hezbollah information (i.e. mid-to-high ranking members). While it is technically possible that such a pager would get into the wrong hands, that would be the fault of the person who left his pager on the table or let his family play with it.
> While it is technically possible that such a pager would get into the wrong hands, that would be the fault of the person who left his pager on the table or let his family play with it.
What the hell? Why isn't it the fault of the one who detonates the bomb? This sets a dangerous precedent for attacking unsuspecting army personnel, even when they're off-duty. I don't think people's stance would be the same if this were done to off-duty IDF or US Army personnel and when they just doing ordinary things in public, for example. Moreover, Hezbollah is also a political party, and it's not just their military wing that's being targeted.
>This sets a dangerous precedent for attacking unsuspecting army personnel
Israel and Hezbollah are at a state of war. Hezbollah is a paramilitary organisation that does not meaningfully distinguish between military and civilian staff. There is already a very clear legal precedent - being an unsuspecting or off-duty combatant offers you no protection under international humanitarian law. Unless you're hors de combat, you're a legitimate target at all times. Sabotage of this type is an entirely legitimate ruse of war.
Given that the pagers are for secret messages to be sent between militants, it would be highly unlikely for them to end up in the wrong hands unless the militant is being irresponsible.
Certainly you would not expect somebody in the military to leave a loaded gun around the house. But, also it should be obvious that they would not leave their radio device for transmitting top-secret information either due to the implications of having such information and how that would affect the safety of family members.
It is likely that nobody could have expected their pager to literally explode. But, military or merely involved in the "political" side, anybody who lets their family play with such a radio/pager is putting their family at risk.
I think the struggle here is that the combatants aren't on a battlefield in these modern wars. They're walking around a city full of civilians. Observing this it's hard not to feel like it wasn't a military target, however it clearly was.
Not only that, but from reports, it sounds like they deliberately sent an alert several seconds before detonation to ensure that the user of the pager would be the direct target. Or perhaps that was just the time it took for the fuse to detonate the explosive? Either way, some of the videos out there show the incredible precision that the owner of the pager was taken down and people in the vicinity were unscathed.
We can nuke a dictator. It's going to blow up everything within miles, evaporating millions of people, but it can't get any more targeted than that. Deal with it.
Seriously, tho, it's infuriating that a government literally triggered explosion among general public, right in front of innocent eyes. This is an act of terrorism, harming the lives of innocent people who've been largely unrelated to the conflict.
Well, the obvious difference is that blowing up airplanes or launching rockets at residential areas intentionally targets civilians in order to spread a maximum amount of terror among the civilian population while blowing up pagers that were used for coordinating attacks against Israel very specifically targets operatives involved in such activities.
Some of the initial footage shows such a device going off while innocent bystanders remain unharmed. You can't get any more targeted than that.
Yes, such a pager might have ended up in the hands of a non-involved person, but given the facts known so far that's very unlikely, because there's a reason those people were carrying these devices on them: They were afraid of being tracked down by Mossad in the first place.