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Comment by N19PEDL2 | Hacker News Reader

I have questions about the concept of legality in a war like the one between Hamas/Hezbollah and Israel. The idea that in a war there can be legal and illegal actions established by international treaties to protect civilians as much as possible can only work if two (or more) legitimate states are fighting each other, with leaders who can be held accountable for the orders they give. But does it still make sense to talk about legality and international treaties when on one side there is a terrorist organization whose method of warfare consists of kidnapping or killing civilians? At this point, doesn't complying to international treaties only mean further endangering their own population?

Important note: I don't want to spark a debate for or against Israel's actions, but simply to better understand the real sense of applying international treaties and conventions in a war like this.

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> The idea that in a war there can be legal and illegal actions established by international treaties to protect civilians as much as possible can only work if two (or more) legitimate states are fighting each other

This is not true (the laws of war work and have been applied successfully in conflicts not involving two or more legitimate states) and it's an assumption that seems to have negatively informed the questions that followed.

> with leaders who can be held accountable for the orders they give.

Holding leaders accountable ("legitimate" political leaders, terrorist leaders, rebel leaders, we can do it) is good, but we also hold individuals accountable.

> But does it still make sense to talk about legality and international treaties when on one side there is a terrorist organization whose method of warfare consists of kidnapping or killing civilians?

Of course it does. The notion that one side is no longer accountable for harm done to civilians in violation of the law because the other side has harmed civilians in violation of the law is wrong.

> At this point, doesn't complying to international treaties only mean further endangering their own population?

Sometimes yes. It certainly does put troops in danger often enough. Everyone who is party to these treaties is well aware that a country could be safer in a conflict if they just quickly incinerated the other side, and they've chosen to be bound by these laws anyway.

This operation was one of the most targeted military operations known in warfare. International law doesn't hold Hezbollah accountable for example. That is the reality today.

Hezbollah's own actions are significantly more targeted and have resulted in significantly fewer civilian casualties.

> Hezbollah's own actions are significantly more targeted

They literally fire unguided rockets in the general direction of populated areas.

They did targeted strikes on military facilities. See for yourself:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46226028

well what's the ratio?

is it 10000000 rockets fired to some region, with 1000 civilian hits, with 1 military facility hit?

how do you "target" that rocket? just point it without precision?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Hezbollah_confl...

woah just linking to wikipedia article without any substance?

damn...

There are extensive references in there. Feel free to back up your own assertions with documentation.

Don't be lazy and cite them

Ad-hominem is the argument of last resort, according to Paul Graham's hierarchy of disagreement.

This is just luridly false, especially (but not exclusively) in the context of Hezbollah's own actions in Syria, where they made and broadcast propaganda videos of them deliberately starving Madaya. When you make claims like this, you call into question everything else you're saying; it's hard to imagine where you could have gotten this notion from.

We’re talking about Israel, not Syria.

It's equally true in Israel, where Hezbollah fired tens of thousands of rockets indiscriminately, killing, among other things, a Druze children's soccer team in the Golan Heights. You can read this on Amnesty (no friend of Israel's) if you want.

Again: it's hard to understand where you could getting this notion that Hezbollah attacks are highly targeted from. That is anything but their operational signature.

I posted plenty of videos in my other reply to you of Hezbollah attacks on Israel. They’re very clearly targeted.

They fire guided munitions at Israeli troop positions. They fire unguided rockets and mortar shells into Israeli towns. A video of a targeted Hezbollah strike doesn't illustrate anything at all; everybody points the gun when it's useful to do so, it's what you do when you don't have a combatant target that tells the actual tale.

I can't say enough how odd it is to bring this kind of take into a discussion about Hezbollah. Note that I'm not making the case that Israel is fastidious about avoiding civilian casualties; that would be an unproductive argument to attempt on this thread. You have found one of the few arguments that are even less productive.

https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/lebanon-hezbollahs...

Any collateral damage here is orders of magnitude less than what Israel has done. There’s no debating that.

I don't have to debate that point, because it addresses an argument I didn't make. The problem is how deeply unmoored your argument is from reality. Exactly why is it that you believe Hezbollah's attacks are characterized by a high degree of targeting? It's clearly not true. Can you explain the logic and the sourcing you used to make that claim?

I already explained it with video evidence. I’m not sure why you hate Hezbollah so much, but I don’t share your animus. In fact I’d consider them an ally from an enemy of my enemy perspective. You don’t have to agree, but that’s my POV.

You didn't, at all. I didn't look at the videos you provided; I simply stipulate that they're real and depict what you say they depict. That doesn't demonstrate anything at all about Hezbollah's rules of engagement. When they have a clear firing solution on an IDF tank, they take the shot? Ok. And?

At the point where you're declaring Hezbollah a moral ally, I think the conversation has run to its logical terminus. Ask the Sunni Arabs in Syria how allied they feel with Hezbollah.

It isn't collateral damage. Hezbollah's goal is to kill Israeli civilians.

Unfortunately, the IDF also doctrinally enshrines killing Israelis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal_Directive

Accountability on both sides is needed, for the violence to end.

I don't understand how that is relevant to this situation.

They are targeted at Israel civilians.

>It's equally true in Israel, where Hezbollah fired tens of thousands of rockets indiscriminately, killing, among other things, a Druze children's soccer team in the Golan Heights.

An innocent kid was killed in this conflict? Thank God the other side didn't do that 20,000x more - then it would have been a real tragedy!

Especially if unlike some indiscriminate firing of crude rockets, they did it purposefully, with state of the art arms and monitoring systems.

I have no idea what you're trying to say here. I think you're trying to weigh Israel's actions against those of Hezbollah's? You're not going to get anywhere, rhetorically, with me doing that, because I'm no supporter of Israel's.

This is completely false. They fired thousands of missiles directly at civilians. 60,000 people had to evacuate. The only reason they didn't kill thousands of people is because the Iron Dome system is so good.

Yes, humanitarian law explicitly applies to enemies who do not, themselves, follow it. It's called [non]-reciprocity:

"The obligation to respect and ensure respect for international humanitarian law does not depend on reciprocity"

https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule140

Nations who break international law frequently spread misconceptions about this.

My understanding is that this non-reciprocity is why international law often feels so permissive of seemingly bad actions. It generally aims to forbid only strategies that are the highly destructive and non-effective at winning wars. The idea is that such actions are not necessary in warfare in any circumstance, rather than a coordinated and mutual choice to leave effective strategies on the proverbial table.

This non-reciprocity is also why many such laws come with large conditional statements. For example, hospitals are typically illegal targets. However, you cannot label a military outpost a hospital as a loophole. There is a gray area in between, where the law is generally more permissive than a layperson might expect.

It is unclear if these laws accomplish this goal in all circumstances. A smaller, modern army attempting to hide might not be able to find non-civilian concealment (e.g., the jungle in the Vietnam war), and there is probably a conversation about the (unfortunate) effectiveness of inflecting civilian damage on an enemy's will to fight and economic output. However, the above is my best understanding of what international law sets out to do.

Disclaimer: I asked AI to evaluate the above comment before posting, and it made the following (paraphrased) criticisms that you might want to consider:

- The primary purpose of IHL (international humanitarian law) is to distinguish civilian from military, not to only ban what doesn't work. Hence, the banning of chemical weapons and landmines.

- The hospital example is better framed as a requirement to distinguish between a civilian hospital and a military target

- Non-reciprocity has the advantage of being simpler to obey (the legal analysis does not depend on the enemy's past actions)

On the contrary, you have it completely backwards. Each time one side beaches the laws of war, more on the other side are motivated towards extremism. This cycle is why there is still war between Israel/Palestine after 74 years of fighting; both sides have continually committed atrocities, cementing the cycle of violence.

Even if it were true, it sounds like an obvious loophole if one party could simply refuse to consider the other party a state and instantly get rid if all legal liability.

Which is actually one of the major issues of conflict with the Palestinians. The Palestinians want to be a state and most of the world considers them one. It's just that Israel and the US (together with other countries) don't and that the US also blocks official designation by the UN.

The Nazis tried the same argument at the Nuremberg trials. They claimed that they weren't bound by the laws of war (e.g., Hague regulations) since Poland and other states hadn't signed them. The court dismissed the argument and stated that certain rules are binding whether both parties are signatories or not. In Israel's case it is even worse since indiscriminate attacks have been outlawed since basically forever. At the Nuremberg trials, the argument "there is no precedent" had some merit, today it certainly does not.

How is it an indiscriminate attack? It targeted Hezbollah operatives, not random Lebanese people.

https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule71

I don't see how that would apply at all. These aren't nuclear weapons that take out entire populations, these are tiny munitions used to target Hezbollah operatives.

Well, sucks to be you then, since many legal experts do see how this rule applies to this case: https://opiniojuris.org/2024/10/15/is-it-cake-on-boobytrappe... https://www.ejiltalk.org/were-the-israeli-pager-and-walkie-t... https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/09/exploding-pa...

None of these have anything to do with what you cited above, which was ICRC's summary of customary law about inherently indiscriminate weapons. Your first and second links here are examining entirely different challenges to the operation's legality, and the third is just some vague assertions from questionable sources like Francesca Albanese.

You could ask ChatGPT and get a perfectly cromulent answer on what these have to do with what I cited. The key theme is indiscriminate weapons used for indiscriminate attacks. Alas, you can lead a horse to water...

Tiny explosives are certainly not the sort of inherently indiscriminate weapons ICRC refers to. You might want to read the article you linked to, which uses nuclear weapons as the main example. The difference in energy released by Israel's beeper vs a modern nuclear payload is at least 10 orders of magnitude.

Scroll down to examples, read it, and then click Next until you get to Rule 80.

ICRC is not really claiming that those examples are indiscriminate, they're giving examples of weapons that might arguably or sometimes be considered indiscriminate.

Some booby traps might fall into that category, but this isn't a toy or a banana, it's a device specifically issued to enemy personnel.

There can be separate textualist arguments about Israel's operation based on the specific language of CCW, but that's unrelated to the customary IHL you linked to.

For one it wasn't targeted, but either way, if it, as you claim, was targeted then it would be even worse because it's worse to kill and maim kids by targeting them than by being indifferent.

How was this not targeted? I was the most targeted military operation we know of. Give me any example of anything in warfare that is close to that.

Firing a projectile at an individual combatant?

Projectiles hit the wrong target all the time. Especially when we get into artillery or air strikes where there's no line of sight to a uniformed soldier, commanders can't be sure if they're going to hit the intended target. That's why we have the principle of proportionality rather than an impossible standard of zero collateral damage.

But surely "the most targeted strike of all time" would be "a single-target strike on a visually confirmed intended individual", right? Or at least that would be more targeted than any strike without LoS?

A parent comment claimed it was the most targeted “operation”, not “strike”. Some small individual strikes have 100% perfect targeting; I think the claim was about large scale operations like artillery barrages or aerial campaigns.

(I think the claim is technically false if we include open field conflicts, but probably true if we narrow it to comparable environments.)

This was about as targeted as anti-personnel landmines, but spread out in civilian areas and detonated without any knowledge of their surroundings at the time.

Because mines are untargeted and designed to maim without discrimination as to who they might hurt there is a long running effort to prohibit their use.

No, the messengers were specifically delivered to Hezbollah leadership. It is not even closely comparable.

They were widely distributed and there was no way for the israelis to know where they were when they detonated them, which they likely did out of desperation and not because they had good reason to believe they were in such and such a position.

It is fucking grim to incessantly defend state terrorism.

You don't seem to have an inch of a problem with terrorist, islamist militants that not only terrorise Israel, they also terrorise Lebanon. Ask the Arab League. Even they define them as terrorists.

Something here is grim indeed and it is not restricted to some regretable educational deficiencies.

Why change the subject?

Hezbollah pagers aren't randomly lying around though, they're normally attached to Hezbollah members. These were also much smaller than any anti personnel mine.

This was far more targeted than, say, any artillery strike that a commander could possibly order. Targeted doesn't mean it's impossible to harm something else. That's possible with any weapon, and far more likely with larger munitions like artillery shells.

Hezbollah members include medical personnel, teachers, politicians and so on. It is a much larger group of organisations than the armed factions.

I'm not sure what you're after. What the israelis did would have been a worse crime if it actually was targeted. Is that your point?

It's not clear that Israel just set off all Hezbollah issued beepers; we don't know what methodology they used. We can guess based on reported casualties, but we don't know which casualties were involved with Hezbollah's military operations.

> What the israelis did would have been a worse crime if it actually was targeted.

It was certainly targeted, it just also had collateral damage, i.e. harm to non-targets.

What you have Israel do instead? Suppose they struck Hezbollah fighters with conventional artillery. They're not sitting around in open fields, so there still would have been collateral damage.

Would you again maintain that the strikes were "untargeted" because there was collateral damage? By this unusual definition, it seems impossible to do a "targeted" strike at least in any urban environment.

Israel should obviously have ended the occupations, payed reparations and prepared for the return of refugees.

The IDF doesn't give a shit about "collateral damage". They mainly attack civilian targets. That's the purpose of the organisation, to make life for indigenous populations in the vicinity of the state of Israel impossible. Destroy their agriculture and water sources, murder their children, displace them, destroy their homes, occupy the land, pretend to be a victim if someone fights back. Then sign some contracts every now and then and don't abide by them while claiming that the other party is the one who doesn't.

This has been ongoing for about a century, it was how the Haganah, Irgun, Stern gang operated. This is why the IDF has such a bad army, they aren't trained for combat and hardly ever have to experience it. Instead they're used for genocidal atrocities against unarmed civilians.

Ended the occupations meaning what, never enter Lebanon? What do you think Israel should have done about Hezbollah’s terrorism, just tolerate it and never let Israelis return to their homes in the north?

Apart from that it seems like you’re just switching topics to a variety of other accusations. We were talking about a particular operation which you claimed was “untargeted”, yet you haven’t suggested any better alternative (besides being nicer to terrorists in hopes that they stop?). In reality the operation had far less collateral damage than what’s possible with any conventional alternative.

Using force to halt or slow a genocide is not terrorism. And yes, Israel ought to retreat from lebanese as well as syrian and palestinian territory, stop it's cross-border attacks, allow displaced people to return to their homes and pay reparations.

The alternative is exactly that, to stop doing apartheid and occupation and allow justice to prevail.

There’s no question that Hezbollah’s bombardment was terrorism. It would be absurd to claim that they were targeting military assets when they routinely use unguided rockets which aren’t capable of doing so. Israel had every right to enter Lebanon in response.

Targeting Hezbollah operatives is certainly targeting, yes. The fact that there was still some nonzero harm to civilians, despite the targeting, does not refute that. Targeting doesn't imply zero collateral damage, which is an impossible standard.

The collateral damage was obvious and predictable. If you know about the potential collateral damage and do it anyway, then it's not targeted, even if you say it's targeted.

For example: say I want to kill someone. I know they live in NYC. So I target them by dropping a nuke on NYC.

Is this a targeted attack? Obviously not. But I said it was targeted! Doesn't work that way.

If you want to target people, you try your best to kill just them. If you're planting bombs in mundane places and setting them off in public, you are not doing that.

I don't know why we feel the need to defend military operatives by essentially claiming they're the stupidest people on Earth and cannot put 2 and 2 together. No no, they can. Meaning, this was intentional.

If I dive bomb an enemy position, knowing that it's dark and windy and I might end up hitting something else, that's still a targeted operation. Same deal with the pager operation.

> So I target them by dropping a nuke on NYC.

You would have plainly violated the principle of proportionality, which is about the relative weight of military advantage vs civilian harm. The pager operation on the other hand created a massive military advantage, with less civilian harm than what's possible with conventional warfare.

> planting bombs in mundane places and setting them off in public

You would have a stronger point if the conflict looked more like Ukraine, where enemies are mostly sitting in trenches wearing uniforms. Hezbollah operates very differently, storing and firing weapons from mundane civilian places. There's no real way to fight Hezbollah without bombs in such places, it's just a question of whether bombs are delivered by artillery, planes or other means.

> this was intentional

I'm not sure what you mean here. I of course agree Israel could have predicted that there would be non-zero harm to civilians. That's true of pretty much any operation though, at least in urban wars.

For comparison, consider Ukraine's massive truck bomb of the Kerch Bridge. Of course they knew there would be collateral damage, and 5 civilians ended up being killed. It was still widely considered legal, considering the major military advantage gained.

Israel's entire mode of operations is to kidnap, kill and rape civilians. They even rioted for their right to rape prisoners to death.

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