Israel’s Pager Attacks Have Changed the World
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The world is in a continuous state of change, and the fact that these pager attacks are now in the public consciousness introduces a whole series of potential pathways of thought and action that wouldn’t have been explored if not for this event. This is in addition to gaining clarity about the world as it already was immediately prior to the attack, i.e. yes we were vulnerable, and an entity was in the process of actively exploiting that vulnerability. Now we're aware, and that awareness has/will initiate a new cascade of change.
ETA: I'm very curious to understand how/why people disagree with this.
Literally the first sentence says the pager attack 'graphically illustrated a threat that cybersecurity experts have been warning about for years'.
The pager attack did change the world in two ways: the obvious one is where your point is most accurate (people becoming aware of how fragile supply chain are - just think snout what a terrorist could do with Amazon’s comingled inventory and returns!), but the other thing it did is start to legitimize this. If it’s only the Unabomber doing something, it’s clearly indefensible but as states use it other people will start to justify it on those grounds.
Hezbollah is hardly a sympathetic target but I’d be shocked if someone in the region doesn’t try to attack Israelis this way saying it’s not a war crime for the same reasons.
This is the most worrying part: Do we really need to normalize the idea of governments sending little bombs out into the civilian population and detonating them, hoping that they actually hit their targets? This is not how legitimate warfighting is done.
9/11 changed the world because it started two major wars in the Middle East, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths. It set the stage for world politics for the next few decades.
The reality of this attack is that it really won’t affect people’s lives in any meaningful way. Maybe a few people will be wary of using beepers for the next few months but I don’t see many people thinking of giving up their smartphones over this. Or perhaps I’m wrong and this foreshadows many similar supply chain bomb attacks in the future… I don’t know, but neither does Bruce Schneier and it’s too early to say definitively what the effect of this will be.
I changed the word "pager" to "building"
1. a goal in and of itself (ie. they want civilians dead)
2. being aware of the costs (ie. they only want hamas dead, but don't mind if some civilians are killed)
tuyguntn was strongly implying that it's #1, whereas HDThoreaun claims it's only #2.
No, I didn't, I only asked a question by replacing words Hezbollah with IDF, pager with building. When pagers got blown up, there were civilians near by
Recently we had what may have been a targeted hit in crowded public space in Alabama. When those individuals are caught, I hope it is understood that you don't choose to open fire in a crowd and only choose to shoot one person. You choose it all.
In such a world how do we make a decision? By judging that the price is right. Why did innocent people die when thousands of bombs blew up in public spaces? Because the price was right. That should be the center of discussion, not whether we'd like to blow up thousands of bombs in public places without paying the price.
Iraq and Afghanistan had worse figures, by many reports even the drone part of GWOT was worse.
And those were generally fought in more permissive environments.
For the most part the single largest casualty cohort in any conflict are civilians achieving a 1:1 to 1:2 ratio depending on which figures you go by while tragic is actually quite impressive for a lack of a better word.
There are tons of videos, none of them show drones chasing children. Some show injured children which unfortunately is unavoidable. Some are children injured by hamas themselves to manufacture a narrative.
Hearsay, no. A doctor has a professional certification, and is specifically certified to make pronouncements of exactly this sort.
That doesn't make them unsusceptible to biases, pressure or corruption. But their testimony definitely does not fall into the category of "hearsay".
If anything it should be taken as sufficient grounds to initiate a proper judicial investigation.
More than sufficient grounds - an imperative, in fact.
And remember, no one will admit in official documents that they have deliberately targeted civilians, not even countries officially recognized as executing a genocide. Not a single one will have any official document saying: target innocent civilians. You can derive it from their actions
Simply killing a 28 year old because they could be called up is not.
This isn’t that difficult to understand, not that the militant groups in the region care or follow any rules in the first place.
Also your last sentence is pretty ironic considering who didn't follow the usual rules here. I guess it's other people's fault if Israel plants explosives in thousands of devices and triggers them with absolutely no way of knowing if they were aboard an airplane or in a hospital.
Well, it seems like most people still make a moral difference between someone who "could" one day server in the army or a militant group (for example - a 10 year old child or a 30 year old guy who never took combat training) and someone who is actively fighting. Israel did not hit random Lebanese citizens, it hit almost entirely Hezbollah operatives. Saying that all Israelis are part of the army is bullshit. Most Israelis, even today, don't do reserve duty for various reasons and quite a few never did army service. If Hezbollah finds a way to hit only (or almost only) Israeli soldiers I would be very sad but wouldn't call it an act of terror.
I beg to differ.
No, they're not. You don't know Israeli society or bothered to look at reserve numbers sorry.
Because that's similar to how Hezbollah operates. Most of their militants are not actively fighting or even "reserves", but could be called into active service when required.
If Hezbollah would become part of the Lebanese army then their members when off duty would also be protected.
Until then it’s fair game.
This version of Schrödinger’s experiment is quite kafkaesque…
So I guess the militants who died and were executed during the Warsaw uprising also deserved it, as they were part of a non nation state armed group and thus could be shot and executed even when unarmed. That's somehow okay according to your interpretation of international laws lol.
If you are willing to make Hezbollah part of the Lebanese state we can talk.
Every large-scale airstrike in an urban area hits random civilians, and so far the Lebanese Health Ministry has indicated that out of 558 killed so far, at least 148 (50 children, 94 women, and 4 medics) were very likely not to have been militants.
Of course these are just the initial stages of reporting, and everything is to be taken with a grain of salt. But in this background, the idea that the strikes have hit "almost entirely" militants is highly dubious.
Again it’s not like Hezbollah plays by those rules.
This is what happens when people have completely no idea on how wars are practically and lawfully waged by western countries.
Why should an agreement negotiated in Europe in 1899 be binding on people outside Europe?
Basically the only way to make your argument work is by applying a double standard where everyone that could quickly become an active Hezbollah fighter is fair game, but everyone that could quickly be activated in the IDF (and has the training, assigned unit and everything else planned for for said activation) is not fine. You could hand waive about international law,but it doesn't make it more true. (Israel prefers to just call everyone around them terrorists to avoid openly breaking international law anyways)
If Hezbollah wants to put itself under the command of the Lebanese army they are more than welcomed to do so.
And the funny thing is that putting explosives in thousands of devices with 0 ways to track or make sure that they don't end up in say, an airplane, is the very definition of terrorism. It's something that even the Hezbollah hasn't done!
If it would be it would be different but it also means that the Lebanese state would be directly liable for its actions.
Who is your enemy and why do they want to hurt you? Is anyone really concerned that mass market consumer devices have command detonated explosives in them already? I mean, other than the iphones?
edit for source: https://x.com/Israel/status/1781951509070012435
Source?
The quoted tweet mentions "videos", and is actually a thread of multiple posts. You have to be signed in to see them, or use a nitter proxy[1]. If you look at those videos, it's clear that they're not calling the protesters "terrorists" for merely protesting, they're calling them "terrorists" for engaging in behavior such as intimidating jewish students or praising the October 7th attacks. It's slightly misleading to round that off to "protesting Israel's actions in Gaza".
[1] https://xcancel.com/ShaiDavidai/status/1781927143758262389
The OP is correct, since although the official Israel account is quote tweeting Shai Davidai, the most shameless zionist hasbarist on twitter, Israel's tweet is still self contained and is clearly trying to demonize and vilify the protestors as terrorists based on their "ideology" i.e. fighting back against your colonizer and oppressor is "terrorism" because any opposition to the racist colonial enterprise that is Israel has to be demonized and delegitimized by Zionists while they themselves engage in blatant terrorism. Israel's propaganda is so awful and lazy that it has become predictable. They will always hyperfocus on fringe cases, even manufacture such cases if they don't exist, in order to delegitimize the whole protest.
And anyone who actually followed the protests carefully has witnessed that Zionists were the aggressors trying to intimidate anyone who opposes Israel's actions in Gaza in any shape or form. Furthermore, the "they were intimidating jewish students" narrative has become so laughable at this point because zionists perceive any opposition to Israel as "intimidating" and so they are abusing the jewish identity as a shield to protect the israeli apartheid entity from criticism. People are sick and tired of this game because they have seen zionists playing these sick and twisted mind games for decades.
Did you not see the xcancel link?
It's very misleading to round it off that way, and that's exactly why Israel crafted that retweet the way it did.
Even though the underlying tweet tells a different story, by truncating and framing the material in that way -- by juxtaposing the insipid "(a)-(b)-(c)" argument with a video of a perfectly nondescript protest scene -- it's very clear that the intent to convey a simple, visceral, 3-second emotional impression: "protesting Israel's actions in gaza == support for terrorists == terrorism".
It seems like a stretch to argue they're "truncating" the material, when twitter doesn't provide a way to link threads besides quoting the first tweet.
>it's very clear that what they're trying to do is to convey a simple 3-second emotional impression: "protesting Israel's actions in gaza == support for terrorists == terrorism".
I certainly didn't get that impression when reading the tweet. I agree the video was nondescript, which was why I went out of my way to use a nitter instance to see whether there were more to that tweet. The standards around "well if you read between the lines..." accusations are seemingly so low that in any given argument you could use them on both sides. For instance, you could plausibly argue that by linking to a thread where the worst pro-palestinian protesters were called "terorrists", and describing that as "[israel] consider US students protesting Israel's actions in Gaza to be terrorists", it gives the "emotional impression" that you can't denounce any aspect of pro-palestinian protesters without being accused of thinking the entire movement are terrorists.
But the whole intent of the retweet's framing (its truncating) of the underlying tweet is to bypass all of that, and just get straight to the cortisol-spiking emotional imagery.
Again, not being able to quote an entire thread is a platform limitation, so to claim that it was intentional is a stretch. I agree that the tweet would be better if it contained a footnote of "btw we're not saying all pro-palestinian protests are terrorists, just the ones in the video", but given that twitter isn't exactly known for nuanced takes, claiming that the lack of such footnote implies it was intentionally truncated is an isolated demand for rigor. Moreover, if you're against truncating and "cortisol-spiking emotional imagery", of @Israel's quote tweet, you should be against the same behavior of the OP, which rounded off the entire thread to be "they consider US students protesting Israel's actions in Gaza to be terrorists".
It's not the the Israel tweet was intending to literally say "protests == terrorists". The whole point is that was innuendo. It didn't have to be literally correct -- only to convey an insinuation and/or an emotional message.
And it seems pretty clear that emotional message was very much intentional in this case. It's also perfectly congruent with the number one insinuation / emotional message the hasbara folks have been repeating incessantly for decades (and in recent years, not merely as an insinuation but literally -- even so far as to have it successively encoded as legislation in multiple countries): "All protest/critique/doubt of Israeli policy or narratives == anti-semitism".
And perhaps we can leave it at that? I mean you can respond of course, but I'm not sure I have much more energy for this. I guess it's pretty clear that I'm pretty fed up with that country's official (and unofficial) propaganda machine, and all the mindless crap it's been spewing for decades and decades. And so I'm kind of tired of looking for reasons to give it the benefit of the doubt.
If you have a different take, then that's fine for you of course.
"basically" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. At best the claim was directionally correct in the sense that Israel hates pro-palestinian protesters, but that's neither a secret nor controversial. The specific claim of "they consider US students protesting Israel's actions in Gaza to be terrorists" is only true if you believe the highly subjective read-between-the-lines-and-consider-the-context interpretation.
>not merely as an insinuation but literally): "all protest/critique/doubt of Israeli policy == anti-semitism".
literally?
Source?
Moreover, you don't see the irony here? You're accusing the israelis of pushing a message of "all protest/critique/doubt of Israeli policy == anti-semitism", but here you are, rounding off a tweet thread where the worst pro-palestinian protesters were called terrorists as "they consider US students protesting Israel's actions in Gaza to be terrorists"? I'm sure you find the latter to be more justified, but surely you can see the issue when someone who's vaguely skeptical of the pro-palestinian view is reading your comments?
It's not literally "all". But there does seem to be strong, steady insinuation in their propaganda that much protest/critique/doubt of the State of Israel's actions/shenanigans is, ipso facto anti-semitic.
There's no source needed for this. It's been omnipresent in the environment of discourse (at least since the dawn of the ADL/Dershowitz era).
Though I do think it's quite fair cite both the Nakba Law within Israel itself, and the anti-BDS legislation adopted in certain countries as attempts to (at least partially) codify this omnipresent insinuation into law. More specifically the idea seems to be brand this visceral association (between strong critique and anti-semitism) as highly intrinsic -- to such a degree that can be called "close to literal" -- in people's minds.
It's both bizarre, and all too mundane and predictable somehow, the extent to which they've been able to keep pushing the envelope on (and reaping dividends from) this effort.
But here we are.
You likely know who Rachel Corrie, an American student and peace activist is, but are forgetting on purpose. She was killed on March 16, 2003, in the Gaza Strip while protesting the demolition of Palestinian homes by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Corrie was crushed by an Israeli military bulldozer while attempting to block its path.
Israel doesn't care, they will murder anyone standing in the way of all the free land land god gave them 3000 years ago.
Americans killed directly by the IDF:
- Mar 16 2003: Rachel Corrie
- May 11 2022: Shireen Abu Akleh killed, very in a likely targeted attack
- Sep 6 2024: Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, also likely targeted
- Jan 19 2024 - Tawfic Hafeth Abdel Jabbar, 17 - [0]
- Feb 10 2024 - Mohammad Khdour, 17 - [1]
The numbers are quite different. However it is deeply significant that Israel is supposed to be one of America's top allies (and the US is definitely Israel's "bestie" by far), yet its government has obfuscated and/or outright lied about a 5 incidents above. And except for Corrie, all 4 were shot in the head.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Tawfic_Abdel_Jabbar
[1] - Who Killed Palestinian-American Teen Mohammad Khdour - https://archive.md/PgRrf
[2] - https://abcnews.go.com/US/americans-killed-israel-hamas-war/... - The article is from October 2023, and since then there've been at least 2 more: Gadi Haggai and Hersh Goldberg-Polin
They've been playing this game for a really long time and so it's no surprise they think they'll keep getting away with it forever.
This is not likely to last through the next election, looking at polls.
It seems like the perfect occasion to quote Mickens' immortal words:
> Basically, you’re either dealing with Mossad or not-Mossad. If your adversary is not-Mossad, then you’ll probably be fine if you pick a good password and don’t respond to emails from ChEaPestPAiNPi11s@ virus-basket.biz.ru. If your adversary is the Mossad, YOU’RE GONNA DIE AND THERE’S NOTHING THAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. The Mossad is not intimidated by the fact that you employ https://. If the Mossad wants your data, they’re going to use a drone to replace your cellphone with a piece of uranium that’s shaped like a cellphone, and when you die of tumors filled with tumors, they’re going to hold a press conference and say “It wasn’t us” as they wear t-shirts that say “IT WAS DEFINITELY US,” and then they’re going to buy all of your stuff at your estate sale so that they can directly look at the photos of your vacation instead of reading your insipid emails about them.
When having terrorist organisations shoot bottle rockets at you or have their members blow themselves up is a common occurrence and your tolerance of collateral damage in your military counter-attacks is so high that you've continuously killed an order of magnitude more people in your counter-attacks every year while maintaining a much higher ratio of civilians casualties per military target, you don't actually need good intel because your mode of response defaults to "just kill 10x as many of them as they killed of us".
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-12-05/ty-article/.p...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/world/middleeast/israel-h...
One take on this is that Netanyahu allowed them to happen because he needs to stay in power to delay his personal risk of going to jail, which would be compatible with his subsequent actions to prolong the war, but it’s also quite plausible that this simply reflects widespread arrogance: many reports say the intelligence alerts were ignored because senior officials didn’t believe that Hamas was capable of a sophisticated attack. Their tactical excellence would have fed into this, because they generally do outclass their opponents considerably.
But the idea that he actually knew about this and let it happen, is IMO very, very unlikely. I mean, just from that same pragmatic perspective in which he'd do anything to remain in power - he lost massive amounts of support because of October 7th. He's been able to claw some of that support back, but he's still polling far below where he was before October 7th, and it is very unlikely he will remain in office past the next elections.
That said, if I had to bet my money is on simple arrogance. When you’re that consistently outclassing your opponent it’s easy to assume that’s always true as opposed to to _mostly_ true. We had similar problems with 9/11 where FBI offices were playing internal political games because they just weren’t serious enough about major domestic attacks.
The fact that most of the IDF was busy finding ways to "liberate" land in the left bank while it happened to me is a reason why i mostly think it is due to stupidity. It's very plausible, and that's what IDF primary purpose was until last october. By removing people from their houses in the west bank, they allow settlers to take that land (as it is unused), and that's how Israel grow. It was like that that they took my father's (christian) orphanage and school: pretexted the building was too old and needed reparation, put the Sisters and the kids out, destroyed the orphanage, settled the place. Easy. They probably thought the warnings were given to prevent them to build new settlements fast enough, and choose to ignore them.
I'm sorry that happened to him.
That's a pretty crazy claim. There were very few Bedouins killed (and how the heck would Bibi know who Hamas was going to kill btw? Hamas could have tried driving straight to Ashkelon or could have focused only on Sderot). Nova party was not a left wing event, right wingers are just as likely to go to raves - I would say the rave was pretty much an ordinary representation of Israeli secular society. Other than that tons of cops got killed, tons of right / center leaning people in the towns near Gaza and so on. And yes quite a few left wingers.
I don't think this is a Netanyahu issue anyway, i think that most israeli leaders, whatever their political leaning would probably have made the same mistakes. Not at least acknowledging "discourse on colonialism" from Cesaire when you have settlers yourselves is to me a grave mistake of the Israeli society. I'm not saying you must agree with most of it, i don't, or that it apply 1 for 1, it doesn't, but acknowledgement this text exist and trying to draw parallels and do a self-criticism is a very good way to limit the impact of colonialism on your own population and (especially in this case) leadership.
Another take is somewhat between yours and that of the parent:
It's not that Bibi "knew" that an all-out massacre was coming on the scale that it actually did. Rather, that he chose to discount the signals he was receiving (that something "big" was in the works), and to downgrade the actual risk to his people. Thinking "Okay, so they might try something, but then we'll just hit back with some heaver-than-usual rounds of lawn mowing. Which will get the message across, and be lots of fun besides."
So in that sense he did "know", in that he could have known if he wanted but his ideology and his blind belief in his insane long-term strategy vis-a-vis Hamas prevented him from seeing what should have been staring him in the face.
Very much like with Bush II and the warnings he got about 9/11 -- but in Bibi's case, apparently the indications were much more specific.
The little we do know doesn't seem to point to him being a single point of failure - it does seem like there were many warnings, but for various reasons being uncovered now, it looks like several people in the establishment discounted these.
That is such an out of the left field thing to lead with that I thought the article must have brought up this possibility somehow. But that doesn't seem to be the case either.
We don't actually live in a cyberpunkish dystopia of sovereign corporations. While it's reasonable to expect large companies to have their own intelligence operations - they are huge targets, after all - I find it hard to believe that any of them would run any kind of spook field operation in general, and definitely not anything this offensive.
others have made the point; we're not in a different world than we were a few months ago. the perception of the world we are, and have been in; may have changed for some.
i don't have a specific reason to name a particular company as more likely than any other to be ready to deploy direct violence in pursuit of shareholder value. I speak with cynical observation that if a capability exists, someone will find a use for it.
For defence product where almost everything is fully specified by the customer, it might be possible. If you know all the components in a device, and you can prove they are all genuine, then you can prove the whole device is genuine.
Engraved hashes on every part comes to mind, but that would be ungainly to validate and fairly easy to bypass by simply copying codes from one device to another.
This isn’t even very effective for software: people have been working on commit signing, reproducible builds, etc. for ages but it’s just a cascade of trust problems where striking the balance between workable and effective can be extremely challenging. Something like xz or SolarWinds would have had valid signatures on everything, and you still wouldn’t know the real identity of the person responsible for the duplicitous code.
> requiring iPhones to be made entirely in the United States.
> attacking an international supply chain to compromise equipment
But "International" has nothing to do with it. If Lebanon had been a powerhouse of pager manufacturing, a fake reseller could have been created just the same and the pagers re-manufactured just the same. Single iPhones or cases of routers can be delayed in local transit for a touch up (through a small bribe, appeal to patriotism, theft or whatever). And remote exploits are common enough. Seems we need much more effort put into verifiability and such, in hardware and software. Secure enclaves was an idea in the right direction: there is a lot of chip budget available and some can be put into purely security features. Patch and firmware checksums. Encrypted memory path same thing.
What's on the way? Retail scanner imaging and reference photos posted by the manufacturers?
Could they be a part of another operation, infiltrating products I work with and eventually harming the reputation of company? Possibly, yes.
You don't need to build specifically for Hezbollah, to start worrying about your risk factors
Arguably if your client is IDF your devices are more likely to exclusively end up in the hands of military personnel whereas if your client is "Hezbollah" (whatever legal entity acted on their behalf in this case) an attack would be (and has been) far more likely to injure, maim or kill civilians and non-militants, not just because of the higher likelihood of harming bystanders and family members.
Would a supply chain attack like this against Toyota be justified because of the large market share in after-market "technicals" used by terrorist and insurgent groups?
I'm sure you'd have said the same if a few thousand explosive devices went off all over Israel, and Hezbollah said that it was just them targeting IDF troops.
The list of state actors that partake in corporate espionage and more is quite long.
corporate espionage yes, practiced by many states, to gain competitive advantage.
infiltration, I don't know many examples, except Israel.
Here's a fun story: https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/23/24163389/joseph-cox-dark-...
Pretty sure that's been done by almost everyone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_bomb
Most countries don't actually have their intelligence services routinely carry out assassinations and when they do the point of having the intelligence service do it rather than the military is usually to keep a low profile.
... then maybe, just maybe, you've become as much of a monster as the ones you claim to be fighting.
The ends don't justify the means. The means define what ends you can achieve. If your ends are "living in relative peace and safety" (and for the sake of realism we take that to mean equivalent to a country in Western Europe as neither of those things can be guaranteed nor permanent) and your means involve deliberately killing 10x as many people as your enemies while also killing more women and children and not stopping before the enemy is guaranteed to never pose a threat again, then your ends are only achievable if you completely exterminate not only every single militant sided against you but also all of their friends and family who might be motivated by your actions to take revenge. Or more likely, you'll end up outnumbered, outgunned and at the mercy of those who had to endure unspeakable suffering because of you.
If you look at the situation in Lebanon, you have a religious para military organization pointing thousands of rockets towards israel with the aim of "liberating" the land and turning the entire region into a shia islamic empire - military power is almost certainly part of the equation of how to deal with it (along with diplomatic resolutions with other players)
And I really fail to see how taking out thousands of hezbollah members with virtually minimal civilians casualties is not a good thing - my main concern and criticism is that israel is not pushing aggressively on the diplomatic front as well to take advantage of that outcome.
Granted, infiltrating a supply chain to boobytrap devices to prep them for a coordinated act of state terrorism is a different beast from merely compromising encryption and communication but a certain level of paranoia seems warranted.
Even if you just think Mossad does this (not the case), if they want to mess with you, it's pretty poor op/sec to declare their nationality first.
They'll do it and they won't be held accountable for it.
Minus The airliner that's exactly what Israel is doing and has been doing for the better part of 40 years. What did you think was going on? The West is moving into a region, destabilizing it, murdering all of the natives, and taking the land, there's definitely going to be some collateral damage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libyan_Arab_Airlines_Flight_11...
"Libyan Arab Airlines Flight 114 (LN 114) was a regularly scheduled civilian flight from Tripoli to Cairo, through Benghazi, that was shot down in 1973 by Israeli fighter jets after it entered by mistake, due to a system malfunction, the airspace of Egypt's Sinai Peninsula – then under Israeli occupation – resulting in the death of 108 civilians"
"The Israeli Cabinet discussed the incident three times in secret meetings. The minutes, declassified in 2023, show that the main decisions were to deny all responsibility and to refuse to hold an official inquiry"
But then, I think the only real difference between a civilian flight and a residential building is that in the first one there's people of many nationalities, while the bodies buried under the collapsed ruins of the building are all Palestinians, so we don't care much about them.
> one there's people of many nationalities
Yes, obviously PR and how the world will react is a big part of decision making.
Also, it's not the IAF pilots "didn't receive a response" to their signals. One of their pilots signaled twice (first with hand gestures, then again by dipping the wings of one of the jets). They did receive a response to first signal at least, but may have been confused by it, or have interpreted as an attempt to flee. It's also entirely possible the pilot of LN 114 was understandably confused and in a very tense mindstate and wasn't sure how to respond.
From WP:
It continued flying eastwards into the Sinai at a speed of 325 miles per hour (282 kn; 523 km/h), until the crew realised they had had problems with their instruments and were off their path; at this moment, the French pilot performed a U-turn, in order to leave the Sinai and go back towards Cairo.[6] The Israeli pilots interpreted it as an attempt to flee and, according to them, then tried to make visual contact with the airliner's crew and to communicate with them by signaling with their hands. Still according to the Israelis, the 727's French pilot responded with a hand gesture indicating refusal, signaling his intention to continue back on his way out of Sinai. The fighters claim to have replied by dipping their wings, what was once again ignored by the civilian airliner crew. Then, the Israeli fighters attacked the civilian plane.
Acceptable collateral damage is about proportionality and trying to reduce casualties to a minimum, it doesn't mean zero (and don't get me wrong, every one is tragic)
And yes, there's something called collateral damage, which depends on the situation is considered legal, so yes, if you actually target a military target and happen to also hit civilians that reside in that target it is not a war crime. But it is a war crime if you just generally lob rockets in a direction hoping to hit something.
We also know for a fact that the top Hezbollah commander had such a pager (since it was reported he was in the hospital for treatment), which is pretty strong evidence they didn't exactly hand them out to random people on the street.
Now, can we know for sure without actually knowing what IDF knew? probably not, but it seems extremely likely based on what we do know that the pagers weren't carried by off duty low level grunts (again, top commander had it, iranian ambassador had one or was in close proximity, 90 or so Iranians had one and were flown back to Iran for treatment), but I guess those were just random iranian tourists that happened to be at the wrong place and the wrong time? right?
And feel free to educate yourself further or the law: https://www.icrc.org/sites/default/files/external/doc/en/ass...
Even without precautions, the odds that one of the pagers was in a plane over Lebanon within a couple minutes of being on the ground does seem very low. Not zero for sure, but you may be able to mitigate that simply by watching the handful of flights that may be over Lebanon at any one time.
Yeah, and that's what is happening. Globalization has waxed and waned several times over the last few centuries. It is a matter of government policy, not in any sense "inexorable". It is currently waning, and will continue to do so for several decades, probably, for this reason and many others.
This is a new one to me, you got me genuinely curious. When was there a meaningful push for globalization prior to WWII, ignoring empires trying to colonize the world?
No? Then nothing has changed.
My first thought is that NATO countries would stop selling arms or partnering militarily with Israel. Though I'm not sure if that is set in stone, the US has a habit of arming and working with groups, especially in the middle east, that either are designated as terrorist groups or act as one and are only missing the official designation.
This is probably the smartest reaction to getting attacked by missiles. Undermine their logistics and eliminate key personal.
Terrorism is trying to inflict as much casualties as possible and this operation was the opposite of that.
I know, this doesn't make people happy, but that has different reasons. Just implying as much as your open question,.