But booby trapping mundane daily objects accessible to non-combatants is a clear violation of international law. No real room for leeway or interpretation on that one either.
Don't hide behind technicalities of international law, tell me literally what else they could possibly have done with a better outcome. (please note in my world view, unlike many other people here, Israel rolling over and dying is not an acceptable solution)
With civilians under constant rocket and ATGM fire (actual, real war crimes BTW), under threat of Oct 7th-style infiltration and invasion, with tens of thousands of civilians displaced and numerous civilian casualties, Hezbollah had forced this war upon Israel. And they forced it on Oct 8th, in coordination with the IRGC and Iran's "Ring of Fire" proxies.
Israel had a legitimate right to self defense and any country in Israel's position would be obligated to defend their citizens from such aggression. And any objective observer would admit that Hezbollah's actions went beyond mere casus belli to just simply open war--including constant actual war crimes--against Israel.
So Israel had not just a right to wage war against Hezbollah, but a duty. The next question is: How best to prosecute the war?
The traditional prosecution of this war would have resulted in tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties. These exquisitely targeted small (3g of PETN) explosions short-circuited that war and undoubtedly saved thousands of innocent lives.
Far from terrorism or war crimes, these attacks indirectly saved many innocent lives, spared hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Lebanese infrastructure, were highly targeted at combatants, and even direct civilian casualties were minimal.
I guess you've never given your phone to your toddler for 2 minutes to watch a video while you pooped in a public bathroom, huh?
I totally get the instinct to condemn the attack, since it's truly, deeply viscerally horrifying (not to mention terrifying!), but most of the rules about how you're supposed to conduct war basically boil down to 1. Make a reasonable effort to avoid disproportionately harming civilians 2. Don't go out of your way to inflict pain and suffering on your enemy beyond what's a necessary part of trying to kill or neutralize them 3. If your enemy is completely at your mercy, you have an extra duty to uphold 1 and 2.
Again, the pager attack is new, unusual, and just very upsetting. But it harmed civilians at a remarkably low rate, and the method of harm wasn't meaningfully more painful than just shooting someone. It compares very favorably with just bombing people on every metric other than maybe how scary it is if you're a combatant.
(I agree the targeting per se seems to have been remarkably good for the world of asynchronous warfare—or even conventional warfare)
Can you cite something for this? Most people would rather be (even permanently) injured than killed, so I'm not sure why using the minimum necessary force would be frowned upon, other than it typically being incredibly difficult and impractical.