Beirut airport bans pagers, walkie-talkies on all flights
nna-leb.gov.lb
nna-leb.gov.lb
It rains something like 2 inches a year there. People collecting rain water someplace with so little rain are likely quite desperate.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2017/11/the-occu...
I wish there wasn't so much conflict but sometimes the people resorting to violence have been essentially left with no other meaningful solution. People with power can politely ruin your life and murder you and yours and then claim you are the bad guy when you fight back less politely.
1. That is a completely different subject - Beirut is in Lebanon, not Gaza.
2. Israel _supplies_ Gaza with water. So Israel controls the water supply in Gaza just like your own water company supplies you with water. And if you were to walk into the offices of the water company and burn the workers' children to death and murder them and kidnap them, well, don't be surprised if they turn off your water supply.
Some stupid Israeli politicians tried to stop that water supply claiming that it's insane to provide your enemy with resources during war (Israel also supplies electricity and fuel to Gaza, both are used in the Hamas tunnels to pump in air). Unfortunately, this stupidity by the current government became the basis of the stuff you're repeating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_crisis_in_the_Gaza...
That's like saying "The US supplies Mexico with water" because the Colorado River originates in the US and the mouth of it is on Mexican soil. Reality: America does all in its power to give as little water as possible to Mexico and the water that reaches the Gulf is a mere trickle, having been largely syphoned off by multiple US states before that point.
What I've read indicates Israel controls the water supply to Gaza and uses and abuses that fact in a hostile fashion.
I don't intend to single you out, and this goes for everyone posting about some far away region that's a bit more complex than what this or that source claims. I guess it's a matter of personality, but I don't feel comfortable talking about politics of far away regions, or even of my own region in some areas. I would rather talk about the simple easy stuff that I feel confident about, like this weird paragraph in the latest C++ standard. Then I wouldn't make embarrassing claims that are basically pre-chewed propaganda for the usefully ignorant foreigners. Except the Rust people. They are the devil!
And that's not even talking about all the water we've horrifically polluted.
They've been trying to kill each other for years, even when they had other solutions and when Israel was the underdog. The difference in power now is huge, but it's always the same story... if some on both sides had their way, the other side would be wiped without a thought.
They’ve been at this since biblical times.
This is an ongoing culture war like Sunni vs Shia or Protestant vs Catholic.
The original people involved in the fight are long dead from old age, replaced by generation after generation claiming to be the victim (on both sides, of course).
This is why it’s best to stay out of it and watch from a safe distance. There is no right or wrong, good vs evil, victim and oppressor. It’s A vs B, cats vs dogs, my sports team vs your sports team.
Israel happens to have the technological edge at the moment, but that’s after a couple of thousand years of being a powerless diaspora victim to oppression and actual genocide.
Conversely, their opponents cry victim while we all full well know that if they got the military upper hand they’d do to the Israelis the same or worse.
It’s depressing to see this from the outside, watching the long term damage wrought by what amounts to mind viruses.
That’s all religions are: particularly addictive memes. Memes that kill hosts to protect themselves from other memes.
If you’ve picked a side, you’ve picked a meme you’d like to be infected by.
I prefer the vaccine.
It serves the interests of the US to have a reliable ally in the region. Previously to the US fracking revolution, Middle East oil was very important to the oil supply for US allies.
Of course now oil has less geopolitical importance and the US has no great interest in protecting Asian-European trade we'll see how far that partnership will continue.
Saying conflict between Israel and Lebanon is wholly unrelated to conflict between Israel and Gaza is like saying stuff happening in the US state of Georgia has nothing to do with its neighbor Alabama.
I'm failing to readily find an online blurb that supports my understanding. But that detail fails to convince me my understanding is wholly in error.
Depending on how you look at this, you can even call it a proxy war as Hezbollah is supported by Iran. Curiously (or not), one of those injured by the pagers blowing up was the Iranian ambassador... https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/irans-ambassador-l...
Most people on the Internet are looking to win an argument, not engage in discussion. I appreciate your comment as it adds information rather than picking a fight, but I'm somewhat inclined to step away from this nonsense at this point.
You are right - the conflict in Lebanon is related to the conflict in Gaza. That is because despite efforts to frame the conflict as "Israel against 2 million poor Palestinians" the real conflict is "2 billion Muslims against Israel". Every time we have a conflict with one of them, the others jump in to attack us. What's worse, they deliberately keep the Palestinians impoverished and suffering to fester conflict - they say this blatantly. The Palestinian cause is not about creating a state to care for the Palestinian people. The Palestinian cause is about creating an Islamic state to displace the Jewish state, and the Palestinian people are the tool to use to pressure the Jewish state and other interested states. They say this clearly - both the Palestinians and the other Arab nations. But that line is so different from Western line of thinking that I know you find it incredible. I implore you to simply read what they themselves say.
At the moment, they are in horrendous crisis, the most obvious and immediate cause of that is Israel and Israel is effectively cooperating with the (according to you) Islamic agenda of painting them as the bad guy so they have a good excuse to exterminate them.
I'm an environmental studies major. I've read for years that our next wars will be fought over water. It looks to me like that's what we are seeing in Gaza.
Water is life. You can't survive without it. Politics aside, if Gaza can't get adequate water to survive, well, most organisms have a survival instinct and will fight like a cornered rat when given no viable means to survive while playing nice with their neighbors.
No one who works for them is a "civilian". One of the "victims" is an Iranian ambassador to Syria. This shows you who Hezbollah really is. They are an Iranian puppet working against the interest of the Lebanese people dragging them into a war they don't want with Israel. They are hiding behind civilian populace and avoiding the "price" of their actions. This was the first time where these a*holes actually paid a price for their actions, for putting the people of Lebanon at such risk.
Calling Hezbollah a "political party" is akin to calling the Nazi party a political party. Technically true, but also deeply misleading.
Likud is a terrorist organization that killed thousands of Palestinians through the IDF. Not to mention Frenchmen, Americans, and Arabs. Their forces recently bombed schools, refugee centers, and other "safe" zones in Gaza. They've fired indiscriminately at reporters and humanitarian aid groups. The party's espoused policy is against statehood for Palestinians and instead encourage settlement of their territory, even through violence.
This tired reply can't be used as rebuttal to any & everything. Eye for an eye is no praxis at all.
(And Taiwan is not China, but the 3. World war might be fought over the question whether they must be the same)
But we all know that company was just a front for Mossad, and in all likelihood the devices never even touch Europe.
If I were the IDF, this is the communications system that I would prefer the enemy to use.
Walkies transmit sporadically, so they can be tracked when activated. It's not instantaneous, but with a decent logging system you can keep track of users to a large degree. Even when you have multiple units all of the same model on the same frequency, there are various tricks to sorting them out to individual units.
One-way pagers don't transmit typical signals, buy like all RF devices, they're still emitting some signals and are trackable to a large degree with an antenna network deployed for that purpose. You might not be able to track them deep within enemy territory, but there is still a lot that can be done to track general movements or to find where clusters of the oscillators associated with the pagers turn up in large numbers.
At least with the pager attack, Israel hasn’t directly admitted it was behind it. Even though pretty much everyone knows it was them. But kinda hard to deny missile attacks.
EDIT: I meant walkie talkies. Old school pagers probably can't. Also I guess if you just use walkie talkies to listen to instructions. The station broadcasting can be tracked, however.
One can triangulate a radio broadcasting, I don't know how one would track receiving the broadcast.
A lot of worksite-oriented handheld radios these days are not just oldschool FM and use digital protocols to efficiently manage bandwidth, which can involve transmitting when not actually sending voice data. I haven't seen any confirmation of whether the affected devices were digital or not, but if they were buying COTS radio equipment there's a decent chance that they were.
The pagers in this case were very boring POCSAG receivers, no transmit capability.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/sep/18/the-gu...
So now we have new fodder for the TSA and others, probably justified this time.
If the last 3 years (Ukraine onwards) have proved, international law and treaties mean nothing, other states are too cowardly to enforce them.
But if personal smartphones/tablets are banned people will riot.
Yeah, 10 minutes after the event every person on earth now knows the best strategy is to rush the cockpit, not sit calmly and wait for the hijackers to ask for a ransom, which was the previous norm.
Between that and reinforced concrete doors flying planes into buildings is no longer a viable strategy.
Lots of different explosives exist and if it is sealed in an airtight container, good luck finding it.
Again, I’m not an expert in how these things work, so I’m happy to be corrected. That to me just seems like the most obvious way the new dual energy scanners would be put to use.
The new scanners take a CT scan [1]. Airtightness is irrelevant. It's not foolproof, largely because we man the scanners with idiots [2]. But it would be detectable and, particularly after the element of surprise has been lifted, likely to be caught.
Interestingly, "Lebanon has one of the highest number of computed tomography (CT) scanners per capita in the world" [3]. Hezbollah being Hezbollah, they could repurpose these from healthcare.
[1] https://www.internationalairportreview.com/news/32019/analog...
[2] https://abcnews.go.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-...
[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09698...
Did they use batteries or rechargeable batteries?
I guess one of those might get banned as well.
If explosive materials were planted in pagers, then god only knows where they could be planted in the future.
How difficult was the sabotage to detect? Would it be detectable by ordinary airport scanners/explosives detection methods?
What do we do if the answer is "you can't trust a flight with an electronics device onboard"?
AI detection of anomalous Xray readings from known hardware?
W/regard to the method used… that open a new vector for all kinds of bad things. These were working devices that would function like normal but could be remotely detonated. What else would a terrorists want in a tool?
Something like, if it goes through an airport, it has to have enough charge to turn on, and all the parts need to deliver a cryptographic signature (via an USB-C connection) that they're genuine and that they haven't been tampered with. Your phone is from a Chinese manufacturer? Good luck entering the US.
It's that or no electronic on flights, not even in checked-in luggage,, and that won't fly (no pun intended) in 2024.
That's assuming airport scanners are genuinely incapable of detecting this kind of sabotage, and I hope that this assumption is wrong.
i know blonde hair blue eye people with relatives involved, so you are just making false inferences
One of the "victims" was an Iranian ambassador to Syria. They are an arm of Iran serving their interests within Lebanon which are in conflict with the interests of the Lebanese people. They fight Israel but then hide behind civilians within tunnels.
For once they became a direct target without the ability to hide behind anyone. Just recently there was declassified intel on them planting bombs within Israel trying to assassinate politicians. They already bootstrapped a phone in the past too.
The reason they have popularity is due to funds they get from Iran which they use to provide loans to poor people. To make this even more attractive they push for a situation of dependency and poverty so the poor would be even more dependent on their loans. Lebanon is in deep distress (financially and politically) and these are the a*holes pushing for it on the behest of Iran.
But overwhelmingly Shia, and has token Christian and Sunni membership due to Lebanon's constitution.
Hezbollah is not Lebanon, and Lebanon is not Hezbollah.
Lebanon is an equal 3 way split between Sunni (Future Movement/Hariri), Shia (Hezbollah), and Christian (Kaateb and smaller parties).
All 3 fought a vicious civil war from the 1970s into the 1990s, and then multiple invasions and interventions by Israel and Syria lead to factional conflicts.
The Sunni bloc and Christian bloc both oppose Hezbollah in Lebanon, and this helped the Israel-Saudi rapprochement, as it is Saudi that supports Hariri and Israel supported the Christian bloc during the civil war and occupation.
Edit: Love the downvotes from idiots who can't even find Tripoli or Beqaa on a map for pointing out how Lebanon is a very complex and split country.
Yep. I made a broad strokes statement because it gets complex very fast.
The Christian community appears to be split between anti-Hezbollah and anti-Palestinian groups like Kaateb (that were also historically pro-Israel during the civil war and intervention), and historically Syrian supported parties who supported Syria during their intervention in Lebanon such as Tashnag, Marada, etc.
FPM was historically opposed to Syria but Michel Aoun made a strategic deal with Hezbollah in order to become M8's face in Lebanon, and because Hezbollah was never going to get Sunni support.
Hezbollah will only accept Shia and are Shia-first, but allied with Syrian-then-Iranian backed parties because they all fought together on behalf of Assad in the Syrian Civil War, along with the alliance of convenience with FPM.
The Pro-Syrian/Iranian coalition is the March 8th Coaliton (of which Hezbollah is the lynchpin), and the anti-Hezbollah/Saudi-funded coalition was the March 10th coalition before it splintered due to political infighting, corruption, and the Syrian Civil War.
Furthermore, now that the Syrian Civil War is largely over, a LOT of battle hardened nuts from all sides in Lebanon have started returning, plus the economic collapse exacerbated an already tense political environment.
Which accounts are you listening to? The accounts that I've heard is that they set every single one of these off all at once with no targeting and they blew up all over Lebanon in markets, theaters, schools, public transportation, etc.
If thousands of bombs were distributed to members of a large criminal syndicate in the US or other western country and then all detonated as these people went about their lives and interacted with normal citizens, we would be absolutely horrified.
They were distributed through and to the Hezbollah network of members and collaborators. As far as they're 'randomly distributed through the country' it depends where Hezbollah members go in the country with the pagers in their pockets.
We have literally zero evidence of this. Either way. If you think you can pierce the fog of war by looking at one side's official announcements, you're going to spend a lot of time confused.
To be fair, so were the Nazis. (Trying to think of a less-combustible example.)
We're speaking within the fog of war. It's unclear, for example, what fraction of Hezbollah's ranks had a pager or walkie talkier. And what fraction of those were military. I'd still challenge that the collateral damage from such an attack constrained to Hezbollah members--even arbitrarily--is less than a conventional strike on suspected militants.