Starker on 24/5/2024 at 22:44

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The world's most moral army can now cross book burnings off the list as its soldiers, among other things, take pictures of them setting fire to a university library:

(https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/military-police-opens-probe-after-soldiers-filmed-themselves-burning-a-quran-and-other-books-in-gaza/)

Cipheron on 17/9/2024 at 19:45

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Well this one is definitely new:

(https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireless-devices-explode-hands-owners-lebanon-hezbollah/story?id=113754706)

(https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/dozens-hezbollah-members-wounded-lebanon-when-pagers-exploded-sources-witnesses-2024-09-17/)



1000s of pager-type devices hand bombs in them. These were used to send text messages because they feared phones were easier for Israel to track. Somebody clearly planted these bombs then set them off, and there wouldn't be many suspects other that Israeli intelligence who have both the motive and capability to plan something like this.

However it doesn't seem like something that would de-escalate the conflict. Whoever did this wants a "shooting war" and to capture land. Possible done by far-right elements in Israel who overlap the government and security forces.

SD on 18/9/2024 at 12:35

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Oh I don't know, I think putting 2,000 terrorists out of action in one fell swoop is a pretty handy way of cooling things off.

demagogue on 18/9/2024 at 14:42

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As for the pagers, if y'all want a deeper dive on this from a lawyers' perspective, well first on the military planning perspective, the tactical and strategic military logic make a surface sense. You put a lot of fighters out of commission and you make the remaining and future fighters paranoid to use tech for communication, disrupting their planning and coordination. I'm not really qualified about the military sense at a deeper level. There's a flavor of this taking a next step into device-based & cyber-attack-like physical attacks, or black op style attacks (using normal-looking devices as weapons) that might be problematic for the military to set as a precedence, but I'd rather listen to what a military expert has to say about the bigger implications than try to speculate. But I think a lot of militaries have been increasingly shying away from black op or hybrid (mixing civilian & military features) style attacks for good reasons, although cyber and information-based attacks is kind of the new frontier in warfare.

Under the laws of war, well if we put it in terms of if there was an actual war crimes trial, the operation on its face violates the principle of discrimination (military operations must distinguish military and civilian targets), since there's no way the Israeli military can know the situation of 100s to 1000s of separate devices at the same moment they push the button to detonate them. There's not even a defense there; the violation is on its face.

There's already cases well legally establishing that using normal-looking devices and hidden boobytraps as weapons (door traps, exploding cigars and pens, etc) violates the principle of discrimination. I think there are also already cases about phone detonated IEDs being indiscriminate (particularly when the caller isn't directly watching the target); and you can't really distinguish this from that line of jurisprudence; or it'd be a challenge for the defense lawyer to try to.

In the wilds of comment sections they're trying to give the defenses that the lethal radius is so short only a wearer would be killed, and the wearers could only have been Hezbollah members. I don't think those defenses could withstand scrutiny in an actual case. To begin with, again, the gov't didn't actually take any measure to discriminate the wearer, so that defense probably fails on its face, and the “blast radius” defense is a kind of wishful thinking you'll in other similar cases that usually doesn't stand up to scrutiny when the device actually gets tested, but I'll grant that's a question of fact that should go to a lab. The non-discriminating mechanism of targeting is sufficient for the legal charge though.

There are people trying to argue that indiscrimination leading to a risk of civilian deaths is justified in the circumstances (e.g., terrorist opponents that themselves use indiscriminate attacks, etc.). That's mixing apples and oranges. They're effectively arguing that it's permissible that some civilians may be killed under proportionality analysis. A targeted strike on a military target may cause civilian casualties that don't make it illegal if they took all reasonable efforts to avoid civilian harm, the number is not disproportionate to the military value of the target, etc. But this case is a discrimination charge, not a disproportionality charge. I'm just saying that's not really a defense in this case.

People are pointing to indiscriminate attacks by Hezbollah, mostly against the Druze kids killed by Hezbollah rockets. Of course that's not a defense to an indiscriminate attack by Israel either, although that is certainly a war crime on Hezbollah's part. There's a deeper layer there as well since the land of those Druze communities was occupied and annexed by Israel, which much of that population opposed, putting them in a similar position as Palestinians in West Bank and Gaza. That's another aspect in the story of ultimately arbitrary discrimination of who gets to be “Israeli” that the government has a duty to protect among very similarly situated peoples, but that discussion has to be for another post. The punchline here is just that indiscriminate or illegal attacks from one's opponents are no defense for your own indiscriminate or illegal attacks.

This is all just about, if there was a case, this is how the case would be rightfully decided, e.g., if you blanked out the names of the parties and looked at it as a law school exam question. The ICC is making some tepid effort to bring arrest warrants against Israeli and Hamas officials that haven't been going anywhere, and even if they were issued there are challenges to enforcing them. But outside of that it's hard to see any actual legal process brought over this or other illegal attacks by Israel or Hamas (hard to imagine Israel would allow any legal process against Hamas without opening itself up to scrutiny), which is another type of problem in itself. And of course Hezbollah is a foreign force based in the territory of Lebanon that the Lebanese gov't has a duty to address, but there are well known barriers to that also; that's another layer of the problem. But even if there's no process or sanction, that's still not making any of these attacks legal (Hamas on Oct 10, Hezbollah's rockets, Israel's pager attack, and countless others).

lowenz on 18/9/2024 at 15:16

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You need to put 200.000 terrorists out of service if you really want to give a blow. 2.000 will be suddenly replaced.