Hacker News Reader

Comment by loeg | Hacker News Reader

These are not booby traps.

"Arguing over minutia to dilute and divest the focus from the main discourse" pattern detected again in this thread.

still: The use of an explosive device whose exact location could not be reliably known would be unlawfully indiscriminate, using a means of attack that could not be directed at a specific military target and as a result would strike military targets and civilians without distinction

>device whose exact location could not be reliably known would be unlawfully indiscriminate

Nope, artillery shells are not illegal and you can even miss where you are aiming! We once obliterated an entire French coastal village with naval gunfire on D-Day because information in war is imperfect.

Accidentally killing civilians is not illegal in war! If you have a "valid military target" who takes a cab from the airport, you can airstrike that cab and not violate the Geneva Conventions.

Consider that a nuke that you detonate in the center of a military base that also "just happens" to wipe out the entire city that base is in is not a war crime!

Yeah no you are targeting somewhere specific even if you miss.

This was a large scale indiscriminate attack. Which is entirely forbidden in Geneva Conventions.

It was a large scale extremely discriminating attack, from all available reporting, right? The Geneva Conventions and ICRC documentation on IHL are online, and have been cited repeatedly on these threads; could you cite the claim you're making, just so we're all clear what it is? People might agree or disagree, but a lot of pointless flaming is driven by people that don't even agree on what they're arguing about.

Article 51(4 a b c) of Genova.

I really don't see how it can be a "discriminating" attack when they exploded in shops; groceries; family homes (in the face of a child) etc.

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;

So far as I can tell, this strike clears all those definitions. I think you may be reading 51(4) to be a prohibition on civilian casualties as collateral to military strikes, but that obviously can't be its meaning --- that would ban virtually all air strikes, for instance, and I'm pretty sure that isn't something the victors of WW2 were going for.

Am I misunderstanding the argument you're making? It's not unlikely that I could have!

You cannot specifically target a military objective using a small explosive in a crowded area. It’s not possible other than by pure luck, which negates any assumed specificity.

The whole premise of this attack is that you can, which is what makes it unprecedented. We can disagree that it succeeded! I understand skepticism about this. I've seen the same videos everyone else has, and the explosions we're talking about are quite small, but obviously there have been civilian casualties.

I see two ways history might judge this:

1. History could decide that the Geneva Conventions and current IHL with respect to combatant status, collateral casualties, and proportionality were simply wrong, and so everything done under current IHL is indefensible. Could happen.

2. It could turn out that the military impact of this strike was dwarfed by the direct civilian cost (in deaths and injuries to noncombatants and property they rely on), which we'll know more about in the coming weeks.

I can kind of appreciate where you’re coming from (in a very morbid, cynical way) but I guess I just think the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Civilians died and I’m not willing to accept the grim argument (not necessarily yours) that “civilians die in conflict and we must abide by it.”

Just to be clear: I think that is very much my grim argument. There is no such thing as a modern war that doesn't kill civilians and anyone who claims otherwise is living in a dangerous fantasy. There are moral distinctions between conduct in war (for instance: Hezbollah has evacuated most of northern Israel by firing over 7,500 rockets at untargeted civilian areas, in one case killing half a youth soccer team). Israel presents a clear example of the continuum: if they're capable of remote-detonating the entire leadership structure of the Radwan Force in Lebanon, what possible justification could they have for flattening tent camps in Gaza?

The fantasy is dangerous because it creates the expectation that military force can solve problems at minimal civilian cost. It can't. Wars are fought in cities, not on marked battlefields; unless we reduce ourselves back to a pre-industrial state, they will never be fought on marked battlefields again. Factor dead children into every war that ever happens from now on.

I don't like anything that is happening in the region. I don't think morally scoring Israel and Hezbollah is productive. All I have to say is that Hezbollah and Israel are military peers, and they are extremely at war right now.

If we're getting to a point where two different cadres with a beef can settle their scores by liquidating each other's top guys instead of taking everything out on each other's pawns and unfortunately associated randoms, I say let's take this technology and run with it.

According to that definition they are:

"booby traps – objects that civilians are likely to be attracted to or are associated with normal civilian daily use"

That would hold true for something like a pay phone, but a personal electronic device, only used by the combatant, would not be associated with civilian use.

A pager is a piece of consumer electronics definitely associated with civilian use. There's a story about a little girl who tried to hand her dad his pager from the dinner table and it blew up in her face. Civilians will not expect consumer tech devices to be bombs.

Her father wasn't a civilian. Had this been some other kind of strike, like a 500lb bomb, it still would have been considered legal collateral damage.

You're assuming your premise as your conclusion. I am not at all convinced about how many of those targeted yesterday actually qualify as combatants. Also, just because a combatant owns something does not make the thing military. Pagers are commonly used by people in emergency services, industrial technicians, and so on.

These pagers work only on Hezbollah's own military network. Lebanon literally had a civil war about this specific issue! People are doing a lot of axiomatic reasoning here about stuff they can look up.

How would you even know which network a pager was on just by looking at it? They were thousands of bombs disguised as consumer devices in circulation in public. There are new reports that other consumer devices may also have been rigged with explosives.

I have no idea, but you could not use a Hezbollah pager for your job as an industrial technician, which was the claim made by the comment I'm replying to.

That's not what they said. Pagers are used by civilians, no one would be on guard around them, they are not considered to be weapons. If you saw someone in a grocery store with a pager, you wouldn't distance yourself from them.

I don't agree but also don't care to litigate this point; the only point I'm on this thread to make is that no professional who routinely carries a pager could have mistakenly been carrying a Hezbollah pager. Also: it is interesting that Hezbollah literally fought a war over phone systems in Lebanon! The rest: these are some of the most complicated conflicts in the world and we're not going to settle anything on HN. I don't begrudge you your take, I just had those two claims to make.

Children were wounded and killed because they picked up these pagers (which they assumed to be safe). Explosives were distributed into public disguised as innocuous consumer devices, it's actually not that complicated.

I think the situation is much more complicated than that but can also, in rare circumstances, detect an intractable argument when it shows up on a message board. Does anything you're saying have anything to do with whether industrial engineers were unknowingly carrying Hezbollah military pagers, or whether Hezbollah fought a war against opposition parties in Lebanon to ensure that it had its own phone system? If not: there's not much productive for us to discuss here --- which is totally fine, there doesn't have to be.

You're assuming that. There has been no reporting on the details. For all we know she could have been sitting next to her father when the pager went off.

What if that industrial sector is managed by Hezbollah and you are responsible for making it run smoothly? They more or less run everything in south Lebanon so I imagine that includes key infrastructure like electricity, water, and telecoms. Staffers in those sectors might or might not be in Hezbollah themselves, but one has to assume a lot of the management is. I don't know about private industry.

It seems odd to me that random laborers would be issued military encrypted pagers, and it seems certain that you couldn't simply go buy one on your own (or at least, buy one and then use it on the Hezbollah military network), but we have reached a point of specificity on the thread where I'm comfortable that we're all talking about the same thing --- previously, I've gotten the sense that we were suggesting random workers who happened to need pagers might have these ones. My personal prediction is that everyone who had these things was a member of Hezbollah, based on the reading I'm doing, but that's all it is: a personal prediction.

I know Hezbollah operates their own telecoms, but I don't think it necessarily follows that this is exclusively military. This article (from an Israeli analyst) examines their communications infrastructure in more depth and points out that thanks to their political maneuvering they have de facto control of all telecommunications in Lebanon. I find it easy to imagine that at least some of the erstwhile pager users worked in an administrative or logistical capacity.

https://israel-alma.org/2021/03/09/hezbollahs-communications...

We'll see, but I think --- without claiming that anything we know right now is dispositive --- that this is going to net out as an attack that overwhelmingly impacted military personnel, for the simple reason that they were the ones who needed the pagers; so much so that the highest death toll from the attack thus far appears to be QF fighters in eastern Syria.

according to who? A little girl was killed today precisely because she picked up someones pager. On top of that solar panels (!!!) are blowing up across Lebanon right now, do those count? Are those somehow incontrovertibly "associated" with a combatant?

I think the solar panel thing isn't confirmed? And so far as I've seen, it's only reported to have happened in on place in Dahieh. If it is confirmed, you'll also be waiting for reporting and evidence that it was a supply chain attack on solar panels (seems unlikely), or a direct attack on that building.

(It seems unlikely to me because we have reason to believe the handsets and pagers shared a contract manufacturer or distributor. Mossad isn't like Gambit from the X-Men; they can't just make random things blow up.)

[flagged]

You've been breaking the site guidelines badly in this thread, as well as using HN primarily for political battle over recent months. We have to ban accounts that do those things, regardless of how right you are or feel you are, and regardless of how other commenters are behaving. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

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.

Pretty telling that it is me, and not your top karma poster, who is getting this reprimand. You are welcome to ban me, and I'm not going to appeal or beg to stay here, its your site after all. But if all I had to do to make my account more palatable to you was mix in the occasional comment on a js framework, or cooking, or exploit development, while continuing to pour out anti-arab racism, as Thomas here has done, repeatedly, for months, than maybe you are doing me the favor. I have yet to see a single comment from you about that. For the record I have reviewed your the guidelines, and I stand by everything I've posted here. I don't use this site "primarily for political battle", in fact I have avoided "political" threads for years. If posting things like "all Palestinians belong in Jordan" as Thomas has done, in threads just like this, for months, isn't something worth responding to directly by you than your rules don't mean much. Or simply apply to less useful people.

EDIT: I forgot about the part where Thomas here tells pacifist jews they are "getting close to the blood libel". That didn't merit a response from you either. Classy stuff dang.

None of these are things I believe or have said. I don't blame you for thinking otherwise; I think message boards just suck ass for this topic.

Brother, I can link you to your own comments. For example here's your "blood libel" comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40067633 I'm actually working, and just logged in to see if I have actually been banned, but I can absolutely go through your own comment history in the last 11 months and pull out each and every example I mentioned. I used to respect you man, and if you read my responses to you, over these last 11 months, they start off annoyed but charitable, attempting to push you to examine your own position, exactly as you and 'dang and whoever are asking and expecting of commenters to do here, and you just keep posting absurd, racist statements and so they have deteriorated to today. I don't expect you to actually do anything about it at this point, but I want to leave a record on this site that I did what I said I've been doing, and you've been doing what I said you've been doing. Maybe you'll surprise me, I don't know.

EDIT: I'm actually really really glad I linked this exact comment, because right beneath it is one of the other highest karma posters on this site, who is of Jewish descent, making my point for me in the best way possible, in opposition to you, and you are continuing in the thread to do exactly what it is I've been telling you you are doing; speaking out of your own ignorance and giving it a patina of authority for example here by gesturing at the ADL and saying "just google it" which is absurd.

You've misunderstood that comment. I blame message boards. I'm comfortable with what that thread says.

I'm not going to litigate my political beliefs with you here, because I don't think it'll work. But I'll tell you what: if you want to know more about what I actually believe, please feel free to email me and ask. My only warning to you is that my beliefs are a lot more boring than you might think they are.

I don't have any beef with you. For what it's worth: I didn't mean anything personal by the X-Men thing. I don't know who you are or really anything about you. If that read personally snarky, I get it, and will try to be more careful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com