At least nine people have been killed and 2, 750 wounded in Lebanon on Tuesday after pagers used by Hezbollah - and medics- exploded in unison, in an attack that the movement and Lebanese government blamed on Israel.
Among the dead was a 10-year-old girl, who was killed in eastern Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley when the pager of her father, who is allegedly a Hezbollah member, exploded. Many have posted a photo of the girl on their X accounts and Instagram stories to pay their condolences.
Several social media users drew attention to the reckless and casual nature of the attack which targeted many people including civilians. A human rights lawyer on X cited the International Humanitarian Law Databases of the ICRC, saying that “there was no way to know if they would be in shopping markets, homes, or streets with busy traffic”, pointing to the indiscriminate nature of the attack.
Anthropologist and researcher Philip Proudfoot cited a section on indiscriminate attacks of the ICRC Geneva Conventions of 1949 and said that Israel is committing a war crime due to the indiscriminate nature of this attack with possible collateral damage. Many other users cited the same section of the convention, drawing attention to the fact that people had no means of knowing who was holding the explosive devices when they went off.
Technically anything the other group does is terrorism. I would call this more irresponsible than anything. Randomly blowing up things sounds like a really good way to kill innocent people
Whats it called when an organization murders random people with the hope of scaring the public into not helping a different group?
Depends on the person you ask.
You. I’m asking you.
When any group kills the members of another group, an argument could be made to call it terrorism.
Are you making that argument?
Now that more information has come out since my original comment? Yes. Also war crime.
A pager is a rectangular device which is able to display the phone number of someone calling your number. Several thousand years ago all cave men wanted to get one. They instead drew paintings on walls by spitting chewed chemicals from their mouth. Later on we indeed had some which made people look way smarter and important than they really were. Now we have cellphones which can transfer billions upon billions of phone number worths of text and image spam and ads. Sometimes people send their cave paintings to one another. But they are strictly for the purpose of sending ads for things we should buy to prevent the economy from collapsing under the rich and powerful.
I just wanna know how the heck pagers were turned into remote bombs??
Intercepting the shipment, lining the interior of with some explosive (some putty that could hug all open space, or swapping out the batteries with custom ones that are half filled, etc), then wiring up a microchip that triggers when a specific code of 1’s & 0’s is received, or perhaps audio signal.
We’re talking about a state secret police here. There is no law or order. There is no “democracy”. They have billions of dollars in funding, and a mandate to do whatever they want with essentially zero consequences.
It’s Israel…they have enough technology to make the damn shell the explosive plastic that’s inert and hard until a certain number mass texts like the EAS system which sets off the internal “ignition” method, probably some high voltage cap discharges enough to begin the reaction …but honestly I don’t know shit about what I’m talking about, just saying the creators of suxnet don’t play amateur ball with long term infiltration for an attack vector.
This is also proof they could have gone about this process completely differently, but from a psycho ops (typo is fair) standpoint… I bet Hezbollah doesn’t use pagers anymore
The thing about the Geneva Convention is that reciprocity is generally accepted for the modern interpretation. Israel will argue that Hezbollah, besides being a terrorist organization in general, specifically engages in frequent indiscriminate explosive attacks themselves (aka rockets), from Lebanon’s territory with official knowledge and as a result they aren’t in breach of the Conventions.
Of course, Hezbollah can make similar claims against Israel, especially thanks to their current ethnic cleansing.
Apartheid. Ethnic cleansing. Genocide. Terrorism. Israel and its benefactor are just awful.
