Back when Google's motto was "Do no evil" we used to joke about Palantir embracing the opposite ethos.

Would that be "Do all evil" or "Do exclusively evil" or "Do no good"?

Do Evil, Yes!

Was this by chance a "No, money down!" Simpsons reference?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yuL6PcgSgM

I actually consider the pager attack to be legal. There's obviously criticism of it, but I'm fairly sure you're allowed to do this kind of thing by laws of war.

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.

Attacking a civilian population is a war crime.

* * *

“Expected” is not enough. These bombs didn’t go off in active war zone. They went off in public in Lebanon, and maimed and killed civilians.

The principle of proportionality is explicitly about expectations, i.e. expected military advantage vs expected collateral damage.

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.

The latitude you wankers expect is absolutely incredible ... talking of impossible standards around "zero collateral damage" after what Israel has done in Gaza et al ...

That's like planting a bomb in front of a military camp. You might have a target, but in the end you just kill whoever was nearby at that time. In the case of the pager attack, that includes children aged 11 and 12, as well as a nurse.

That's much closer to a terrorist attack than to legal warfare.

You cannot quarantee who is holding the pager at the moment of explosion.

There might be some potential legal defense in terms of proportionality of collateral damage but it's so thin here as to be absurd.

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.

there is 0 war crimes that IDF has been found guilty of by any legal authority.

There's no central enforcement of international war crime law, so this thread on legal technicalities isn't particularly relevant in real terms, but there is at least an arrest warrant out for the (former) Minister for Defence & Prime Minister in 124 countries, so there's not a lot of room for ambiguity here.

"It's not a war crime the first time!"

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.

War crime laws only apply to poorer nations sadly

Targeting here goes beyond reasonable expectation from a military at war. Compare that to the russian terror of lobbing 500kg bombs at random housing blocks.

Does it? Do you have any data on how many of these devices ended up in civilian hands?

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?

A year on, some Lebanese bystanders hurt in Israel’s pager attack still recovering... Over 3,400 were wounded when devices belonging to Hezbollah members exploded https://www.timesofisrael.com/a-year-on-some-lebanese-bystan...

@dang why is this downvoted? Because I'm including a link to an Israely newspaper? Replying to a question asked? I don't include any opinion!

All I can tell you is that users downvoted it. As to why - your guess is as good as mine, though there are sometimes clues in the replies.

Afaik they intercepted a shipment for Hamas members only

Ignoring that it was Hezbollah, not Hamas, I would point out that many of Hezbollah members are civilians.

Members of an organization that shoots missiles over international borders and stockpiles arms cannot be called civilians.

That would apply to Americans and Israelis too.

I'm not a member of any American military or political organization that takes any kind of military action.

Or the Israeli terror of lobbing 2000lb bombs at random housing blocks for that matter.

I suspect that "random housing block" was on top of some non-random tunnels full of non-uniformed military intentionally using the occupants of those houses as human shields.

Otherwise there's no reason to use such a large bomb on some houses.

The people those pagers were given to were NOT civilians. They were active members of Hezbollah.

Tell that to the dead civillians

Like the 12 Syrian Druze children Hezbollah killed in this attack? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majdal_Shams_attack

The intended targets of the exploding papers weren't civilians. Very few actual civilians ended up hurt by the detonations, much fewer than attacks by conventional weapons. It's about as targeted an attack as one can achieve from a distance.

As an act of warfare, Israel did a splendid job on this. Thoroughly impressive work.

People tend to easily forget that the civilian casualty ratio for conventional warfare is around 50%

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.

Very few actual civilians ended up hurt by the detonations, much fewer than attacks by conventional weapons.

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.

The reports are 4,000 wounded and 12 killed unintended targets

Which reports? According to whom? Hezbollah?

"The reports" are that 12 were killed total, not that 12 civilians were killed. Only 2 of the killed were civilians as far as I can tell. Several of those who people on Twitter tried to claim were civilians, including a doctor, were admitted by Hezbollah to be Hezbollah members and given Hezbollah funerals.

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.

Incorrect. The reports are 42 total killed, 12 civilians including 2 children.

"Operation Grim Beeper" (seriously) on Wikipedia cites these numbers from Lebanese government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lebanon_electronic_device...

Fair enough, 12 total only includes the original pager attack, not the subsequent radio one. However, you seem to have made the same mistake. 42 people were killed total, but that does not mean that there were 42 targets.

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.

I didn't say 42 targets.

Per the report: 42 dead, 12 of which were civilians. It follows that 30 were considered Hezbollah.

The figure of merit in a military strike is casualties, not KIA; it's the "wounded" part you actually care about (in fact, in some tactical situations, wounding is preferable to killing, as it ties up adversary logistical resources).

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.

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.

Hezbollah is a legal political party in Lebanon. This is an important detail buddy.

For the IDF, a 28.6% civilian death rate is actually quite good. Their own classified data reveals an 83% civilian casualty rate in Gaza—nearly three times worse.

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).

there is no classified idf data of 83% civilian casualty rate. there is data that idf can identify by name 17% of casualties as hamas/etc member. if there are 10 people with machine guns and rpg and you blow them up with a bomb, they don't become civilians just because you don't know their names

You understate your point: the 83% rate is much, much more than 3x worse. To kill 100 intended targets, a 28.6% civilian death rate means you'll need to kill `N / (100 + N) = 0.286` (N = 40.06) civilians. With an 83% civilian death rate, to kill 100 intended targets, you need to kill `N / (100 + N) = 0.83` (N = 488) civilians. It is about 12x worse to have an 83% civilian death rate compared to a 28.6% rate.

in order to kill 42 targets.

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.

You're telling me that the 2,800 injured were mostly Hezbollah operatives? Was this sourced and verified anywhere? What is the rate of combatant to non-combatant casualties is this instance compared to "conventional weapons"?

The IDF is only able to kill 17 people they classify as "Hamas" for every 100 people they kill in Gaza (per their own internal reports). They have a self assessed 83% civilian kill rate.

Not true. The "classification" is combatants killed and identified by the IDF with first & last name. There's a larger un-identified group of combatants due to Hamas fighting in civilian clothes, and falsely claiming all deaths are civilian

The issue is using civil infrastructure as weapon, that could arguably be an act of terror. As pagers are rarely used in non-criminal settings, i guess this is somewhat okay in my opinion, but the callousness and overall reactions (proudness, smugness) of israelis and most of the west on this near-terror attack is in my opinion another proof of a lack of empathy that is starting to be pervasive in our societies.

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.

Yes, since conveniently the attacker also gets to define who is a civilian.

When one quotes Health Ministry for numbers of casualties and deaths, that is relying on HAMAS for information. To knowingly use sources that have demonstratbly be shown to be false, inaccurate, or misleading makes one also unreliable.

Did it only focus on Hezbollah military officials? Hezbollah is a political party. This is like package bombing US congressmen, Presidential cabinet members, etc. Which would be considered a terrorist attack obviously (and was when Israel sent our politicians, including our President, mailbombs shortly after WW2)

It's technically and sort of a political party. It's also an occupying military force in Lebanon; it is foremost an instrument of the IRGC. It's useful to understand that Hezbollah is Shia-supremacist organization, and Shia muslims constitute a minority of the Lebanese population.

That doesn't really distinguish it from Israel's government. s/Lebanon/Palestine/g, s/IRGC/USA/g, and s/Shia/Jewish/g

All of the arguments I've seen supporting this attack focus on the idea that it's fine to kill and maim civilians including children as long as you will probably get some combatants. It's a little bit open to interpretation, I guess, and I'm not a legal expert so fine, ok.

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.

It's not really a "mundane daily object" though. It's a communications device that's issued to people on the Hezbollah private communications network. It's only accessible to non-combatants if they are (1) in the Hezbollah hierarchy in a non-combatant role, or (2) the person with the pager was exercising poor operational security and letting someone else handle their pager.

letting someone else handle their pager

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?

A pager is not a phone. Pagers and portable radios are not multi-purpose devices. You can't watch Frozen on a pager.

The prohibitions on booby-traps are that they're indiscriminant, not that they involve mundane objects.

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.

Given the apparently-terrible injury-to-death ratio, another angle to attack the legality of the action might be that the weapons were first and foremost effective at maiming, not killing, which is generally frowned upon by the laws of war (if they were intended as lethal, their success on that front was so bad it might fall into "guilty through incompetence" sort of territory)

(I agree the targeting per se seems to have been remarkably good for the world of asynchronous warfare—or even conventional warfare)

What would you prefer? Israeli tanks blowing their way through families and bombing beirut to rubble to get at the Hezbolla terrorists? War was inevitable, the amazing actions of the mossad mitigated hundreds if not thousands of civilian casualties. What is your complaint, that they booby trapped the communications devices used exclusively by Hezbolla and not, i don't know, their kalashnikovs?

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)

Probably most of the people who have done terrorism or war crimes would also claim they didn't have any alternatives. It's not my role to find alternatives to terrorism or war crimes, I am just a person on the internet pointing out that terrorism or war crimes have been done.

I don't know if it's "legal" or not and by who's laws, but it certainly seems like terrorism to me (i.e. intentionally creating a state of terror).

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".

I think this was a brilliant operation and perfectly lawful. I also think that if Lebanon (not Hezbollah) were in a state of war with Israel, yes, that would (depending on proportionality and target discrimination) be perfectly legal, too.

perfectly lawful

Are you a lawyer / expert in conflicts? If not, curious how you arrived at this conclusion.

No, I am not a lawyer. Does that preclude my having an opinion on the value and legality of a military strike? Anyway it seems to me that it was:

  - 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

Passes the smell test to me.

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?

Passes the smell test to me

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.

Words mean things. "Perfectly lawful" means just that? And so, I was curious.

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.

Targeted attacks against military/militia leadership is not terrorism - almost by definition.

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.

Two things

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.

When Ukraine assassinates a Russian general with a car bomb, is that "terrorism" or is that just a targeted killing of a military leader during a war? Do you think this is somehow morally problematic beyond the typical standards of war?

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.

When Ukraine assassinates a Russian general with a car bomb, is that "terrorism" or is that just a targeted killing of a military leader during a war?

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".

No it wouldn't, as long as the target is military and you didn't have opportunity to killed him in base it is fine. At most you could complain it is violates proportionality however no car bomb would kill 100 people. Not to mention your analogy is flawed - hezobllah doesn't have any marked bases.

No it wouldn't, as long as the target is military and you didn't have opportunity to killed him in base it is fine.

"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.

Terrorism doesn't mean "anything that makes someone scared," or else all wars would be acts of terrorism.

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.

So you're arguing if the US declared war on Venezuela, that Venezuela could just use a drone to blow up the US president and that's just how war should work from now on?

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.

While I'm only adding to the choir of people telling you "of course," since I'm directly the person you're responding to it still feels worth saying: yes, of course, if America and Venezuela went to war, it's completely legal for Venezuela to attempt to kill the U.S. President.

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.

Well you need to actually think about what you're saying here. Suppose for example China/Israel/whoever is the first to invent really, really great drones (like the size of a bird or even a bumblebee) that are lethal.

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.

No. Generals are always legitimate military targets.

So let me just understand your position here. Suppose the US declares war on Venezuela. Suppose a venezuelan living in America just looks up a bunch of US generals addresses online, and then sets all their houses on fire killing them in their sleep in their McMansions in suburbia.

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.

I'm pretty sure even that is allowed, yes.

Obviously he must wear a uniform while actually conducting the attack though.

The Geneva Convention ought to have something to say about how a general may and may not be attacked.

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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions

The Geneva Convention ought to have something to say about how a general may and may not be attacked.

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?

There are indeed actors who only respect might. That is not universal. Preaching might is right is also not universal.

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.

No, generals in an operational military force are definitionally combatants, and cannot in fact be "terrorized".

The issue is that Israel has no idea where those pagers were at the time of the attack, civilians were directly hurt by the explosions: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/survivors-of-israels-page...

You think you are not allowed to do a military strike if civilians may be hurt?

Your comment is nonsense. What do you mean by “allowed”? Who is enforcing the rules of what is “allowed” and what isn’t? The fact is that Israel carried out an attack that severely harmed civilians. The question is whether it was targeted or whether it constitutes terrorism.

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?

did, in effect, target civilians.

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.

I agree with your last point, but tbh, the exact idea of "targeted" is splitting hairs IMO. I'm not arguing that civilians were the primary target, but not caring that they were around, and being fine with their death as long as the combatant was dead, in my view makes it seem that Israel's enemies are not the combatants of Hezbollah, but generally just the Lebanese people.

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?

Israel had in fact very clear intelligence that the specific pagers they were detonating were overwhelmingly going to be in the custody of combatants. This was very probably the most precisely targeted large-scale military strike of the last 100 years. That's not a value judgement; it's a descriptive claim.

Twelve civilians killed and 4,000 injured does not indicate a precise attack.

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...

Right, if in fact 1500 Hezbollah fighters were injured, any claim that over 1500 noncombatants were injured is suspicious. We have video footage of the explosions (along with a directional sense of the wounded vs. KIA count of the strike). It is not plausible that more noncombatants were injured than combatants, given the pagers were strictly military comms devices.

Both the 1500 and 4000 number were confirmed by Lebanon, and no reputable watch organization has credibly disputed them, you're not citing evidence just conjecture on how you believe everything went down due to a relative small bits of information.

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 have any sources at all for your assertion “This was very probably the most precisely targeted large-scale military strike of the last 100 years”? It is hard to engage with your statement in any reasonable fashion without knowing where you are getting your information.

Just start from the premise that Israel targeted exclusively handheld military comms devices that would in ordinary practice only be in the custody of Hezbollah combatants, and from the additional premise that the explosions in the strikes were relatively small, so small that the overwhelming majority of the Hezbollah casualties were wounded and not KIA. Then try to make another story make sense.

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 1: The pagers were military devices, but based on what we know about them, it is impossible to assert that all were in the custody of Hezbollah combatants at the moment they exploded. One would need to prove that the pagers were physically on the combatants’ persons—and not, for example, sitting on a coffee table or elsewhere—at the time of detonation.

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?

Here is an excellent and HN-worthy writeup of the argument for legality, and the counterargument that it was an improper booby trap.[1] It seems to me most of the polarizarion on this board could have been avoided had the original article recognized (as does the one linked here) "that the legality or illegality of the pagers attack can only be determined on the basis of a detailed factual analysis and that the relevant facts are still not fully known."

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 disagree with @dang's decision to leave the original link up, as it is nearly valuless in framing this discussion

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?

Zionists don't care about civilian casualties. It's extremely well documented. They even defend the explicit rape of their "prisoners". They will just explain them away as Hamas sympathizers and people will shrug their shoulders and move on.

I, like roughly 90% of the world's jews, am a zionist and I care about civilian casualties. In fact, I don't know a single zionist who doesn't care about civilian casualties. You just made up this racist nonsense, and your comment is totally inappropriate for HN.

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.

Targeted attacks against military/militia leadership is not terrorism - almost by definition.

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".

The reason foreign military organizations don't routinely target active duty US military generals isn't that they're worried about being dragged into some mostly-fictitious courtroom to answer for their misdeeds. It's that the United States armed forces will very quickly reduce their entire organization, and much of the surrounding area, to its combustion products.

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.

US military ... worried about being dragged into some mostly-fictitious courtroom to answer for their misdeeds...

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 ...

The Idea of the Nation-State Is Synonymous With Genocide: A conversation with political theorist Mahmood Mamdani (2024), https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/mahmood-mamdani-na...

And all I have to do to operationalize this logic is to accept the premise that the idea of a nation-state is synonymous with genocide.

At least we've established it is capable of inflicting undeserved "annihilation". That's a start ;)

Of course, by Mamdani's logic here we're fully justified in mobilizing force on the scale of the Allied war in Europe during WW2 against any and every nation-state for the crime of being a nation-state. Go ahead and bomb Dresden again out of nowhere, because the nation-state is genocide!

Go ahead and bomb Dresden again out of nowhere, because the nation-state is genocide!

This is the 2nd time "[bomb] Dresden" at 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

(from the book's Introduction):

  ... Nuremberg effectively depoliticized Nazism, saddling responsibility for Nazi violence with particular men and ignoring the fact that these men were engaged in the project of political modernity on behalf of a constituency: the nation, the volk. The Allies who prosecuted individual Nazis at Nuremberg were invested in ignoring Nazism's political roots ... After the war, the Allies engaged in many atrocities similar to those the Germans had ... Germans were loaded onto the same cattle cars the Nazis used to transport Jews to concentration, labor, and death camps ... Some half a million Germans died amid the ethnic cleansing.

  ... If Nazism had been understood not as a crime but as a political project of the nation-state, there may yet have been a place for Jews in Europe, in denationalized states committed to the equal protection of every citizen. However, because the response to Nazism took the nation-state for granted, the solution for the Jews turned out to be the nation-state, again.

 ... South Africans didn't give up their cultural identities and reject diversity. They rejected the politicization of diversity. Decolonizing the political through the recognition of a shared survivor identity does not require that we all pretend we are the same; far from it. It requires that we stop accepting that our differences should define who benefits from the state and who is marginalized by it.

How are all acts of war not “intentionally creating a state of terror?”

I don't whether something is terrorism as something that's relevant for whether it's allowed by the laws of war.

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.

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?

Terrorism targets civilians. So no, this isn't terrorism.

I actually consider the pager attack to be legal.

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.

Legal or not it makes me afraid of Israeli technology.

I don't want to be part of their collateral damage.

Don't kill their citizens, don't launch rockets at them. Don't socialize with people that do.

It's quite clearly a war crime. You're putting booby trapped devices into supply chains where civilians will foreseeably get them and be injured or killed by them. This includes medical professionals and their families, who were both victims [1].

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...

Would you be here pushing the war crime narrative if Hamas had pulled off this operation on the IDF?

One of the most sucessful integelligence operations ever, absolutely brilliant. And the brilliance in my opinion is that the targeting was not your regular Hizbollah terrorists but only higher ranking members the one who were given the beepers. So basically cutting the head of the snake.

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 brilliance in the targeting was in doing pagers, which are disproportionately carried by doctors and other medical workers. One of the most effective acts of terrorism in history.

You seem to be under the impression that they targeted pagers that were distributed through civilian channels. These were pagers that were purchased BY Hezbollah to be used on Hezbollah's private, secure network, not on a public network. These were not pagers used by a hospital for normal healthcare work. Healthcare workers were carrying these pagers because Hezbollah effectively serves as a shadow state in Lebanon. So if a healthcare worker had one of these pagers, it was because they were part of that hierarchy.

Again, so what? You aren't off the hook because of the actions of your enemies. It was obvious these would be going off around civilians, in homes and public spaces, including hospitals, and they chose to go through with the attack knowing this. That the civilians who would be around them would have no particular reason to fear or suspect this attack, because the vector was a common daily object.

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.

It wasn't a non-military political goal. It had a military purpose of taking out the communications network and personnel of a group that was actively engaged in combat.

this

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"

We literally have videos of these going off in public spaces. The explosions were weak enough that people literally inches away were unharmed. The only way to be seriously injured is to be holding it in your hands or against your body.

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.

Such amazingly precise bombs that they can kill Hezbollah leadership with effectiveness while "people literally inches away were unharmed". Maybe tone down the rhetoric some.

The explosions were in fact strong enough that innocent people, including children, died https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lebanon_electronic_device...

That doesn't necessarily mean the blast radius was large. The 9 year old was killed while holding the pager.

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-...

Oh, I didn't know this. Innocent people were still killed and maimed by shrapnel. The other children aged 11 was killed when his father's pager detonated

Palantir ended up having to rent a second-floor building that housed its Tel Aviv office, to accommodate the intelligence analysts who needed tutorials

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.

I think Foundry is insanely impressive tbh. If you set it up correctly, its insanely powerful

I second that. My company is really changing its point of view on data at scale thanks to their tools. [note: SAP announces DataSphere for 2026, and their stack is surprisingly similar :)]

An ERP where instead of investing in building up your in-house domain experts, your pay consulting fees to train another company's staff on the knowledge, then pay to access it.

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?

Maybe they aren’t optimizing for user experience and are instead optimizing for how much data they can suck into their central db?

you have to wonder, if they weren't the only tech firm willing to engage w/ DOD, would they survive in a more competitive atmosphere?

Yeah sure. Seems like a big leap from "they use Palintir's software" to implying that it was somehow important for this attack.

Also did they really call it Operation Grim Beeper? Hilarious if true (but I suspect not given how codenames are meant to work).

[flagged]

This conversation already has comments on one side flagged to invisibility. If you are going to allow these conversations, but only allow one side, then Hacker News is not about discussion but about what?

If there are flagged comments which are not breaking the site guidelines, I'd like links to take a look at.

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.

Dude, your flag function is abused to no end, and you don't really do anything about it. One of the earliest comments I've made was one on semi-recent X11 history, and got flagged for it, because apparently everything is political now.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45796728

I agree with you that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45796728 should not have been flagged, and have fixed that now.

The post isn't the point. The point is that you have people abusing the flag mechanism. Maybe you should start ignoring their flags when they abuse it?

That's already implemented. I overused flagging at one point in my account history and my flags stopped having any effect. I eventually emailed the moderators and pledged to be more judicious with my flagging if they'd give me the power back, and they gave it back.

At least one of mine, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46219068

The last sentence breaks the site guidelines.

OK, sure. How 'bout this one? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46221729

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=46221729 sounds like cross-examining to me.

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.

The point isn't so much to litigate each flagged comment, just to highlight how pervasive the flag abuse problem is. And of course, when the flag abusers 'defect' and gain some utility, it is only rational for the 'victims' to themselves defect from the civil conversation and start to abuse flags.

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 don't assess it that way. In any case, I am certain that turning off flags on controversial topics would have a devastating effect. To me that's like saying "let's turn off the immune system for the most fatal viruses".

Hi @dang. Here is a factual comment of mine that does not break the rules which, along with many other comments on one side of the Israel/Palestine issue, was unnecessarily and unjustifiably flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45832233

I think that one is borderline but, in the context of a topic this divisive, borderline is not so bad, so I've unflagged it.

95% of flagged comments don't break guidelines in any given discussion. flagging been used forever to silence "inconvenient facts" and "dissenting opinions"

as example, just below there is reply to you saying that flagging been abused, been flagged

95% of flagged comments don't break guidelines in any given discussion

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.

Can expound on what software did this on its own?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46218945

That one doesn't seem to violate the rules, and there is a lot of discussion below it.

There are no useful discussion to be had on such topics as war in Isreal, Donald Trump (be it "stolen elections", or foreign politics), or Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

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.

There are no useful discussion to be had on such topics

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).

You might believe there are useful discussions to be had, but when a faction of readers like the GP flag or downvote every thread they don’t like, then it’s impossible to have any conversation, no matter how much good faith is brought to bear.

Manually appealing to dang for unflagging is not a workable solution either.

This really is an entirely unsuitable forum for this discussion.

It shouldn't be the case that people acting in bad faith can disrupt meaningful discussion between people acting in good faith. I am at a loss to suggest a better forum. Town halls, protests, talking to people on the street, Congress, etc, are not able to have these discussions either.

Maybe this is not the forum, but then what is? A philosophy class you took ten years ago?

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.

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.

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.

So, what exactly did Palantir provide? I'm staying out of commenting whether or not this was legal/justified and asking strictly what service this was that was sold.

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.

Most likely as a data lakehouse, but the Palantir angle is most likely overstated - Palantir has a tiny presence in Israel, and has had a history of overstating it's intel and defense credentials (eg. A three letter agency that churned Palantir was named for years after before they stopped calling them out).

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.

Thanks for attempting to answer what I was asking about. I have had difficulty finding out more about it, the alleged ex-Palantir commenter said this would be part of their Gotham product, but most of what I could find on that was buzzword data visualization stuff. If their old post history and what you're saying is accurate, then it's really just a database integration tool with a nice interface?

Their association with defense comes from the fact they got their start in industry thanks to in-q-tel which literally has the purpose of funding technology for the CIA and intelligence agencies. So it would not be surprising if they were heavily intertwined in that world.

I believe 972mag.com have reported on Palentir tech involved in the "AI target selection" programs that the Israeli military has used in Gaza. My recollection is they use a logic similar to the subprime ratings agency scandal: collate info on individuals (cell tower proximity, movement patterns, social media leanings), and find the top 5% of target candidates, call those "high quality" regardless of any absolute metric of quality, and then rubber-stamp approve air strikes on their homes by the human lawyers "in the loop" -- then repeat with the next top 5% and call those "high quality" again. The implication was that Palentir worked on the ranking system itself. (The 5% is arbitrary here, a stand-in for whatever top slice they do use)

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

Having being working as a direct competitor to Palantir on and off for the past decade, I'd guess one of their embedded engineers wrote a few custom SQL queries.

I’ve said this before and cannot be said enough. Palantir is a data platform. I think they optimize for knowledge graphs (ontology). It has several uses. It’s seems to be fashionable to blame Palantir these days. But then wouldn’t you also blame other things - Java and database open source, Python, Linux foundation, etc. for all this.

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.

Palintir is people, specifically people who are tasked with onboarding customers to use the data platform. They get to choose their users in a way that Java and Linux do not. (I hold no ill will against them, I'd rather Israel win than the other guys)

For those curious, you can find videos of what Palantir Gotham is on YouTube. It might help you be more informed before you post here.

"please verify that you're feeling something different—quite different—from anger and a desire to fight this war."

Um, why is it inappropriate to be outraged that international humanitarian lwas are actively being violated by Israel, in Gaza?

I don't think they're saying it's inappropriate. It seems like they're saying this isn't the place to share your outrage.

Inappropriate and “this isn’t the place” are synonyms.

Why is it inappropriate to be outraged that international humanitarian laws are actively being violated by Israel, in Gaza? Can someone help me understand?

There are a few different angles to this.

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...

* * *

So the indiscriminate mass detonation of explosive devices is not terrorism? Are you aware of how many civilian casualties there were as a result of this attack? Would this be acceptable if Hezbollah did this to Israeli military officers?

The attack was by definition discriminate. I don't think there's an attack in modern history that was more targeted and had less collateral damage. The attack targeted hundreds Hezbollah leaders, who bought and used those pagers. There was minimal collateral damage among civilians amounting to unverified allegations that a child of a Hezbollah member was maimed, and some minor other damage. The explosives in the pagers were measured in grams, and the explosions were relatively small, specifically to minimize collateral damage.

It was indiscriminate in timing, location, and device possession.

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?

The timing was during a war, the location was in a belligerent country, and the pagers were only and exclusively given to hezbollah leadership. The very definition of discriminate.

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: timing - They were triggered to explode en masse, which implies that there was zero consideration to minimizing civilian harm.

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?

timing - The fact that they were triggered to explode en masse does not imply there was zero consideration to minimizing civilian harm. However, the fact that only Hezbollah leaders had these pagers, and the fact that the explosives were small, does imply there was deep consideration to minimizing civilian harm.

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.

Re: timing - They were triggered to explode en masse, which implies that there was zero consideration to minimizing civilian harm.

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.

Would you call it terrorism when Israel sent mailbombs to US top brass, including our president?

This has not happened anywhere other than your imagination. You mean "if" not "when."

Fortunately, it was well documented. Per the New York Times:

https://www.nytimes.com/1972/12/02/archives/letterbombs-mail...

This is what you call "well-documented"? Did you even read the article?

This 1972 article cites unsubstantiated claims from memoirs written decades after the fact — not verified evidence. There is no solid historical documentation that Israel, the Israeli government, or even Lehi sent functional bombs to U.S. leadership in 1947. The only sources are anecdotal, inconsistent, and disputed.

Crucially, there are no Secret Service or National Archives records of any assassination attempt on Truman by Zionist militants. A Freedom of Information Act request for such records produced nothing. Historians who have looked into the claim find no contemporaneous evidence and no confirmation in government archives.

In other words, this is not a "documented Israeli attack on the U.S." Instead, it’s a story that survives (in spite of evidence that it's false) in the minds and narratives of people like you want it to be true. That’s how conspiracy theories work: weak evidence, strong emotion.

Ok, so I see you're taking a denialist approach. At best you will have to settle on "well they sure did send them to a bunch of British politicians, and ya know, they did carry out the King David Hotel bombing that killed 91 people via terrorism, and they did plan on terrorist bombing a bunch of Westerners and Arabs to blame it on communists and Muslim Brotherhood (the Lavon Affair) before getting caught, but they definitely didn't send them to Truman we pinky promise".

This isn't even the most outrageous thing Lehi and Irgun did (trying to partner with Hitler against the British might take that) before the Israeli government disbanded them and merged most of them into the IDF when they no longer needed to terrorize the West.

Correct. I am taking a denialist approach toward an absurd conspiracy theory that has been thoroughly debunked.

What you’re doing instead is substituting facts for relevance. You went from a false claim (“Israel mailed bombs to Truman”) to a pile-on of unrelated historical violence, as if proving Jews committed any political violence somehow rescues your earlier claim for which there is zero evidence. It doesn’t.

On the facts: – Irgun carried out the King David Hotel bombing against a building housing British military command, intelligence, police, and civil administration. Civilian staff were killed. That qualifies as terrorism by modern definitions. I’m not defending it. – Lehi was a tiny, radical splinter group widely condemned at the time, including by mainstream Jewish leadership. – In 1941, Lehi produced one fringe document proposing that a future Jewish state and Germany shared a common enemy in Britain. The proposal was ignored. There was no alliance, no cooperation, no operational contact. Calling this “trying to partner with Hitler” is dishonest.

None of this provides evidence that Israel, any Zionist organization, or any Jewish group attempted to assassinate a U.S. president. The fact that some groups committed real crimes does not magically make the crimes you invented true.

Conflating Irgun with Lehi, anti-British insurgency with “terrorizing the West,” and an ignored memo with Nazi collaboration isn’t history, it's you polemicizing.

We have the ICC. It was set up by lawyers with subject matter expertise. The liberal democratic nations of the world could decide to start using and empowering that.

What for? To issue arrest warrants against dead terrorists and prime ministers who kill terrorists?

They should stick to african warlords, maybe they can make a difference there.

If fully realized it would mean we actually have international law, including fair trials.

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.

That's just wishful thinking.

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.

How is holding Israel accountable for it's very well documented war crimes "blatantly biased"?

There you go.

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.

HN let this one fall through the cracks I guess. Usually this article would get flagged in under 10 minutes of being up.

The scale of these terrorist attacks seems to be lost by some in the comments here.

Here’s a documentary showing the extent, including all of the undeniable civilians that were injured or killed: https://youtu.be/2mqqDTIs4vE

I am in awe of the opinions in this thread. Really.

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.

Hezbollah stated repeatedly that they would stop attacking Israel if Israel stopped committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. I know I certainly support them.

"our struggle will end only when this entity [Israel] is obliterated".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezbollah

If I were Israel, I would have not invaded Gaza, which would have resulted in far fewer civilian casualties, and also would have ended the strikes by Hezbollah.

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.

The military dynamics of the Israel and Hezbollah conflict are an indictment of Israeli's Gaza campaign. When Israel is clear-eyed, strategic, and effective at confronting a serious military adversary, it looks like the Hezbollah conflict: ultra-targeted rapidly disabling strikes. That Israel instead systematically leveled an entire civilian metropolitan area to combat Hamas makes the the claims about the Hezbollah strike more damning, not less.

Actually it's Hezbollah that has been practicing very targeted, military only strikes against Israel. Israel on the other hand has killed thousands of Lebanese people and displaced over a million. That's just since the Oct 7th attacks. Prior to that Israel carpet bombed Lebanon on multiple occasions.

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