All of the arguments I've seen supporting this attack focus on the idea that it's fine to kill and maim civilians including children as long as you will probably get some combatants. It's a little bit open to interpretation, I guess, and I'm not a legal expert so fine, ok.
But booby trapping mundane daily objects accessible to non-combatants is a clear violation of international law. No real room for leeway or interpretation on that one either.
What would you prefer? Israeli tanks blowing their way through families and bombing beirut to rubble to get at the Hezbolla terrorists? War was inevitable,
the amazing actions of the mossad mitigated hundreds if not thousands of civilian casualties. What is your complaint, that they booby trapped the communications devices used exclusively by Hezbolla and not, i don't know, their kalashnikovs?
Don't hide behind technicalities of international law, tell me literally what else they could possibly have done with a better outcome. (please note in my world view, unlike many other people here, Israel rolling over and dying is not an acceptable solution)
Probably most of the people who have done terrorism or war crimes would also claim they didn't have any alternatives. It's not my role to find alternatives to terrorism or war crimes, I am just a person on the internet pointing out that terrorism or war crimes have been done.
With civilians under constant rocket and ATGM fire (actual, real war crimes BTW), under threat of Oct 7th-style infiltration and invasion, with tens of thousands of civilians displaced and numerous civilian casualties, Hezbollah had forced this war upon Israel. And they forced it on Oct 8th, in coordination with the IRGC and Iran's "Ring of Fire" proxies.
Israel had a legitimate right to self defense and any country in Israel's position would be obligated to defend their citizens from such aggression. And any objective observer would admit that Hezbollah's actions went beyond mere casus belli to just simply open war--including constant actual war crimes--against Israel.
So Israel had not just a right to wage war against Hezbollah, but a duty. The next question is: How best to prosecute the war?
The traditional prosecution of this war would have resulted in tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties. These exquisitely targeted small (3g of PETN) explosions short-circuited that war and undoubtedly saved thousands of innocent lives.
Far from terrorism or war crimes, these attacks indirectly saved many innocent lives, spared hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Lebanese infrastructure, were highly targeted at combatants, and even direct civilian casualties were minimal.
It's not really a "mundane daily object" though. It's a communications device that's issued to people on the Hezbollah private communications network. It's only accessible to non-combatants if they are (1) in the Hezbollah hierarchy in a non-combatant role, or (2) the person with the pager was exercising poor operational security and letting someone else handle their pager.
> So? You aren't off the hook because someone did something unexpected or "was exercising poor operational security."
You might be. If it was Hezbollah's guns that exploded and not their pagers, I would expect most people to agree that you would be "off the hook" if someone else was handling that gun.
Not saying pagers = guns, but it's a spectrum surely.
The laws of war don't expect a military to attack a target only if there was no risk to civilians. That would be so unrealistic that nobody would even attempt to follow the laws of war. There has to be some consideration of relative risk and proportionality.
Where you draw the line is complicated. If you look at what the allies did in WWII for instance, there are some decisions that are highly problematic (firebombing wooden Japanese cities or the RAF deliberately bombing German civilian populations) but there are also some decisions that I think were reasonable even with a very high civilian death toll (e.g. the US Eight Air Force conducting bombing raids on German industry with limited precision, leading to high civilian casualties).
I think this specific incident was lawful. Hezbollah was the aggressor here, and it spent the war launching attacks that were far less justifiable than this one (much more limited targeting). I think this was a reasonable act of self-defense. That doesn't mean that I think that everything Israel did in the war was lawful.
Well, I guess we disagree on this, but I think it's a shit move to blow up a bunch of any object that is normally benign and which could logically be sitting next to or in the hands of an innocent. I'll die on that hill. I know it goes against most people's opinions on HN but I don't mind that. As you can see, I have some points to spare so feel free to downvote me to oblivion, even though that downvote button is meant for people who go against the rules; I don't believe I have in any of my posts in this thread, but I am willing to apologize if so.
Also, I have a thought for you: what would you call it if a foreign nation which your country had poor relations with, possibly open hostility, had blown up the work laptops (which they might take home) of a bunch of high ranking military members in your country? Would that be terrorism or a legal attack to you? What would you think of the innocent lives lost to such an attack?
This incident did not occur in a vacuum. If this had been a surprise attack during peacetime, the calculus would be different, but it wasn't.
Hezbollah began firing rockets at Israeli civilian populations more or less indiscriminately very soon after the October 7th terrorist attack. Just a few months before the pager incident, a Hezbollah rocket killed 12 children in a Druze town in the Golan Heights.
Israel was justified in defending itself against an aggressor. Not to do so would mean continuing to let their civilians be killed. Once you start from that premise, then blowing up pagers that only belong to Hezbollah members is a much better option than any alternative.
The standard can't just be "you aren't allowed to take any action that could kill innocent people". To have that as the standard is the same as to have no standard at all, because it's so unrealistic that nobody would follow it. The standard has to take into account whether the action is offensive or defensive, what the relative risk of killing innocent people is, and what the alternatives are.
That's why I talked about the allied bombings during WWII, which killed enormous numbers of German and Japanese civilians. To suggest that the allies should not have used bombers in, say, 1941 because they would inevitably kill many civilians is unreasonable. But you can distinguish between, say, the RAFs nighttime bombing campaigns, which were intended to strike civilian targets for the purposes of demoralizing and starving the population, and the USAAFs daytime bombing campaigns, which were intended to destroy factories. Both killed many, many innocent people, but there are clear moral differences.
The prohibitions on booby-traps are that they're indiscriminant, not that they involve mundane objects.
I totally get the instinct to condemn the attack, since it's truly, deeply viscerally horrifying (not to mention terrifying!), but most of the rules about how you're supposed to conduct war basically boil down to
1. Make a reasonable effort to avoid disproportionately harming civilians
2. Don't go out of your way to inflict pain and suffering on your enemy beyond what's a necessary part of trying to kill or neutralize them
3. If your enemy is completely at your mercy, you have an extra duty to uphold 1 and 2.
Again, the pager attack is new, unusual, and just very upsetting. But it harmed civilians at a remarkably low rate, and the method of harm wasn't meaningfully more painful than just shooting someone. It compares very favorably with just bombing people on every metric other than maybe how scary it is if you're a combatant.
Given the apparently-terrible injury-to-death ratio, another angle to attack the legality of the action might be that the weapons were first and foremost effective at maiming, not killing, which is generally frowned upon by the laws of war (if they were intended as lethal, their success on that front was so bad it might fall into "guilty through incompetence" sort of territory)
(I agree the targeting per se seems to have been remarkably good for the world of asynchronous warfare—or even conventional warfare)
>the weapons were first and foremost effective at maiming, not killing, which is generally frowned upon by the laws of war
Can you cite something for this? Most people would rather be (even permanently) injured than killed, so I'm not sure why using the minimum necessary force would be frowned upon, other than it typically being incredibly difficult and impractical.
But booby trapping mundane daily objects accessible to non-combatants is a clear violation of international law. No real room for leeway or interpretation on that one either.