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Drone strikes seems like a reasonable one. I'm not a fan of Israel by any means, but this seems straightforwardly preferable to the classic "hellfire missile into a compound that turns out to be a wedding". As I recall, there were a lot of incidents along those general lines, any one of which was almost certainly much more objectionable than this entire attack.
What exactly is the basis for objection here?
The targets are Hezbollah agents. I don't see any reasonable objection to Israel targeting Hezbollah agents.
The method involves explosives, which are not perfectly discriminate, so there's risk of collateral damage. Only, these appear to be very small bombs, such that you need to be either touching them or quite unlucky to be seriously maimed or killed.
The explosives are delivered "blind", in the sense that when they're detonated, the people detonating them don't know where they are or who actually has them, raising the risk of collateral damage. On the other hand, they were delivered in a way that provides a very high probability that they will, in fact, be in the direct personal possession of legitimate targets, and those not in the personal possession of legitimate targets probably got there by the actions of the legitimate targets, not the attackers.
My distaste for the Israeli state comes from them frequently being indiscriminate in the application of violence, either maiming and killing people who I do not consider legitimate targets. This attack in particular seems orders-of-magnitude better than the average in terms of target discrimination.
US drone strikes are a lot worse than is widely reported. Any male from 12 up in the combat zone was classified as a military target.
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You think this is closer to a drone strike than it is to an IED?
My objection is that IEDs in marketplaces are a terrorist tactic, and that we are probably closer to this becoming normalized.
"Your honor. I spent hours meticulously crafting these. To call them 'improvised' explosives is an insult."
Jokes aside, yes, it is very clearly closer to a drone strike than to an IED, and it is not particularly close to a drone strike.
You can think of it in terms of energy-in-the-system. IEDs in a middle-east context are generally remote-detonated artillery shells, suicide vests, or vehicle bombs. Drone strikes are usually a hellfire missile. In any of these cases, we're talking about dozens of pounds of high explosive and almost always significant added fragmentation. Recently, the US has been deploying the R9X hellfire, which trades the HE warhead for deployable blades, relying on pure kinetic impact... but even that is less discriminate than these pagers; people standing within arms-length of one of these are extremely likely to be unharmed. These are not "bombs in a market", because that implies that the market, in general, suffers the harmful effects of the bomb. They are literally bombs in someone's pocket. The fact that the person might be in a market when they go off is irrelevant; unlike IEDs or hellfires or even the r9x, the market and the other people in it will almost certainly be fine.
You can think of it in terms of discrimination in lethal effect. arty-shell bombs, suicide vests and car bombs are all designed to maximize lethal effect across the widest radius possible. Hellfires are not optimized for lethal radius, but their warhead and kinetic energy often deliver a similar effect. The R9X is directly intended to minimize lethal radius, and these pager bombs take it to about the minimum possible value while maintaining effectiveness. This minimization is possible because the attacker delivered these bombs in a way that maximized the chance of intimate contact with the target before detonation. IEDs are "to who it may concern"; these are, again, literally in the targets' pockets. And again, the Israelis did this blind, so they can't guarantee that it's a Hezbollah guy holding the hot potato when it pops. But you can't guarantee that the target of a sniper attack doesn't turn out of the line of fire at the last second, and you hit someone in the background instead. Mistakes happen, but this method seems to be quite optimized for minimizing them.
A drone strike also requires a chain of command to strike a certain target at a certain place, an IED does not. So some of these may have been detonated in schools, hospitals, or diplomatic facilities, crowded markets, places which would not be targets for drone strikes following a chain of command. Apparently the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon was injured, was the Iranian ambassador a target? There's no accountability like there would be for a drone strike.
The insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan also planted many well-placed IEDs which only harmed American military personnel. That is regarded as a terrorist tactic regardless. And obviously this attack is closer to an attack by IEDs than it is to a drone strike.
Obviously a bombing in a market causes the market to suffer the harmful effects? What are you even denying at this point? It causes obviously immediate disruption and panic and potential injury to bystanders. In the long term it creates fear and instability.
I think it's probable that these bombs were better targeted than the average drone strike. The chain of command observably sucks at identifying and designating targets, and often resulted in significant collateral damage. I care about striking particular people at particular places because I want harm to bystanders minimized. These bombs seem likely to have done a very good job of minimizing harm to bystanders.
This would concern me if they had been randomly airdropped by a helicopter. It would concern me if Israel simply put charges in every pager in the country, and then detonated them all. But the story at the moment is that they compromised Hezbollah's pager supply specifically, which means that anyone harmed by one of these pagers is overwhelmingly likely to either be a member of Hezbollah, or was gifted a pager by a member of Hezbollah. Maybe that impression is mistaken, in which case I'll happily agree that my assessment is invalid. But if it is accurate, I think my assessment stands.
I don't particularly think that schools, hospitals, diplomatic facilities, or indeed crowded markets are intrinsically off-limits to war. They are vulnerable and valuable, and efforts should be made to minimize harm to or within them... But if the above holds, then the reason these areas were bombed is because an active member of Hezbollah entered them. Further, the places themselves were not harmed in any significant way. If the Iranian diplomat was injured, it sorta raises the question of how he got within area effect of a bomb this small, likely being held by a Hezbollah operative. My sympathy is limited.
Could you unpack the word "accountability" in this sentence? What "accountability" applied for drone strikes, and how does it differ from the accountability applying here? Some agent of a government did both. If either kills innocents, there's going to be negative consequences, but probably not serious ones. What's your model here?
That the market structures, contents, or occupants generally were harmed by the physical effects of overpressure or fragmentation, which are the central examples of "harm" caused by a "bomb". Here's some examples of the destruction caused by central examples of "bombs" in a market.
War tends to cause disruption, panic and potentially injury to bystanders, as well as fear and instability. If you don't want that, avoid war.
If you think the people hit weren't actually Hezbollah, say that. I'm willing to believe it if there's reasonable amounts of evidence.
If you think the people hit were Hezbollah but this method of hitting them was inappropriate, I'm curious as to what a more appropriate method would be better. This method seems on the order of individual bullets from a sniper, which is pretty damn selective.
Depends how they inserted the pagers. Did they rig a specific batch bought by the Hezbollah office supplies department? Or did they send them to a reseller "known to supply to Hezbollah"?
If it was done the second way a lot of these could have been sold to totally random people.
It's also possible that the pagers were sold much more widely but only the ones that were eventually pinned to Hezbollah agents were triggered today.
Yeah, my guess is that it's probably an "and" operator. The old joke about US cyber attacks is that you can always tell when it's the US, because the code looks like it's written by lawyers. Israel is not terribly far behind on that front; they're still pretty sensitive to collateral damage. My guess would be that they were both pretty confident that this supply chain was serving Hezbollah, specifically, but they also had a cyber vulnerability. They must have had some sort of cyber vulnerability, since they were able to trigger them remotely. This access, combined with other SIGINT methods, probably allowed them to have a second filter, identifying all of the devices that had a second indicator of being used by Hezbollah, specifically, and they only triggered these ones.
The tradeoffs for this plan would be that you would essentially be leaving some "unexploded ordnance" out in the wild. A mitigating factor would be that it's highly likely that there's been enough publicity that if anyone else has one of these things unexploded, they're probably highly likely to "do your EOD for you". That said, if there are any left, it is also possible for Hezbollah to try to stage some PR stunt/false flag by killing some innocent person with it and claiming that Israel still did it (or was at least negligent in creating the circumstances, yadda yadda...).
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Entirely true. I'm happy to see evidence either way.
Allegedly, the specific pagers were purchased through a single kinda-sketchy reseller:
I'd expect there's serious problems trying to separate sales from Hezbollah from non-military sales in Lebanon, and the total sales number probably means a lot more individual items than it looks at first, but this doesn't look like the sort of outfit that does a company that has the capacity to do many 3-10k batches of assembly at this scale.
Of course, that assumes they were compromised by BAC. A compromise further up the supply chain would be much less targeted, one downstream would probably be much more.
Thanks, I'd heard rumors that was the case, but no evidence.
They need to take lessons from Hamas and intertwine their procurement with humanitarian groups. Mossad can't make your stuff explode if it was bought by the red cross and half the pagers went to the Charity Home For Puppies and Photogenic Orphaned Children Who Don't Want Their Dicks Blown Off
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That these particular bombs were a threat to anyone in the market, other than their intended targets.
That is absurd, obviously a bomb in a crowded place is a danger to people standing near the person with the hidden bomb. We don't have any numbers on civilian casualties yet, the ideas that these bombs didn't harm anybody standing near them strikes me as extremely improbable.
Assuming that this video depicts what it is purported to depict, I see three guys standing literally right next to the guy with the pager, and none of them are harmed.
Another follow-up, the Guardian is reporting that of the 9 killed, one was a 10-year old girl. I'm not trying to "won't someone think of the children!" here, I'm pointing out that Israeli IEDs don't magically not pose a threat to the civilians in the areas in which they are planted.
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This is incredibly disingenuous Hoffmeister. In the first place because, a single video instance is not enough to prove the statement "these explosives were not a danger to anybody standing near the person holding them". But even more so because you have no idea what injuries the people around may have suffered. Just because someone runs away doesn't mean they aren't injured.
What I find hard to understand is why don't you just admit that these explosives do create danger for the civilians around them, and then just say it's justified? We don't have any notion for how many non-Hezbollah may have been injured. But we have video evidence of one detonating within a few feet from children.
If those children were standing on the other side of that fruit stand, they would have been head-level with the bomb. So say it was "no threat to them" is just an obvious lie.
I didn’t claim that it is. However, it shows that it’s actually quite plausible that these bombs did not do widespread harm to uninvolved bystanders, because the explosion just isn’t that big or destructive. Hell, in this video, even the guy with the pager is still alive afterward, still has both of his legs, etc. It’s nothing like the kinds of suicide bombs we see in Kabul or Baghdad that absolutely shred and annihilate the people nearby. Yes, it’s possible that the guy next to him who ran away sustained some fairly minor shrapnel injuries, but I think it’s very unlikely that he will even require hospitalization. The other guy who starts the video out of frame appears literally completely untouched by the blast.
Because I don’t have enough information to say that’s true! Assuming that every one of the blasts was as small as the one in this video, I just don’t see a mechanism by which they could have created serious threat of death and dismemberment to a large number of people who were not intended targets. Obviously they created some non-zero level of danger; I would be horrified to learn that some random guys walking around at a concert or bake sale I’m attending are carrying miniature explosives. But in terms of minimizing civilian exposure to danger while still measurably impacting an enemy terrorist organization, I think this is about as great a scenario that we could possibly ask for from Israel.
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The militant : civilian casualty ratio is likely far better than that in many military actions you’d consider just.
Actually, the practice of using hidden/planted IEDs has had a terrible civilian casualty ratio which is why the United States does not use this tactic. That's not to say every single instance has harmed civilians, many IEDs in Iraq only killed Americans. But as a practice it's not considered good to flood public/civilian areas with hidden explosives, that is a terrorist tactic.
That’s because many IEDs are improvised bombs in a crowded marketplace in Mogadishu or Baghdad that kill 50-300 civilians alongside a handful of security staff or military personnel. As far as I know there’s zero evidence of a casualty ratio anywhere near that in this case.
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An "IED" is merely an "improvised explosive device"; whether something fits that description says nothing about whether the use of it is according to the laws of war.
Ok? It's obviously an IED. Traditionally, terrorists and insurgents in Iraq/Afghanistan have used IEDs to target American military personnel within planted, hidden explosives. Now Israel is using IEDs for the same purpose against Hezbollah. So why object to my statement that Israel is embracing/normalizing tactics using by terrorists? Just admit they are and argue it's a good thing if you're inclined.
If it is an actual explosive, and they deliberately manufactured the devices they are no more improvised than a tank shell.
They are bombs of a sort, and bombs can be more or less targeted. It can be put on a street, it can be put under a soldiers car, or fired into an army barracks from a mortar.
Tactics used by terrorists are the same tactics used by states. The US dropped a nuclear bomb on civilians with the intent to intimidate Japan into surrender. But that isn't regarded as a terrorist attack, even though it fits most of the criteria to a tee. States plant mines and other explosive devices that are hidden, and if they can will drone strike someone, killing them and people around them. But none of that is terrorism. So it can't be that hidden bombs or collateral damage or targeting civilians that mean it's terrorism.
Taboo the term terrorism and IED for the moment. They don't add anything concrete to the discussion.
What specifically is the issue? Risk of collateral damage/deaths? Being sneaky and underhanded? Being unfair? Lack of targeting? Something else?
All IEDs are "deliberately manufactured".
The term came into existence to describe IRA's boobytrapped explosives, like suitcases that would explode when you opened them. This operation is obviously on the level of "send a boobytrapped explosive suitcase" to someone, which is unambiguously an IED.
Boobytrapping goods which are shipped internationally with explosives is a terrible precedent. Explosives which can detonate anywhere, anytime, regardless of the target in the area.
What if peace had been brokered in the months since the distribution of those explosives? Then you are just left with a bunch of untracked explosives in civilian areas? It beggars belief that you struggle to find the issues with this practice.
Yes, I am from Northern Ireland so quite aware of the etymology. But booby trapping brief cases and sabotaging pagers so cleverly at an industrial scale that you can have them running for 5 months undetected are very different things. The IRA did not have that capability. This is industrialised booby trapping, which is so far beyond IRA bombs it reaches deliberate manufacturing standards. But thats beside the point.
I never said there weren't issues with the practice. But those issues are clearly less than killing a whole city. You're also assuming the Israelis could not track them or disarm them remotely.
Bombing people is a terrible precedent. But so is shooting people and nuking them and firebombing them, and firing rockets at them, and kidnapping and decapitating them. It's not clear sneaky microbombs are a worse precedent than any of those. Indeed in death terms they clearly aren't.
I think the point you are missing is that in war, you do bad things. So if you think this is uniquely bad, you have to compare to other actions in war conditions. It's killed fewer extraneous people than a single drone strike for example. Killed fewer civilians than IRA bombs. Much fewer than nukes or air raids.
It seems to me, that it is not clearly worse than other weapons of war. Its unusual but that doesn't mean worse.
You're also running into a reputational issue here. Your feelings about Jews and Israel are well known. So anything you say about how bad they are is suspect. I am not even much of an Israel supporter (even if my brethren back home fly Israeli flags) compared to the average American and think Israel have done a lot of things which i condemn and I think your biases are blinding you here. A relatively targeted strike against Hezbollah operatives is simply not that bad in the grand scheme of war.
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If they made them in a munitions factory, they're not "improvised". My point is your use of the term "IED" adds no light, it's nothing but heat.
Insurgents in a US-occupied country using IEDs to attack American military targets are fully within the laws of war in doing so.
So a boobytrapped suitcase is an IED, but a boobytrapped pager is a grenade or a drone strike?
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