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Comment by JohnMakin | Hacker News Reader

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It seems like the purpose was to disable enemy combatants, and prevent those combatants from striking Israel; which would be a legitimate and targeted strike. Your phrasing makes it seems like the explosives were targeted at damaging the restaurants and stores (along with, perhaps all the occupants), which would not be a legitimate and targeted strike.

My phrasing says exactly what it says - that this was indiscriminate. Do you think the IDF considered whether civilians would be harmed, or have a good possibility of being harmed? Surely blowing up thousands of devices in a major urban area would fall somewhere under this consideration.

> Do you think the IDF considered whether civilians would be harmed, or have a good possibility of being harmed?

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.

There's only so much explosive you can fit inside a small handheld device that still needs to function and power itself.

Eh, deniability and international response is another reason not to drop bombs from the air.

I'm not sure deniability is something Israel is prioritizing here. They know that the world will immediately know that nobody but Israel would/could have done this.

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

Deniability doesn't mean "no one thinks they know you did it." There need only be seeds of doubt (even if it's only motivated doubting) to prevent consensus from forming.

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

Yes, it’s clear they considered it. It’s the only reason they didn’t make the explosions much more powerful. Why else?

Well there is only a limited amount of space in the container (pager housing.) Early reports were that the shaped charge was about the size of a #2 pencil eraser.

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

I suppose that depends on how many of the injured people were bystanders, as opposed to being the people who owned the pagers, do you agree?

Not really. If you fire a rifle into a crowd and manage not to injure someone, you're still recklessly disregarding lives, or more poignant to this discussion, if a terrorist attack fails in some way, you'd still call it terrorism - but this is getting pedantic - the amount of videos I've seen surfacing suggests that more than a few bystanders have been injured or killed.

If they didn’t consider civilians, they could have been a lot more effective. But, they targeted combatants devices, which also limits the destruction capability of the bomb.

There is no law or custom of war that prohibits fighting in urban areas.

Except,

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.”

You've posted several paragraphs. It would be helpful if you'd identify the part of this you think Israel has violated, because I see none.

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.

Hang on, you've jumped on my response without the context. I'm specifically responding to someone who stated there isn't law or customs of war surrounding this, when infact there clearly are.

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?

Fair enough. I read too much into it. Though I think that previous poster was actually correct. None of these rules 'prohibit[] fighting in urban areas." But you're right that these rules would certainly be relevant to urban fighting.

>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.

None of that bans urban fighting. While the Conventions strive to minimize civilian deaths they (even the effectively optional 1977 Conventions) do not ban civilian collateral as it would simply be unrealistic and have the rest of Conventions not taken seriously.

While technically true I think the geneva conventions also address the fact that like, when you target something like a hospital (something that has happened) there’s a high probability of civilian deaths that don’t really fall under “collateral” definitions in the way you’re using it. Surely anyone sane would agree with this, wouldn’t you? The convention addresses this in pretty clear terms. Would you think exploding multiple thousands of devices simultaneously in a densely populated area might hit civilians too? Of course you would. This directly violates geneva convention by any interpretation of what it says, but the amount of propaganda from nearly every major country in this situation makes sane discussions of this impossible, so I’ll probably digress. These threads are cancerous and almost certainly flooded by IDF smurfs, or people unknowlingly spewing smurf propaganda.

The devices were very low yield and the vast majority of casualties were the members of Hezbollah network. Even most of those have lived. I don't see how it violates the conventions.

So you'd be good with this kind of attack happening in your neighborhood, with your family members killed or maimed?

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

The Geneva "Recommendations" are pointless until someone wins decisively and has the ability to enforce them.

Quite to the contrary, most of GC is relatively low effort to follow unless someone revels in being evil. At the same time it makes no attempt to redefine the murderous nature of warfare, just to curb the absolute worst behaviors.

It might be but no one is checking the rules before they do stuff.

Come off it, the design of an attack like this is absolutely designed to instil fear in the general populace as well as injure the people carrying the electronic devices. If something similar happened in a military base or a military administrative office, sure. But if you're setting off thousands of explosions in commercial and residential districts assurances that none of the bystanders need to worry about it are meaningless.

People misconstrue (naively or purposefully) what it means to target as opposed to collateral damage.

Hezbollah has a political arm, and a military one. Both were targeted, but only the latter consists of combatants.

And they are both parts of a terrorist organization.

The european union for example, only considers the military wing a terror organisation.

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.

As attacks go, this is far more targeted than most dropped bombs.

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.

I don't think it's reasonable to say that the purpose was to disable those electronic devices. The devices were compromised and modified to include explosives. They could have been modified with a remote kill-switch that destroyed the device without causing a large explosion. The purpose of the explosion was to injure humans, not to make devices inoperable.

The rules of war prohibit planting explosive in objects which are likely to be picked up by civilians. The rules of war also discourages fighting in civilian areas. Members of an enemy organization are not automatically valid military targets according to the rules of war. Especially when they are just going about their civilian lives far away from the battlefield.

This is attack consistent with terrorist tactics, not warfare.

How likely are Hezbollah terrorists to hand over their communications devices to regular citizens? I’d say it’s not a very likely scenario. Obviously there will be some cases where people are adjacent who are innocent, but the same is the case when dropping bombs and shooting up a building where there at with a machine gun.

> The rules of war prohibit planting explosive in objects which are likely to be picked up by civilians.

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.

Man if only we didn’t live in a global society where carrying electronic communication devices in non-combatant (aka civilian) settings was the norm, you’d maybe have a point here. Multiple children have been reported as killed. Do you think that may fall under the category of “indiscriminate?”

The fact of unintended victims doesn't make an attack indiscriminate - it's a failure to distinguish military from civilian targets and/or using attacks that are as likely as not to kill civilians. You need to minimize civilian casualties, not prevent them entirely.

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.

I don’t think most of us here on HN are experts in international humanitarian law, and certainly not in this thread. The sources I have read which includes opinions from such experts seem to make it pretty clear that this attack did indeed violate international humanitarian law[1]:

> 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.”

I don't think civilians regularly carry military-grade pagers.

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.

> Do you think that may fall under the category of “indiscriminate?”

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

What number is the threshold? afaik this isn’t really defined anywhere

It’s relative the potential threat the main target presents. So, the collateral damage is justified as long as it is approximately lower or equivalent to the lives saved by eliminating the threat.

source?

Article 51 of the Geneva Conventions [1]. It is slightly ambiguous on purpose, more details can be found in the commentary [2].

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

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

idk, just bricking the devices or (as originally conjectures when the first reports about this emerged yesterday) causing the battery to heat up and melt would be equally disruptive of communications without turning them into mini-bombs.

The purpose is to injure enemy combatants

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