This site is for curious, thoughtful, respectful, and kind interaction—most of all with those you may disagree with, regardless of how bad they are or you feel they are.
If that's not possible, it's ok not to post. We'd rather have a thread with no comments than a thread with aggressive comments, let alone nationalistic or religious flamewar. There is far too much aggression in the thread below, which is is understandable, but please don't add more. It provides a fleeting sensation of relief, but then it just makes everything worse.
Note this, from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46147605
https://media.defense.gov/2023/Jul/31/2003271432/-1/-1/0/DOD...
The question of whether what Israel did with the pagers was legal is not really controversial, or rather, it's not unclear what the law is. Find out the exciting answer in 6.12.4.8 Booby-Traps and Other Devices in the Form of Apparently Harmless Portable Objects Specifically Designed to Explode. (spoiler alert: of course what they did is illegal)
In case you were wondering what the big deal was the other day about the US bombing shipwrecked "narco terrorists" there's 7.3 RESPECT AND PROTECTION OF THE WOUNDED, SICK, AND SHIPWRECKED.
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.
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.
They literally fire unguided rockets in the general direction of populated areas.
"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.
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)
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.
The Geneva convention doesn't apply to combatants in this case and you cannot be more targeted than this operation. You spoiler alter falls rather short on many accounts.
The truth is that the veneer of any international law is quite thin and you can pretty safely exist if you don't start aggression against another country. Any law that treats this differently isn't a law that serves justice.
Organizations...like Irgun?
Iran has existed for thousands of years....the Persian people's existence predates Judaism by hundreds of years. So how you equate Iran with being a state explicitly existing to destroy Israel, a state that is less than 100 years old, is beyond me. But don't let me get in the way of your narrative.
>Lebanon suffers as well here and Israel certainly isn't the main threat.
Out of all the major (and minor) actors in the theater of middle eastern geopolitics politics, only one nation has nuclear weapons. That nation also has a lot of nuclear weapons and isn't a signatory to the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty. That nation has also attacked US Warships. Another nation IS a signatory to said treaty and regularly allows international nuclear weapons inspectors into its enrichment facilities.
Note: fuck the Iranian regime they are religious nutjobs that are suffocating Iranians and have been for decades. I don't support ANY religious regime no matter where on earth it is.
Israel could eliminate them in a heartbeat but actively pursue the avenue that glorifies Hamas and hezbollah and keeps them active and new members pouring in.
It's hard to hate Israel when they are peaceful, don't encourage their "settlers" to colonize neighboring countries, aren't blocking aide, aren't blowing up hospitals and schools, and leveling entire cities of innocent people.
It's easy to hate Israel when their political body props up minor annoyances that can be used as convenient opportunities to have citizens rally 'round the flag, and ignore the fact that Bibi has been in power for decades and is actively trying to avoid jail due to gross corruption and heinous abuses of power. Oh yeah they also have a large amount of mission ready nuclear weapons available at all times.
Nukes versus a glorified caveman or two who have a few guns that predate the first Apple computer by a 2+ decades....hmmm.
You've posted this in multiple places in this conversation, and it's just sort of strange. A sniper shooting a uniformed enemy is "targeted." A thousand little bombs that blow up a bunch of people including some civilians is... less targeted.
This is just an easy sanity-check for a validity of a statement. Name an operation that is more targeted.
Literally any operation that doesn't involve dispersed high explosives. I can't imagine why you're being so obtuse about it, it discredits anything of worth that might be buried in what you're posting.
Is this like, live location information provided from social media/carriers/etc? Is it AI guessing who might be a target based on collected data?
EDIT: I ask because this sort of claim could just be marketing on Panantir's end and the quotes and this post never actually explained what it was other than saying their software was used.
There are a couple such systems, and I am speaking without the ability to take the time right now to find those articles to confirm/counter my recollections, so consider this a prompt for a proper review -- ironic.
This comment may be a good stepping stone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46222724
That said, I have heard some positive feedback about Palantir's data integration capabilities - most other vendors don't provide bespoke professional services to build niche integrations for even low ACV customers.
IQT has invested in hundreds of rounds, and in the cases I have dealt with personally, has been very hands-off. Most other IQT funded companies I know of never showcased it to the degree that Palantir has - for example, OpenText was a peer of Palantir in the early 2000s and never showcased it's IQT ties.
In a way, though I think it understates how difficult of a problem unified data integration is - especially in organizations with disparate schemas and internal data that may often not be well documented and with dev teams that are often personnel strapped.
Most other vendors in the data integration space don't provide the same degree of support and hand-holding that Palantir does with their FDEs. The FDE model is their secret weapon tbh - it makes it easy for organizations to gain temporary staff augmentation without having to expend their hiring budget.
Obviously this creates a huge problem for pretty much everyone though, since we can imagine that our ordinary consumer products from all sorts countries could similarly explode if we ended up at war with the manufacturers.
I think if Lebanon found a clever way to assassinate the top 45 military commanders in Israel the same people who are defending this wouldn't be calling it a "Legal act of war".
If it was just random devices exploding, then sure, that could be considered terrorism. But it wasn't random devices, it was communication devices procured by Hezbollah and directly given by Hezbollah to their own members for their own purposes.
Firstly, generals, like anybody else can be terrorized.
Secondly, even if you only kill generals, that doesn't mean you didn't cause terror for everybody else. Imagine for example that Hezbollah found a way to poison the food for Israel's top X military personnel. It would cause a state of emotional terror for many people in Israel about their food safety for decades most likely, even if they weren't in the military themselves.
Do you think that "normal" means of military action, like dropping a 500lb bomb, is less "terroristic" than essentially setting off a firecracker in their face/hands/pocket? Because, like, that's the alternative. If your position is that all forms of war are illegal, then you have the right to that opinion, but it's not a realistic position.
That depends on when the car detonates. If the car detonates when he and his guard enter it at 6 am near the defense ministry sure. If the car detonates when it is parked in the middle of Moscow at noon and 100 people are around then by pre-2022 standards it would be terrorism.
I think instead of these fake whataboutisms we should just admit that there is no universal bar and if it's "our team" then we are willing to change the standard.
In this case, we know that when Israel set off these pagers some innocent bystanders got hurt. No need to "whatabout".
"Opportunity to kill in base" is completely vague and varies depending on the military tribunal that will try you. Israel has, AFAIK, never said that there was no other way to kill those people.
>At most you could complain it is violates proportionality however no car bomb would kill 100 people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_car_bombings
Plain disinformation
>Not to mention your analogy is flawed - hezobllah doesn't have any marked bases.
This line of thinking justifies bombing (with massive collateral damage) any partisan /resistance movement that is constantly on the move. Which I guess makes sense since that is what Israel did a lot in Gaza.
why is that guy trying to fight against dictionary-definition of "terrorism"?
where did "intentionally creating a state of terror == terrorism" come from?
making up word definitions to win arguments?
Are you saying that's a valid military strike, and therefore can't possibly be terrorism? Suppose this person is so successful he kills 1,000 and generals and numerous quit their jobs and move in fear for their life, just to really clarify what you're arguing here.
Obviously he must wear a uniform while actually conducting the attack though.
I'd understand if you were arguing against using excessive force, eg using thermobaric weapons in residential neighborhoods against an individual target, but there hardly exists a more targeted method than the pager attack / arson of specific houses.
I don't think the analogy is apt. Members of Hezbollah do not occupy a positions of similar relationship to Lebanon as US generals does to the US. As far as I've heard, flag officers and others are escorted by personal security for an attack of any sort, such as the 2009 Ft Hood shooting. [0]
Moving past that, a civilian citizen of Venezuela in the US who performed actions against US military targets would not be a valid military strike since that person would not be an identifiable member or Venezuela's military. It would more akin to a spy or assassin. Below is an excerpt from an article representing a US-centric view of history [1].
But the right to kill one’s enemy during war was not considered wholly
unregulated. During the 16th century, Balthazar Ayala agreed with Saint
Augustine’s contention that it “is indifferent from the standpoint of justice
whether trickery be used” in killing the enemy, but then distinguished
trickery from “fraud and snares” (The Law and Duties of War and Military
Discipline). Similarly, Alberico Gentili, writing in the next century, found
treachery “so contrary to the law of God and of Nature, that although I may
kill a man, I may not do so by treachery.” He warned that treacherous killing
would invite reprisal (Three Books on the Law of War). And Hugo Grotius
likewise explained that “a distinction must be made between assassins who
violate an express or tacit obligation of good faith, as subjects resorting
to violence against a king, vassals against a lord, soldiers against him whom
they serve, those also who have been received as suppliants or strangers or
deserters, against those who have received them; and such as are held by no
bond of good faith” (On the Law of War and Peace).
1. https://lieber.westpoint.edu/assassination-law-of-war/
Edit: /Hamas/Hezbollah/
If I remember correctly, the assailant must be dressed in some sort of military uniform to be considered a prisoner of war if captured. Lacking the uniform, it would be espionage and no Geneva Convention rights.
Obviously, neither side in the conflict is adhering to these rules.
I should give this a read:
Except nobody in power actually gives a damn about the Geneva convention or the "laws of war" being thrown around in this topic.
Those laws were made up so that victorious powers can bully smaller countries when they lose a war, but superpower nations themselves don't have to abide by them because there's nobody more powerful than them to hold them accountable when they break those rules. Because laws aren't real, it's only the enforcement that is real.
Like the US also doesn't care about the Geneva Convention with all its warmongering and crimes against humanity in the middle east, and the torturing in Guantanamo Bay, and the likes of George Bush and Tony Blair will never see a day at the ICJ. Hell, not even US marines accused of using civilians for target practices in Afghanistan got to see a day at the Hague because the US said they'd invade the Hague if that happened. Russia also doesn't care about the Geneva convention and Putin won't see a day at the Hague. Israel doesn't give a crap about the geneva convention when bombing Palestinian hospitals, and Netanyahu won't see a day at the Hague. And if China invaded Taiwan, they won't care about the Geneva convention and Xi Jinping will never see the Hague. Trump can invade Venezuela tomorrow, and same, nothing will happen to him or the US.
THAT IS THE REALITY, that is how the world really works, dominance by the strong, subservience of the weak, everything else about laws, fairness, morality, etc only works in Tolkien tales and internet arguments, not in major international conflicts.
Edit: to the downvoters, could you also explain what part of what I said was wrong?
It is still important to have might even if you aren't in that camp because inevitably you will run into people with that worldview and they cannot be reasoned with without might.
And things don't have to be universal to be true, but just one leader/nation bombing or abusing the shit out of you is all you need to teach you this lesson, and waving the Geneva convention in their face won't help you.
The real world is harsh, unfair and unjust and pieces of paper named after European cities don't change that. A barrel in your hand pointed at them does. The ability to use force is the only thing in history that was guaranteed to change things in your favor.
No it's not. The size of the American economy, it's extensive trade, the independence of the Central Bank and the rule of law and commitment to paying debts do that. Americans do not force anyone to trade in USD.
> No it's not. The size of the American economy, it's extensive trade, the independence of the Central Bank and the rule of law and commitment to paying debts do that. Americans do not force anyone to trade in USD.
The OP is correct, historically. US might, albeit aimed at anyone attempting to disrupt trade, WAS the basis for US hegemony. The US effectively policed the largest oceans, ensuring world trade was reliable and cost-stabilized since WW2. As long as you dealt in USD, you were supported. A type of soft influence that was very effective.
This has been disrupted recently. The US has declined to re-invest in the navy (ship construction has almost bottomed out), routed most of the navy to east asia, and antagonized other nations by disrupting agreements that could have sustained on momentum. This year's farming subsidy (to the tune of 12 billion) is due to those abandoned agreements, paired with unnecessary antagonism.
And how did the American economy get to that size without the military?
>As long as you dealt in USD, you were supported.
And what happened to you if you wanted to trade with the USSR? You're omitting that part
There isn't a universally agreed upon definition, but generally it refers to targeting non-combatants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism
For example, when the Allies tried to assassinate Hitler with a smuggled briefcase bomb during WW2, that wasn't terrorism: that was just regular warfare. Hitler was the leader of Germany and directed its military.
Similarly, smuggling pager bombs to members of Hezbollah generally wouldn't qualify as terrorism, since Hezbollah a) is a militia (famously it's the largest non-state militia in the world), and b) was actively fighting a war against Israel — a war that Hezbollah themselves initiated.
Good luck trying to get them though.
Because it's only a matter of years until drones get small and stealthy enough that nobody is safe; exploding pagers are a clear first step in this direction.
As an American, I certainly hope they would fail. But do I think it's legal? Yes: it's a targeted strike on the leader of an enemy country they'd theoretically be at war with. Do I think it's wise? Well — no, Venezuela has a much smaller military, and assassinating the U.S. President would trigger a massive war that would devastate Venezuela for decades while modestly inconveniencing American taxpayers. But legal? Yes.
So then China could, at any point, call up the US president and say "Look there's a drone in the room with you right now. Shut down all your nuclear facilities or I hereby declare war and you're dead within 10 seconds." Then failing that they could hit the VP next, Secretary of state, etc etc.
Point being the idea of sticking with WW2 "rules" with current and future technology is laughably implausible.
And I guarantee you the citizens of Israel would NOT think it's perfectly legit, legal, and fair if Netenyahu got assassinated with a drone along with his military commanders.
We've massed forces for an attack, attacked their ships, violated their airspace with combat aircraft (that's today), and extensively and publicly threatened them. They'd be in their legal rights to strike preemptively, including possibly a decapitation strike (this is why the Dubya administration kept repeating the term "preemptive strike", even though it was obviously nowhere near applying in the case of Iraq—it was a way of asserting its legal basis)
[edit] As thereisnospork points out in a sibling comment, however, this doesn't mean it'd be a good idea.
Not sure why you have doubts about this.
[0] Shouldn't - classic example of a tactical win being a strategic blunder. Killing the American president and would solidify American public support for the war - which would probably be undesirable in the balance.
This isn't part of any modern definition of terrorism, otherwise war is terrorism, stalking is terrorism, bullying is terrorism &c.
But that isn't the problem here, luckily. It was an extremely targeted operation, generals are military target and know the risks of war. A war that they started in this case.
You know terrorism doesn't mean people were terrorized, right? Surely you understand that.
Even if you drop a bomb to target a military personnel, but you drop it in the middle of busy city, this will be a war crime, as you didn’t do anything to avoid civilian casualties, and disregarded them.
I disagree with @dang's decision to leave the original link up, as it is nearly valuless in framing this discussion.
[1] https://lieber.westpoint.edu/well-it-depends-explosive-pager...
I'm open to replacing it with a better link, but the one you've listed here (even though it's a much more in-depth article) isn't about this specific topic.
I found https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-used-palantir-its-... by googling. Is it better than OP?
For whatever it's worth I think it's fine that the resource posted in that comment just makes it an especially valuable comment, without altering the story itself.
We have significant evidence for both these premises!
This is not an argument that the strike incurred no civilian casualty, that no child of a Hezbollah combatant was in close proximity when one of the bombs went off, anything like that. It's rather a sanity check on arguments based on statistical claims about the casualties. There might have been quite a lot of civilian casualties! But for there to have been significantly more of them than combatant casualties, I would argue that you have to break one of my two premises.
Premise 2: The physical location of the pagers directly affects the pattern of civilian injuries. Hospitals reported that many of the injured were civilians, including children, women, and non-combatants who were at home, at work, or in public areas. Even pro-Israel outlets, such as the Times of Israel, reported the same distribution of casualties.
Footage from Reuters, Al Jazeera, AP, and local Lebanese reporters shows numerous injured civilians with bandaged hands and faces, including people hurt inside homes, markets, farms, and workplaces, as well as children with hand and facial burns.
Now I would pose the question to you, why is your (likely novice) understanding of explosives and the footage you seen enough to overwrite the opinions of the hospitals and government of Lebanon?
Premise 2 just repeats Premise 1, from what I can tell.
The footage argument doesn't rebut any claim I made. You're treating this as if it's an argument that the pager strike was clean, or even morally justifiable; I have made neither claim.
It's also false that footage shows numerous injured civilians with bandaged hands and faces. Again, show a credible source and explain how this happened to them.
OP did split this chain, but a sibling comment has the sources you want.
EDIT: Getting downvoted because I didn't want to paste the same source N times. Nice.
"Footage from Reuters, Al Jazeera, AP, and local Lebanese reporters shows numerous injured civilians"
How do you know they were civilians?
My other points still stand, but it’s strange to me that the argument seems to go (not necessarily from you, but from other commenters above):
The explosions were too small to hurt others, so the reported number of civilians injured must be false.
We see that the explosions did hurt civilians.
Well, only a small fraction — the numbers must still be false.
Can you see how this is moving the goalposts? The argument shifted from “the explosives were so precise that Israel must have known exactly who was targeted, and those injured were combatants,” to, in the grandparent comment:
How do you know they were civilians?
Now we see that civilians were present and injured. Perhaps you're correct that the videos show only a small number, but the videos still confirm the core point: civilians were harmed.
@tptacek, I don’t have a problem discussing this with you, but each thread you respond to splits off into new points I have to address. It feels like arguing with two people making contradictory claims.
I’ll leave you with this: the videos show only a minority of the pager detonations. Civilian injuries are most reliably known by Lebanese hospitals and government sources. The idea of detonating explosives in civilian-populated areas without knowing who is immediately around those devices is deeply problematic. And there is no way Israel could have known who would be harmed with any reasonable certainty; the reported numbers only reinforce that fact.
Most of this comment is you arguing points that I don't disagree with. The one place we're clearly not aligned is your belief that there were more civilian casualties (or even a comparable number of civilian casualties) than combatant casualties. I've argued, at length and with specific details, as to why that doesn't seem possible, regardless of what Lebanon or Hezbollah reports. If you want to keep hashing this out, that's probably the place where there's something to actually discuss.
No we haven't. You haven't provided any proof.
There is no credible figure for the number of combatants killed or injured. The Times of Israel reported that 1,500 fighters were injured. Taking these two data points together, a majority of those injured were civilians rather than combatants.
Where are you getting the claim that this was “probably the most precisely targeted large-scale military strike of the last 100 years”? That is a far-reaching assertion, especially given the lack of sources.
You say this is not a value judgment but a descriptive claim, yet the claim does not appear to be backed by facts.
(The 4000 figure) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lebanon_electronic_device... (The 1500 figure) https://www.timesofisrael.com/a-year-on-some-lebanese-bystan... (General HRW source) https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/09/18/lebanon-exploding-pagers...
> along with a directional sense of the wounded vs. KIA count of the strike
I am not sure what this means.
To add, you're making it impossible to argue anything against your claim. We're discussing how the pagers hurt civilians and if they were properly targetting combatants. You're saying no matter what, since you know the pager was targetting combatants, the evidence that civilians were hurt must be false. Your logic circular.
Do you know of any civilians anywhere in the world that currently use pagers?
Who had the pagers and why they had the pagers is almost derivable from first principles at this point, never mind the international journalism on the subject.
Another way to say this is that if you have evidence/reporting suggesting that Israel did in fact set explosives in pagers that were broadly available to Lebanese civilians, my argument falls apart.
I think Hezbollah is inexcusably evil, far worse than Israel is, but I'm not particularly interested in defending Israeli governance; I have no commitment to the proposition that Israel doesn't commit atrocities (in fact, I think they commit rather many of them). So I'm fine with my argument collapsing; I'm just waiting for evidence to topple it. The trouble the preceding commenter is having with me is that I can't find a story that squares the circle of the numbers they're trying to present.
Dennis Duffy, but he is the Beeper King.
(2) We have Hezbollah's own claims about how many of their fighters were actually killed.
(3) We have Hezbollah's own photographs of scores of injured Hezbollah fighters --- people not blown apart from the explosions, further backing a claim that all sides to the conflict are making (far more casualties than KIA).
(4) We know how small the pagers were (indeed, exactly what pagers they were) and what the explosive was.
To the extent Lebanon is reporting higher civilian casualties than Hezbollah fighter casualties, the balance of evidence is that at least one of two things is happening: either Hezbollah is dramatically understating its own casualties, or Lebanon is dramatically overstating civilian casualties.
later
(Or we're just misreading the statistics! Pretty normal outcome for a message board discussion!)
You, reasonably, cautioned against axiomatic reasoning --- I do feel like I'm bringing quite a bit of empiricism into this, though I am rejecting the ratio of casualties we're attributing to Lebanese and Hezbollah reporting --- so let me add a couple more empirical observations:
* We have reporting (Reuters, others) that the pagers were packed with 6 grams of PETN.
* 6 grams of PETN produces ~35kJ of explosive force.
* That's about 7x more powerful than a cherry bomb, or about 2% of the explosive force of a standard fragmentation grenade.
Later
In considering that yield statistic bear in mind also that the lethality of an M67 (lethal within 5m, casualties within 15m, well studied) is mostly a function of its construction --- its explosive charge, 50x greater than that of 6g of PETN, is designed specifically to propel fragments of a hardened steel case out through its blast radius.
The pagers were just pagers, with the explosive payload specifically designed not to have metal components (which would have been detectable by Hezbollah.)
I think a stronger argument is that in the aggregate, the devices overwhelmingly targeted combatants.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46227021
(If you want to reply to that argument, can I ask that you do it on that leg of the thread, just to keep the thread simpler? Thanks!)
My claim is that since Israel could not have possibly known who was in possession of the pagers at the time of the attack, and since the attack occurred regardless of who was nearby—detonating all pagers in civilian-occupied areas—Israel did, in effect, target civilians.
If you attack a military target that is surrounded by civilians, and that attack injures or kills those civilians, then those civilians were also targeted. Do you think all that matters is who the primary target was, and that as long as Israel decides the civilian casualties were “worth it,” the decision is moral?
That's ridiculous
> If you attack a military target that is surrounded by civilians, and that attack injures or kills those civilians, then those civilians were also targeted.
They are not targeted.
You could say that depending on number of innocent casualties or the likely number the attacked could be reckless and/or disproportionate in attacking in a way that was likely to cause such injuries. In certain cases you could claim they broke the laws of war although the laws of war are practical (they're not meant to prevent all deaths of civilians, the countries who agreed to them didn't intentionally make it impossible to fight including in defense).
And even if something is not a war crime you could still claim it might be immoral but that is a more complex argument.
If someone droped a nuke on a city to kill 1 person, does it matter who that person was specifically targeting? Does the distinction if his intended target matter at all? I would think you and I would agree that obviously it doesn't matter at that point, but then I ask, at what point does that distinction matter?
What is true is that I'd deny allegations about civilian casualties that I think are false, but that would be because I think they're false, nothing to do with zionism.
I mean, you're not wrong: the State seeks monopoly on violence; the kind of damages it can inflict, where, when and however it wants. Everyone else is ... a terrorist, and whatever they do is ... terrorism.
> communication devices procured by Hezbollah and directly given by Hezbollah
Replace "Hezbollah" with "the US Govt" and you'll arrive at some answer.
Btw, off-duty / non-combat personnel aren't deemed to be "at war".
There aren't a lot of opportunities in life you get to use the word "annihilatory"; this is one of them. And in the immortal words of William Munny out of Missouri: "deserve's" got nothing to do with it.
Acutely aware of this fact, yeah.
> There aren't a lot of opportunities in life you get to use the word "annihilatory"; this is one of them.
Not wrong. None of the former great empires that fell were as military capable as the super powers of the modern era.
> And in the immortal words of William Munny out of Missouri: "deserve's" got nothing to do with it.
True. Some on the Left have extreme take on "Nation States" for this reason:
One was to challenge the thesis that nationalism and colonialism are two separate things — that nationalism is the good side, colonialism the bad side; that nationalism came first, colonialism later, or vice versa. I wanted to show that they were twins joined at the hip. And I also wanted to show that from the outset, the nation-state project could not be achieved without ethnic cleansing and extreme violence. This could be seen in the expulsion of Jews and Muslims [from the Iberian Peninsula], and that soon led to a conflict between states, because each state had an official majority — the nation it claimed to represent — and its minority, or minorities.
The human rights paradigm focuses on the perpetrators of violence. It wants to identify them individually so that we can hold them individually accountable. It does not look for the beneficiaries of that violence. Beneficiaries are not necessarily perpetrators. To address beneficiaries, you need to identify the issues around which violence is mobilized ...
This is second time someone has said "Dresden" to me in this thread. Interesting.
> by Mamdani's logic here we're fully justified ...
Well, if you're curious about where his "logic" (his political hypothesis) leads, Mamdani wrote an entire book on it (which is in fact the subject of the interview): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neither_Settler_nor_Native
That's not really a good description of terrorism. Terrorism is going after non-military targets, or at least indiscriminate targeting, for the express purpose of causing terror.
If an enemy tank platoon is rolling down the street, the operator of an antitank missile certainly knows that blowing up the lead tank and killing the crew in front of their compatriots is going to instill terror in the rest of the tank platoon. Taking that action anyway is correctly described as an act that intentionally instills terror, but that's not an act of terrorism. War, regardless of if it's waged lawfully, is often terrifying.
The way to successfully argue that Israel's pager attack was an act of terror is to show indiscriminate targeting - not merely highlight how terrifying it is to have a bunch of high level officers killed at once. However, investing a lot in the latest information gathering technology sound like the opposite of indiscriminate targeting.
I obviously can't speak for how the public writ large would react to our hypothetical. But I can at least speak for myself that if Hezbollah somehow, say, flew a bunch of drones onto IDF bases and killed officers, then that would be an act of war but not an act of terrorism no matter how terrified it might make Israelis feel.
Instead what we have is IHL, i.e. the Geneva and Hague conventions etc., and if you are targeting military personnel or other targets of military importance, without any extra cruelty or attacks on civilians, what does it matter if it looks like terror-bombing?
If it's allowed by IHL but is terrorism by British or French of German law or whatever, it's allowed. IHL is the actual binding thing.
And who enforces that?
When Netanyahu or Putin break that and bomb children and civilian hospitals, can you stop them by waving the IHL in their face?
Are you a lawyer / expert in conflicts? If not, curious how you arrived at this conclusion.
- highly discriminatory
- only Hezbollah commanders received these devices
- it's an essential piece of military C2 gear so you'd expect they would keep possession of them at all times
- the explosive was small enough to mitigate any risk to bystanders
- targeted at combatants
- likely to achieve (and in fact did achieve) military effects at least proportional to any collateral damage
Would you still have a bone to pick with my credentials if I said that I thought the Dresden firebombings were not brilliant and not perfectly legal? Or the same about US military strikes on suspected drug trafficking vessels?
Hacker News arrogance in a nutshell, ladies and gentlemen.
Feel free to also weigh in on Napoleonic currency reform, the proportion of Siberian anime fans, DNA methylation rates of Tyrannosaurs, and anything else you know nothing about.
Or maybe I just skipped CS456: "How To Know Everything About Non-Tech Topics" in college.
Gotcha. Thanks.
> Does that preclude my having an opinion on the value and legality of a military strike?
Words mean things. "Perfectly lawful" means just that? And so, I was curious.
> Would you still have a bone to pick with my credentials if I said that I thought the Dresden firebombings
Felt the need to know whether I was mistaking an arm-chair opinion for an expert opinion, is all.
He did prefix it with "I think", highlighting that "this is my opinion / my interpretation", not that he is issuing a ruling as a judge in an international court.
This can be true, but terrorist acts can also be indifferent to the target, which is where the debate here comes from.
Such attacks are nothing but war crimes. Targeting civilians and harming/killing them without trial is illegal NO MATTER OF WHAT.
All kinds of retaliation attacks are also illegal if harming civilians etc.
This is not my opinion but global consensus for the past 80 years globally
As an act of warfare, Israel did a splendid job on this. Thoroughly impressive work.
The reports are 4,000 wounded and 12 killed unintended targets in order to kill 42 targets.
On what planet is that “very few actual civilians”? I think you knew full well before posting that’s a ridiculous claim which is why you did it anonymously.
This is not correct. Each one that had this pager was connected to Hezbollah, i.e. a soldier of Hezbollah. This attack was meant to "disable" a very big portion of Hezbollah, which it did (4000 of them).
This is one of the most sophisticated attacks to avoid civilian casualty.
I've never heard of "42 targets", and given 12 people died total, obviously 42 targets were not killed.
You should provide some sourcing for your numbers.
"Operation Grim Beeper" (seriously) on Wikipedia cites these numbers from Lebanese government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lebanon_electronic_device...
Since the pagers that were targeted were exclusively used by Hezbollah (which fought an actual civil war with the Lebanese security forces specifically in order to establish its own telecom network), I would be extraordinarily wary of any source that has claimed more injuries to noncombatants than to combatants.
You can still tell a story where the pager attack was unacceptable owing to civilian casualties: there could be so many civilian casualties that any number of combatant casualties wouldn't justify it. But if you're claiming that there were more casualties to noncombatants over small explosions from devices carried principally in the pockets of combatants, it is rational to draw the conclusion that your reasoning (and sourcing) is motivated.
Have you provided any sources at all for you numerous claims throughout this thread? Would it also me rational to draw a the conclusion that someone who has provided no sources at all is also engaging in “motivated reasoning”? At least be consistent.
In any case, if Hezbollah themselves admit that 1500 of their fighters were injured by the attack (according to your own source), it seems extremely dishonest to claim that all 4000 were civilians or that there were only 42 targets.
Per the report: 42 dead, 12 of which were civilians. It follows that 30 were considered Hezbollah.
You quite literally did.
Presumably if you have thousands of Hezbola people walking around within their homes, businesses, hopistals, shops, etc. it makes sense you'd have many civilian injuries when these went off. There wasn't a geo fence around them and if someone was in an NICU or preschool the explosions were indiscriminate.
So while there was some element of precision in placement of who had these pagers, there was zero awareness (by design) to where they actually were when they all exploded.
42 killed, of whom Hezbollah said 12 were civilians (later admitting some of the 12 were fighters).
Historical average is about half of the wounded or killed in conflicts to be civilians. < 12/42 would be a relatively "good" ratio.
We're talking about a tiny amount of explosives in each pager. Sure, it could lightly wound a bystander under perfect circumstances, but it's not going to create a big confluence of major injuries. <6 grams of PETN--we're talking about a risk of injury at roughly arm's reach.
> According to the Lebanese government, the attack killed 42 people,[11] including 12 civilians,[12] and injured 4,000 civilians (according to Mustafa Bairam, Minister of Labour and a member of Hezbollah).
The wikipedia page's other reference claiming that the majority of those injured were civilians is also vague. For instance, it writes, "On 26 September, Abdallah Bou Habib, Lebanon's Foreign Minister, confirmed that most of those carrying pagers were not fighters, but civilians like administrators"
The reference for that sentence is this, which reads: https://carnegieendowment.org/emissary/2024/09/israel-hezbol...
> It was an attack mostly on Hezbollah, but a lot of civilians got hurt in the process, because not everybody is sitting there fighting on the front. These are people who have pagers or have telephones. They are regular people. Some of them are also fighters, but not most of them. A lot of them are administrators working here and there. . . .
This is a very different claim that what the article reads. "Administrators" and "not fighters" is a very different thing than "civilian". A woman working in my building also works in the Army's HR department during the day. She's literally a member of the military, but it's also not wrong to say she is "not a fighter" and an "administrator".
In short, the idea that we have credible evidence that the 4,000 people who were injured (and more, importantly, those that were actually maimed rather than receiving light injuries) were mostly civilians doesn't seem to pan out.
You make an assumption that of the 4000 people wounded /all/ were civilians, which is odd, considering that explosive was in a device given out to Hezbollah members.
even if very close, one of the videos shows a supermarket line, and no one around is hurt
So they only managed to hit 30 targets with 12 misfires… that makes it even worse.
> In any case, if Hezbollah themselves admit that 1500 of their fighters were injured by the attack (according to your own source)
That’s 1500 in addition to the 4,000 civilians. The fact they managed to wound 2.5x+ as many civilians as targets isn’t exactly making them look better…
Which reports? According to whom? Hezbollah?
The answer to your question is yes: the "4,000 civilians wounded" figure is attributed to Mustafa Bairam, a high-ranking Hezbollah member. I have not seem any corroborating sources. As far as I can tell every mention of that number, including Wikipedia, traces back to him. Obviously this is a highly biased source that should not be trusted blindly.
The Lebanon pager attack: 12 civilians (including 2 children) killed out of 42 total deaths (28.6% civilian casualty rate).
Gaza genocide: Leaked IDF intelligence documents show 8,900 militants killed out of 53,000 total deaths as of May 2025 (83% civilian casualty rate).
>> Sources within the Israeli intelligence community cited in the report raised concerns about how deaths were categorized, with one source claiming people were sometimes "promoted to the rank of terrorist after their death" in the database. <<
Even the 12 civilian count is probably higher than reality because it is doubtful that 12 civilians had access to a military clandestine communication device
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/hezbollahs-tunnels...
Regarding the leaked IDF document this was leaked to a minor blog yet cannot be seen anywhere.
But let's entertain it as real, these are 8000 named Hamas terrorists known for certain by one intelligence unit in the IDF to be dead. This only means the minimum amount of Hamas terrorists, this doesn't take into account the other armed groups in Gaza that had a prewar strength of 10,000s of terrorists or the Hamas members who are only known by uncertain intelligence to have been killed.
Taking that number and reducing it from the Hamas published death count (an organization that kidnapped babies for political goals, but is incapable of lying, and was caught faking death counts before) to get the civilian death count is very unscientific to be extremely mild
You specific argument though misuses even those numbers. 42 is the number of people actually killed. I couldn't figure out how many were targeted (how many pagers did explode), but I'd assume the number could be much higher than the number of deaths. Without that number we cannot determine how well targeted this was. I also don't think it is plausible that for every target you injure 100 bystanders. So I would assume the number of targets was at least an order of magnitude higher.
There's also another number from Hizbollah, that 1500 of their people were injured. But no idea it those would be included in the 4000 wounded number.
These attacks killed and maimed children, but firing JDAMs kills and maims even more children.
Not excusing the Israeli military here... they definitely dropped a lot of JDAMs, unguided artillery, and indiscriminate autocannon munitions on Gaza.
But the specific point on the pager attacks being against civilians is not a great argument.
Another thing I will note is that a lot of Palestinian groups also use similar reasoning towards targeting the Israeli population on the basis of the fact there is mass conscription in place.
Causality in war includes people that were only injured. This was far, far more than a 50% casualty rate. More like a 9552% casualty rate.
Given this context: A limited number of specialty electronics, acquired and distributed by Hezbollah as a means of military command and control, and subsequent to this operation Hezbollah's C2 was demonstrably neutered--you believe that the majority of injuries were innocent civilians?
Basic logic indicates that the vast majority of those killed and injured were, in fact, nodes in Hezbollah's command and control structure.
Here is Hezbollah boasting to Reuters before the pagers attack, about how it moved to using pagers and couriers to counter Israeli intelligence.
As you can guess, with the advent of mobile phones in the 2000s, pagers became obsolete in Lebanon
Yes, because these pagers were only used by Hezbollah and Israel was able to read the messages they sent on them so they could know if they were in use by a Hezbollah member.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/aug/21...
I know people talk about the "entitlement epidemic", but entitlement is just another name from narcissism, in essence a lack of empathy. Which seems to be more and more socially acceptable and even rewarded (with internet points mostly), like your comment show (i'm not jumping on you, you are tamer than many, so i think it's a better exemple for my point than more violent ones).
And since that's the example we show our kids today, i'm now officially more worried about our society ability to handle social media than climate change.
Anyway sadly even if they did start attacking civilians, say Palestinian civilians as a random example, who is going to enforce the penalty for war crimes. These days its seems they're more of a suggestion than a rule of engaging in war.
If anything, it's the opposite.
Otherwise there's no reason to use such a large bomb on some houses.
Afaik they intercepted a shipment for Hamas members only. Do you have more information?
How many civilians there even use these pagers instead of mobile phones? Are there any?
Ignoring that it was Hezbollah, not Hamas, I would point out that many of Hezbollah members are civilians.
I was born an American. Hezbollah is a group you have to choose to join. Accidents of birth and conscious choices to join a group with a violent ideology and a history of acting on it are so different, I find it hard to believe you would actually equate them.
Hezbollah is more akin to joining the KKK or Weather Underground.
What? Hamas didn't have any of the pagers, Hezbollah did.
That's much closer to a terrorist attack than to legal warfare.
Planting a bomb on each soldier would be even better.
Regardless, given the number of war crimes this army has been found guilty of, this is somewhat moot. What's another war crime in the grand scheme of things.
been accused it's not same as been found guilty. at least last time I checked.
Maybe I'm wrong, but, I think Hezb0-lla-h is pretty much the "government", especially in southern Lebanon
and I interpret his analysis as that it was targeted enough to be legal.
You seem to be holding Israel to an impossible standard of guaranteeing zero collateral damage, which IHL does not require because no military is capable of that.
Curious how the concept of the 'war crime' is weaponized by the pacifist and largely ignored by the non-pacifist that knows how proper deescalation can take place.
I don't want to be part of their collateral damage.
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)
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.
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?
What you want to appeal to are just war principles.
It's the equivalent of blowing up a commercial plane or bus because there's a military commander on it. Or, you know, levelling a residential apartment building [2].
If anyone else had done this we'd (correctly) be calling it a terrorist attack.
[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/9/17/lebanons-terrib...
[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/israel-says-it-struck-hez...
A better comparison would be if Hamas pulled off this operation against the members of the Knesset (or, even more comparable, against a specific party like Likud) while they were at home.
This is obviously terrorism. The methods are the same as terrorists, the intent is the same, the results are the same. 3000 wounded, this is extremely far from the "surgical precision" claimed by the fascist apartheid state of Israel.
If it was done to "israelis", I bet you'd be singing a different tune. Imagine if iran or saudi arabia or anyone else did this to "israelis", some whiny people would be calling it terrorism.
Here’s a documentary showing the extent, including all of the undeniable civilians that were injured or killed: https://youtu.be/2mqqDTIs4vE
That’s apparently the good look
Has anyone here tried using their software? It's salesforce-level fucked. They did a great job spewing lofty concepts, with their ontologies and their kinetic layers, but in the end it all ends up being a giant wormy ERP. There might be one good idea in there (articulating the schemas and transformations in separate layers) but overall it's a perfect vibe match for orwellian bureaucracies.
Also the engineering / product culture @Palantir is diametrically opposed to what exists at SAP, so I favour Palantir.
Crazy how modern companies want to be McFranchise level of capable. What are you adding as a company if you outsource everything that can make your company a differentiator and your company is just plug and play cogs?
If you don't believe that, you shouldn't be investing.
If you're going to make this argument, it'll only apply to private companies in founders' hands, maybe to family businesses, but certainly not to public companies.
The moderation intention is for comments which break the site guidelines to be flagged, regardless of which side they are or aren't on. It's not possible to reach this state perfectly, of course.
That one doesn't seem to violate the rules, and there is a lot of discussion below it.
as example, just below there is reply to you saying that flagging been abused, been flagged
That number is much too high IMO, so I assume we interpret the site guidelines very differently.
> as example, just below there is reply to you saying that flagging been abused, been flagged
I assume you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46221396? No, you'd see "[flagged]" if that were the case. The comment is [dead], but it was killed by software, not flagged by users. I'll restore it.
Or this one? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46221631
Or this one? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46221972
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46221631 is not flagged. That might be because we'd already turned off flags on it (I can't remember).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46221972 I agree should not be flagged and I've unflagged it.
In threads that are, unfortunately, adversarial, abusing the flag button is a stable Nash equilibrium. I think it's a shitty equilibrium, though, and makes real, substantive conversations--ostensibly the goal on this forum--harder to achieve.
I think it's high time to reconsider the current 'flag' mechanics. At the very least I think we would all be better off if flags were simply disabled on highly controversial topics.
I recognize that's a big ask for an already-overburdened mod. I just don't see any good alternative.
Separately, I want to express that while I don't always agree with you, I think you generally do an excellent job moderating and I appreciate your efforts to keep this community free and healthy.
Nobody will ever think "That was a well-reasoned argument I now believe war crimes were, or were not, committed".
The best thing to do on posts like this is avoid reading them, or flag them.
It feels like there's an obviously correct side to most of these issues, the problem is half the audience here believes their side is correct and yours is wrong.
I think there are useful discussions to be had on these topics, and in fact, we must have those discussions. The issue is that, if we want to do so productively and a comment section is the only venue for us to speak to each other, then we must be extremely patient with others and ourselves and reflect on what they say and what we say (i.e., discuss in good faith).
That burden may be too high for most people, but collectively, we don't have a better forum anymore, and we need to have these discussions and come to consensus before the world is engulfed in authoritarianism or war (which is not hyperbole).
Manually appealing to dang for unflagging is not a workable solution either.
This really is an entirely unsuitable forum for this discussion.
Maybe this is not the forum, but then what is? A philosophy class you took ten years ago?
Funny that you mention it, but Israel/Palestine was also a banned topic in the “Ethics and International Law” course I took circa twenty years ago.
I advocate concerning yourself with the things you can control, which does not include this forum’s idiosyncratic moderation style.
I can control my comments, which are a part of this forum's moderation style, and I can advocate in those comments for people to act in good faith, and appeal for help in figuring out how to make it more common.
If we can't discuss important topics in good faith on a nerd website, what hope do we have of discussing them elsewhere? It's not hyperbole anymore to say that if we don't come to some consensus we are going to end up in authoritarianism or war.
You think half the audience here or anywhere is on the side of israel and genocide? The only reason no discussion can be had is because of the influence of israel in tech, media, government and the bot farms they are allowed to employ all over social media.
If Israel, unprovoked, randomly carried out this attack it would be one thing. But:
1. Hezbollah had been continuously, deliberately firing rockets at civilians since October 8th, 2023 displacing tens of thousands and killing multiple civilians including 12 children in a playground in Majdal Shams.
2. Hezbollah embeds itself and fires from within civilian population in Lebanon
3. Hezbollah leadership had stated that they intend to escalate their attacks including a ground invasion of Israel
I think everyone in this thread criticizing this operation needs to first explain what they would have Israel do in this situation.
Because if you think Israel should retaliate against Hezbollah at all, please explain how you, in Israel's shoes, would achieve a comparable result with fewer civilian casualties.
Also, if you look at the data on attacks by Israel against Lebanon, they are disproportionate, Israel launching 10x more airstrikes, even going so far as to level entire city blocks of apartment buildings in Beirut. I remember just on the first day of attacks by Israel against Lebanon, over 1000 civilians were killed. Also Israel refuses to vacate southern Lebanon after a ceasefire agreement, and continues to violate the ceasefire. Just in the last 24h, Israel has bombarded 4 different locations in Central Lebanon with airstrikes. If I were Israel, I would simply stop acting as a fanatic aggressor with no regard for human life.
During the war Israel was attacked from the territories of Gaza, Lebanon, the west bank, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen. All of these were unprovoked, except maybe Iran. All by parties openly calling for Israel's destruction.
Gaza had invaded Israel, killing 1200 and kidnapping 250.
What do you think the above attackers would do if Israel showed there was effectively no retaliation for doing something like that? You are asking Israel to commit suicide.
> If I were Israel, I would simply stop acting as a fanatic aggressor
Israel was attacked first by each and every party above (except maybe Iran), beginning with the Hamas attack.
> with no regard for human life.
In nearly every bombing in Lebanon, and most bombings in Gaza, Israel preceded the attacks with leaflet, social media posts, and phone calls calling people to leave the area. It has achieved the best civilian-combatant death ratio of any urban war in modern history. How does that show no regard for human life?
> It has achieved the best civilian-combatant death ratio of any urban war in modern history.
False.
False.
See? I can play that trick too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Hezbollah_confl...
I don't know how far off we are on our assessment of current Israeli governance, but I'd bet it's not as far as you think we are. But I'd also guess we're wildly far apart on Hezbollah, which, along with Ansar Allah in Yemen, are some of the most amoral and illegitimate military forces on the planet.
Unfortunately, Hezbollah was, up until 2024, waging a largely PR-based war on Israel (their "puppet" adversary; their true adversary was Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham in Syria, where they spilled more blood and lost more men and materiel than in every conflict they've had with Israel over the last 20 years), and people have --- for understandable reasons --- antipathy towards Israeli leadership. So Hezbollah, like the Houthis, have a western cheering section, made up almost entirely of people who have chosen not to understand anything about what makes either organization tick.
You can come up with lots of military atrocities committed by Israel, because Israel has in the Gaza conflict committed many atrocities. None of it will legitimize the IRGC's Shia-supremacist totalitarian occupation of Lebanon or their genocidal occupation of Yemen. The civil wars in Syria and Yemen (the real military fronts in the last 2 decades) claimed an order of magnitude more lives than anything Israel did, which is truly saying something given the horrifying costs of Israel's botched, reckless, amoral handling of Gaza.
> On 4 December 2024, the Lebanese Health Ministry reported that since 7 October 2023, Israeli attacks killed 4,047 people, including 316 children and 790 women, and injured 16,638 others
Our premises may be too far apart to usefully discuss this. The core of my argument (the comparative military and civilian body counts in Syria and Yemen) aren't going to be easy to refute by appeals to Hezbollah's PR. (You may also have responded to a by-2-minutes-or-so earlier version of my comment; we may be responding to each other in too-close succession and talking past each other.)
Edit: I'm now throttled from posting but I was able to go back and find more video of Hezbollah's attacks on Israel military facilities. I think people should watch these and judge for themselves:
* https://x.com/ME_Observer_/status/1752035071047926029
* https://x.com/ME_Observer_/status/1790471234867568905
* https://x.com/ME_Observer_/status/1756031325264318682
* https://x.com/ME_Observer_/status/1743565825771032895
There's a reason why there are still crypto Jews in Iberia.
All you have to do is listen to actual Arab discourse from people in the area (or Arab protesters in Arabic in the West). Where they insist repeatedly that's it's about the Jews.
All the talk about White Supremacy (Guess who calls black people Abeed?), Settler colonialism, genocide etc are just earworms for Western ears
Um, why is it inappropriate to be outraged that international humanitarian lwas are actively being violated by Israel, in Gaza?
As dang has said elsewhere in this thread and in other comparable threads, before you comment about a topic like this, there needs to be some processing or metabolizing of those feelings. HN is a place for learning, not venting or battling. And there is much to learn about these topics by discussing them curiously. I certainly do, and I see others doing that too. That's a significant reason why I think it's important for us to make space for these discussions here. But if the threads are overwhelmed by people expressing extreme emotions, there's less to learn, other than that people on both sides are angry about this issue, which we already knew.
As I say in many contexts, you may not owe the other side better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
Here's an analogy which may (or not) be helpful. Even in the middle of a war, it sometimes happens that enemies meet and discuss things. Such discussions won't help anything or anyone if they just consist of yelling at each other.
p.s. I appreciate your question and apologize that you had to reply here instead of to my comment itself (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46221528). We have to turn off replies on pinned comments, but I hate giving the impression that we don't want to hear responses or objections.
1. If any other state had done this, we'd be correctly calling this a terrorist attack and there wouldn't be any question about it; and
2. Palantir was a partner in developing several AI systems used for targeting missile strikes in Gaza. Collectively these tend to be called Lavender [1][2]. Another of these systems is called "Where's Daddy". What does it do? It targets alleged militants at home so their families with be collateral damage [3]; and
3. These systems could not exist without the labor of the humans who create them so it raises questions about the ethics of everything we do as software engineers and tech people. This is not a new debate. For example, there were debates about who should be culpable for the German death machine in WW2. Guards at the camp? Absolutely. Civilians at IG Farben who are making Zyklon-B? Do they know what it's being used for? Do they have any choice in the matter?
My personal opinion is that anyone continuing to work for Palantir can no longer plead ignorance. You're actively contributing to profiting from killing, starving and torturing civilians. Do with that what you will. In a just world, you'd have to answer for your actions at The Hague or Nuremberg 2.0, ultimately.
[1]: https://www.business-humanrights.org/es/%C3%BAltimas-noticia...
[2]: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
[3]: https://www.businessinsider.com/israel-ai-system-wheres-dadd...
They should stick to african warlords, maybe they can make a difference there.
Imagine slapping Putin in handcuffs when he touches down in any Western country, rather than the glad-handing and photo ops he gets now.
Dictators play democracies off each other. International law is in part about solving a coordination problem.
I would argue that by going after Israel in such a blatantly biased way the ICC and the UN have fallen to precisely the sort of groups you want to use them against.
Not saying the ICC can't be useful, you would just have to massively limit the scope of their "authority" to realistic targets. I.e. South American dictators and various warlords. And of course islamic terrorists.
Plenty of international law works because it actually serves a useful purpose for states like shipping. Countries don't like domestic terrorists and crime organisations. They would also prefer africa to be developed so they can trade.
There is no state organised war crimes going on, just normal war. If you can't understand the distinction that's your problem not mine. In my opinion Israels actions in Gaza fall well within the actions of a legitimate war, to the extent warfare can be legitimised. I'm not commenting on individual cases, and anyway those are not relevant to my argument.
The point of the ICC is to resolve this sort of question via a thorough legal process, just like we have in so many democracies around the world. Israel wouldn't be on trial, Netanyahu would. I presume you are talking about him at least. And if he is innocent then he should have his day in court.
And yes, fully embracing the ICC would be a radical shift for the entire world. We would be bringing in a lot of people other than just Netanyahu. The idea is that no one is above the law, no matter how important they may be.
Unless you’re saying that the country behind a self-evaluated >80% civilian to combatant kill ratio in Gaza went through rigorous protocols to minimize harm in this attack?
Also, Israel has not "self-evaluated" a >80% civilian to combatant kill ratio. There was a Haaretz report that said the IDF was able to ID about 20% of those killed as militants against known databases, which is remarkably high compared to any other war. That doesn't mean the remaining 80% are civilians, it just means they weren't ID'd against a databse. So this includes anyone with a gun at a distance. Do you think Ukraine has a database of Russian soldiers and are able to ID 20% of the russian soldiers they kill against that database? Of course not. Israel's self evaluation of the ratio varies between 1.4:1 and 2:1 depending on the government official you quote.
Re: location - They exploded everywhere you can think of, while these targets were doing civilian activities near other civilians, and not in a combat setting.
Re: possession - Given the above, and Israel’s horrendous kill ratio, there was definitely no consideration for possession of these pagers at the time of the attack. For example, who is to say that some pagers weren’t in use by members of the political bureau, or unofficially resold to a hospital for use by oncall doctors?
Zero? The whole nature of the attack shows consideration towards "minimizing civilian harm." Tricking an enemy agent into carrying a small explosive device on his person, then detonating it, will have far less civilian harm than the standard procedure of dropping a bomb on whatever building they happen to be in.
Your thinking appears unreasonably binary here, as shown by your use of phrases like "zero consideration" and "definitely no consideration," in reaction to Israel not meeting an unrealistically high standard for "minimizing civilian harm." Could Israel have done more to minimize civilian harm with that attack? Perhaps, but that doesn't mean they did nothing.
location - they all exploded on the person of hezbolllah leaders or in their possession in a belligerent country during wartime
possession - Israel has a laudable and low civilian: militant kill ratio, possibly the best in the history of modern combat. The pagers were encrypted military devices with military messages, there was no known use by doctors or non Hezbollah operatives.
I don’t think this attack could have been more moral or justified than it was. It didn’t even kill on large numbers, instead it was just enough to neutralize Hezbollahs command and control structures.
The negation would be evil(x) and do(x) by DeMorgan's law.
If what you mean is all(x), evil(x) -> not(do(x))
then the negation would be exists(x), evil(x) and do(x).
Also did they really call it Operation Grim Beeper? Hilarious if true (but I suspect not given how codenames are meant to work).
> Yet what is the result, the gain to humanity, of this wonderfully regulated society which has been built solely to make life richer? Millions are on the verge of starvation, hundreds of thousands are spending their lives in producing instruments for the destruction of human life, and millions again are wasting their existence in a dull tragedy of monotony. In every great industrial centre where wealth is most plentifully produced, there is poverty and want. In the rich town where no production is carried on, there is plenty and enjoyment. He who labours hard or produces wealth is in poverty, he who lives in idleness is rich. When the warehouses are full, there is want and hunger. Those without food are forbidden to produce because the demand is already supplied. [0]
I highlighted the part that relates to Palantir and most everyone on here reading HN (except you, of course, you're special :))
Which is to say this is nothing new and discussing the minutia of did this specific company do this specific thing when the system that makes this inevitable remains unaddressed is missing the point.
Oh well, politics for 99% of people seems to amount to gossip. Did you hear what X said/did? Oh my god, I can't believe it, etc, etc.
[0] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/george-barrett-the-a...
I doubt Palantir had any involvement, just trying to get some credit. The operation to attack the supply chain was started long before Palantir had grown and could offer something.
(The device and procurement details here are from Reuters).
So no, I don't think your point about doctors and medical workers is well taken.
It was an attack on civilians in pursuit of a non-military political goal. Terrorism. I think it was pretty successful on the terms of the people who carried it out but call it what it is.
You cannot seriously call it an attack "on civilians" - you especially cannot say that it's in pursuit of a non-military goal when it kicked off a literal military operation by crippling Hezbollah communications and (literally crippling) hundreds/thousands of their fighters before a land invasion of the southern border areas of Lebanon. And in any case, all war is politics.
> Fatima was in the kitchen on Tuesday when a pager on the table began to beep, her aunt said. She picked up the device to bring it to her father and was holding it when it exploded, mangling her face and leaving the room covered in blood, she said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/world/middleeast/lebanon-...
seems like you like being sarcastic, but don't know basic stuff even 15 year olds know
I didn't claim that they were particularly lethal. In fact, they were not particularly lethal. Thousands of pagers exploded and only 12 people were killed despite these devices being held directly up to the face or against the skin (pockets).
They were as close to non-lethal incapacitation, even against targets, as it is possible to get in war. When even the targets are rarely killed by the explosion, obviously that results in fewer unintended victims being hurt/killed.
stark constrast to hezbollah's direct attack on civilians:
1. directly targeted civilians 2. direct action (not remote) 3. intentionally brutal (beheadings, rapes)
...what are they, animals?
pager attack is, however scary it looks, rather more "reserved and gentlemen-ly way" of doing things:
1. targeted hezbolla militants (would average civilian use walkietalkie?) 2. indirect action
for anyone saying otherwise, how more "gentlemen-ly" should israel be? do nothing? "talk" with the leaders? waste more precious lives by directly sending troops without any prior action?
I just don't get why people talk negatively about the walkietalkie boomboom campaign -- it's a masterpiece of "trying the most not to kill civilians but doing your job"
They masquerade as civilians and use civilians as shields. This is why we have regular uniformed soldiers and separate places for them to do their military shit.
It's what "israel" specializes in. When you read the history of "israel", it's literally a series of acts of terrorism.
I think people just want to blame without analyzing what else could be blamed to. Really it’s most of the free software community too.
Disclaimer: I don’t consider what Israel did unlawful. They were under attack by hezb and Hamas. They were within rights to retaliate. And no, hezb and Hamas don’t care about civilian casualties.
But they won’t. And I’m fine with that. My point is foundations have licensing power while corporations regulate it through sales. Each decision is connected to money. And no one is going to say no to more money.
Anyways, it's war against a known terrorist group.