Israel concealed explosives inside batteries of pagers, Lebanese officials say
cnn.com
cnn.com
Calling it just "warfare" greatly detracts from the terrorist nature of this scandal.
So, if someone sets off a bomb in a mall...to kill a terrorist... it's not a terrorist act?
And do these people really have the POWER to not let terrorist infiltrate their society?
No, by definition a terrorist act is done to cause “terror”
These were assassinations with collateral damage
You are seriously downplaying how such decisions are made.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_bombing_of_the_C...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarnak_Farm_incident
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Jean_Charles_de_Me...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Alon_Shamriz,_Yotam...
[edit: fix formatting and correcting info]
When you fire a gun in combat at a target?
People who have no idea how warfare actually works have unrealistic expectations about this.
The trickle-down effect is intentional and important. Terrorists are using off the shelf technology to kill civilians and communicate. They should know that they can be hit anywhere. This is an organization that killed hundreds of Americans and fires at civilians ±25 rockets per day.
You sound like someone who is amazed and flabbergasted by the Iranian ambassador having (and being injured by) one of those pagers.
A joke I saw:
"Why did the Iranian ambassador have a Hezbollah pager?"
"Because he left the Hamas pager at home."
The difference is:
1. Who is targeted
2. Objective of the attack
3. Value of military objective compared to expected collateral damage
In other words, everything. This attack is one of the most targeted and surgical attacks of this caliber in the history of warfare. Seeing comments like this on HN really kills my faith in humanity.
That's war starting wars is a bad idea.
Opening the door to supply chain attacks like this is a huge problem, but I'm not sure it was illegal under IHL.
The method of delivery is too imprecise to guarantee only (or even mostly) the combatants are targeted. A targeting system that was "blind" by design (intention) was almost guaranteed to harm civilians inside civilian buildings, and it did. Terror is a big component of terrorism and the goal of terrorizing civilian population with random explosions and death around them was definitely achieved. In effect this was a slightly more targeted version of bombing a hospital because some military targets are there. Also from the quote above:
> “Authorities have reportedly dismantled unexploded devices in universities, banks, and hospitals.”
IMO, it's a categorical error to say that putting an explosive in a secure pager purchased in bulk order by an internationally recognized terrorist militia is equivalent to rigging a door to explode when anyone (no matter who) opens it. Yes, the actual wording of the law doesn't do a great job of delineating the two situations, but let's not pretend there's not a difference.
When the law was written, the distinction between "civilian use" and "military use" was far far more clear than it is today. Militaries around the world use off the shelf commercial equipment today. A "commercial radio issued to military personnel" doesn't feel like it should be given a pass as being "civilian" because the type of object it is can be purchased by anyone. In practice it was specifically handed out as a military-use item to members of a military organization.
It's true the UN is unanimously anti Israel for most of its existence. This isn't a change. And of course Israel ignores the UN, also not a change.
The Lebanese/Hezbollah better wise up. The Israelis outgun them by inconceivable degrees, and like the Palestinians, were only saved from the usual historical result of annihilation by the politics of oil for the last 75 years.
However:
1) the USA is oil independent with shale oil, and has no functional interest in the region anymore
2) the Saudis, who no longer have the us military as de facto mercenaries on demand and longtime funder of anti Israel groups, need a military power against their biggest threats (Iran and turkey), and are now allies with Israel.
3) yes saudi oil is still important to China,Japan, and Europe, but EVs and alternative energy are poised to make oil a strategically insignificant product in the coming decades, one that can be easily sourced by major militaries without caring about the muddle east.
Anyway, so people arguing about who is the terrorist and who is the valid nation state are arguing from the context of an international trade system that gives a damn about the region being stable.
Israel knows the new rules: nobody cares, just like nobody cares about the Tigers war and nobody cares about Armenia Azerbaijan and whatever other hotspots around the world. Hezbollah and Palestinians need to wake up to this reality, even though the sad fact is that they won't as long as Iranian funds are the only thing that keeps the lights on for them.
The biggest difference is: in this case the terrorists get the payback. The people who are actually guilty/related to that. Organizations like Hezbollah target civilians and fire blindly at entire regions.
There are quite a lot of other differences, I suggest avoiding false equivalencies of this sort.
I get that Israel has a lot it needs to improve on, but it has been remarkably "clean" compared even to American war standards e.g. https://www.newsweek.com/israel-has-created-new-standard-urb...
It didn't bomb civilian areas knowingly, that would constitute a war crime and would immediately trigger the Leahy Law that would block all aid to Israel https://www.state.gov/key-topics-bureau-of-democracy-human-r...
If there was a shred of actual *real* evidence of Israel intentionally targeting civilians it would be in US courts right now trying to enforce that law. The fact is this is all online propaganda where facts don't actually matter and proof isn't necessary... Speaks volumes...
> The difference may be ideological, geopolitical, etc. but it is not that one side follows the rules and the other breaks them.
If your ideology is global Sharia law then sure... If you hate the West then sure. It's just ideology. Their ideology is that Israel should be wiped out. The ideology of Israel is that it's already there and should remain there. I don't think calling this "different ideologies" is a legitimate stance.
No, it didn't.
"Intent" mind reading or not. This is what happened and is a terrorist act.
The existence of non-combatant casualties doesn't make the strike illegal.
https://github.com/golergka/golergka/blob/main/israeli-pager...
I guess people trust and simp for intelligence agencies now or maybe there was a lot of operatives in that thread... who knows.
Some reports suggest they were triggered by a message sent to the pagers over the pager network. But batteries generally are only connected to the power and ground lines of the device they are powering. If the pager firmware was modified to watch for receiving a special trigger how would the firmware communicate that to the explosives inside the battery?
It would seem there would have to be some extra connection from the mainboard to the battery.
I suppose there could be wireless communication between the mainboard and something inside the battery. I doubt a pager would feature Bluetooth, since you generally don't need headphones with a pager, but often devices use chipsets that include capabilities the device doesn't use. E.g., you might use an ESP32 module to give your device WiFi capabilities and completely ignore that ESP32 also can do Bluetooth. If the chipset has Bluetooth or some other radio communication support not used by the pager firmware, the bomb maker could have put a receiver for that in the battery with the explosive and hacked the firmware to use that.
Actually, now that I think about it, maybe a firmware hack could communicate to something inside the battery over the power connection. There are probably things the firmware can do that affects power use, like changing the display brightness. It could do something like rapidly switch between maximum and minimum brightness in a particular pattern. A trigger inside the battery could watch power use and look for fluctuations that match that pattern.
So it wouldn't be hard for the replacement batteries to have yet another contact and this one wired to a part of the circuit board perhaps intended to be used only for testing during manufacturing but going hot thanks to modded firmware that matches a certain phone number or something. It only takes a few bytes of extra instructions to match a string and set a pin high/low on a micro-controller.
Alternatively using a microcontroller inside that battery that is signaled through existing contacts would take even less wiring. The signaling code to activate the microcontroller would be a bit more complex, but since you don't care what happens afterwards you can still keep it small.
[1]: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2024/turning-everyday-gad...
To further my knowledge - did Hamas coordinate with Hezbollah for Oct 7? Or did they start launching rockets out of solidarity and general support? How many rockets = 1 pager? Is Israels response proportional? Maybe half the number of pagers should have exploded?
So yes, killing them seems appropriate. If you don't want your electronics exploding, don't attack the Jews.
At some point somebody will have to deescalate, but Israel has had the upper hand for half a century by now, and never did anything but attack. It's really hard to complain about the underdogs attacking too.
Were the massacres of native jewish populations also done for the sake of freeing area for Israel?
UPDATE: Since I cannot post new comments, I'll reply here.
> But as a point in fact group you are referring to, being by and large composed of descendants of recent migrations from other regions (with no direct ancestry in Palestine for 1000+ years) -- is better described as "long-term resident" rather than "native".
This is false. I'm talking about Jewish communities which have continuously lived in the region for 2 thousand years, like community in Hebron. They were much more numerous just a few hundred years before. For example, back in 17th century, about half of the population of Gaza was Jewish. You can take a guess about what happened to that half.
Statements like "Jews didn't live in Palestine for 2 thousand years", just as "Jews came from Europe" are false narratives distributed for propaganda purposes.
Because they were clearly offered the exact place, in no ambiguous terms, and got a clear message to go somewhere else, not very different from the one they are sending people right now.
The situation is completely fucked-up from the beginning. They are to blame for doubling down on fucking it up more, but not for creating it.
First of all, most of the new jewish settlements in the beginning of 20th centuries were in the coastal swamps, not in the desert. Second — how about a cultural and practical connection to a region which had a significant Jewish community continuously for the last few thousand years with close ties to the diaspora.
And finally — most of Israeli Jews come from the Middle East. Why would they go into a completely different region instead of their homeland?
> Britain gave them the opportunity to establish Israel anywhere they wanted
This is false. Britan gave false promises and then actively worked against attempts to establish the country. They turn the blind eye to massacres of the jews, and actually turned back jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Founders of Israel had to go to literal war with British authorities to achieve their gains.
Because they weren't invited by the folks living in the place they wished to settle (who in fact had been living there continuously, by and large, and in every metric were much more "native").
More specifically: the new migrants were more or less welcomed by the locals, from the Mamluk period onwards -- but once they started arriving in highly disproportionate numbers, post-1880, and signaling an intention not to assimilate, and pretending that they had a supremacist "right" to settle there based on what the region's temporary colonial occupier (the British) and the scribblings of some weird Austro-Hungarian ideologue told them -- that's when things started to get "complicated", and they began to find themselves not so welcome in their desired place of residence. As any group should naturally expect if they tried to settle somewhere where they could not trace reasonably close ancestry, and in very large numbers.
Also "homeland" is nonsense of course as applies to post-1880 migrants. We need to have some kind of a reasonable definition for what constitutes an "ancestral right" to live somewhere. The simple fact the component of ancestry that this group does have with historic Palestine lies with groups that were expelled or otherwise left in successive waves, ending the Crusades (but for most of them, back to the Roman/Byzantine eras), and which mixed significantly with other groups (far removed from the region in their origins) along the way.
I'm not saying this completely precludes any claim of "ancestral right"; it's a thorny question -- one which applies to countless groups all over the world, each equally deserving of consideration. We need to be human and forgiving and all, and in principle there should be a safe place for all of us in this world.
But not a supremacist right. And it is precisely this claim of a supremacist right to settle in their desired place of residence (fully trouncing the rights of people who in fact been living their continuously for millenia -- give or take migrations within successive empires); along with the successive wavs of violence employed to enforce this "claim" -- which lay the grounds for the post-1917 conflict that we are now stuck with.
> they weren't invited by the folks living in the place they wished to settle
This is false for several reasons. Places that jewish settlers have chosen have mostly been uninhabited and the land bought by willing absentee landlords. There's plenty of arabic towns across Judea and Samaria, and in general farther from the coast. Can you find a single one on the coast from Jaffo to Haifa? May be you think that there's no way that plentiful rainfall on flat plains would cause malaria swamps to appear? And that all documentation about said malaria swamps, and numerous deaths from malaria is false, too?
> the new migrants were more or less welcomed by the locals, from the Mamluk period onwards
That's false. Native Jewish population across the whole Middle East have always been a second-class citizen persecuted minority in the Muslim Arab countries, as all other conquered people — if they had the fortune to survive and save their identity at all.
Jews have been slaughtered and persecuted across the whole of Arab world, just as in Palestine, for centuries. So were other ethnical and religious groups. Can you find a single one which was not?
Why, do you think, in modern Israel it's exactly the mizrahim, jews from Muslim Arab countries, are one of the mast hawkish, anti-Arab groups in Israel? If you take a look at the peace activists who wave Palestinian flags in Tel Aviv, they're almost universally ashkenazi. It's because their families remember. Now, it's important to notice that I'm not making a value judgement here. The fact that mizrahim have a grudge to hold doesn't mean that it's necessarily right; all I'm saying that they do have a huge grudge.
Also, please don't think that my description of Arab Muslim world shows prejudice. Almost all other nations have always worked the same way. Arab Muslims, especially at the time, were not dissimilar from Chinese or English. Humans become more tolerant and humane as their level of living increases, but for most of history, humans across the whole world were equally horrible to one another.
> once they started arriving in highly disproportionate numbers, post-1880, and signaling an intention not to assimilate
I'm confused here. Is it supposed to be something bad? Are you implying that conserving a national and religious identity is something that immigrants should not be doing?
> pretending that they had a supremacist "right" to settle there based on what the region's temporary colonial occupier (the British)
No, I'm pretty sure the only reason they had the right to settle is because they followed the legal procedures to move to another country, buy property or land and develop it. Religion has nothing to do with it. Religion was why the _wanted_ do it.
You see, _right_ to do something and _desire_ to do something are different things. First, you get a _desire_. Then, you go about fulfilling it. If you break laws or human morality, then you don't have a right to it. Otherwise, you have.
Nobody of local Arab population was forcefully expelled in late 1880 onwards. How do you even imagine this could have happened? Do you think that a small group of a persecuted ethnic minority can actually conquer some part of a small village, kill and expel a few local families, all in the middle of a hostile ethno-religious majority, and just... Survive? You make a point elsewhere that immigrants which are viewed as "others" are rarely tolerated. Do you think that immigrants who behave like that are more tolerated? Or, may be, you think that in 1880, around the time of Dreifus case in France an similar persecution across Europe, somehow landed with superior European arms and battleships, guns blazing?
There were no armed Jews there until Jews started to get killed.
What happened in 1880 onwards is, Jews started buying land from absentee Ottoman landlords, and, more importantly, local Arab leaders. Big part of local population was convicted not to register their property rights as to avoid Ottoman taxation by said Arab leaders — who then cheated their people and sold that land.
Some people reply that there's no way that these Arab leaders were corrupt like that. But personally, I fail to see why these people think that said Arab leaders would be less corrupt than modern politicians.
> the scribblings of some weird Austro-Hungarian ideologue told them
All other points in your comment at least have arguments behind then. Good, bad, but it's a legitimate discussion. However, this right here is use of diminishing language and a personal attack without any justification.
Why "scribblings"? Why "weird"? Why the accent on citizenship? Would his figure be more acceptable if he didn't have a huge beard? If he did speeches instead of publications? If he was an Ottoman citizen? Why?
> that's when things started to get "complicated", and they began to find themselves not so welcome in their desired place of residence
No. As I already said, almost any other ethnical and religious groups have found themselves just as "not so welcome" in Muslim Arab world. The only reason Jews got special attention is because they were actually successful in their resistance to this world.
Let's recall what was happening in latter half of 19th and first half of 20th century. Muslims were fighting with Hindus in India/Pakistan. Muslim Turks were fighting with Greek Christians. Muslims were fighting with Christians in Lebanon. Christians were fighting against Muslim persecution in Serbia. Arabs were fighting with Ottomans in Egypt. Turk Muslims have been slaughtering Christian Armenians. Turks, Arabs, Alawites and Armenians were fighting in Syria. Assyrian Muslims were fighting with Kurds. Ottoman Muslims were fighting against Kurds. Druze Muslims were fighting against Ottoman Turks. There's probably even more conflicts that I don't know about.
Just to be clear, all of these conflicts are abhorrent. I think that there were horrible atrocities on all sides. But do you honestly think that in this horrible world, where different people have constantly been massacring one another Jews were "welcomed" by Arab Muslims living around?
> As any group should naturally expect if they tried to settle somewhere where they could not trace reasonably close ancestry, and in very large numbers.
That's a fair description of reality. However, this argument is not about "what is", but also about "what ought to be" (yes, I like Hume). Are you implying that this, resistance to outsiders, is a good thing? Something that we should see in a bright light?
> Also "homeland" is nonsense of course as applies to post-1880 migrants. We need to have some kind of a reasonable definition for what constitutes an "ancestral right" to live somewhere. The simple fact the component of ancestry that this group does have with historic Palestine lies with groups that were expelled or otherwise left in successive waves, ending the Crusades (but for most of them, back to the Roman/Byzantine eras), and which mixed significantly with other groups (far removed from the region in their origins) along the way.
I'm afraid that once again, this paragraph confuses "desire" with "right". Why Jews wanted to settle there doesn't matter. I have good arguments on this point as well, but this can't make Jews right or wrong. The only thing that matters if they had the right to do this or not. There's nothing in this, or following text that touches on the matter, so it's irrelevant.
>Jews have been slaughtered and persecuted across the whole of Arab world, just as in Palestine, for centuries. So were other ethnical and religious groups. Can you find a single one which was not?
I think this needs to be viewed in context. At various points in time in Antiquity, Jews were enslaved, subjected to poll taxes, massacred, and denied the right to full citizenship even after emancipation. After Theodosius enacted the Edict of Thessalonica, Jews lost the right to build synagogues and were barred from holding many professions. Pogroms became common and Jews were segregated; this was the story well into the 9th century in Byzantine territories. Meanwhile, in western Europe, this is the period where the blood libel originates. Quite a lot of Jews actually migrated into Muslim territories as paying the jizya was considered a sight better than what they got in Christian ones.
The jizya itself is not some unique artifact of Islamic polity anyway, poll taxes, temple taxes in India, and tithes have all variously been levied by rulers of specific sects against constituents who adhered to other ones. The same is true for sectarian hierarchy, which continued well into the age of exploration, when, for example, the Portuguese levied the Xenddi against Muslims and Hindus alike in its territories in India.
Not to suggest that there isn't widespread antisemitism in the Muslim world, but I do think characterizing it as unique and unprecedented when it emerges in the medieval Levant is at least anachronistic if not orientalist.
That's exactly why I wrote that
> Also, please don't think that my description of Arab Muslim world shows prejudice. Almost all other nations have always worked the same way. Arab Muslims, especially at the time, were not dissimilar from Chinese or English. Humans become more tolerant and humane as their level of living increases, but for most of history, humans across the whole world were equally horrible to one another.
First, how'd you land on the beard angle? That's quite a supposition you're making there. I have no problem at all with the Assyrian beard! I think it's kind of cool, actually, and we can hardly imagine him without it, now can we.
Nor do I have any negative feelings about the guy as a person -- and more broadly, I don't see my characterization as ad-hominem. The reference to his nationality was simply to showcase the obvious fact that whatever one may make of his ideas, they were in both substance and origin utterly alien to the actual people living in the place he wanted to set up his utopian colony in. (We'll get to that later).
As for his "scribblings" -- his prose was known to be manic at times, and even in highly sympathetic sources one encounters that description.
As for "weird"? He definitely had some peculiar ideas. His various epithets (Jiden, Mäuschel) for Jews who didn't buy into his program seem to stand out quite prominently. More significant were the strains in his thinking seemed to be manifestations of internalized antisemitism: such as his salient view that Jews needed to overcome the traits that triggered the antisemites' negative perceptions of them -- ironically by adopting idealized Germanic traits. As revealed in random passages such as these:
As early as 1885, Herzl wrote in a telegram to his parents: “Yesterday at grand soirée at Treitel’s. Some thirty or forty ugly little Jews and Jewesses. No consoling sight.” (Bein et al. 1983–1996 I: 212; Beller 1991: 12, n. 22) A little later, when he was staying in Paris as a correspondent of the Vienna journal Die Neue Freie Presse, Herzl visited a local synagogue and noted in his diary: “I had a look at the Parisian Jews and indeed I noticed similarities in names; audacious and unfortunate faces, furtive and cunning eyes.” (See, e.g. Kornberg 1999: 16–17.) Moreover, after Herzl’s visit to the Roman ghetto, he wrote: “They do not realize that they are creatures of the ghetto and most of our people are just like them.” (See, e.g. Wistrich 1995: 15.)
First and foremost -- independent of whether he had genuinely racist, paternalistic otherwise disdainful attitudes about the Arab population (there are indications that he did, but they are also comparatively muted and ancillary in his writings); or whether he intended or essentially knew his grand project would entail a significant degree of violence and coercion against them (for which there's also good evidence, but also conflicting indications) -- it is beyond question that he was deeply indifferent to and profoundly disinterested in this community as a people. At the end of the day, they were a problem to be managed and assuaged - objects and a matter of circumstance in his utopia, but certainly not partners, or even central characters or protagonists.
It is equally clear, in my view, that the forceful expropriation and disenfranchisement that did ultimately occur were not a matter of historical happenstance, but inherently "baked into" his ideology. And that, as acknowledged by the early Zionists themselves, his project would never be realized without a major component of such coercion, and the corresponding negation of their collective rights of self-determination in their homeland.
So that I find weird. Also, and even more deeply: the idea the Jewish people people of Europe could attain a form of liberation for themselves, not just by abrogating the rights of the vast majority of the indigenous population in Palestine -- but by in effect denying their very identity and legitimacy as a people. And not just liberation, but a form of "moral and spiritual perfection", thus forming a society that would become "a light unto the nations".
That's what I find weird.
The only arab group which was really indeginous to the land were bedouins, and they thrive in Israel. The only terrorists linked to bedouin communities (like the one who recently killed people in Jaffa) have been incorporated in the palestinian communities (the one in Jaffa by marriage, if I'm not mistaken).
So no, the whole zionist project didn't have any conflicts with any indigenous people already living on the land. They did, however, have conflicts with people who have settled the land not that long before, and had adopted a totalitarian ideology of subjugating all other ethnic and religious groups.
The first statement is simply false. As a result, the second is equally vacuous.
While migrations in the late Ottoman period were significant, they were not nearly large enough to offset the "core" (pre-1781) population, which had been continually resident for over a thousand years. Going by all the known data we have (for example the tables in the page below) the influx due to migrations could not have amounted to a net increase of more than about 20 percent. The vast bulk of the net population increase during the 19th century was due to improvements in living conditions and infant morality rates, not migration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Palesti...
The fact that Palestinian national identity is largely a 20th-century creation (as with modern Israeli nationalism) is irrelevant to the core issue, "connection to the land". The central fact here is that all nationalisms are modern inventions, and up until the late 19th century, most people self-identified in terms different from the names of the nation states their descendants live in today.
What's sad here is that instead of trying to say something positive about Herzl's ideas, or the Jewish diaspora's claim of a connection to the land -- all you can think to do is attempt to water-down and delegitimize the largely (by all the data we have) indigenous population's history, and their connection to that land.
Arabs have been massacring Jews living in the region for hundreds of years. Arabs started widespread pogroms in 20s and 30s. Arabs have rejected partition plans. Arab states invaded Israel after it declared independence.
Saying that Israel "went to war against their new neighbours" is a statement I have very hard time responding to without breaking the rules of Hacker News. I feel sorry for amount of misinformation someone must have been fed to sincerely believe something like this.
But as a point in fact the group you are referring to, being by and large composed of descendants of recent migrations from other regions (with no direct ancestry in Palestine for 1000+ years, and with significant admixture with other groups) -- is better described as "long-term resident" rather than "native".
--
Per the commenter's update:
Sorry, but what you're saying is false. It's true that there've always been some Jews living continuously in Palestine, but for centuries they were essentially a bottleneck community, and over time (especially after the Alhambra Decree in 1492, but starting well before then) their numbers began to be supplanted by migrants largely from Spain and from other parts of the Ottoman Empire, as well as from other countries in Europe.
It's just a demographic and historical fact. The statements "Jews didn't live in Palestine for 2 thousand years" and "Jews came from Europe" (which no one said here) are both straw men in that regard. I won't assign motives to you for what you're saying, but it's ahistorical in any case. Most likely you are simply mistaken, as a result of the "Jews have lived continuously in Palestine" line being repeated over, and over, and over again. It's partially true of course, but only part of a much bigger story.
Sounds like it was community of Theseus then? My own family have left Spain after Alhambra Decree, and some members have chosen to move to Palestine then. AFAIK, they become part of the local Jewish community, they didn't supplant anyone. Anyway, I fail to see how the fact that Jews have migrated between different communities, including to and from Palestine, invalidates my point.
The point was simply a demographic observation -- that the Old Yishuv were composed largely of descendants of waves of post 13th-century migrants from Jewish communities in other regions (such as your own family from what you say). Meaning in turn their lineage is from communities that had been dispersed from the region for easily 1000+ years. So "native" is not quite the right term for them. Meanwhile the truly "native" contingent among them (meaning descendant from continually resident communities) was comparatively small.
"Supplanted" was poor word choice -- it wasn't meant in the sense of 'replacing' or pushing out. I meant simply, numerically superseded by. Should have said simply that.
It's very cool that you can trace your history back that far, BTW.
I'll try to get to your longer post still, if I can.
"Why did the Iranian ambassador have a Hezbollah pager?"
"Because he left the Hamas pager at home."