Politically, this is the sort of action that invites comparison to conventional terrorism. It also begs the question of why Hezbollah or other actors shouldn’t try a similar attack against civilian targets. It’s almost like a chemical or biological attack, which most countries shy away from because it’s so hard to defend against (a big part of why it’s illegal). No country can perfectly safeguard its supply chain from intentional sabotage.
I’m afraid that the entire world is a little bit less safe after this move. Maybe Israel is goading Hezbollah into all-out war, who knows, but this affects all of us.
However this was of course unintended, the malware was never meant to make it out to the wider world.
That's the damage I'm talking about.
Certainly to me I don't see the difference between explosives supplied in a missile produced with US tax-subsidies to arms profiteers or explosives produced by someone else. Except that in the first case US voters have some control over the supply -- not much, but some.
The GP comment is clearly talking about the lack of precision or targeting. Here you may have a point if we consider absolute quantities instead of some relative measurement: a US-taxpayer-supplied-with-profits-to-a-private-company Hellfire missile fired into a refugee camp full of women and children might kill 10 obviously-innocent people for 1 presumed-to-be-a-terrorist-without-any-sort-of-trial person; whereas a pager bomb exploding might blow up the we-dont-know-yet-anything-but-he-was-in-Hezbollah and his ten-year old daughter.
If I were a moral simpleton I might argue that the Hellfire missile murders were worse than the pager murders.
But what do I know? After all hundreds of years of protocols and treaties and norms about this sort of thing are probably just old and in need of being re-envisioned by some clever code jockey.
By the standards of modern warfare, what happened today was probably weirdly humane.
The Westphalian treaties gave France, Sweden and later Russia the explicit right to intercede (i.e. invade) to guarantee the Imperial constitution [1]. (Westphalia was concerned with the Holy Roman Empire.)
Westphalian sovereignty is a myth [2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guarantor_of_the_imperial_co...
[2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-organi...
1.) Communication network completely destroyed (anyone with a working pager in Lebanon has thrown it in the garbage).
2.) Most targets, while severely injured and even blinded, are still alive - I'm sure their families prefer this to them being dead.
3.) If you are an enemy of Israel, what can you even do now? You cannot assume your phones or your furniture or even your cat is safe. Any one of these things could detonate and kill or maim you at any time. And you can't trust anyone in your organization either.
I think this attack coupled with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Ismail_Haniye... Haniyeh assassination (in the presumably safest of safe places for him) has re-established Israel and Mossad as absolutely and utterly dominant.
I deplore zionism, but that doesn't change how humane and effective and incredibly precise this attack was. Probably its humane-ness was not particularly on purpose, and was more a side-effect of the constraints they were working with (hiding explosives in a small pager while still maintaining its correct operation), but that doesn't take away from how much better this is for all the casualties compared to, for example, Hamas casualties in Gaza.
Contrary to what you said, this is pretty much the ultimate in targeted attacks.
Neither Israel nor Hezbollah is mobilized for all-out war here. Hezbollah is depleted from its disastrous efforts in Syria; Israel is fully committed to combat operations in Gaza. The north of Israel has been evacuated for months because of indiscriminate rocket attacks from Hezbollah. Hezbollah is an arm of the IRGC, which is more or less at open war with Israel. If either side could have launched an all-out assault (or, I mean, a more conventional all-out assault than this one), they would have done so already.
> Hezbollah is depleted from its disastrous efforts in Syria
There is an awful lot of reporting stating the opposite of this, and I haven't really seen anything credible questioning the fact that Hezbollah has many thousands of missiles and rockets at the ready, along with a sizable number of competent fighters. In fact, the threat from Hezbollah is widely considered one of the largest deterrents Iran has against a direct attack from Israel.
Despite their potential to harm Israel, the group would almost certainly lose an all out war against the IDF. Many if not most of the members would be killed in such a conflict and Lebanon would be plunged into a war zone. So it's easy to see why Hezbollah would be hesitant to get into a full scale war, despite their combat potential.
Since 10/7 a number of top Israeli officials have advocated for a preemptive assault on Hezbollah. So far they have lost the argument but it still could conceivably happen at any time. Eliminating the looming threat and allowing civilians to return to the north are compelling reasons, but the risk of heavy losses and getting bogged down into another quagmire in Lebanon are serious concerns.
> Unlike stuxnet, this attack had a lot of non-hezbolah civilian casualties. It’s "targeted" in a sense, but not really much more targeted than a drive-by assassination attempt.
I read the news in Arabic, there are credible reports of an 8 year old girl being killed in this attack. I haven't seen that yet in English language news. That is a horrible price to pay. But it is part of a calculated risk that, as per those same news sources, killed between 10 to 12 Hezbollah operatives and injured 2700 more.
> which most countries shy away from because it’s so hard to defend against
This is not why. It's shied away from because it's extremely difficult to target effectively without causing mass unwanted causalities and the associated killing mechanism is considered cruel and unusual. "Being hard to defend against" is exactly something factored in with weapons. Why would I want to use a weapon that is easy to defend against? If that's the case, the US would march with clubs and bows, you know, "to make things fair".