All: before commenting here, please verify that you're feeling something different—quite different—from anger and a desire to fight this war. That is not what HN is for, and destroys what it is for.
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.
Interestingly just nine days ago someone here shared a link to the US's Law of War manual for military personnel. It's pretty good for what it is. Since countries base this stuff on the same international treaties they've all signed, it's a guide to Israel's conduct during war (or just about anyone's) as well as the US's.
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.
I have questions about the concept of legality in a war like the one between Hamas/Hezbollah and Israel. The idea that in a war there can be legal and illegal actions established by international treaties to protect civilians as much as possible can only work if two (or more) legitimate states are fighting each other, with leaders who can be held accountable for the orders they give. 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? At this point, doesn't complying to international treaties only mean further endangering their own population?
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.
> The idea that in a war there can be legal and illegal actions established by international treaties to protect civilians as much as possible can only work if two (or more) legitimate states are fighting each other
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.
This operation was one of the most targeted military operations known in warfare. International law doesn't hold Hezbollah accountable for example. That is the reality today.
Parent meant this as a statement of fact (stating it's x that lies, and implying it's not y, or that x lies more than y). As such (true or not) it makes perfect sense, and requires only a very intuitive and casual understanding to get it.
Your comment reads as if it was some failed attempt at some kind of axiomatic construction (x lies _therefore_ y doesn't).
This is completely false. They fired thousands of missiles directly at civilians. 60,000 people had to evacuate. The only reason they didn't kill thousands of people is because the Iron Dome system is so good.
Your comments have been repeatedly and egregiously breaking the site guidelines. That's not ok, and if you keep doing it we will have to ban your account.
HN's rules don't change based on how right you are or feel you are, or how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.
I'm sorry and will stop but isn't spreading false Hezbollah propaganda against the rules? How are we meant to respond to people saying incredibly wrong things?
The short answer is that you (<-- I don't mean you personally, of course, but all of us) should respond to incorrect information with correct information, to bad arguments with better arguments [1], and do this thoughtfully and respectfully, assuming good faith and so on, as the site guidelines request (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
For a longer answer, I need to clarify the principles we rely on. I'm happy to give that a try, as long as it's clear that I'm not commenting on the specific topic of this thread.
People are allowed to be wrong on Hacker News [2]. They have to be, because we're all more or less wrong about most things.
It's not that the truth doesn't matter—it matters enormously! But it's not the moderators' job to decide what is true vs. false. It's the community's job to hash that out through respectful discussion and debate. Mods couldn't do it even if we wanted to—we don't have a truth meter [3]. Plus the community wouldn't stand for it. There would be a huge backlash against the mods imposing their views on everyone else.
Wrongness is part of hashing out the truth. One needs to be free to visit wrong points in the solution space, or we'd all be trapped in a hell version of the old nine-dot puzzle (the one that spawned the phrase "thinking outside the box") with no solution.
"Spreading false propaganda" is, of course, an extreme case of wrongness, but the right scope for describing the principles here is wrongness-in-general, whether it's being wrong in an extreme way or just ordinary wrong-being.
It's true that posting in bad faith, e.g. saying wrong things despite knowing that they're wrong, is worse than just being mistaken. But can we decide who is and isn't doing this? That would require reading their mind and/or heart, and that's impossible—so we can't use that as a basis for moderation.
Internet readers are too quick to jump to the conclusion that someone else is posting in bad faith. Nearly always, the other person is as sincere as you are. It's just that their background is so different from yours that they've ended up holding an opposing view on a charged topic.
Most people find it hard to tolerate differences of opinion that are outside of a certain radius from their own position. We can call that the "comfort radius". In the past I've called it the "shill threshold" [4]. Past that radius or threshold, i.e. outside one's circle of comfort, it feels impossible that anyone could possibly hold such obviously-wrong views in good faith. The other person must be a shill, a propagandist, or worse. What other explanation could there be?
Well, here's the other explanation: that person has a background different enough from yours/mine/ours that entirely different things feel obvious to them. The world is much bigger and more diverse than your comfort radius, or mine, can easily allow for. If the delta between X's background and mine is big enough, X's views are going to feel not just wrong, but obviously and incredibly wrong, and—as the delta gets larger—appalling, barbaric, and so on.
So what should we do? We should assume good faith, because assuming bad faith is wrong far more often than it is right, and instead work on tolerating the distance between the other person's view and our own. By "tolerating the distance", I don't mean agreeing with them. I mean being willing to endure the discomfort and bad feeling in one's own system (the rage, fear, you name it) that comes up when encountering a view that feels obviously and incredibly wrong.
This is sometimes called "bearing the unpleasant manifestations of others" [5]. It is hard and takes practice. Actually, it's one of the hardest things we have to do, but also one of the most important. (I am not advertising this very attractively, but it does suck.)
To the extent we do it, a kind of metabolic process takes place where one's intense initial reactions get converted into a range where one becomes able to do what I described above: respond to false information with correct information, and to bad arguments with better arguments, while—I'll add one more thing—remaining in good-enough connection with each other.
Or to go back to short-answer mode: if you're hot under the collar, wait till you cool down before posting [6].
You also have been breaking the site guidelines badly by perpetuating this flamewar and by using HN primarily for political battle. That's not ok, and if you keep doing it we will have to ban your account.
HN's rules don't change based on how right you are or feel you are, or how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.
We need you (i.e. everyone) to follow the rules regardless of how others are behaving.
It always feels like the other person started it and did worse (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), so you (i.e. all of us) can't rely on that as a basis for responding. It leads to a downward spiral, and eventually scorched earth.
I agree with you about the previous comment, which was unhelpful, but regarding Hezbollah, I'm afraid you're making claims about things you want to be true more than you are relating any actual research.
It's my fault for picking this scab with you again in the first place, though.
Tptacek has been one of the more reasonable voices on this thread and it is odd you would single him out for criticism. Your use of the word "goybucks" is very concerning.
I apologized for correcting a comment from someone who I believe isn't in a place to discuss the issue, and who would predictably contest the claim --- since we'd already had the same disagreement elsewhere, bringing it up again, however valid my concern was, was bad for the thread. The apology was in no way whatsoever a reflection of my beliefs about what actually happened.
Though: this world's essentially an absurd place to be living in, it doesn't call for bubble withdrawal. I've been told it's a fact of life: men have to kill one another. Well, I say there are still things worth fighting for!
Jews use "goy" as a slur against non-Jews. As a so called "goy", I don't find "goybucks" offensive and in fact appreciate the attempt to reclaim the word.
This is just luridly false, especially (but not exclusively) in the context of Hezbollah's own actions in Syria, where they made and broadcast propaganda videos of them deliberately starving Madaya. When you make claims like this, you call into question everything else you're saying; it's hard to imagine where you could have gotten this notion from.
It's equally true in Israel, where Hezbollah fired tens of thousands of rockets indiscriminately, killing, among other things, a Druze children's soccer team in the Golan Heights. You can read this on Amnesty (no friend of Israel's) if you want.
Again: it's hard to understand where you could getting this notion that Hezbollah attacks are highly targeted from. That is anything but their operational signature.
>It's equally true in Israel, where Hezbollah fired tens of thousands of rockets indiscriminately, killing, among other things, a Druze children's soccer team in the Golan Heights.
An innocent kid was killed in this conflict? Thank God the other side didn't do that 20,000x more - then it would have been a real tragedy!
Especially if unlike some indiscriminate firing of crude rockets, they did it purposefully, with state of the art arms and monitoring systems.
I have no idea what you're trying to say here. I think you're trying to weigh Israel's actions against those of Hezbollah's? You're not going to get anywhere, rhetorically, with me doing that, because I'm no supporter of Israel's.
They fire guided munitions at Israeli troop positions. They fire unguided rockets and mortar shells into Israeli towns. A video of a targeted Hezbollah strike doesn't illustrate anything at all; everybody points the gun when it's useful to do so, it's what you do when you don't have a combatant target that tells the actual tale.
I can't say enough how odd it is to bring this kind of take into a discussion about Hezbollah. Note that I'm not making the case that Israel is fastidious about avoiding civilian casualties; that would be an unproductive argument to attempt on this thread. You have found one of the few arguments that are even less productive.
I don't have to debate that point, because it addresses an argument I didn't make. The problem is how deeply unmoored your argument is from reality. Exactly why is it that you believe Hezbollah's attacks are characterized by a high degree of targeting? It's clearly not true. Can you explain the logic and the sourcing you used to make that claim?
I already explained it with video evidence. I’m not sure why you hate Hezbollah so much, but I don’t share your animus. In fact I’d consider them an ally from an enemy of my enemy perspective. You don’t have to agree, but that’s my POV.
You didn't, at all. I didn't look at the videos you provided; I simply stipulate that they're real and depict what you say they depict. That doesn't demonstrate anything at all about Hezbollah's rules of engagement. When they have a clear firing solution on an IDF tank, they take the shot? Ok. And?
At the point where you're declaring Hezbollah a moral ally, I think the conversation has run to its logical terminus. Ask the Sunni Arabs in Syria how allied they feel with Hezbollah.
My understanding is that this non-reciprocity is why international law often feels so permissive of seemingly bad actions. It generally aims to forbid only strategies that are the highly destructive and non-effective at winning wars. The idea is that such actions are not necessary in warfare in any circumstance, rather than a coordinated and mutual choice to leave effective strategies on the proverbial table.
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)
On the contrary, you have it completely backwards.
Each time one side beaches the laws of war, more on the other side are motivated towards extremism.
This cycle is why there is still war between Israel/Palestine after 74 years of fighting; both sides have continually committed atrocities, cementing the cycle of violence.
Even if it were true, it sounds like an obvious loophole if one party could simply refuse to consider the other party a state and instantly get rid if all legal liability.
Which is actually one of the major issues of conflict with the Palestinians. The Palestinians want to be a state and most of the world considers them one. It's just that Israel and the US (together with other countries) don't and that the US also blocks official designation by the UN.
The Nazis tried the same argument at the Nuremberg trials. They claimed that they weren't bound by the laws of war (e.g., Hague regulations) since Poland and other states hadn't signed them. The court dismissed the argument and stated that certain rules are binding whether both parties are signatories or not. In Israel's case it is even worse since indiscriminate attacks have been outlawed since basically forever. At the Nuremberg trials, the argument "there is no precedent" had some merit, today it certainly does not.
I don't see how that would apply at all. These aren't nuclear weapons that take out entire populations, these are tiny munitions used to target Hezbollah operatives.
None of these have anything to do with what you cited above, which was ICRC's summary of customary law about inherently indiscriminate weapons. Your first and second links here are examining entirely different challenges to the operation's legality, and the third is just some vague assertions from questionable sources like Francesca Albanese.
You could ask ChatGPT and get a perfectly cromulent answer on what these have to do with what I cited. The key theme is indiscriminate weapons used for indiscriminate attacks. Alas, you can lead a horse to water...
Tiny explosives are certainly not the sort of inherently indiscriminate weapons ICRC refers to. You might want to read the article you linked to, which uses nuclear weapons as the main example. The difference in energy released by Israel's beeper vs a modern nuclear payload is at least 10 orders of magnitude.
ICRC is not really claiming that those examples are indiscriminate, they're giving examples of weapons that might arguably or sometimes be considered indiscriminate.
Some booby traps might fall into that category, but this isn't a toy or a banana, it's a device specifically issued to enemy personnel.
There can be separate textualist arguments about Israel's operation based on the specific language of CCW, but that's unrelated to the customary IHL you linked to.
For one it wasn't targeted, but either way, if it, as you claim, was targeted then it would be even worse because it's worse to kill and maim kids by targeting them than by being indifferent.
This was about as targeted as anti-personnel landmines, but spread out in civilian areas and detonated without any knowledge of their surroundings at the time.
Because mines are untargeted and designed to maim without discrimination as to who they might hurt there is a long running effort to prohibit their use.
Hezbollah pagers aren't randomly lying around though, they're normally attached to Hezbollah members. These were also much smaller than any anti personnel mine.
This was far more targeted than, say, any artillery strike that a commander could possibly order. Targeted doesn't mean it's impossible to harm something else. That's possible with any weapon, and far more likely with larger munitions like artillery shells.
It's not clear that Israel just set off all Hezbollah issued beepers; we don't know what methodology they used. We can guess based on reported casualties, but we don't know which casualties were involved with Hezbollah's military operations.
> What the israelis did would have been a worse crime if it actually was targeted.
It was certainly targeted, it just also had collateral damage, i.e. harm to non-targets.
What you have Israel do instead? Suppose they struck Hezbollah fighters with conventional artillery. They're not sitting around in open fields, so there still would have been collateral damage.
Would you again maintain that the strikes were "untargeted" because there was collateral damage? By this unusual definition, it seems impossible to do a "targeted" strike at least in any urban environment.
Israel should obviously have ended the occupations, payed reparations and prepared for the return of refugees.
The IDF doesn't give a shit about "collateral damage". They mainly attack civilian targets. That's the purpose of the organisation, to make life for indigenous populations in the vicinity of the state of Israel impossible. Destroy their agriculture and water sources, murder their children, displace them, destroy their homes, occupy the land, pretend to be a victim if someone fights back. Then sign some contracts every now and then and don't abide by them while claiming that the other party is the one who doesn't.
This has been ongoing for about a century, it was how the Haganah, Irgun, Stern gang operated. This is why the IDF has such a bad army, they aren't trained for combat and hardly ever have to experience it. Instead they're used for genocidal atrocities against unarmed civilians.
Ended the occupations meaning what, never enter Lebanon? What do you think Israel should have done about Hezbollah’s terrorism, just tolerate it and never let Israelis return to their homes in the north?
Apart from that it seems like you’re just switching topics to a variety of other accusations. We were talking about a particular operation which you claimed was “untargeted”, yet you haven’t suggested any better alternative (besides being nicer to terrorists in hopes that they stop?). In reality the operation had far less collateral damage than what’s possible with any conventional alternative.
Using force to halt or slow a genocide is not terrorism. And yes, Israel ought to retreat from lebanese as well as syrian and palestinian territory, stop it's cross-border attacks, allow displaced people to return to their homes and pay reparations.
The alternative is exactly that, to stop doing apartheid and occupation and allow justice to prevail.
There’s no question that Hezbollah’s bombardment was terrorism. It would be absurd to claim that they were targeting military assets when they routinely use unguided rockets which aren’t capable of doing so. Israel had every right to enter Lebanon in response.
Suppose we believe all captions in your links, so for example we'll assume that guy in shorts and flip flops was some sort of “spy balloon manager.”
It wouldn’t matter, because once you perform terrorist attacks, you’re still a terrorist even if you also attack valid targets sometimes. Same as Hamas, which is still a terrorist org despite attacking some IDF bases.
Even Amnesty has acknowledged Hezbollah’s routine use of unguided rockets, which can’t possibly target military assets but are just lobbed in the general direction of population centers. That makes them terrorists, regardless of what else they do.
My suspicion is that you expect it to short circuit the conversation, and that no one is willing to side with terrorism or affiliate themselves with it in any way, which would give you a degree of power over the conversation.
It's a weasely word, and has about zero relevance in criminal law regarding warfare, it being a political designation mainly used by states that meet resistance to colonisation and the like.
Yeah, sure, Hezbollah has committed war crimes. So what? They look like a pathetic little rounding error beside the usian and israeli war crimes over the past decades, or even just the last year or so. Like Hamas I'm sure Hezbollah would gladly send people to the Hague for prosecution if Israel did too.
So tell us, why is this designation so important to you? Is it because you lack arguments? Is it because you're lazy and just want to waste other people's time?
While there isn't one standard definition of terrorism, Hezbollah's untargeted bombardment of Israeli towns qualifies under pretty much any definition.
You seemed happy to use the term against Israel [1], claiming an operation which specifically targeted Hezbollah operatives was somehow terrorism. Why do you suddenly have a blanket objection to a term that you were just using yourself?
Under what definition would the targeting of villages where the IDF is operating qualify? Why are you back to lying about the pager attacks being "targeted", even though they clearly were not, and even if they were, that would make the israeli crime a lot worse?
I used it as a rhetorical device, and as is obvious above and elsewhere, it's not something I'm monotonically trying to rub in as part of an astroturfing campaign.
They were widely distributed and there was no way for the israelis to know where they were when they detonated them, which they likely did out of desperation and not because they had good reason to believe they were in such and such a position.
It is fucking grim to incessantly defend state terrorism.
You don't seem to have an inch of a problem with terrorist, islamist militants that not only terrorise Israel, they also terrorise Lebanon. Ask the Arab League. Even they define them as terrorists.
Something here is grim indeed and it is not restricted to some regretable educational deficiencies.
Projectiles hit the wrong target all the time. Especially when we get into artillery or air strikes where there's no line of sight to a uniformed soldier, commanders can't be sure if they're going to hit the intended target. That's why we have the principle of proportionality rather than an impossible standard of zero collateral damage.
But surely "the most targeted strike of all time" would be "a single-target strike on a visually confirmed intended individual", right? Or at least that would be more targeted than any strike without LoS?
A parent comment claimed it was the most targeted “operation”, not “strike”. Some small individual strikes have 100% perfect targeting; I think the claim was about large scale operations like artillery barrages or aerial campaigns.
(I think the claim is technically false if we include open field conflicts, but probably true if we narrow it to comparable environments.)
Targeting Hezbollah operatives is certainly targeting, yes. The fact that there was still some nonzero harm to civilians, despite the targeting, does not refute that. Targeting doesn't imply zero collateral damage, which is an impossible standard.
The collateral damage was obvious and predictable. If you know about the potential collateral damage and do it anyway, then it's not targeted, even if you say it's targeted.
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.
If I dive bomb an enemy position, knowing that it's dark and windy and I might end up hitting something else, that's still a targeted operation. Same deal with the pager operation.
> So I target them by dropping a nuke on NYC.
You would have plainly violated the principle of proportionality, which is about the relative weight of military advantage vs civilian harm. The pager operation on the other hand created a massive military advantage, with less civilian harm than what's possible with conventional warfare.
> planting bombs in mundane places and setting them off in public
You would have a stronger point if the conflict looked more like Ukraine, where enemies are mostly sitting in trenches wearing uniforms. Hezbollah operates very differently, storing and firing weapons from mundane civilian places. There's no real way to fight Hezbollah without bombs in such places, it's just a question of whether bombs are delivered by artillery, planes or other means.
> this was intentional
I'm not sure what you mean here. I of course agree Israel could have predicted that there would be non-zero harm to civilians. That's true of pretty much any operation though, at least in urban wars.
For comparison, consider Ukraine's massive truck bomb of the Kerch Bridge. Of course they knew there would be collateral damage, and 5 civilians ended up being killed. It was still widely considered legal, considering the major military advantage gained.
International law, as poorly enforced as it is, needs to have answers what to do with organizations that exist for the reason to destroy another country and that is financed through hostile nations. In this case Iran. Lebanon suffers as well here and Israel certainly isn't the main threat.
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.
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.
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.
> needs to have answers what to do with organizations that exist for the reason to destroy another country
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.
Hezbollah exists to destroy Israel, not Iran. Iran current theological dictatorship just wants to see itself as leader of the Islamic world and uses Gazans as welcomed victims, just like Hamas. It famously fund terrorist activities like Hezbollah.
in the grand scheme of things, Hezbollah is a gnat going up against a fortified nuclear power.
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.
Doesn't matter if they are a gnat if they fire ordinance at another country. And a while ago they weren't a gnat at all, they were the largest non-state militant force on the planet. Until Israel defended itself decisively and in my opinion that doesn't need justification.
Who really needs justification is Iran for funding these militants.
> and in my opinion that doesn't need justification.
It doesn't, but why does that justify their aggression towards noncombatants? Does it justify the killing of women and children, who then will go on to be culturally reinforced to hate Israel (for obvious reasons)?
What? Iran is a 2574 years old. Saying Iran exists to "destroy Israel" is absurd as your attitude to International law. Was Iran just sitting there planning how to destroy Israel for 2500 years?
Enjoy WW3, because that's where that attitude will take you.
ICJ has made no such finding. They will probably making a ruling on genocide allegations in the coming years; they certain have not made one yet. The opinions they've issued so far are here https://www.icj-cij.org/decisions
ICJ found the accusation plausible, and did later in another case conclude that the israeli occupation of palestinian land and apartheid is not lawful and must stop.
Whether ICJ had found genocide perpetrated or just plausible does not matter very much since international law demands that even the risk of genocide triggers state action to put an end to that risk. The ICJ judgement regarding plausibility also made demands towards Israel, which that state has refused to comply with.
Starving a population of millions and systematically destroying their homes and infrastructure does not become jolly fine and dandy just because some court hasn't yet deemed it genocidal.
This is still not accurate. What ICJ found plausible was "some of the rights claimed by South Africa and for which it is seeking protection". The then-president even clarified explicitly that the plausibility finding was about the existence of these rights, not the occurrence of genocide [1].
Noone is saying things are "jolly fine and dandy", but it's important to stick to facts when making such accusations.
It's not nitpicking - what the court is entirely different from what you stated (though it's understandable as a lot of sources misrepresent it).
The court can issue orders without finding any sort of violation, which is what happened in this case when they ordered Israel to "prevent genocide". It can be interpreted as a reminder to Israel of its obligations.
States have a clear obligation to stop the genocide in Palestine. Only the mentally infirm distrust that one is ongoing. Due to rules of process and the perpetrators waging war against the court it will likely never make a sound judgement in this case.
It has, however, found reason to order Israel to take certain actions, with the express purpose of preventing genocide, which the state of Israel has refused to follow and its politicians, pundits and other prominent members of israeli society have kept declaring their genocidal intent over and over again since then.
Do you worry more about the interpretation of legal minutiae than a developing mainstream in international relations that considers genocide and other forms of indiscriminate murder permissible?
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
idk isn't pager operation the textbook example of "trying to avoid civilian deaths" while getting your job done?
why is it "genocide"? is becoming hezbollah determined at birth? is hezbollah a race? does average civilian use walkie-talkie?
even if hezbollah was a race, after its civilian attack on 2023 (beheading babies, raping and killing even foreigners), I wouldn't even care about what those guys get
(also, don't say "humanity" like you represent the whole "humanity")
if you ARE talking about palestinian civilians, I don't think israel can do anything more gentlemen-ly to them other than pager-operation: the other option is carpet bombing and direct invasion (which is a completely another topic)
The ICJ has not said Israel's response is a genocide - not in Lebanon, which is what this thread is about, nor in Gaza.
“…the court decided that the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide and that South Africa had the right to present that claim… it did not decide — and this is something where I’m correcting what’s often said in the media — it didn’t decide that the claim of genocide was plausible.” - ICJ head President Donoghue
First of all, you are conflating Hamas and Hezbollah.
Second of all, the stories about beheading of babies and mass rape on October 7, 2023 have been thoroughly debunked.
Third: the pager operation caused indiscriminate explosions at places where non-combattant citizens were present. Not very gentlemen-ly (to use your words), and indeed a war crime.
Fourth: What they did in Gaza is arguably worse than carpet bombing.
But the hundreds of concert goers who Hamas killed is very true. Remember how they paraded the broken body of that young German woman around like a disgusting hunting trophy?
How did you come up with that tally? Israel has refused to comply with requests from international investigators into the matter, likely because a lot of the casualties were due to IDF actions.
I remember the footage of "that young German woman" but it is to me extremely peripheral and did a lot less of an impression than the thousands of images of destroyed baby bodies I've seen that were caused by the IDF. The criminal actions perpetrated by palestinians on October 7th 2023 were pathetic compared to what the israelis have done for decades.
Claiming the IDF killed all of these people is a truly despicable lie that destroys your credibility.
On 7 October 2023, the al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Palestinian nationalist Islamist political organization Hamas, initiated a sudden attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip. As part of the attack, 378 people (344 civilians and 34 security personnel) were killed and many more wounded at the Supernova Sukkot Gathering, an open-air music festival during the Jewish holiday of Shemini Atzeret near kibbutz Re'im. Hamas also took 44 people hostage, and men and women were reportedly subject to sexual and gender-based violence. Some 20 of the attackers were also killed by Israeli security forces in the area of the festival.
I did not write "all of these people". I pointed out that the state of Israel has refused to provide conditions for an investigation of what happened, and instead it has mainly been the press and leaks to the press that have shed light on the issue.
What we have known for sure since then is that the IDF brought helicopters to the area where the festival was held and Hellfire:d generously, hence the large amount of burnt cars and the typical markings on asphalt roads and so on that are clearly visible in the early photos.
This and the use of tank artillery against inhabitants of the kibbutzim has caused several scandals in israeli politics and the opposition has been requesting thorough investigation for a long time by now. The IDF calls this policy of killing your own soldiers and civilians the Hannibal directive.
I've been following this genocidal colony for decades, every time they've been "mowing the lawn" as they call it there is a massive amount of imagery of murdered kids coming out of the Gaza strip. The reason you think I'm lying is that you haven't been paying attention, and this is probably also why you react so strongly to a single recording of palestinians parading Shani Louk. It might also just be that you're racist and deem israelis or zionists generally more human than the people they are exterminating.
Well, if that stops your thinking, maybe ponder the illegality of the israeli occupation of palestinian territory then.
The israelis must withdraw their people from palestinian territories occupied in -67 and ought to pay reparations for both the occupation and destruction of property, as well as allow refugees to either return to their homes or pay reparations to them.
Unless they do this immediately the international community ought to assemble an international military force and invade the region and put an end to the US-Israeli atrocities. Which is unlikely since they're both expected to use nuclear weapons in response to justice.
After losing WW2 Germany lost about 25% of its land. When Israel was created by UN mandate the Palestinians were offered their own sovereign state, something they never had, but instead chose to try to destroy Israel to get all of the land. They lost and are never going to get that land back. Your entire comment is completely deranged.
In WWII Germany was the genocidal aggressor, in this case Israel and its backers are the genocidal aggressors.
Punishing a state for genocidal aggression is quite a bit more reasonable than the might is right-ideology you subscribe to.
The palestinians have a right to statehood and self-determination, it's not something they need to be "offered". They also have a right to return to their homelands, and they have a right to oppose occupation, violently if they so choose.
And East Jerusalem and the Gaza strip. I'd also argue that the occupations of Lebanon and Syria are illegal, and that taking control over the Philadelphi corridor was an act of war against Egypt.
If you think such crimes of occupation and aggression are "very much needed", then I'll have to consider you morally impaired beyond the ability to take part in a reasoned discussion.
The northern settlements were largely evacuated and used by the IDF. The party to this conflict that systematically targets civilians is the state of Israel.
One could make the argument that the US and Israel committing genocide makes paramilitary action against them legal, since the US controls the UN security council through their veto power.
Right now Israel is an occupying power that systematically destroys civilian infrastructure and threatens an international force in Lebanon, making it permissible to fight back.
"The northern settlements were largely evacuated and used by the IDF."
This is a complete and utter lie. Hezbollah's missile attacks throughout 2024 led to the
evacuation of over 60,000 Israeli residents from northern Israel.
Try to imagine the US response to Mexico shooting that many missiles at a US city.
"Israel is an occupying power"
Israel isn't occupying Lebanon but Hezbollah is.
" making it permissible to fight back."
This is exactly what Israel did so brilliantly with the pager attack.
Close to a hundred thousand israelis were evacuated from the north at the peak of it. Out of thousands of attacks something like 45 israeli civilians were killed, like when the IDF brought civilians to repair power lines and Hezbollah attacked them. More IDF soldiers were killed between October 2023 and the so called ceasefire agreement, which makes it quite clear that Hezbollah practiced restraint in this regard.
I still agree with e.g. HRW that Hezbollah did not do enough to protect civilians, but adjacent to the crimes of the IDF it's a rounding error.
IDF discplaced something like 1.5 million people in Lebanon, many of whom still aren't allowed to return to their homes and those that try are commonly murdered, and similarly those that try to repair their homes have their equipment destroyed or are killed. Recently Israel bombed a parking lot filled with bulldozers and excavators and the like, to halt reconstruction in Lebanon.
Claiming that one of the largest parties in lebanese politics "is an occupying power" is insane. Israel is building military facilities in Lebanon and controlling territory, as well as attacking both Beirut and the Beqaa valley every now and then in violation of the so called ceasefire agreement.
"Hezbollah did not do enough to protect civilians"
What an insane statement. Hezbollah was intentionally trying to kill as many civilians as possible with the missiles. The only reason they "only" killed 45 is because Israel has invested so much into the Iron Dome system.
Hezbollah isn't a political party. It is a proxy army of Iran. That is why they started shooting missiles at Israel after Oct 7 2023 even though it led to the killing of its leader
Hassan Nasrallah
No, they did not. They also mainly used munitions that fly low and escape the israeli air defenses, which is why most of their targets were close to the border.
Hezbollah is a movement that is many things, among them one of the dominant parties in lebanese parliamentary politics. The name means 'Party of God', which is a hint. They also run hospitals, schools and other social services, as well as financial organisations. Due to the background as a militant mobilisation against israeli aggression they also have several armed factions, which is a very reasonable response to their southern neighbour.
Nasrallah and other Hezbollah leaders stated that they initiated militant action against Israel to support the palestinians and clearly expected it to shorten the genocidal campaign in the Gaza strip. As we now know, this strategy failed and Hezbollah misjudged the bloodthirst of israeli society as well as the degree of backing it would have from the US and european states. They should not have wasted time on a restrained attrition style campaign and instead acted more forcefully if they wanted to slow or halt the extermination of the palestinians.
As for Nasrallah, he is surely missed by many but he also spent his life expecting and preparing for martyrdom.
Yes. They formed as a militia to protect Lebanon against israeli invasion, because the relevant colonial powers did not allow the lebanese state to build enough of an army to protect its borders.
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.
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.
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.
The era of microservices and micro teams gives all "company X uses us" claims a different vibe. Maybe it used to actually mean "this is the thing Facebook uses to power its website on millions of servers" but now it's usually like "the team of 6 that runs the analytics platform for Apple Fitness+ uses this on 5 servers"
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.
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.
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?
“A nice interface” disguises the truth here. Palantir is so successful because they build minimum viable prototypes on the fly for clients, deliver rather than balk when custom code has to be written, and leave working solutions alone. (See also other replies about FDEs here.) It’s the kind of behavior I used to take for granted as normal as a small-town ISP, and were it not for their ‘ethics are the customer’s problem’ approach I’d have signed on as a database / dashboard engineer for them years ago.
> it's really just a database integration tool with a nice interface
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.
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 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.
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".
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.
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.
>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.
The posted article states 2800 people were injured in the first attack and 600 in the second. These numbers sound a bit questionable given only tens of people were killed. However, 3400 injured is massive collateral damage if true.
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 think it is a valid military strike if a Venezuelan soldier does it on an order. Military targets where a strike are in danger of killing civilians are a hard judgment call. Generally one should never risk targeting civilians. Military law is a complex subject and officers spend quite a lot of time being educated in it. Here is a Swedish defence college course on it. https://www.fhs.se/en/swedish-defence-university/courses/int...
> 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.
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).
Are you implying military personnel aren't a legitimate target in a war?
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.
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.
>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.
Military might is the thing keeping the USD the world reserve currency instead of the GBP, EUR or Yuan. It's literally the core keeping the US economy and prosperity.
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.
>Military might is the thing keeping the USD the world reserve currency instead of the GBP, EUR or Yuan. It's literally the core keeping the US economy and prosperity.
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.
>>Military might is the thing keeping the USD the world reserve currency instead of the GBP, EUR or Yuan. It's literally the core keeping the US economy and prosperity.
> 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 protecting it from IDK, the USSR just taking it?
The US hegemony successfully strangled the USSR leading to the current Russian oligarchy (with a dictator at the top). The USSR never found itself in a position to expand its borders without threatening an internal insurrection, a coup, and/or the extermination of most of the military forces in a single conflict. US funded the rebuilding of Europe as part of the manufactured hegemony, allowing free trade to supply europe with cheap goods and workers safely across the waters, or under strict supervision of US intelligence for deals with the USSR and the rest of Asia. The USSR wasn't part of these agreement negotiations per se. They had to deal with their own internal politics and manufacturing limitations, while negotiating with countries that had a veto-enabled silent partner.
TBH, I have no idea what people are talking about when are implying "the American economy" is large. It's 8% of world pop and is largely an exporter of natural resources. The strength of the US economy is the reliability of the bond market. The USSR had no chance of taking the US, but did meaningfully threaten the security of the US during the cuban missile crisis. USSR was considered a credible threat to most of Europe for the duration of the cold war, in a carefully structured scenario of mutual destruction.
> And what happened to you if you wanted to trade with the USSR? You're omitting that part
World politics is not as simple as cause and effect. Many countries did deal with embargoed/sanctioned countries, including the US - notably the sale of grain to the USSR during the 70s. If you wanted first crack at new trade deals or wanted security guarantees from the US for delicate trade deals, you had to make allowances according to US wishes. Germany made it clear that they were going to purchase natural gas from the USSR as a matter of their own energy security. The US made an allowance. Maybe one US partner attacked another (Iraq vs Kuwait), the US would step in militarily. You wanted to sell oil to Russia? Sanctions or embargoes or worse, you were not able to call on the US navy when your shipping lanes were disrupted. Maybe the US called on some pirates regularly to raid your ships, maybe not. Thems the breaks, mafia style.
That is naive, it is much more about the US hegemony and mainly about their military might. I would be good to sometimes reach such a state, but as of today it is not.
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.
I can’t reply to zugzug underneath (is there a maximum comment depth), but it feels pretty obvious that the US President is a very legitimate target in any war with the US. Maybe the most legitimate target.
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.
I don't care whether the citizens of Israel would think it's legal. It's not terrorism if you're at war to attack enemy combatants or their leaders, and that goes for any side in a war: whether you're Israel, Iran, China, America, Russia, Ukraine, whoever. That's just how war goes. There's no point to the term "terrorism" if it just means killing enemy combatants or leaders: it's duplicative of the term "war." What do you think war entails?
If your opponent has way better weapons technology than you: well, it sucks to be on the losing side. But you are, and that's how war goes sometimes. That's what happened to Japan, and the Mayans. If one side has guns and the other has obsidian spears, there's no law that the side with guns has to drop them on the ground because it's unfair to the stone-age side.
actuall hezbollah did crash drone into netanyahy private residence (scratched windows) and iran tried to blow up secretary of defense with ied.
there was 0 discussion about "legit, legal and fair". the only discussion that took place it's that security measures need to be improved to prevent things like this in future.
They could do that now and it might be legal under international laws of war.
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.
I mean of course they could, and should[0] how is that a question?
[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.
Hezbollah is an organization that tries to destroy Israel. If any law doesn't have an answer to that problem, it isn't worth to discuss legality.
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.
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.
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 want some deeply studied anthropological journal article on “The use of pagers in Lebanese society “?
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.
I'm not deriving who had the pagers from first principles. They were military pagers, on a military network that Hezbollah fought an actual civil war to establish and maintain, with subverted devices that Hezbollah itself acquired directly. There's a lot of reporting on this. Israel did not booby trap the whole supply of pagers into Lebanon. The Hezbollah combatants carrying these pagers did not acquire them at a Beirut Cellular Retail Outlet.
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.
It’s almost like explosives… explode, and hit the people and surroundings near them. Shrapnel travels. You’re trying to derive who had the pagers from first principles, yet you don’t seem to understand how a bomb actually works.
(1) We have videos of the explosions and their scale.
(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 we have in fact pretty strong reporting that at least 2 children were killed, and while the explosions and payload were nowhere nearly as devastating as a grenade, they were still much bigger than a firework mortar (which themselves have killed children).
I think a stronger argument is that in the aggregate, the devices overwhelmingly targeted combatants.
I'm sure those exist --- it has never been my claim there there were zero or even just few civilian casualties --- but the videos I've seen had people standing next to the person carrying the pager walking away, startled but apparently unharmed. The explosions were quite small (I quantified them downthread from what Reuters reported).
Please provide links to these videos because every video I saw showed only the person holding the pager getting hurt. They only had 6 grams of explosives.
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.
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.
> 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.
No, they're basically the same, and this Substack has some additional primary source material the MEE piece doesn't (MEE and this Substack have approximately the same editorial slant).
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.
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?
Premise 1: I accept that they could have been on coffee tables! The problem isn't that I'm sure every pager was in a combatant pocket; it's that they were microcharges (we have videographic evidence!), and unless most of the pagers were for whatever reason not on hand to a combatant but rather for some reason close to a civilian, the Lebanese civilian/combatant casualty figures can't be made to make sense.
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.
So, we established that there were injuries among people surrounding those with the pagers. Therefore, the parent comment’s claim was false — the explosions could hurt people nearby and weren’t small enough to affect only the combatant.
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.
Sources show, the source commenter I was discussing with in this thread agreed, why are you challenging this that were established in the thread? Why are you insisting that we don't use the context in the thread to continue discussion?
He never provided any evidence. Every video of a pager explosion I saw showed it only injuring the person holding it. The amount of explosives in the pagers was so small it would be unlikely for it to harm bystanders much if at all.
I'm not moving the goalposts. Instead, what I'm pretty sure is happening is that you see this as an argument about whether the strike was good or justified. I don't. I'm not interested in that question, which will never, ever be resolved on a message board. I'm just interested in getting the clearest picture of what actually did happen.
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.
They weren't terrorists they were Hezbollah members during a time when Hezbollah was shooting thousands of missiles at Israel that forced 60,000 people to evacuate. This made them fair targets. The pagers contained about grams of explosives which only injured the person holding it.
Premise 2 is false. The vast majority of the injured were Hezbollah terrorists. You say The Times of Israel reported "many of the injured were civilians, including children, women, and non-combatant" - show me a source, please.
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.
Cmon man, there are sources pasted all over this thread from my discussion with OP. I'm not going to post the same source that was already discussed with him, why would I waste my time to do so?
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.
They knew who purchased those devices. Did they know that at the moment of detonation only military personnel had those devices on them? Military propaganda of course will nod at “intelligence” to defend any actions in public, as there is no way to prove these statements.
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?
> 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?
It's not splitting hairs it gets to the point when people falsely accuse them of every single thing in the book. Weapons have always been imprecise but things that don't have any benefit to the war effort and target innocent civilian deaths are war crimes. You may ask how much the difference matters morally(it still does matter a lot intent it rule based vs consequences based morality systems I'd argue for somewhere in between) but yes targeting matters when it comes to usually false claims of crimes
They do care about not killing civilians the question is how much? And is that enough? There will almost never be any operation near cities without civilian casualties.
This particular operation was an extremely Targeted operation that included tricking Hezbollah into selling pagers meant for Hezbollah internal military use and only deploying small explosions minimizing any unnecessary casualties.
It's not a very good piece of rhetoric asking about nukes because Israel actually has nukes. They didn't use them.
They have carried out other heavier strikes on Lebanon that had worse ratios but were justified by military targets such as Hezbollah leader Nasrallah.
Your suggestion also seems to totally not understand how Israelis view Lebanon. Until recently and still Lebanon does not control violence within it's borders.
Hezbollah (a militia/terrorist group that takes orders from Iran) was more powerful then the Lebanese army and decided what happened on the ground. Iran which had a countdown clock counting down to the destruction of Israel.
Of course they were supposed to be disarmed after the Lebanese but unsurprisingly the UN resolution didn't have any effect so when they attacked and threatened to invade Israel did what they could to take them out. Israel would love to have peace with Lebanon but that's not likely if Iran and Hezbollah have anything to do with it.
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.
Sure you do. Just like MAGA voters who are suffering from the decisions from their vote "didn't vote for this". Except you explicitly did. Zionism necessarily removes land and homes from people to carve out a "safe space" for Jews without any consideration for the generations you're fucking over. Just like you conveniently ignore the decades of "settlers" taking over other people's land. Just like you ignore the destruction of Palestinian wells and hospitals. Just like you ignore the rape of prisoners and the celebration among Zionists for it. It's a nasty belief system that puts Jews above other humans. It is explicitly bigoted and xenophobic and it is proudly announced and broadcast throughout Israeli society.
> A member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party, speaking Monday at a meeting of lawmakers, justified the rape and abuse of Palestinian prisoners, shouting angrily at colleagues questioning the alleged behavior that anything was legitimate to do to "terrorists" in custody.
> Lawmaker Hanoch Milwidsky was asked as he defended the alleged abuse whether it was legitimate, "to insert a stick into a person's rectum?"
> "Yes!" he shouted in reply to his fellow parliamentarian. "If he is a Nukhba [Hamas militant], everything is legitimate to do! Everything!"
That is what you are defending. It's fucking disgusting.
Not only military leadership was killed, there was a significant amount of civilians being harmed.
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.
The Irish terrorists that were mostly the responsible to put word "terrorism" into political discourse targeted almost exclusively politicians and military. And targeted way better than that Israel attack.
Hezbollah is an organization consisting of civilian infrastructure besides its military wing (political party, media, hospitals/medical centers, schools, banking, etc) . These devices were distributed amongst different personnel of whom nobody knows their military activity and can safely be assumed it's highly likely they're civilians (hence the randomness of this, not targetted at all). Besides the fact that these targets weren't in active duty but rather targeted in their homes, workplaces, and other random whereabouts (supermarkets, playgrounds, etc) again emphasising how random and not targetted any of it is and the danger it imposes on others (physical or psychological) around them. It's just insane.
> 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 ...
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!
... 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.
Right, now I'm not South African so I can't speak to that angle of what he's writing. I can speak to the angle of Jews in post-WW2 Europe. Mamdani's thesis here has the problem of rather dramatically, in fact insultingly, ignoring the most basic fact: almost nobody in the displaced-persons camps for Jews after the war wanted to go back into post-war European societies, and most of those who tried were murdered or faced state repression (eg: from the Soviet Union) for their trouble. After surviving the Holocaust and/or the war, everyone was much more interested in getting the hell away from people they perceived as their murderers than in a theoretical project of "denationalization" that wouldn't be invented for several decades more anyway.
> 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.
And this is, de facto, Nazi apologia on Mamdani's part, because he willfully refuses to see significant differences between alternative regimes within the paradigm of the nation-state, as against the post-national ideal he wants to realize in post-colonial Uganda (but which, of course, post-colonial Uganda has never actually implemented).
>It requires that we stop accepting that our differences should define who benefits from the state and who is marginalized by it.
I would also say Mamdani is an entire paradigm behind the times here. Whether you define it via educational credentials, income, or relation to the means of production, politics has been repolarizing around class, not identitarian belonging. "Who benefits from the state" is a deepity concealing Mamdani's social-democratic imaginary in which nation-states rule nations, rather than network-states administrating international markets in labor, capital, and goods.
Why is an Israeli visitor to the US commenting on our politics? You are welcome to return to Israel and genocide innocent civilians. Can we report this SOB to ensure his visitor pass is cancelled? He is a hate filled propagandist for the greatest evil of this generation (I-L)
I didn't say "undeserved". I said "deserve's got nothing to do with it". Sovereigns relate in the state of nature, not under the rule of any specific law.
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.
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.
Its a war between two organized armies, however lopsided, with one army recieving support openly to defend against a larger state. Isreal is not only a belligerent state, it openly commits war crimes from every single human war convention in existence, if not outright genocide, what is it?
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.
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?
> No, I am not a lawyer. Does that preclude my having an opinion on the [...] legality of a military strike?
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.
> 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.
As long as it's other people's children being killed by Zionist terrorist attacks I'm sure you're perfectly okay with it. Typical conservative response to any tragedy. You'll only ever change your tune when it personally impacts you and then you'll be all confused about how anyone could support that.
The most brilliant part about the civilian casualties from this operation is how many fewer of them there were than there would have been with any alternative means available to Israel.
That's very true, when Israel consistently bombed and destroyed almost every hospital in Gaza. The media tried very hard to narrowly frame it this as legitimate.
Unfortunately for people, Israel will further be tightening its grip on the world (and has already) by buying and censoring platforms such as TikTok.
So there goes one of the main ways news was being shared defying the main stream narrative.
These are the facts and you will be labelled for stating them.
I don't see how. It was intended to paralyze and undermine a militia which it did. A lot of war actions create terror that doesn't make most war terrorism
i think there are internationally recognized lawful terminology that several institutions and countries recognize that permit the use of "act of war" and "terrorism". but at any given time a country _does_ act of war/terrorism, they likely would deny claims of terrorism if it was recognized as terrorism by said institutions.
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.
> 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.
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.
> This is one of the most sophisticated attacks to avoid civilian casualty.
127 civilians Lebanese civilians killed since the ceasefire by the party you claim is avoiding civilian casualties, btw. very careful bunch
"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.
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.
No, it isn't. Hezbollah is an occupying military force in Lebanon, responsive only to a minority of its population, that happens to have a political party attached. It is the IRGC's faction of the Lebanese Parliament, except to the extent that it operates its own parallel government when that body is inconvenient to it.
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.
The report is 4,000 civilians injured (which means they just didn't die -- people lost fingers, limbs, eyes, etc.)
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.
I haven't seen a report of 4000 civilians injured. I have seen a report of 4000 people injured across the two attacks, but presumably some fraction of these are targets.
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.
You didn’t see 4,000 because you didn’t look for it. It’s literally in the wikipedia article linked in the thread you’re responding to with multiple associated citations.
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.
The problem is, 2750 + 750 injured is less than 4000, and it doesn't make sense that none of the injured were targets but >30/42 of those killed were.
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.
To be clear, that claim of 4,000 comes from a member of Hezbollah:
> 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"
> 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.
but we have the benefit of seeing live videos from actual shops where these hezbollah members were, and you can see the explosion was small enough to not hurt anyone in the vicinity
even if very close, one of the videos shows a supermarket line, and no one around is hurt
>42 people were killed total, but that does not mean that there were 42 targets.
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…
I vouched for your post because your question is legitimate and asked in an appropriate manner; there is no good reason to flag it.
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.
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).
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.
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
>> 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. <<
According to Hezbollah sources 1500 of their terrorists were taken out of commission due to this attack. Making the death ratio 42/1500 or 3% while if only taking the civilian ratio that's even lower.
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
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
Hezbollah is designated as a terrorist organization by:
Argentina
Australia
Austria
Bahrain
Canada
Colombia
Czech Republic
Ecuador
Estonia
European Union
France
Germany
Gulf Cooperation Council
Guatemala
Honduras
Israel
Kosovo
Lithuania
Netherlands
New Zealand
Paraguay
Serbia
Slovakia
United Arab Emirates
United Kingdom
United States
They're military and political personnel. Terrorist designation is a made up political thing as Trump has made obvious. Hezbollah has done nothing that Israel hasn't also done.
Military personal wear uniforms, are clearly identifiable in their operations & movements and have standards of behavior in line with jus ad bellum & jus in bello.
The numbers you state are from the Lebanese government and Hizbollah. So I don't think we can assume they are accurate. I don't have any better numbers, though.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
These pagers weren't purchased in stores by civilians. You see, Hezbollah had a problem: Their phone network was totally compromised. Israel was using operatives' phones as tracking beacons. So Hezbollah purchased a few thousand pagers through specialty channels (which we now know had been compromised by Israel) to distribute to their commanders. They believed this would improve their security, because unlike the two-way radios in cell phones, pagers use a one-way broadcast radio, and there is no need to know or report the pager radio's location.
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.
Doctors don't use pagers anymore, just like tech on calls used to and don't anymore. Mobile phones are far superior for that, and are very available anywhere in the world, and especially to doctors
Regarding whether that's brilliant, that is not my wording, but generally it was quite mild compared to the methods of Hezbollah and was highly successful in ending a war with very little bloodshed. The other alternative was tried in 2006 and in Gaza, and fighting a terror organization entrenched in an urban setting means bombings and killing civilians in the process. This was not the end result as Hezbollah fell apart relatively quickly afterwards, so I think it was good compared to any alternative for Lebanese and Israelis
Doctors still use pagers. I don’t know about Lebanon in particular, but I would wager they still use them there too.
The rest is a bunch of hypotheticals. I am also unsure where the conclusion that Hezbollah is dead is coming from. Was their operational capability degraded? Of course. Is the group dead? Absolutely not.
Regarding the pagers in any case these were specially imported by hezbollah, so these were not used by doctors, even if we assume they only use pagers in Lebanon.
Regarding the group, it has signed a cease fire agreement with very unfavorable terms which essentially let Israel bomb any of its members or locations that violate the terms of the cease fire agreement and the lebanese army did not work to resolve, this happens on a weekly basis since the end of the war
If you compare this state to the state just prior to October 2023 where Hezbollah had setup a tent in Israeli territory which Israel was too afraid to do something about for months over fear of starting a war, then this is essentially a complete break up in my opinion.
Is it dead? no. it's alive enough to keep lebanon in its permanent failed state status due to fear of all other sects of civil war. But together with what happened to its patron, and the local popularity it lost it might break up completely
I am aware of that, and hopefully they will become a Lebanese political party without an armed wing, similar to all other political parties, which are most essentially led by former warlords involved in mass killings
The UK's National Health Service (NHS) is widely considered the single largest user of pagers in the world, with over 130,000 devices in use as of recent years. This figure represented an estimated 10% of the total number of pagers remaining globally.
Where would a Lebanese doctor get an encrypted pager bought by Hezbollah and given to Hezbollah members with the explicit use for communicating with other Hezbollah members?
The idea that only criminals or terorists have pagers is ridiculous(you mentined doctors). But Israel didnt target pagers in Lebanon. They sold equipment for Hezbollah internal use om their own network (they convinced Hezbollah to pay a front company for the walkies).
That is the opposite of indicrimante.
as for
> white Judeo-Christian variety
Judeo Christian is a silly concept. Either say christian or say Abrahamic. While most casulties were affiliated with Hezbollah and therefore overwhelmingly Shia Muslim enough of the general public of Lebanon is Christian that they would make at least some of civilian bystanders injured. Also Lebanese people aren't any whiter in average skin color then the average Israeli
That's not the argument. Presumably a broad cross-section of Lebanese people have pagers. But only Hezbollah combatants had these pagers, which were specifically procured by Hezbollah through an idiosyncratic suppler, linked to Hezbollah's own military encrypted network, and triggered by a pager message encrypted to that network.
> linked to Hezbollah's own military encrypted network, and triggered by a pager message encrypted to that network.
I am not sure where you’re getting this information from. For instance, you seem confident that this network used exclusively by the armed wing.
Regardless, absolutely none of this negates the fact that this was an indiscriminate terrorist attack.
If the sides were reversed, or if virtually any other state executed this kind of attack, it would be rightfully condemned. But Israel, as always, gets a pass. And it was indeed a brilliant plan, but only in how comically evil it was.
The most obvious citation is Reuters, which did a whole article on this, including the specific circumstances in which the pagers exchanged hands. And, whatever the rest of the moral circumstances of the strike may have been, the fact of the devices being combatant communication equipment does mean that it was neither indiscriminate (it was in fact very discriminate) nor terroristic (it had combatant targets, not civilians).
The attacks can still be immoral for a host of other reasons. Pearl Harbor was deeply immoral. It was also not an indiscriminate terrorist attack. Words mean things.
I have expanded in other comments in this same tree, but it was indiscriminate in timing, location, and possession (unless Israel individually verified possession).
If it were a “discriminate” attack as you claim, then we wouldn’t have seen thousands of civilians (non-combatants, Hezbollah affiliated or otherwise) being injured.
> Words mean things.
Small aside: not saying this applies to you specifically, but I have found that most people who use this adage (if you will) are quick to apply it to situations they don’t agree with, but become more flexible when it aligns with their interests.
The typical example I use is how Western politicians vehemently deny/denied usage of the term “genocide” or even “war crimes” for Gaza, but apply it liberally to Ukraine, even though the latter is objectively (by any metric) “less” of a genocide than Gaza is. Bernie Sanders only came around just a few months ago.
I don't love "words mean things" and winced after I typed it, but I think we both understand what I meant by it.
My contention is that we did not in fact see thousands of noncombatants injured. I went into some pretty serious depth on this point elsewhere on the thread.
I think, for what it's worth, that I can pretty easily make the argument that Ukraine is a genocide and Gaza is not. In fact, I could say that about the Al Aqsa Flood as well! That argument will annoy the shit out of you. But I'd say that's because you've affixed undeserved gravity or finality to the term "genocide", as a sort of "worst possible crime". What Israel is doing in Gaza can be as bad as what Russia is doing in Ukraine without establishing genocidal intent (which Russia pretty clearly does have).
I think the push to label the Gaza campaign as a "genocide" has been a fairly spectacular own goal on the part of western Palestinian rights activists. Unless the situation on the ground changes (I grant that it could), people are just going to keep shooting that claim down, and advocates for Palestinians will be stuck explaining instead of persuading, against relatively powerful countervailing arguments.
The case for ethnic cleansing, atrocities, and widespread war crimes is trivial to make. It's just not enough for online advocates; it's like they're trying to get an in-game trophy for the term "genocide".
I understand we won’t come to an agreement here, but I wanted to respond to two of your points:
1. Re: the term genocide, do you know why Palestinians have been insisting on this specific word to be used? Because genocidal intent was clearly communicated from virtually day 1, and was backed by actions to prove this intent. Cabinet members were calling Palestinians “human animals” and “amalek” for God’s sake - and that’s not even close to the worst of it! Palestinians didn’t just wake up one day and say “well, it’s arbitrarily a genocide, and we want everyone to call it that”. And South Africa rightfully pursued a case at the ICJ. Firstly, because they recognized the shared suffering from their experience with apartheid, but most importantly, because they saw that there was a mountain of incontrovertible legal evidence to support their case.
1. Re: Ukraine, you simply cannot make that argument in good faith. Russia’s goals in Ukraine are in direct opposition to Israel’s goals in Gaza and the West Bank.
Russia ultimately wants to annex Ukraine to expand its influence and reinstate its past glory with the USSR. This requires that it absorb Ukrainians into Russia proper. Russia uses the shared culture and language as a justification in its propaganda, but I think there is a kernel of truth there when it comes to Russia’s motivations, particularly in eastern Ukraine. Given all this, genocide is a non-starter for Russia - how can you claim annexation when you are also working to genocide the local population?
On the other hand, Israel wants to cleanse the land of its people - in fact, the absolute last thing it wants to do is absorb Palestinians into Israel proper. From day 1, its intentions were crystal clear: Palestinians as a racial/ethnic group cannot remain in Gaza. They used all tools at their disposal in pursuit of this goal, including mass starvation, collective punishment, mass bombardment, forced relocation, and so on. Taken together with the statements made by top gov officials, this constitutes genocide.
This is all setting aside that Ukraine is a fully sovereign nation with an equipped and supported conventional military fighting a conventional war against a nation state aggressor.
Let me say first of all: super chill response and I really appreciate that.
On point (1), I've got reason to question the claims of genocidal intent that get bandied about in these kinds of conversations. Yair Rosenberg wrote a piece for The Atlantic debunking one of the most frequently cited "amalek" claims. It's easy to find people on either side of the conflict espousing genocidal views, but harder to map specific actions to realistically genocidal intent (especially when the views are ascribed to people with no decisionmaking authority over how the campaign is being waged).
I hate having to be so hedgy but I'll do it anyways: none of that is to say that the Gaza campaign was waged ethically or with meaningful concern for civilian life, and I fervently hope many of its architects end up imprisoned for their roles in it. But that's a cards-on-the-table statement, not a clinical assessment.
On point (2) about Ukraine: Russian decisionmakers at the highest level have repudiated the existence of Ukrainian ethnicity; Russia has deliberately --- in ways I don't think map cleanly to how the IAF has prosecuted the war in Gaza --- targeted civilian populations (Bucha is an obvious example), and, most damningly, Russia embarked on a campaign of family separation and coerced adoption with the specific intent of disrupting Ukraining ethnicity.
You point out that Israel wants to "cleanse" the land (call it Greater Israel, from the Jordan river and including the Gaza strip) of Palestinians. I'm not as sure about that, but I can stipulate to it. That by itself does not constitute genocide!† (Ethnic cleansing? A crime against humanity? Very possibly!) Genocide as a concept does not encompass any link between blood and soil.
It really pisses Palestinian advocates off to hear this, and I get why, but there is by rights already a Palestinian state in the Levant: it's called Jordan, where Palestinians have, at multiple points over the last 50 years, made up a majority of the resident population. Similarly, if we're doing comparative statecraft, Assadist Syria successfully cleansed itself of its concentrated Palestinian population, over just the last 10-15 years. See how often you see Palestinian advocates make claims about Yarmouk camp, though. You start to understand why advocates for Israel (I am not one of those) are jaded about this whole thing.
† You get a similar thing about "apartheid", a term I'm more comfortable using with Israel, from people who correctly observe that Israeli Arab citizens, of whom there are a great many, have vastly more rights than black Africans had under apartheid, to the point where the term makes more sense applied to other larger, more salient ethnic divides elsewhere in the world. But like, preemptively: I'm with you, it's effectively an apartheid system in the West Bank.
This is the kind of discussion that I feel would be better to have in-person; I am not a great writer :)
Re: Israel & the term genocide, if you closely look at the combination of:
(1) the words that came/are coming out of the mouths of Israeli cabinet members, Knesset members, and the Israeli media (especially in Hebrew!)
(2) the policies enacted on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank
(3) the actions taken by the IDF in Gaza since Oct 7 (I won't enumerate them here)
(4) the clear cut plans for a "greater Israel"
(5) the extra-territorial conflicts & attacks (esp. the 12 day war and Qatar strike), and the ground invasions in Lebanon & Syria, the latter under the guise of "minority protection" (a tale as old as time)
You must conclude that Israel is at the very least committing war crimes, and is the least rational actor in the Middle East. Palestinians, their allies, and (at the nation state level) South Africa & observers took it a step further and argued that the sum of the above constitutes genocide.
> Russian decisionmakers at the highest level have repudiated the existence of Ukrainian ethnicity
What Russia is doing here - and what it did with the USSR - may constitute "cultural genocide", but this is not legally defined. Keep in mind that Israel also denies the existence of Palestinians and reduces them instead to "Arabs".
> in ways I don't think map cleanly to how the IAF has prosecuted the war in Gaza
Three questions that I find helpful when comparing the two situations generally:
1. Does Hamas have an air force or access to air defense systems? If not, does that make it easier or harder for mass killing to take place when compared to the situation in Ukraine?
2. Does Russia regularly level entire buildings - with civilians present - in exchange for so-called "high-value targets"? All AI-driven btw, giving us a glimpse into the future of warfare.
3. Does Russia control the entire border of Ukraine? And has it ever enforced a total blockade on all goods entering Ukraine?
> but there is by rights already a Palestinian state in the Levant: it's called Jordan, where Palestinians have, at multiple points over the last 50 years, made up a majority of the resident population.
It pisses off advocates because it actually ties back into how Israel erases the Palestinian national identity, and is a common hasbara talking point :)
From day 1, Jordan has been a malicious actor of sorts in opposition to the Palestinian national movement. The West Bank post-partition was supposed to be given to a Palestinian ("Arab") state, but Jordan invaded under the guise of protection, which was a valid excuse, but also an excellent opportunity to establish Transjordan. The Jordanians held control until 1967. In 1967, many Palestinians were forced to relocate to Jordan in a second Nakba (called the Naksa[1]). Soon after this, the PLO escalated its fight against the Jordanian monarchy, culminating in Black September. Today, there are a large number of self-described (very important!) Jordanian-Palestinians residing in Jordan, but they still have ties to Palestine, and claim it as their homeland even after multiple rounds of expulsion. In other words, even in Jordan, there still is a separate Palestinian national identity that lives on.
As far as the camps go in Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, that's a separate topic of discussion. A big part of the continued existence of these refugee camps in Arab countries throughout modern history is the optimism of Palestinians & the host Arab states that a solution will be reached soon.
> from people who correctly observe that Israeli Arab citizens, of whom there are a great many, have vastly more rights than black Africans had under apartheid
South African apartheid is the model, but not the only form. I believe that there is sufficient evidence for the argument that Israeli Arab citizens do indeed live under apartheid, mainly due to the ethno-religious nature of citizenship in Israel proper.
I think you're doing great, but I'll keep my response brief to avoid dragging you into a longer thread.
* I agree, Israel appears to me to be guilty of war crimes; quite a great many.
* We disagree about the black-letter genocidal intent Russia has exhibited in Ukraine. Organized mass kidnapping and coerced adoption of children is a per se genocidal action under the 1948 Genocide Convention.
* The US outclasses almost every armed service in the world to the same extent Israel outclassed Hamas (which no longer exists as a military force). That doesn't make US involvement in any given armed conflict genocidal or immoral.
* If your point was simply that Israel is capable of putting into practice genocidal intent, of course, I agree with that. They have a mechanical advantage in doing that, to the point where they shoulder additional burdens to avoid genocidal outcomes, and I preemptively agree they haven't satisfied those obligations. But flip it: Hamas has essentially no capability to successfully commit a genocide of Israelis. And yet their attack, under the Convention, was more clearly genocidal.
* I agree with you about the governance of Jordan! I think all the surrounding states share significant moral burden with regards to the Palestinian people,and launder it through Arab enmity towards Israel and Jewish ethnicity.
* I want to be very clear: I also believe the Palestinians have a moral claim to Gaza and the West Bank, and that there is no practical resolution to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict that won't involve two states on land Israel now controls. When I bring up the Jordan thing, I'm making a broader claim about the sustainability of Palestinian ethnic identity, not the "Palestinians should be remigrated into Jordan" argument the neo-Kahanists make. Kahanism is vile.
"You're telling me that the 2,800 injured were mostly Hezbollah operatives?"
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.
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
Most sides in most wars aren't expected to classify every person they killed. Identifying certain people as Hamas(and they could be wrong about some of them) doesn't mean that every single other person is not a member of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or other millitant
Not all Israelis (or most) are reservists and most of the civilians were murdered by Hamas death squads execution style, not by the fabled Hannibal directive
While Hamas does not wear uniform in combat and publishes its dead as civilians, so no, my logic holds
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.
Pagers are used by more then just criminals(see doctors) and targeting random criminals as opposed to millitants wouldn't be justifiable. But these particular pager that were wired up were specifically intended only for Hezbollah internal use and were sold to Hezbollah by Israel through a third party front.
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.
I don't agree, but we don't have to agree on this point to recognize the illegitimacy and coerciveness of Hezbollah and the IRGC. Even factoring Israel's most recent strikes in, the largest military losses Hezbollah has incurred in the last 10 years weren't with Israel, but rather in Syria, on behalf of the Assad regime, a client of the IRGC's, where Hezbollah (and the Lebanese security forces Hezbollah dragooned into the conflict) gleefully targeted civilian populations.
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.
Huh? Lebanon is not being held to war crime laws, and is the poorer nation. They bombed Northern Israel for over 2 years, including a soccer field full of children that weren't their targets but are very much dead.
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.
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.
If you are part of the American electorate (including a voter who is eligible but choosing to abstain out of protest or indifference) you are part of a political organization that chooses military action.
That's fine if you think that, but I hope you know that your position is not common at all.
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.
Indeed, my reply to his reply was downvoted as well. Along the lines of: "I have a preconceived opinion and don't want to deal with facts." Quite popular in some circles these days.
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.
"planting a bomb in front of a military camp" is like the textbook goal for bomb-planting devices (airplanes, artillery, MRLs), its one of the most normal scenarios out of all of normal war scenarios.
Planting a bomb on each soldier would be even better.
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'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.
You can have a reasonable expectation secure military pagers are only going to be used by soldiers. Given how few collateral deaths there were this was a reasonable assumption.
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 ...
Hezbollah was actively launching thousands of missiles at Israel when these pagers blew up. They stopped launching missiles at Israel en masse soon after these pagers blew up. What a odd coincidence.
No war in history has completely avoided any civilian casualties or attacks on civilian populations, as even limited conflicts often involve indirect harm (e.g., from stray fire, blockades, or displacement), and larger wars almost inevitably affect non-combatants.
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.
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.
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.
With civilians under constant rocket and ATGM fire (actual, real war crimes BTW), under threat of Oct 7th-style infiltration and invasion, with tens of thousands of civilians displaced and numerous civilian casualties, Hezbollah had forced this war upon Israel. And they forced it on Oct 8th, in coordination with the IRGC and Iran's "Ring of Fire" proxies.
Israel had a legitimate right to self defense and any country in Israel's position would be obligated to defend their citizens from such aggression. And any objective observer would admit that Hezbollah's actions went beyond mere casus belli to just simply open war--including constant actual war crimes--against Israel.
So Israel had not just a right to wage war against Hezbollah, but a duty. The next question is: How best to prosecute the war?
The traditional prosecution of this war would have resulted in tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties. These exquisitely targeted small (3g of PETN) explosions short-circuited that war and undoubtedly saved thousands of innocent lives.
Far from terrorism or war crimes, these attacks indirectly saved many innocent lives, spared hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Lebanese infrastructure, were highly targeted at combatants, and even direct civilian casualties were minimal.
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.
> So? You aren't off the hook because someone did something unexpected or "was exercising poor operational security."
You might be. If it was Hezbollah's guns that exploded and not their pagers, I would expect most people to agree that you would be "off the hook" if someone else was handling that gun.
Not saying pagers = guns, but it's a spectrum surely.
The laws of war don't expect a military to attack a target only if there was no risk to civilians. That would be so unrealistic that nobody would even attempt to follow the laws of war. There has to be some consideration of relative risk and proportionality.
Where you draw the line is complicated. If you look at what the allies did in WWII for instance, there are some decisions that are highly problematic (firebombing wooden Japanese cities or the RAF deliberately bombing German civilian populations) but there are also some decisions that I think were reasonable even with a very high civilian death toll (e.g. the US Eight Air Force conducting bombing raids on German industry with limited precision, leading to high civilian casualties).
I think this specific incident was lawful. Hezbollah was the aggressor here, and it spent the war launching attacks that were far less justifiable than this one (much more limited targeting). I think this was a reasonable act of self-defense. That doesn't mean that I think that everything Israel did in the war was lawful.
Well, I guess we disagree on this, but I think it's a shit move to blow up a bunch of any object that is normally benign and which could logically be sitting next to or in the hands of an innocent. I'll die on that hill. I know it goes against most people's opinions on HN but I don't mind that. As you can see, I have some points to spare so feel free to downvote me to oblivion, even though that downvote button is meant for people who go against the rules; I don't believe I have in any of my posts in this thread, but I am willing to apologize if so.
Also, I have a thought for you: what would you call it if a foreign nation which your country had poor relations with, possibly open hostility, had blown up the work laptops (which they might take home) of a bunch of high ranking military members in your country? Would that be terrorism or a legal attack to you? What would you think of the innocent lives lost to such an attack?
This incident did not occur in a vacuum. If this had been a surprise attack during peacetime, the calculus would be different, but it wasn't.
Hezbollah began firing rockets at Israeli civilian populations more or less indiscriminately very soon after the October 7th terrorist attack. Just a few months before the pager incident, a Hezbollah rocket killed 12 children in a Druze town in the Golan Heights.
Israel was justified in defending itself against an aggressor. Not to do so would mean continuing to let their civilians be killed. Once you start from that premise, then blowing up pagers that only belong to Hezbollah members is a much better option than any alternative.
The standard can't just be "you aren't allowed to take any action that could kill innocent people". To have that as the standard is the same as to have no standard at all, because it's so unrealistic that nobody would follow it. The standard has to take into account whether the action is offensive or defensive, what the relative risk of killing innocent people is, and what the alternatives are.
That's why I talked about the allied bombings during WWII, which killed enormous numbers of German and Japanese civilians. To suggest that the allies should not have used bombers in, say, 1941 because they would inevitably kill many civilians is unreasonable. But you can distinguish between, say, the RAFs nighttime bombing campaigns, which were intended to strike civilian targets for the purposes of demoralizing and starving the population, and the USAAFs daytime bombing campaigns, which were intended to destroy factories. Both killed many, many innocent people, but there are clear moral differences.
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)
>the weapons were first and foremost effective at maiming, not killing, which is generally frowned upon by the laws of war
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.
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.
Of course not. The IDF aren't civilians. Hezbollah officials, unless they are part of its military sub-organization, are civilians.
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.
The idea that it's a war crime is ridiculous. They specifically inserted it into the Hezbollah supply chain specifically Hezbollah internal use. They didn't just sell them at Lebanons markets they specifically sold the entire special order to Hezbollah directly. I think if any one other then Israel pulled it off a lot fewer people would be baselessly claiming it was a war crime
If this attack had been carried on US soil it would have been grounds enough to justify another pointless war in the Middle East. But since it was committed by Israel unto a random Arabic country most Americans would fail to place on the map, it's "probably legal".
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.
Yeah, that's when you plant a bomb in a device and then make it beep and subsequently explode even though you have no idea whether it's in someone's home and a kid might pick it up to bring to a parent or perhaps in a crowded civilian market where non-combatants might get hurt and so on.
If the israelis weren't indiscriminate it would obviously make their actions in this case even worse, i.e. they somehow were looking at those kids being close to the explosives and still initiated the detonation sequence to draw their attention and hurt them.
That's the position you'd take if you wanted to smear the israelis.
If it wasn't indiscriminate, then they intentionally killed and maimed kids.
It being indiscriminate would be the lesser evil out of these two options and it is unclear to me why you would prefer this interpretation of the events.
My view is based on the technicalities as I found them reported in mass media and directly from individuals in Lebanon at the time, which gave me the impression that the israelis went ahead and detonated the gadgets at the time they did because they suspected that Hezbollah was onto them, and that they had basically no idea where exactly these devices were at the time. To me this explains why they were detonated at the same time and not 'surgically', as state terrorists like to put it.
I can sympathise with the impulse to believe that the IDF is almost omniscient and able to organise a simultaneous attack against thousands of people individually, they sure want to promote such an image of themselves and put a lot of effort into doing so. But I don't believe it, in part because they have shown themselves to be quite unprofessional and sloppy, as well as lacking in strategic sophistication. Basically, I don't think they have enough disciplined personnel to pull something like that off, and instead they just broadcast a detonation signal to all the devices based on the suspicion that their operation might be revealed and countered.
There's a specific group of people that have this notion of thinking and I don't even need to explain further because most people will know who I am talking about
It's not legal, the consensus among human rights organizations and UN experts is that it's a violation of international humanitarian law. But I guess the American urge to see middle eastern people suffer is alive and well.
> 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.
Why is it inappropriate to be outraged that international humanitarian laws are actively being violated by Israel, in Gaza? Can someone help me understand?
These pagers did not bring down buildings as shown in here. This 'documentary' is all over the place factually with sources from many of the most anti-Israel (not pro-Palestinian) organizations.
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.
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.
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.
> In my opinion Israels actions in Gaza fall well within the actions of a legitimate wa
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.
The United Nations is only providing Sudan refugees around 400 calories per day. When Israel was claimed to be doing war crimes and starving Gaza it was providing over 1000. Should the ICC go after the UN program for Sudan refugees?
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?
> 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.
@Cyph0n, if you think Israel's approach led to too much collateral damage, why don't you propose a solution that would have led to less collateral damage while still taking the Hezbollah leaders out of action?
I bet you won't do this, because I think we can ultimately agree it wasn't possible for Israel to take all these men out of action simultaneously and minimize collateral damage much beyond what it did.
I think where we disagree is that you think Israel should not have taken these men out of action.
Nice deflection. All I need to care about as a lowly SWE is that this attack injured thousands of Lebanese civilians. This is the real world, not a movie or simulated war game.
And I would wager that you would immediately condemn such a barbaric attack if the sides were reversed.
So you weren't able to propose a solution that would have led to less collateral damage because no such solution exists. You know it. I know it. Everyone reading this knows it.
Instead of answering directly you make a comment about deflection, and insist an obvious falsehood (the attack injured thousands of Lebanese civilians) is all you care to believe. On this, we agree. It's all you care to believe, the evidence be damned!
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.
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.
This reminds me of other 20th century atrocity denial I read online. There is adequate evidence of the Truman bombing attempt.
Regarding Lehi and Irgun, they were small because terrorist cells usually are. They operated with the permission of the government (evidence by the government ultimately demonstrating this when it dissolved them and incorporated many of them into itself), and involved people celebrated today in Israel for their terrorism, including future PMs of Israel. It is entirely accurate to say that the terrorist organizations Irgun and Lehi represent the nature and spirit of the Israeli people today in a pure and honest form. And I doubt many over there would disagree with you, as long as you're speaking Hebrew lol
The “20th century atrocity denial” comparison is disgusting and transparent. Holocaust denial is rejected because it contradicts a mountain of primary evidence. You are doing the opposite. You are trying to manufacture certainty where the documentation is missing, then calling anyone who asks for records a “denialist.”
On the Truman claim, you keep saying “adequate evidence” while producing none. The best you have is a biography by Truman’s daughter decades later that does not cite sources and newspaper blurbs repeating those claims. That is not “well documented.” That is the stuff of conspiracy theory.
Here is what you still have not provided: a contemporaneous Secret Service report, a White House mail log entry, an FBI memo, a case number, a preserved device, photographs, lab notes, arrests, indictments, or any archival file tying an actual bomb to Lehi. In fact, a FOIA request to the Secret Service for records of this alleged incident came back “no responsive documents,” and the Truman Library reports it has nothing and explicitly notes that Margaret Truman’s biographies rarely cite sources.
So no, you do not get to say “adequate evidence” and then hide behind moral outrage.
Your next move is equally sloppy. “They operated with the permission of the government.” In 1947 there was no Israeli government. When the state did exist, it disbanded Lehi, arrested members, and fought Irgun in the Altalena affair.
If you have a primary document tying a Truman mail bomb to Lehi, post it. If you do not, drop the Holocaust baiting and admit you are repeating an allegation you cannot substantiate.
And your finale, that Irgun and Lehi represent “the nature and spirit of the Israeli people today,” is just collectivist bigotry. “Terror cells are usually small,” you say, and then you claim two fringe militias somehow define millions of Israelis. That is not analysis. It is an ethnic smear.
“Obviously” is a nice rewrite, but you did not say Holodomor. Holodomor or Holocaust, the move is the same: you are trying to smear “denialism” over a claim you cannot document. Denialism is rejecting mountains of primary evidence. I am asking you for primary evidence and you have produced none. Post a contemporaneous Secret Service or FBI record tying a Truman bomb to Lehi, or admit you are repeating hearsay. Either way, I appreciate you providing a written record of your conspiracy theories and holocaust bating here on Hacker News.
If you know history, it's quite obvious. The Holodomor is an alleged genocide with no absolute evidence that it was planned and intentional, just a great deal of credible hearsay and correlating patterns of behavior. Much like there's no reason to think the allegation made that Israel was sending a mailbomb to Truman was false given all the other Western politicians they were mailbombing at that time.
Thanks for finally stating your epistemic standard out loud: “credible hearsay and correlating patterns” is enough for you to accuse Jews of trying to assassinate a U.S. president. That is not “knowing history.” That is how conspiracy theories work. "Quite obvious" and "no reason to think false" don’t count as proof. You started with a claim you probably genuinely believed in, realized there was no evidence for it, and instead of admitting to that, reverted to trolling. That's bad faith discussion and against HN rules. I’m not playing “atrocity analogy” whack-a-mole as you pivot to minimizing the Holodomor to cover for a claim you cannot document. Absence of evidence isn’t evidence.
I didn't accuse "Jews" of trying to assassinate a US president, I accused Israel of doing so.
>You started with a claim you probably genuinely believed in, realized there was no evidence for it, and instead of admitting to that, reverted to trolling.
I still believe it, as the claim was from Margaret Truman Daniel, who had first hand knowledge of what happened to her parents. You clearly don't agree, despite Israel having done the same thing at the same time to other Western politicians. There's no "trolling" or violation of "HN rules" going on, other than perhaps the antisemitic conflation of Jewishness with Israel, particularly when it comes to who is blamed for the terrorism committed by the latter. It is a form of ethnoracial essentialism and bigotry that also impacts Muslims in the US and other ethnic and racial groups (such as the targeting of Chinese citizens in Indonesia as a form of blame for the country of China's actions).
Nice dodge, but switching from “Jews” to “Israel” does not make you more precise. It makes you chronologically wrong. Israel did not exist in 1947.
And the sermon about “conflating Jewishness with Israel” is rich coming from the person who already declared that Irgun and Lehi represent “the nature and spirit of the Israeli people today.” You do not get to smear an entire people, then clutch pearls about conflation when the smear gets noticed.
Also, Margaret Truman Daniel is not “first-hand evidence” of a 1947 mail bomb plot. First-hand evidence would be a Secret Service or FBI file with a case number, a White House mailroom log, the device itself, lab reports, arrests, indictments, or any archival record from the time tying a specific package to a specific group. You have produced none. A biography written decades later, with no citations, is hearsay until it is anchored to contemporaneous documentation.
“No reason to think it was false” is not how history works. Post a primary document or retract the claim. Everything else here, including your sophomoric word games, is noise.
Doing the pushes up glasses "Ahem well ackshully it was Mandatory Palestine" shtick doesn't really give your terrorism apologia narrative any more legitimacy.
>First-hand evidence would be a Secret Service or FBI file with a case number, a White House mailroom log, the device itself, lab reports, arrests, indictments, or any archival record from the time tying a specific package to a specific group
Which would certainly be classified.
Frankly, this is all just a diversion. Classic Z tactic. I really don't care if someone believes that (the future) Israel's paramilitary terrorists, out of their extensive mailbombing campaign against Western politicians, did or didn't target one specific person. It's really tangential to my point that Israel is a terror state that was born of a campaign of death and atrocities against not only the original inhabitants of the land they stole, but also against Western victims whose only crime was not helping the genocidal Zionist project enthusiastically enough.
This is you admitting you were never discussing history in good faith. You started with “adequate evidence of the Truman bombing attempt.” When asked for records, you pivoted to “it would certainly be classified.” Now you say you “don’t really care” whether it happened. That is not an argument. That is a bluff collapsing in real time.
Your “pushes up glasses, Mandatory Palestine” sneer is also a self-own. You accused “Israel” of an act in 1947. Israel did not exist in 1947. Correcting the actor and the date is not “apologia.” It is basic competence. And I literally called the King David Hotel bombing terrorism and said I’m not defending it, so your “terrorism apologia narrative” is just you lying about what I wrote.
The “classified” excuse is especially weak because this has been FOIA’d. The Secret Service response that’s publicly posted comes back “no responsive records.” Agencies do not answer “we found nothing” when they are sitting on a neat classified case file that exists. They either locate records and exempt them, or they Glomar. “No records” is what it says on the tin.
Then you retreat into “Classic Z tactic,” which is just coded insinuation for “I can’t support my factual claim, so I’ll smear you as part of a tribe.” You do not get to throw that kind of ethnic shorthand around and then pretend you are the one worried about “conflation.”
Bottom line: you used an unverified rumor to call me a denialist. When challenged, you switched to “classified.” When cornered, you admitted you don’t care if it’s true. That tells everyone exactly what this was.
… and it’s not just that Israel woke up one morning and decided to take Hezbollah to the cleaners, either. Hezbollah started a military campaign against Israel on October 8th, 2023, one day after the most horrific attack Jews have experienced since the holocaust.
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.
This substack doesn't support the claim at all it just quotes a book that makes the claim. The headline is basically as informative as the whole article. Trash content only useful for riling people up.
Not even the quoted passage from the book makes the claim in the title. It basically says Palantir had a contract with the IDF during the same time the IDF executed the pager attack. There is zero substantiation of the claim that Palantir assisted with the attack itself. It’s mostly a breathless description of Palantir’s standard operating practice — namely, sending “forward deployed engineers” (consultants) to customers — garnished with some emotional (but clever) wordplay like “Operation Grim Beeper.”
So rather than point us at more Palantir marketing and YouTuber conspiracy theories, why not be a little more specific (if you can) and just tell us a bit more about that since you are allegedly an ex-Palantir?
> 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 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 :)]
Yeah, but Foundry is so ahead, not seeing DataSphere competing there honestly. The only reason is, you already are on SAP and don't want a second system.
Also the engineering / product culture @Palantir is diametrically opposed to what exists at SAP, so I favour Palantir.
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?
You forget that the whole idea that public companies sell on the stock market is that any management, any idiot with an MBA, could just come in and take it over, making roughly the same profit as the people that sold.
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.
I will never understand how people honestly think that there is a such a thing as a central DB. Do you really think that Gov Agencies from all over the world deploy Gotham just connected to the internet without controlling inflow / outflow of data? I would bet money that 99% of critical systems are not even connected to the internet but air-gapped because, believe it or not, people at those agencies are not that stupid.
“The tech was used” but how, specifically, in regards to Operation Grim Reaper? The implication is that it was used to select targets but if that it true then does that mean there are still unexploded pagers in use?
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.
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.
I don't agree, and there are many counterexamples in this thread alone.
People who are passionate about a divisive topic often feel like the site/moderators/community are hopelessly biased against their view. The people with opposing views feel exactly the same way—which, ironically, becomes the one thing they can agree about, although they disagree about the direction.
This is ultimately a function of how the passions work, so I don't believe there's much we can do about it.
you are avoiding the actual topic in question and try to divert discussion into different direction.
flags are been abused and you don't do anything about it, short of "show me wrongly flagged comment and i'll unflag it if i think it was flagged wrong"
can you openly admit that flags are been abused and misused to silence opinions that people disagree with ?
if you can't agree with such a trivial statement, I don't think there is anything to discuss here.
ps. obviously after i made 3 comments i am throttled and cant post this comment
If you want to build up a track record of using HN as intended for a while, you'd be welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and we can take a look and hopefully take the rate limit off your account.
if by "addressed" you mean ignored - yes. I saw multiple people raising with you and with other moderator issue of "abuse of flagging of comments" (not submissions), and I never saw neither of you trying to address it. I saw you only trying to avoid it.
just like you did now twice, first time when I asked, you diverted it to different topic and second time you accused me of asking questions in bad faith.
ironically, you violated yourelf site guideline: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
something funny i saw a couple of weeks ago: some dude that was here for 10-15 years and wrote only 200 or so comments (but really good comments. i went through his comment history and it was really good and insightful), wrote in one of discussions that abuse of flagging of comments is crazy and it used to suppress discussion and that he leaves the site.
his comment got flagged.
this is the atmosphere that you been fostering here. either by inaction against abuse or by "pardoning" people that according to you violate guidelines in multiple ways https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46227648
edit. and how you decide "low quality comment" ? is it your objective opinion or is it all the downvoting from people that don't like facts that i preset (it's common here to downvote and flag comments with link to factual data) ?
Thank you (even though it's not my comment). I feel like if people are free to say the pager attack was "brilliant", then saying it was an act of terrorism (which obviously I agree with) is the equivalent on the other side.
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.
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.
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
@dang Here is another comment of mine on this thread that is substantive, responding directly to the issue, and not a personal attack, but was still flagged. I'm an HN user for 15 years, have reviewed the rules, and don't think this violates any (except that I used the word "balls"?). I agree with the other commenters that flagging is being abused here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46223274
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".
To be clear, I am not suggesting to eliminate any form of moderation whatsoever. I think threads like these require intensive manual moderation.
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.
Perhaps it's worth considering an algorithmic review of flagging abuse. You can feed a table of flagged comments with the user, the comment the user flagged, and the context, as well as HN's rules, into GPT or a similar AI to get a first approximation of which users are abusing flagging, and on which topics flagging is most abused. I bet you'd find some interesting data!
- immune system flagged this story because it thought that this story doesn't deserve to be on this site and it won't contribute/create any productive discussion (you can see this sentiment from many people who flagged it). Based on your comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46218920) you turned off flags on this story and created gesturing around this. You essentially did what you just here criticized.
- immune system comes with interesting thing: autoimmune diseases
A better approach IMO would be to simply turn off comments entirely on controversial topics.
Whether flagging is available or not, nothing is gained in such polarized discussions. Of course it would be best if we could lower that polarization over time, but I am pretty skeptical that discussion boards & comments are a mechanism that will achieve that. I suspect their actual effect is to increase 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).
Comment sections are not the only venue for us to speak to each other and we must be able to consider that they might actually make the problem worse.
Other venues
- real life, talking to people in person
- telephones, audio & video calling, talking to people
- writing op-eds, blog posts, sub-stack newsletters
- podcasts
None of these of course produce the dopamine hit of seeing your likes/retweets/karma go up and that of your opponents going down though, so we would have to give that up. I think that's a good deal.
We can call internet comment infrastructure "community" but that doesn't mean it actually is one or functions to enhance community.
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?
> I advocate concerning yourself with the things you can control, which do 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.
> 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.
I don't know what the numbers are, nor is it possible to determine this from the data we have, but I am reasonably sure that most of the commenters who post about this to HN are doing so in good faith. That doesn't make it any less tough to discuss (or to moderate the discussion). If anything, it makes it tougher.
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.
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.
This is obviously false. Hezbollah was indiscriminately firing artillery into Israel and managed to kill, among other people, 12 Druze soccer players in the Golan Heights.
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.
I've been following this very closely from the start. Hezbollah was targeting radio towers and IDF personnel. Hezbollah denied that it was their rocket that hit the Druze and they certainly didn't have any other attacks that matched that type of target. Again, it's well documented that Israel has caused orders of magnitude more civilian damage and casualties than Hezbollah: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Hezbollah_confl...
> 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
You haven't responded to any claim I've made other than to advance a claim that Hezbollah, which fired tens of thousands of mostly unguided rockets into Israel, did not in fact kill 12 Druze children in the Golan Heights.
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:
You don't want to miss a step holding Israel to account. I'm not interested in pushing back on you about that. But to accomplish that, you're defending Hezbollah. Hezbollah is indefensible. If you want to keep hashing out why, I'm willing to keep talking about it, but I suspect this isn't a productive conversation.
You all will figure out it's all about the Jews eventually.
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
>This is obviously false. Hezbollah was indiscriminately firing artillery into Israel and managed to kill, among other people, 12 Druze soccer players in the Golan Heights.
That is very indiscriminate. They targeted Israel but the rockets landed in Syria. But some how managed to hurt Israelis.
I'm not interested in litigating this claim because it has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. If it helps, you can be as angry at Israel as you'd like without getting much flak from me (I'm angry too), just as long as we don't get to the "enemy-of-my-enemy" stuff that legitimizes Hezbollah.
I don't think "terrorist" is a useful label for either side. It wasn't "terrorism" when Hezbollah besieged Madaya; they did that as a military force.
As a US citizen I have absolutely no problem with Hezbollah. Why would I? They're no threat to me and indeed, are fighting people who are a threat to me.
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?
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.
Yeah, I agree with them there. That’s just being anti-Zionist, which is a position held by most the world. That’s the equivalent of saying “our struggle will end when Nazi Germany is obliterated”.
That's not really true. The point is that there's a difference between how you feel about a topic and how you express it. People will have different feelings and different intensities of feelings about a topic like this. That's normal, understandable and valid.
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.
It's not inappropriate to be outraged. What's inappropriate is to post comments to Hacker News that vent aggression at other commenters and/or those on the other side of the conflict. Doing that is against both HN's rules and, more importantly, the intended spirit of this community (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). A certain amount of processing or, if you like, metabolization needs to happen between those two steps.
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.
> 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.
The perception gap between Zionists and everyone else around this is astonishing. Zionists are gleeful and the rest of us are horrified and disgusted. I don’t see how we don’t eventually end in an armed conflict as this difference seems unreconcilable.
This reads like an ad for the geriatrics in power. They don't even mention what the hell they contributed but did mention that whatever it was was "AI powered" rofl.
Commenters here need to follow the rules, and the rules don't go away when the topic is a tough one. On the contrary, they apply more, as https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html makes clear.
Happy to follow the rules when free discussion is allowed. Watching this topic get censored aggressively on here during some of the darkest months for Palestinians eroded my respect for your “rules”.
We've specifically protected, carefully moderated, and kept open many threads about this topic, at considerable cost, because each time one of these appears on HN, the mods can kiss the rest of their day goodbye, not to mention look forward to streams of abuse [1]. Forgive me therefore if I dispute your claim of "censored aggressively". To me that feels like not taking yes for an answer.
That's understandable, because the people who feel passionately about any topic (call it X) always feel like X is vastly underrepresented, and even "censored aggressively", on HN. We can say things like "frontpage space is the scarcest resource" and "we can't have too much repetition" till the cows come home, but it won't take this feeling away. Even when X is literally the most discussed topic on HN, we get people claiming that X is being censored aggressively—it's not even uncommon [2]. This is a function of how people feel and nothing else.
[1] I'm not comparing this to the suffering of the people in the actual situation. That is obvious of course, but since someone will accuse me of doing that if I don't say this, I'm saying this.
[2] If you want an example, this one is engraved in my memory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23624916. How someone could turn the most-discussed topic on the entire site into "not any mention" and "censored aggressively" still zaps me with pain and anger every time it comes back to me, which fortunately is not all that often.
As someone who is extremely online and often bored at work, I spend a lot of time checking the top ~100 or so posts here. Any article related to Israel was getting rapidly flagged and taken down. It’s possible that these posts are being mass-flagged by users and automatically taken down, but if that’s the case it appears to be an abuse of the flag function. I understand it’s difficult to moderate these threads and that Israel/Palestine is a contentious topic, but that just doesn’t explain the rapid (~10 minute latency) take downs prior to ANY inflammatory comments. Again, I don’t know exactly how your system works, but maybe some additional transparency would be helpful. It’s clearly already being gamed so it wouldn’t hurt.
Edit: I think it’s also important to be conscious of the central role that Y combinator and Silicon Valley in general have played both in the Israel / Palestine “conflict” and domestic US politics. “Hackernews” is not a neutral zone. It is directly associated with the most powerful forces in the world today. I’m not casting judgment because I work in this industry to. But it undoubtedly raises serious questions about the moderation (automated or otherwise) of speech around these topics on here.
The key word in your comment is "any". If you really mean that "any", I propose consing an 'm' onto it, because HN has hosted dozens of threads totalling many thousands of comments, probably tens of thousands by now, about this topic. That shouldn't be hard to verify. One could start here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
> maybe some additional transparency would be helpful.
No amount of transparency will help, alas, for two reasons: (1) people decide these things based on how they feel, and (2) the measure-zero internet law: no matter how often you repeat something, the set of users who receive the information has measure zero (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
> the central role that Y combinator and Silicon Valley in general have played both in the Israel / Palestine “conflict” and domestic US politics.
I don't remotely believe that YC has played a "central role" in any of that, but even if it had, Hacker News is moderated by me and tomhow, and no one at YC has ever put any political pressure on us. If you're talking about HN moderation, that's who you're talking about—and we're quite accessible and willing to answer questions and address objections. (That's why I've posted 81k comments over the last 10+ years, what-am-i-doing-with-my-life-god-help-me.)
p.s. I've always felt that people being bored at work are HN's core constituency, so thank you!
I don’t want hacker news to be neutral or biased, I want it to be a site or I can nerd out about tech stuff. Then when I feel like reading about the news of the day or arguing about politics, I’ll leave hacker news, and go to Twitter.
I don’t want hacker news to become Twitter.
I don’t want hacker news to become a 24/7 critical theory struggle session.
All I can do as one person, acting within the guidelines, is to exercise my ability to flag stuff too focussed on politics.
Thank you for trying to keep HN from devolving into 24x7 culture war like every other site.
I have so many places I can go if I want to read and discuss Israel and Palestine. I don’t need another, and I especially don’t want to lose the one spot I have that’s relatively free of it.
Yeah... requires serious mental gymnastics to argue otherwise.
Military/terrorist group procures communication devices to coordinate military operations. Explosive is sized to injure the holder, not bystanders - per CCTV videos, eg:
What is really annoying is the same people saying this incredibly targeted attack on Hezbollah is a horrible act of terrorism are completely silent on WHY Israel did it, which is because Hezbollah started shooting thousands of missiles at Israel in support of Hamas after the horrific attacks on Oct 7 2023. Just imagine the reaction the US would have if Mexico started shooting thousands of missiles at a US city?
I am simply pointing out OP's double standard: when it comes to Israel, everything is to be distrusted; when it comes to Israel's enemies, everything is to be believed. I am well-aware of the differences between Hamas and Hezbollah and have studied this conflict for well over two decades.
> when it comes to Israel, everything is to be distrusted
Correct, with a good reason for it. Israelis have been caught lying so many times that now when they make a claim, it is on them to prove that the claim is correct, rather than on others to prove that it is not. Just a few examples off the top of my head include:
- The killing of medical workers in a convoy of ambulances and burying them in shallow graves, then lying about doing it until someone dug the bodies up and found footage confirming that they lied on the phone of one of the buried aid workers. [1]
- The hunting down and killing of World Central Kitchen aid workers via multiple air strikes [2]. This was repeatedly denied by Israelis until too much evidence was stacked up and they settled for "it was a grave mistake".
- The high profile case of killing of Hind Rajab [3] who for a brief period of time was the sole survivor of a tank attack in a shelled vehicle filled with her dead family members. Aid workers were dispatched to rescue here, coordinated with Israelis. Neither the girl nor the aid workers were ever seen alive after that. Israelis repeatedly insisted that there were no troops in the area, until too much evidence was stacked again.
Hi there, I see you too trust Hamas sources (the origin of the Hind Rajab sotry) and not Israeli sources, so you too are in the camp of "believe hamas" and "doubt israel".
1. Hamas used World Central Kitchen vehicles, according even to the head of World Central Kitchen, who initially condemned the attack and then later admitted Hamas used WCK vehicles. You didn't know this, did you?
2. A few questions on the Hind Rajab incident:
Was the car stationary or moving? was it travelling north to a combat zone or south away from one? According to the original Arabic reports, did the family get out of the car or were they trapped inside? In the audio of this attack, was there any crossfire? When was Hind Rajab killed? Was it at 8:10am or at 2:30pm? What happened in those 6 hours? How can you be sure this was not a "fog of war" incident as opposed to a deliberate targeting of a civilian?
As per my previous assertion, it is now on Israel and their sympathizers to answer all those questions in a manner that leaves no doubt about their veracity. Watching what they are doing and what they are saying for two whole years, and the results of it all, leaves them with zero benefit of the doubt with the vast majority of people in the world.
Nothing's invented, what I listed are real events with extensive documentation and evidence behind them.
You are stating some questions which are supposedly going to lead to IDF's innocence in the matter if they are truthfully answered. The burden of that additional proof is now on you. Mere questions being enough to dispel a case against the IDF is a thing of the past. They worked very hard to earn such a reputation, and now there are consequences for it.
There's no burden of proof on me, it's all on you.
You're the one claiming Israel purposefully killed Hind Rajab and yet you refuse to answer the specific questions I asked you about the incident. You say this is because you answering is "going to lead to IDF's innocence." On this we agree. The facts of what actually happened matter.
In the case of Hind Rajab, I hope this does go to court so we can find out what happened in this tragic incident. If there were war crimes, I'd like to see the soldiers who committed them face legal justice. But I still believe in the concept of presumed innocence and the burden of proof.
You don't get to make up crimes and declare a party guilty of them, even if you're totally sure they're the baddies. That's what enlightenment thinking and four centuries of western jurisprudence teaches us. Innocent until proven guilty.
Everything you say here is false.
1. Israel's stated goal is to neuter Hamas and return the hostages, not kill civilians.
2. Arabs speak a semitic language; the "semites" in "anti-semite" has always referred to Jews.
3. Jews, including white Ashkenazi European Jews, are levantine in origin. Their lineage traces to Judea.
4. "Antisemitic" means anti-Jew. You are using it to mean anti-Arab, but arabs are not semites
5. You did make all that up!
>Israel's stated goal is to neuter Hamas and return the hostages, not kill civilians
Sure, yeah, just like it was in any number of previous operations, which at the time they declared successful, even though they did quite a bit more of the latter. Per Occam's razor, either they are prodigious bunglers, or you are overly credulous.
> 1. Israel's stated goal is to neuter Hamas and return the hostages, not kill civilians.
And yet so many dead civilians. It's almost like a genocial terrorist country like israel always lie. Also, I was referring to israel's genocide of the semites in palestine to found "israel" up to present day. You conveniently forgot about it.
> 2. Arabs speak a semitic language; the "semites" in "anti-semite" has always referred to Jews.
Arabs are ethnic semites who speak a semitic language. "Israelis" are non-semitic europeans pretending to be "jews". Ethnic europeans are not semites and can never be semites because they come from an entire separate branch of the human family tree.
> 3. Jews, including white Ashkenazi European Jews, are levantine in origin. Their lineage traces to Judea.
No they do not. Maybe a handful.
> 4. "Antisemitic" means anti-Jew.
No it does not because semite doesn't mean "jew". A semite and a jew are two different things.
> You are using it to mean anti-Arab, but arabs are not semites
No. I'm using semite to mean semite. Arabs surely are semites. Europeans are not though.
> 5. You did make all that up!
If arabs are not semites, then what are they? You say arabs are not semites and I'm the liar? I'm making shit up?
1. There aren't a lot of dead civilians given that this was a 2 year war fought in a built-up urban environment fought against a plainclothes terrorist enemy that violated every law of war, including using hospitals and schools as military bases.
2. Semites is not an ethnicity, it's a language family, sorry. When used colloquially it has always referred to Jews.
3. “Semitic” is a language group, not a racial caste. Jews—including Ashkenazi—have documented Middle Eastern ancestry, and about half of Israelis are Jews from the Middle East and North Africa. The idea that Israelis are “non-Semitic Europeans pretending to be Jews” is just antisemitic nonsense, not a serious factual claim.
4. See above. Semitic is a language family, not a people. "Anti-semite" as a term has always meant "anti-Jew."
5. Correct, Arabs are Arabian. You're not "making shit up" you're repeating evidence-free nonsense you want to be true without examining its validity.
> 1. There aren't a lot of dead civilians given that...
It's amazing how similarly zionists/israelis and nazis rationalize.
> 2. Semites is not an ethnicity, it's a language family, sorry. When used colloquially it has always referred to Jews.
"Semitic people or Semites is a term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group[2][3][4][5] associated with people of the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, including Akkadians (Assyrians and Babylonians), Arabs, Arameans, Canaanites (Ammonites, Edomites, Israelites, Moabites, Phoenicians, and Philistines) and Habesha peoples." --wiki
> 3. “Semitic” is a language group, not a racial caste.
Germanic is a language group and an ethnic group. Using your logic, germans are not germanic peoples because germanic is a language group.
They have less documented middle eastern ancestry (none) than elizabeth warren has of native ancestry.
> The idea that Israelis are “non-Semitic Europeans pretending to be Jews” is just antisemitic nonsense, not a serious factual claim.
Considering that most "israelis" are ATHEISTS and most "israelis" are non-semitic and most "israelis" do not adhere to or respect the torah, it is a factual claim.
> 5. Correct, Arabs are Arabian. You're not "making shit up" you're repeating evidence-free nonsense you want to be true without examining its validity.
Why do you lie? People can literally google "semites" or "semitic peoples". If you lie about something like this, what are the odds you are lying about israel killing civilian semites in palestine?
> 1. What's the similarity in your view between "zionist rationalization" and "nazi rationalization"?
Penchant for rationalizing away acts of genocide and dehumanize peoples. The only difference is zionists dehumanize actual semites ( palestinians) while nazis dehumanized european "jews". Zionists/"Israelis" are actual anti-semites. While nazis were anti-european "jews". Heady stuff.
> To me this sounds like more antisemitic nonsense, you comparing zionists to Nazis.
I'm comparing apples to apples.
> So using “Semitic” to argue that Israelis are “fake” or “non-Semites” is simply incorrect.
"Israelis" are europeans. Europeans are not semites.
> 3. The germanic language group is a family of languages that includes dutch, english, yiddish, afrikkans, etc. The germanic people includes germany, not brits and americans.
But germanic people includes ENGLISH though. It's pathetic what you are trying to do here.
> 5. I'm not lying.
That's all you have done. "Arabs are not semites". Lie. "Israel wasn't trying to kill civilians". Lie.
You seem to think that asserting something makes it true. I particularly love that you call yiddish speakers, americans and dutch "germanic people" - a novel claim, haha.
You literally do not understand antisemitism or semitic people or genetics or ethnic and national identity.
Israel's goal since the beginning was to exist, to be able to live. Antisemitism has literally never meant hatred against various semitic people such as Ethiopian semites or Assyrians it has always been a term to describe Jew hatred, coined by a German Jew hater. Also semitic is not a genetic thing, its a language thing and various identities tied to various semitic languages largely do not see it as a useful grouping. I have never heard of pan-semitic movement similar to pan Germanic or pan Slavic ones(those were not universally popular when they existed but they did exist and had some popularity). About half of Israeli Jews ancestors didn't recently live in Europe (and most of those had ancestors who lived elsewhere in MENA). Finally when it comes to genetics both Jews and Palestinians have substantial overlapping ancestry to the ancient Levant region as well as ancestry from outside of it, but that doesn't really change people's minds on ethnic identity and nationalism
Yes that’s why I said minimal AOE and also why I said in a war (keyword - we live in real world and war is a very real thing whether we like it or not) minimizing harm to innocents is key.
The alternative is 10s of thousands of civilians suffering because their leaders drag them into hell with them. We already see how bad that is..
According to many US politicians, it's a thing to celebrate (Fetterman stands out as one, having received a golden pager from an Israeli official).
And the mildly veiled threats on social media to people speaking out about Palestine referencing the pager attacks that goes unpunished by social media platforms.
This is why Grim Beeper was so enlightening for me. It proved that Israel could go above and beyond to limit collateral damage with some brilliant attack no one has even contemplated before and there would still be people online saying it was a war crime.
> Gabriel said Mossad had learned that Hezbollah was buying pagers from Gold Apollo, a company in Taiwan.
> "When they are buying from us, they have zero clue that they are buying from the Mossad. We make like the 'Truman Show,' everything is controlled by us behind the scene," Gabriel said. "In their experience, everything is normal. Everything was 100% kosher."
> To further the plot, Mossad hired the Gold Apollo saleswoman Hezbollah was used to working with, who was unaware she was working with Mossad. According to Gabriel, she offered Hezbollah the first batch of pagers as an upgrade, free of charge. By September 2024, Hezbollah had about 5,000 pagers in their pockets.
> Going analog has been a signature move for terror groups ever since the September 11th attacks as a way to successfully mask communications from Western militaries and government defense agencies.
> A source cited by the Wall Street Journal said many of the affected devices were from a new shipment delivered to Hezbollah militants in recent days.
> Apparently, the encrypted pagers currently in use by Hezbollah were brand new models and bought in bulk for the members just a few months ago, several sources told Reuters.
I'm sure you can find more if you look; there's a lot of articles about it.
It's a war, you know. People die. Sometimes in perfectly legal and justified strikes, sometimes in attacks that contravene the laws of war. And given that Hamas uses the civilians under their control as both a sword and a shield, and that Egypt simply refuses their obligation under IHL to allow refugees to flee, collateral damage is an unfortunate inevitability.
Lumping together all civilians killed by Israel in the course of war is overly reductive: Some were killed in unlawful intentional acts, some were unfortunate collateral damage of lawful acts, and some were intentional victims of Hamas brutality, sacrificed at the altar of making Israel look bad.
It's an occupation that has been ongoing for almost 80 years, not a 'war' that began unprovoked, along with recorded history and the universe itself, on October 7th.
>Sometimes in perfectly legal and justified strikes, sometimes in attacks that contravene the laws of war.
More than half the time, these 'perfect justifications' don't hold water and in fact rest on the hope of total impunity from IHL.
>Hamas uses the civilians under their control as both a sword and a shield
Not according to any sane definition that is internationally agreed upon. Conversely, the IDF's use of human shields - as defined in IHL and in their own propaganda - is abundantly documented.
>Egypt simply refuses their obligation under IHL to allow refugees to flee, collateral damage is an unfortunate inevitability.
Rather odd that rendering Palestinians stateless is just a law of nature in your books, and that Israel's obligations as an occupying power and the agent that created a refugee crisis - ie, prosecuted a campaign of human cleansing - is not part of your calculus at all.
This is exactly one group wants to do. Be vocal, throw out many lies.. and people will start thinking both sides are (very) bad and there is no reason for them to be involved. This thinking allows Israel to commit genocide, extend its borders, bomb journalist, cut aid, arrest..
The Lebanese Ministry of Health stated that the attack had killed a confirmed 12 civilians, while killing 30 Hezbollah members. 1 civilian death for every 2.5 combatant deaths.
For comparison, in World War II, there were an estimated 2 million civilian deaths and 5.3 million combatant deaths. 1 civilian death for every 2.6 combatant deaths.
Those are remarkably similar ratios. Take that as you will.
> The Lebanese Ministry of Health stated that the attack had killed a confirmed 12 civilians, while killing 30 Hezbollah members.
Source? AFAIU The Lebanese Ministry of Health stated 12 total were killed in operation grim beeper, this number did not appear to exclude Hezbollah members.[0] They listed 2 children which AFAIU were friends/family members of Hezbollah members. They list four of those killed as healthcare workers but don't appear to identify if those healthcare workers were also Hezbollah members. Keep in mind the attack was more designed to injure rather than kill, with nearly 3000 injured.
> 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.
Israel made the entire world a less safe place by using consumer electronics as bombs shipped out into the public in one of the worst acts of terrorism ever recorded.
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)
Yes the foundations can mandate that the tools are forbidden to use in military and intelligence applications.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
The comment I was answering above above was saying that explosions were so weak that people inches away were unarmed. The doctors in Lebanon would probably dissent
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.
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.
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.
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"
Hezbollah has not been known to behead and rape civilians and has in fact condemned the use of these tactics by Islamists. This conflation really draws into question the quality of your analysis.
They go off around civilians, in homes and public spaces, including hospitals because guerrillas and terrorists are not regular soldiers and imbed themselves in homes and public spaces, including hospitals.
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.
The pagers that were targeted were exclusively used by Hezbollah combatants, procured by Hezbollah, linked to an encrypted military network Hezbollah fought a civil war in Lebanon to established, triggered by a message encrypted to that network. The bombs consisted of 6 grams of PETN, yielding a 35kJ blast, approximately the size of 5-10 cherry bombs, or 2% of the raw explosive yield of an M67 grenade --- with the key difference that the pagers were just pagers, with no metal parts introduced (deliberately, to avoid detection by Hezbollah), unlike fragmentation grenades, whose lethality (at 5m) stems from the hardened steel shrapnel they project.
(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.
All: before commenting here, please verify that you're feeling something different—quite different—from anger and a desire to fight this war. That is not what HN is for, and destroys what it is for.
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."
Interestingly just nine days ago someone here shared a link to the US's Law of War manual for military personnel. It's pretty good for what it is. Since countries base this stuff on the same international treaties they've all signed, it's a guide to Israel's conduct during war (or just about anyone's) as well as the US's.
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.
I have questions about the concept of legality in a war like the one between Hamas/Hezbollah and Israel. The idea that in a war there can be legal and illegal actions established by international treaties to protect civilians as much as possible can only work if two (or more) legitimate states are fighting each other, with leaders who can be held accountable for the orders they give. 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? At this point, doesn't complying to international treaties only mean further endangering their own population?
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.
> The idea that in a war there can be legal and illegal actions established by international treaties to protect civilians as much as possible can only work if two (or more) legitimate states are fighting each other
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.
This operation was one of the most targeted military operations known in warfare. International law doesn't hold Hezbollah accountable for example. That is the reality today.
Hezbollah's own actions are significantly more targeted and have resulted in significantly fewer civilian casualties.
> Hezbollah's own actions are significantly more targeted
They literally fire unguided rockets in the general direction of populated areas.
They did targeted strikes on military facilities. See for yourself:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46226028
well what's the ratio?
is it 10000000 rockets fired to some region, with 1000 civilian hits, with 1 military facility hit?
how do you "target" that rocket? just point it without precision?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Hezbollah_confl...
woah just linking to wikipedia article without any substance?
damn...
There are extensive references in there. Feel free to back up your own assertions with documentation.
Don't be lazy and cite them
Ad-hominem is the argument of last resort, according to Paul Graham's hierarchy of disagreement.
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This doesn't even make sense. Suppose Israel does lie constantly. What does that have to do with whether Hezbollah does?
Parent meant this as a statement of fact (stating it's x that lies, and implying it's not y, or that x lies more than y). As such (true or not) it makes perfect sense, and requires only a very intuitive and casual understanding to get it.
Your comment reads as if it was some failed attempt at some kind of axiomatic construction (x lies _therefore_ y doesn't).
No?
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This is completely false. They fired thousands of missiles directly at civilians. 60,000 people had to evacuate. The only reason they didn't kill thousands of people is because the Iron Dome system is so good.
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You mean except for all the ones Amnesty reported, and that children's soccer team in the Golan Heights.
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Good note.
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Your comments have been repeatedly and egregiously breaking the site guidelines. That's not ok, and if you keep doing it we will have to ban your account.
HN's rules don't change based on how right you are or feel you are, or how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
I'm sorry and will stop but isn't spreading false Hezbollah propaganda against the rules? How are we meant to respond to people saying incredibly wrong things?
The short answer is that you (<-- I don't mean you personally, of course, but all of us) should respond to incorrect information with correct information, to bad arguments with better arguments [1], and do this thoughtfully and respectfully, assuming good faith and so on, as the site guidelines request (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
For a longer answer, I need to clarify the principles we rely on. I'm happy to give that a try, as long as it's clear that I'm not commenting on the specific topic of this thread.
People are allowed to be wrong on Hacker News [2]. They have to be, because we're all more or less wrong about most things.
It's not that the truth doesn't matter—it matters enormously! But it's not the moderators' job to decide what is true vs. false. It's the community's job to hash that out through respectful discussion and debate. Mods couldn't do it even if we wanted to—we don't have a truth meter [3]. Plus the community wouldn't stand for it. There would be a huge backlash against the mods imposing their views on everyone else.
Wrongness is part of hashing out the truth. One needs to be free to visit wrong points in the solution space, or we'd all be trapped in a hell version of the old nine-dot puzzle (the one that spawned the phrase "thinking outside the box") with no solution.
"Spreading false propaganda" is, of course, an extreme case of wrongness, but the right scope for describing the principles here is wrongness-in-general, whether it's being wrong in an extreme way or just ordinary wrong-being.
It's true that posting in bad faith, e.g. saying wrong things despite knowing that they're wrong, is worse than just being mistaken. But can we decide who is and isn't doing this? That would require reading their mind and/or heart, and that's impossible—so we can't use that as a basis for moderation.
Internet readers are too quick to jump to the conclusion that someone else is posting in bad faith. Nearly always, the other person is as sincere as you are. It's just that their background is so different from yours that they've ended up holding an opposing view on a charged topic.
Most people find it hard to tolerate differences of opinion that are outside of a certain radius from their own position. We can call that the "comfort radius". In the past I've called it the "shill threshold" [4]. Past that radius or threshold, i.e. outside one's circle of comfort, it feels impossible that anyone could possibly hold such obviously-wrong views in good faith. The other person must be a shill, a propagandist, or worse. What other explanation could there be?
Well, here's the other explanation: that person has a background different enough from yours/mine/ours that entirely different things feel obvious to them. The world is much bigger and more diverse than your comfort radius, or mine, can easily allow for. If the delta between X's background and mine is big enough, X's views are going to feel not just wrong, but obviously and incredibly wrong, and—as the delta gets larger—appalling, barbaric, and so on.
So what should we do? We should assume good faith, because assuming bad faith is wrong far more often than it is right, and instead work on tolerating the distance between the other person's view and our own. By "tolerating the distance", I don't mean agreeing with them. I mean being willing to endure the discomfort and bad feeling in one's own system (the rage, fear, you name it) that comes up when encountering a view that feels obviously and incredibly wrong.
This is sometimes called "bearing the unpleasant manifestations of others" [5]. It is hard and takes practice. Actually, it's one of the hardest things we have to do, but also one of the most important. (I am not advertising this very attractively, but it does suck.)
To the extent we do it, a kind of metabolic process takes place where one's intense initial reactions get converted into a range where one becomes able to do what I described above: respond to false information with correct information, and to bad arguments with better arguments, while—I'll add one more thing—remaining in good-enough connection with each other.
Or to go back to short-answer mode: if you're hot under the collar, wait till you cool down before posting [6].
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932851
[5] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[6] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Either reply productively to refute the things you disagree with, or flag the comment and move on.
Telling someone they’re insane is not that.
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You also have been breaking the site guidelines badly by perpetuating this flamewar and by using HN primarily for political battle. That's not ok, and if you keep doing it we will have to ban your account.
HN's rules don't change based on how right you are or feel you are, or how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
I’m simply responding to people who are attacking my posts though.
We need you (i.e. everyone) to follow the rules regardless of how others are behaving.
It always feels like the other person started it and did worse (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), so you (i.e. all of us) can't rely on that as a basis for responding. It leads to a downward spiral, and eventually scorched earth.
I agree with you about the previous comment, which was unhelpful, but regarding Hezbollah, I'm afraid you're making claims about things you want to be true more than you are relating any actual research.
It's my fault for picking this scab with you again in the first place, though.
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Tptacek has been one of the more reasonable voices on this thread and it is odd you would single him out for criticism. Your use of the word "goybucks" is very concerning.
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I apologized for correcting a comment from someone who I believe isn't in a place to discuss the issue, and who would predictably contest the claim --- since we'd already had the same disagreement elsewhere, bringing it up again, however valid my concern was, was bad for the thread. The apology was in no way whatsoever a reflection of my beliefs about what actually happened.
"Goybucks" is absolutely not OK here.
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I think the ship has sailed on you putting things politely in this thread.
You think quite a lot of things other people disagree with in this thread.
Though: this world's essentially an absurd place to be living in, it doesn't call for bubble withdrawal. I've been told it's a fact of life: men have to kill one another. Well, I say there are still things worth fighting for!
I hope that you discover a world worth that is worth sharing with your fellow man, in your lifetime.
Would you be ok with "abeedbucks"?
Once again, that is off-topic and unrelated to the discussion we are having.
No more than "goybucks" is.
Jews use "goy" as a slur against non-Jews. As a so called "goy", I don't find "goybucks" offensive and in fact appreciate the attempt to reclaim the word.
Would you be ok with "abeedbucks"?
If it's self-depricating, sure. I'd love to see how my two cents in goybucks measure up in the eyes of a Muslim man.
This is just luridly false, especially (but not exclusively) in the context of Hezbollah's own actions in Syria, where they made and broadcast propaganda videos of them deliberately starving Madaya. When you make claims like this, you call into question everything else you're saying; it's hard to imagine where you could have gotten this notion from.
We’re talking about Israel, not Syria.
It's equally true in Israel, where Hezbollah fired tens of thousands of rockets indiscriminately, killing, among other things, a Druze children's soccer team in the Golan Heights. You can read this on Amnesty (no friend of Israel's) if you want.
Again: it's hard to understand where you could getting this notion that Hezbollah attacks are highly targeted from. That is anything but their operational signature.
>It's equally true in Israel, where Hezbollah fired tens of thousands of rockets indiscriminately, killing, among other things, a Druze children's soccer team in the Golan Heights.
An innocent kid was killed in this conflict? Thank God the other side didn't do that 20,000x more - then it would have been a real tragedy!
Especially if unlike some indiscriminate firing of crude rockets, they did it purposefully, with state of the art arms and monitoring systems.
I have no idea what you're trying to say here. I think you're trying to weigh Israel's actions against those of Hezbollah's? You're not going to get anywhere, rhetorically, with me doing that, because I'm no supporter of Israel's.
I posted plenty of videos in my other reply to you of Hezbollah attacks on Israel. They’re very clearly targeted.
They fire guided munitions at Israeli troop positions. They fire unguided rockets and mortar shells into Israeli towns. A video of a targeted Hezbollah strike doesn't illustrate anything at all; everybody points the gun when it's useful to do so, it's what you do when you don't have a combatant target that tells the actual tale.
I can't say enough how odd it is to bring this kind of take into a discussion about Hezbollah. Note that I'm not making the case that Israel is fastidious about avoiding civilian casualties; that would be an unproductive argument to attempt on this thread. You have found one of the few arguments that are even less productive.
https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/lebanon-hezbollahs...
Any collateral damage here is orders of magnitude less than what Israel has done. There’s no debating that.
I don't have to debate that point, because it addresses an argument I didn't make. The problem is how deeply unmoored your argument is from reality. Exactly why is it that you believe Hezbollah's attacks are characterized by a high degree of targeting? It's clearly not true. Can you explain the logic and the sourcing you used to make that claim?
I already explained it with video evidence. I’m not sure why you hate Hezbollah so much, but I don’t share your animus. In fact I’d consider them an ally from an enemy of my enemy perspective. You don’t have to agree, but that’s my POV.
You didn't, at all. I didn't look at the videos you provided; I simply stipulate that they're real and depict what you say they depict. That doesn't demonstrate anything at all about Hezbollah's rules of engagement. When they have a clear firing solution on an IDF tank, they take the shot? Ok. And?
At the point where you're declaring Hezbollah a moral ally, I think the conversation has run to its logical terminus. Ask the Sunni Arabs in Syria how allied they feel with Hezbollah.
It isn't collateral damage. Hezbollah's goal is to kill Israeli civilians.
Unfortunately, the IDF also doctrinally enshrines killing Israelis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal_Directive
Accountability on both sides is needed, for the violence to end.
I don't understand how that is relevant to this situation.
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They are targeted at Israel civilians.
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Yes, humanitarian law explicitly applies to enemies who do not, themselves, follow it. It's called [non]-reciprocity:
"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.
My understanding is that this non-reciprocity is why international law often feels so permissive of seemingly bad actions. It generally aims to forbid only strategies that are the highly destructive and non-effective at winning wars. The idea is that such actions are not necessary in warfare in any circumstance, rather than a coordinated and mutual choice to leave effective strategies on the proverbial table.
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)
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On the contrary, you have it completely backwards. Each time one side beaches the laws of war, more on the other side are motivated towards extremism. This cycle is why there is still war between Israel/Palestine after 74 years of fighting; both sides have continually committed atrocities, cementing the cycle of violence.
Even if it were true, it sounds like an obvious loophole if one party could simply refuse to consider the other party a state and instantly get rid if all legal liability.
Which is actually one of the major issues of conflict with the Palestinians. The Palestinians want to be a state and most of the world considers them one. It's just that Israel and the US (together with other countries) don't and that the US also blocks official designation by the UN.
The Nazis tried the same argument at the Nuremberg trials. They claimed that they weren't bound by the laws of war (e.g., Hague regulations) since Poland and other states hadn't signed them. The court dismissed the argument and stated that certain rules are binding whether both parties are signatories or not. In Israel's case it is even worse since indiscriminate attacks have been outlawed since basically forever. At the Nuremberg trials, the argument "there is no precedent" had some merit, today it certainly does not.
How is it an indiscriminate attack? It targeted Hezbollah operatives, not random Lebanese people.
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule71
I don't see how that would apply at all. These aren't nuclear weapons that take out entire populations, these are tiny munitions used to target Hezbollah operatives.
Well, sucks to be you then, since many legal experts do see how this rule applies to this case: https://opiniojuris.org/2024/10/15/is-it-cake-on-boobytrappe... https://www.ejiltalk.org/were-the-israeli-pager-and-walkie-t... https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/09/exploding-pa...
None of these have anything to do with what you cited above, which was ICRC's summary of customary law about inherently indiscriminate weapons. Your first and second links here are examining entirely different challenges to the operation's legality, and the third is just some vague assertions from questionable sources like Francesca Albanese.
You could ask ChatGPT and get a perfectly cromulent answer on what these have to do with what I cited. The key theme is indiscriminate weapons used for indiscriminate attacks. Alas, you can lead a horse to water...
Tiny explosives are certainly not the sort of inherently indiscriminate weapons ICRC refers to. You might want to read the article you linked to, which uses nuclear weapons as the main example. The difference in energy released by Israel's beeper vs a modern nuclear payload is at least 10 orders of magnitude.
Scroll down to examples, read it, and then click Next until you get to Rule 80.
ICRC is not really claiming that those examples are indiscriminate, they're giving examples of weapons that might arguably or sometimes be considered indiscriminate.
Some booby traps might fall into that category, but this isn't a toy or a banana, it's a device specifically issued to enemy personnel.
There can be separate textualist arguments about Israel's operation based on the specific language of CCW, but that's unrelated to the customary IHL you linked to.
For one it wasn't targeted, but either way, if it, as you claim, was targeted then it would be even worse because it's worse to kill and maim kids by targeting them than by being indifferent.
How was this not targeted? I was the most targeted military operation we know of. Give me any example of anything in warfare that is close to that.
This was about as targeted as anti-personnel landmines, but spread out in civilian areas and detonated without any knowledge of their surroundings at the time.
Because mines are untargeted and designed to maim without discrimination as to who they might hurt there is a long running effort to prohibit their use.
Hezbollah pagers aren't randomly lying around though, they're normally attached to Hezbollah members. These were also much smaller than any anti personnel mine.
This was far more targeted than, say, any artillery strike that a commander could possibly order. Targeted doesn't mean it's impossible to harm something else. That's possible with any weapon, and far more likely with larger munitions like artillery shells.
Hezbollah members include medical personnel, teachers, politicians and so on. It is a much larger group of organisations than the armed factions.
I'm not sure what you're after. What the israelis did would have been a worse crime if it actually was targeted. Is that your point?
It's not clear that Israel just set off all Hezbollah issued beepers; we don't know what methodology they used. We can guess based on reported casualties, but we don't know which casualties were involved with Hezbollah's military operations.
> What the israelis did would have been a worse crime if it actually was targeted.
It was certainly targeted, it just also had collateral damage, i.e. harm to non-targets.
What you have Israel do instead? Suppose they struck Hezbollah fighters with conventional artillery. They're not sitting around in open fields, so there still would have been collateral damage.
Would you again maintain that the strikes were "untargeted" because there was collateral damage? By this unusual definition, it seems impossible to do a "targeted" strike at least in any urban environment.
Israel should obviously have ended the occupations, payed reparations and prepared for the return of refugees.
The IDF doesn't give a shit about "collateral damage". They mainly attack civilian targets. That's the purpose of the organisation, to make life for indigenous populations in the vicinity of the state of Israel impossible. Destroy their agriculture and water sources, murder their children, displace them, destroy their homes, occupy the land, pretend to be a victim if someone fights back. Then sign some contracts every now and then and don't abide by them while claiming that the other party is the one who doesn't.
This has been ongoing for about a century, it was how the Haganah, Irgun, Stern gang operated. This is why the IDF has such a bad army, they aren't trained for combat and hardly ever have to experience it. Instead they're used for genocidal atrocities against unarmed civilians.
Ended the occupations meaning what, never enter Lebanon? What do you think Israel should have done about Hezbollah’s terrorism, just tolerate it and never let Israelis return to their homes in the north?
Apart from that it seems like you’re just switching topics to a variety of other accusations. We were talking about a particular operation which you claimed was “untargeted”, yet you haven’t suggested any better alternative (besides being nicer to terrorists in hopes that they stop?). In reality the operation had far less collateral damage than what’s possible with any conventional alternative.
Using force to halt or slow a genocide is not terrorism. And yes, Israel ought to retreat from lebanese as well as syrian and palestinian territory, stop it's cross-border attacks, allow displaced people to return to their homes and pay reparations.
The alternative is exactly that, to stop doing apartheid and occupation and allow justice to prevail.
There’s no question that Hezbollah’s bombardment was terrorism. It would be absurd to claim that they were targeting military assets when they routinely use unguided rockets which aren’t capable of doing so. Israel had every right to enter Lebanon in response.
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Suppose we believe all captions in your links, so for example we'll assume that guy in shorts and flip flops was some sort of “spy balloon manager.”
It wouldn’t matter, because once you perform terrorist attacks, you’re still a terrorist even if you also attack valid targets sometimes. Same as Hamas, which is still a terrorist org despite attacking some IDF bases.
Even Amnesty has acknowledged Hezbollah’s routine use of unguided rockets, which can’t possibly target military assets but are just lobbed in the general direction of population centers. That makes them terrorists, regardless of what else they do.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/12/israel-hezbol...
Resistance to occupation and attack isn't "terrorism", that word has no meaning anymore.
Could you quote from that article where Amnesty makes a statement calling actions by armed factions of Hezbollah terrorism?
I didn't say that Amnesty used the term. If bombardment of population centers, with no targeting of military assets, isn't terrorism than what is?
Yeah, why don't they do that? And why do you?
My suspicion is that you expect it to short circuit the conversation, and that no one is willing to side with terrorism or affiliate themselves with it in any way, which would give you a degree of power over the conversation.
It's a weasely word, and has about zero relevance in criminal law regarding warfare, it being a political designation mainly used by states that meet resistance to colonisation and the like.
Yeah, sure, Hezbollah has committed war crimes. So what? They look like a pathetic little rounding error beside the usian and israeli war crimes over the past decades, or even just the last year or so. Like Hamas I'm sure Hezbollah would gladly send people to the Hague for prosecution if Israel did too.
So tell us, why is this designation so important to you? Is it because you lack arguments? Is it because you're lazy and just want to waste other people's time?
While there isn't one standard definition of terrorism, Hezbollah's untargeted bombardment of Israeli towns qualifies under pretty much any definition.
You seemed happy to use the term against Israel [1], claiming an operation which specifically targeted Hezbollah operatives was somehow terrorism. Why do you suddenly have a blanket objection to a term that you were just using yourself?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46243118
You're repeating yourself.
Under what definition would the targeting of villages where the IDF is operating qualify? Why are you back to lying about the pager attacks being "targeted", even though they clearly were not, and even if they were, that would make the israeli crime a lot worse?
I used it as a rhetorical device, and as is obvious above and elsewhere, it's not something I'm monotonically trying to rub in as part of an astroturfing campaign.
No, the messengers were specifically delivered to Hezbollah leadership. It is not even closely comparable.
They were widely distributed and there was no way for the israelis to know where they were when they detonated them, which they likely did out of desperation and not because they had good reason to believe they were in such and such a position.
It is fucking grim to incessantly defend state terrorism.
You don't seem to have an inch of a problem with terrorist, islamist militants that not only terrorise Israel, they also terrorise Lebanon. Ask the Arab League. Even they define them as terrorists.
Something here is grim indeed and it is not restricted to some regretable educational deficiencies.
Why change the subject?
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Firing a projectile at an individual combatant?
Projectiles hit the wrong target all the time. Especially when we get into artillery or air strikes where there's no line of sight to a uniformed soldier, commanders can't be sure if they're going to hit the intended target. That's why we have the principle of proportionality rather than an impossible standard of zero collateral damage.
But surely "the most targeted strike of all time" would be "a single-target strike on a visually confirmed intended individual", right? Or at least that would be more targeted than any strike without LoS?
A parent comment claimed it was the most targeted “operation”, not “strike”. Some small individual strikes have 100% perfect targeting; I think the claim was about large scale operations like artillery barrages or aerial campaigns.
(I think the claim is technically false if we include open field conflicts, but probably true if we narrow it to comparable environments.)
Targeting Hezbollah operatives is certainly targeting, yes. The fact that there was still some nonzero harm to civilians, despite the targeting, does not refute that. Targeting doesn't imply zero collateral damage, which is an impossible standard.
The collateral damage was obvious and predictable. If you know about the potential collateral damage and do it anyway, then it's not targeted, even if you say it's targeted.
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.
If I dive bomb an enemy position, knowing that it's dark and windy and I might end up hitting something else, that's still a targeted operation. Same deal with the pager operation.
> So I target them by dropping a nuke on NYC.
You would have plainly violated the principle of proportionality, which is about the relative weight of military advantage vs civilian harm. The pager operation on the other hand created a massive military advantage, with less civilian harm than what's possible with conventional warfare.
> planting bombs in mundane places and setting them off in public
You would have a stronger point if the conflict looked more like Ukraine, where enemies are mostly sitting in trenches wearing uniforms. Hezbollah operates very differently, storing and firing weapons from mundane civilian places. There's no real way to fight Hezbollah without bombs in such places, it's just a question of whether bombs are delivered by artillery, planes or other means.
> this was intentional
I'm not sure what you mean here. I of course agree Israel could have predicted that there would be non-zero harm to civilians. That's true of pretty much any operation though, at least in urban wars.
For comparison, consider Ukraine's massive truck bomb of the Kerch Bridge. Of course they knew there would be collateral damage, and 5 civilians ended up being killed. It was still widely considered legal, considering the major military advantage gained.
Israel's entire mode of operations is to kidnap, kill and rape civilians. They even rioted for their right to rape prisoners to death.
Another really detailed analysis of what happened and the law-of-war implications was posted downthread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46227273
Another legal analysis on the attack: https://opiniojuris.org/2024/10/15/is-it-cake-on-boobytrappe...
International law, as poorly enforced as it is, needs to have answers what to do with organizations that exist for the reason to destroy another country and that is financed through hostile nations. In this case Iran. Lebanon suffers as well here and Israel certainly isn't the main threat.
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.
> you cannot be more targeted than this operation
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.
Because people repeat the wrong narrative of this being a somehow egregious strategy against an organization which exists to eradicate another nation.
This is just an easy sanity-check for a validity of a statement. Name an operation that is more targeted.
> 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.
> needs to have answers what to do with organizations that exist for the reason to destroy another country
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.
Hezbollah exists to destroy Israel, not Iran. Iran current theological dictatorship just wants to see itself as leader of the Islamic world and uses Gazans as welcomed victims, just like Hamas. It famously fund terrorist activities like Hezbollah.
in the grand scheme of things, Hezbollah is a gnat going up against a fortified nuclear power.
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.
Doesn't matter if they are a gnat if they fire ordinance at another country. And a while ago they weren't a gnat at all, they were the largest non-state militant force on the planet. Until Israel defended itself decisively and in my opinion that doesn't need justification.
Who really needs justification is Iran for funding these militants.
> and in my opinion that doesn't need justification.
It doesn't, but why does that justify their aggression towards noncombatants? Does it justify the killing of women and children, who then will go on to be culturally reinforced to hate Israel (for obvious reasons)?
Does it justify having a massive nuclear arsenal?
What? Iran is a 2574 years old. Saying Iran exists to "destroy Israel" is absurd as your attitude to International law. Was Iran just sitting there planning how to destroy Israel for 2500 years? Enjoy WW3, because that's where that attitude will take you.
I was referring to organizations, in this case Hezbollah. The nation supporting terrorist activities is Iran.
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ICJ has made no such finding. They will probably making a ruling on genocide allegations in the coming years; they certain have not made one yet. The opinions they've issued so far are here https://www.icj-cij.org/decisions
ICJ found the accusation plausible, and did later in another case conclude that the israeli occupation of palestinian land and apartheid is not lawful and must stop.
Whether ICJ had found genocide perpetrated or just plausible does not matter very much since international law demands that even the risk of genocide triggers state action to put an end to that risk. The ICJ judgement regarding plausibility also made demands towards Israel, which that state has refused to comply with.
Starving a population of millions and systematically destroying their homes and infrastructure does not become jolly fine and dandy just because some court hasn't yet deemed it genocidal.
> ICJ found the accusation plausible
This is still not accurate. What ICJ found plausible was "some of the rights claimed by South Africa and for which it is seeking protection". The then-president even clarified explicitly that the plausibility finding was about the existence of these rights, not the occurrence of genocide [1].
Noone is saying things are "jolly fine and dandy", but it's important to stick to facts when making such accusations.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3g9g63jl17o
What would the implication of this nitpick be, in your opinion?
Wasn't a consequence of this conclusion that the court ordered Israel to change its behaviour because it has an obligation to prevent genocide?
It's not nitpicking - what the court is entirely different from what you stated (though it's understandable as a lot of sources misrepresent it).
The court can issue orders without finding any sort of violation, which is what happened in this case when they ordered Israel to "prevent genocide". It can be interpreted as a reminder to Israel of its obligations.
Yes, it is.
States have a clear obligation to stop the genocide in Palestine. Only the mentally infirm distrust that one is ongoing. Due to rules of process and the perpetrators waging war against the court it will likely never make a sound judgement in this case.
It has, however, found reason to order Israel to take certain actions, with the express purpose of preventing genocide, which the state of Israel has refused to follow and its politicians, pundits and other prominent members of israeli society have kept declaring their genocidal intent over and over again since then.
Do you worry more about the interpretation of legal minutiae than a developing mainstream in international relations that considers genocide and other forms of indiscriminate murder permissible?
Define genocide please.
"Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Genocide_Conventionidk isn't pager operation the textbook example of "trying to avoid civilian deaths" while getting your job done?
why is it "genocide"? is becoming hezbollah determined at birth? is hezbollah a race? does average civilian use walkie-talkie?
even if hezbollah was a race, after its civilian attack on 2023 (beheading babies, raping and killing even foreigners), I wouldn't even care about what those guys get (also, don't say "humanity" like you represent the whole "humanity")
if you ARE talking about palestinian civilians, I don't think israel can do anything more gentlemen-ly to them other than pager-operation: the other option is carpet bombing and direct invasion (which is a completely another topic)
The pager operation is illegal according to international laws. I think you should ask ICJ on way it has designated Isreal response as genocide.
The ICJ has not said Israel's response is a genocide - not in Lebanon, which is what this thread is about, nor in Gaza.
“…the court decided that the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide and that South Africa had the right to present that claim… it did not decide — and this is something where I’m correcting what’s often said in the media — it didn’t decide that the claim of genocide was plausible.” - ICJ head President Donoghue
well if you know, then you can say here?
So were the many thousands of rockets Hezbollah fired at Israel civilians between Oct 7 2023 and the pager attack but no one cared about those either.
First of all, you are conflating Hamas and Hezbollah. Second of all, the stories about beheading of babies and mass rape on October 7, 2023 have been thoroughly debunked. Third: the pager operation caused indiscriminate explosions at places where non-combattant citizens were present. Not very gentlemen-ly (to use your words), and indeed a war crime. Fourth: What they did in Gaza is arguably worse than carpet bombing.
But the hundreds of concert goers who Hamas killed is very true. Remember how they paraded the broken body of that young German woman around like a disgusting hunting trophy?
How did you come up with that tally? Israel has refused to comply with requests from international investigators into the matter, likely because a lot of the casualties were due to IDF actions.
I remember the footage of "that young German woman" but it is to me extremely peripheral and did a lot less of an impression than the thousands of images of destroyed baby bodies I've seen that were caused by the IDF. The criminal actions perpetrated by palestinians on October 7th 2023 were pathetic compared to what the israelis have done for decades.
Claiming the IDF killed all of these people is a truly despicable lie that destroys your credibility.
On 7 October 2023, the al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Palestinian nationalist Islamist political organization Hamas, initiated a sudden attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip. As part of the attack, 378 people (344 civilians and 34 security personnel) were killed and many more wounded at the Supernova Sukkot Gathering, an open-air music festival during the Jewish holiday of Shemini Atzeret near kibbutz Re'im. Hamas also took 44 people hostage, and men and women were reportedly subject to sexual and gender-based violence. Some 20 of the attackers were also killed by Israeli security forces in the area of the festival.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_music_festival_massacre
https://www.barrons.com/news/israel-revises-death-toll-from-...
"I remember the footage of "that young German woman" but it is to me extremely peripheral "
Then you are a horrible person.
"thousands of images of destroyed baby bodies"
You are just lying now.
I did not write "all of these people". I pointed out that the state of Israel has refused to provide conditions for an investigation of what happened, and instead it has mainly been the press and leaks to the press that have shed light on the issue.
What we have known for sure since then is that the IDF brought helicopters to the area where the festival was held and Hellfire:d generously, hence the large amount of burnt cars and the typical markings on asphalt roads and so on that are clearly visible in the early photos.
This and the use of tank artillery against inhabitants of the kibbutzim has caused several scandals in israeli politics and the opposition has been requesting thorough investigation for a long time by now. The IDF calls this policy of killing your own soldiers and civilians the Hannibal directive.
I've been following this genocidal colony for decades, every time they've been "mowing the lawn" as they call it there is a massive amount of imagery of murdered kids coming out of the Gaza strip. The reason you think I'm lying is that you haven't been paying attention, and this is probably also why you react so strongly to a single recording of palestinians parading Shani Louk. It might also just be that you're racist and deem israelis or zionists generally more human than the people they are exterminating.
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screaming "genocide" like this has become a cliched thought terminating cliche.
I am not screaming. ICJ has ruled Isreal is commiting genocide.
Well, if that stops your thinking, maybe ponder the illegality of the israeli occupation of palestinian territory then.
The israelis must withdraw their people from palestinian territories occupied in -67 and ought to pay reparations for both the occupation and destruction of property, as well as allow refugees to either return to their homes or pay reparations to them.
Unless they do this immediately the international community ought to assemble an international military force and invade the region and put an end to the US-Israeli atrocities. Which is unlikely since they're both expected to use nuclear weapons in response to justice.
After losing WW2 Germany lost about 25% of its land. When Israel was created by UN mandate the Palestinians were offered their own sovereign state, something they never had, but instead chose to try to destroy Israel to get all of the land. They lost and are never going to get that land back. Your entire comment is completely deranged.
In WWII Germany was the genocidal aggressor, in this case Israel and its backers are the genocidal aggressors.
Punishing a state for genocidal aggression is quite a bit more reasonable than the might is right-ideology you subscribe to.
The palestinians have a right to statehood and self-determination, it's not something they need to be "offered". They also have a right to return to their homelands, and they have a right to oppose occupation, violently if they so choose.
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And East Jerusalem and the Gaza strip. I'd also argue that the occupations of Lebanon and Syria are illegal, and that taking control over the Philadelphi corridor was an act of war against Egypt.
If you think such crimes of occupation and aggression are "very much needed", then I'll have to consider you morally impaired beyond the ability to take part in a reasoned discussion.
> crimes of occupation and aggression are "very much needed"
You intentionally warp statements. At this point I am just here to disagree with you.
Israel Isn't occupying Lebanon Hezbollah is
The northern settlements were largely evacuated and used by the IDF. The party to this conflict that systematically targets civilians is the state of Israel.
One could make the argument that the US and Israel committing genocide makes paramilitary action against them legal, since the US controls the UN security council through their veto power.
Right now Israel is an occupying power that systematically destroys civilian infrastructure and threatens an international force in Lebanon, making it permissible to fight back.
"The northern settlements were largely evacuated and used by the IDF."
This is a complete and utter lie. Hezbollah's missile attacks throughout 2024 led to the evacuation of over 60,000 Israeli residents from northern Israel.
Try to imagine the US response to Mexico shooting that many missiles at a US city.
"Israel is an occupying power"
Israel isn't occupying Lebanon but Hezbollah is.
" making it permissible to fight back."
This is exactly what Israel did so brilliantly with the pager attack.
Close to a hundred thousand israelis were evacuated from the north at the peak of it. Out of thousands of attacks something like 45 israeli civilians were killed, like when the IDF brought civilians to repair power lines and Hezbollah attacked them. More IDF soldiers were killed between October 2023 and the so called ceasefire agreement, which makes it quite clear that Hezbollah practiced restraint in this regard.
I still agree with e.g. HRW that Hezbollah did not do enough to protect civilians, but adjacent to the crimes of the IDF it's a rounding error.
IDF discplaced something like 1.5 million people in Lebanon, many of whom still aren't allowed to return to their homes and those that try are commonly murdered, and similarly those that try to repair their homes have their equipment destroyed or are killed. Recently Israel bombed a parking lot filled with bulldozers and excavators and the like, to halt reconstruction in Lebanon.
Claiming that one of the largest parties in lebanese politics "is an occupying power" is insane. Israel is building military facilities in Lebanon and controlling territory, as well as attacking both Beirut and the Beqaa valley every now and then in violation of the so called ceasefire agreement.
Courtney Bonneau has been reporting for a long time from the area, https://xcancel.com/cbonneauimages .
"Hezbollah did not do enough to protect civilians"
What an insane statement. Hezbollah was intentionally trying to kill as many civilians as possible with the missiles. The only reason they "only" killed 45 is because Israel has invested so much into the Iron Dome system.
Hezbollah isn't a political party. It is a proxy army of Iran. That is why they started shooting missiles at Israel after Oct 7 2023 even though it led to the killing of its leader Hassan Nasrallah
No, they did not. They also mainly used munitions that fly low and escape the israeli air defenses, which is why most of their targets were close to the border.
Hezbollah is a movement that is many things, among them one of the dominant parties in lebanese parliamentary politics. The name means 'Party of God', which is a hint. They also run hospitals, schools and other social services, as well as financial organisations. Due to the background as a militant mobilisation against israeli aggression they also have several armed factions, which is a very reasonable response to their southern neighbour.
Nasrallah and other Hezbollah leaders stated that they initiated militant action against Israel to support the palestinians and clearly expected it to shorten the genocidal campaign in the Gaza strip. As we now know, this strategy failed and Hezbollah misjudged the bloodthirst of israeli society as well as the degree of backing it would have from the US and european states. They should not have wasted time on a restrained attrition style campaign and instead acted more forcefully if they wanted to slow or halt the extermination of the palestinians.
As for Nasrallah, he is surely missed by many but he also spent his life expecting and preparing for martyrdom.
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Restrained? Do you know why Hezbollah exists? This is just ridiculous propaganda...
Yes. They formed as a militia to protect Lebanon against israeli invasion, because the relevant colonial powers did not allow the lebanese state to build enough of an army to protect its borders.
Then they never left even after the Lebanon government told them to. They are Iranian puppets and deeply hated by non-shia Lebanese
The threat they were formed to handle never went away.
It's rather racist to think that the lebanese shia and their political parties are "puppets".
Hezbollah is the problem when they attack Israel unprovoked and cause Israel to strike Hezbollah in Lebanon.
What do you mean, "unprovoked"?
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> Not a single person criticizing the pager bombs mention the reason for the operation.
I'd enter into a conversation like that assuming the other parties in the conversation were aware there was a war going on.
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.
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
The human in the loop gets a few seconds to decide if it's a target or not, do not know the exact number.
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.
The era of microservices and micro teams gives all "company X uses us" claims a different vibe. Maybe it used to actually mean "this is the thing Facebook uses to power its website on millions of servers" but now it's usually like "the team of 6 that runs the analytics platform for Apple Fitness+ uses this on 5 servers"
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.
> thanks to in-q-tel
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.
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?
“A nice interface” disguises the truth here. Palantir is so successful because they build minimum viable prototypes on the fly for clients, deliver rather than balk when custom code has to be written, and leave working solutions alone. (See also other replies about FDEs here.) It’s the kind of behavior I used to take for granted as normal as a small-town ISP, and were it not for their ‘ethics are the customer’s problem’ approach I’d have signed on as a database / dashboard engineer for them years ago.
> it's really just a database integration tool with a nice interface
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.
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.
Dark humor
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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.
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".
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.
What massive collateral damage?
The posted article states 2800 people were injured in the first attack and 600 in the second. These numbers sound a bit questionable given only tens of people were killed. However, 3400 injured is massive collateral damage if true.
No, generals in an operational military force are definitionally combatants, and cannot in fact be "terrorized".
this
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?
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 think it is a valid military strike if a Venezuelan soldier does it on an order. Military targets where a strike are in danger of killing civilians are a hard judgment call. Generally one should never risk targeting civilians. Military law is a complex subject and officers spend quite a lot of time being educated in it. Here is a Swedish defence college course on it. https://www.fhs.se/en/swedish-defence-university/courses/int...
> 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.
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].
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Fort_Hood_shooting1. https://lieber.westpoint.edu/assassination-law-of-war/
Edit: /Hamas/Hezbollah/
I'm pretty sure even that is allowed, yes.
Obviously he must wear a uniform while actually conducting the attack though.
If he wants to be treated as a POW rather than a spy should he be captured.
Are you implying military personnel aren't a legitimate target in a war?
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.
That would be fine, it's war, and Venzeula would have to deal with the consequences also
That's a valid military strike, period.
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.
Military might is the thing keeping the USD the world reserve currency instead of the GBP, EUR or Yuan. It's literally the core keeping the US economy and prosperity.
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.
>Military might is the thing keeping the USD the world reserve currency instead of the GBP, EUR or Yuan. It's literally the core keeping the US economy and prosperity.
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.
>>Military might is the thing keeping the USD the world reserve currency instead of the GBP, EUR or Yuan. It's literally the core keeping the US economy and prosperity.
> 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.
>The size of the American economy
And how did the American economy get to that size without the military protecting it from IDK, the USSR just taking it?
>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
>> The size of the American economy
> And how did the American economy get to that size without the military protecting it from IDK, the USSR just taking it?
The US hegemony successfully strangled the USSR leading to the current Russian oligarchy (with a dictator at the top). The USSR never found itself in a position to expand its borders without threatening an internal insurrection, a coup, and/or the extermination of most of the military forces in a single conflict. US funded the rebuilding of Europe as part of the manufactured hegemony, allowing free trade to supply europe with cheap goods and workers safely across the waters, or under strict supervision of US intelligence for deals with the USSR and the rest of Asia. The USSR wasn't part of these agreement negotiations per se. They had to deal with their own internal politics and manufacturing limitations, while negotiating with countries that had a veto-enabled silent partner.
TBH, I have no idea what people are talking about when are implying "the American economy" is large. It's 8% of world pop and is largely an exporter of natural resources. The strength of the US economy is the reliability of the bond market. The USSR had no chance of taking the US, but did meaningfully threaten the security of the US during the cuban missile crisis. USSR was considered a credible threat to most of Europe for the duration of the cold war, in a carefully structured scenario of mutual destruction.
> And what happened to you if you wanted to trade with the USSR? You're omitting that part
World politics is not as simple as cause and effect. Many countries did deal with embargoed/sanctioned countries, including the US - notably the sale of grain to the USSR during the 70s. If you wanted first crack at new trade deals or wanted security guarantees from the US for delicate trade deals, you had to make allowances according to US wishes. Germany made it clear that they were going to purchase natural gas from the USSR as a matter of their own energy security. The US made an allowance. Maybe one US partner attacked another (Iraq vs Kuwait), the US would step in militarily. You wanted to sell oil to Russia? Sanctions or embargoes or worse, you were not able to call on the US navy when your shipping lanes were disrupted. Maybe the US called on some pirates regularly to raid your ships, maybe not. Thems the breaks, mafia style.
That is naive, it is much more about the US hegemony and mainly about their military might. I would be good to sometimes reach such a state, but as of today it is not.
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.
I can’t reply to zugzug underneath (is there a maximum comment depth), but it feels pretty obvious that the US President is a very legitimate target in any war with the US. Maybe the most legitimate target.
Good luck trying to get them though.
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.
I don't care whether the citizens of Israel would think it's legal. It's not terrorism if you're at war to attack enemy combatants or their leaders, and that goes for any side in a war: whether you're Israel, Iran, China, America, Russia, Ukraine, whoever. That's just how war goes. There's no point to the term "terrorism" if it just means killing enemy combatants or leaders: it's duplicative of the term "war." What do you think war entails?
If your opponent has way better weapons technology than you: well, it sucks to be on the losing side. But you are, and that's how war goes sometimes. That's what happened to Japan, and the Mayans. If one side has guns and the other has obsidian spears, there's no law that the side with guns has to drop them on the ground because it's unfair to the stone-age side.
actuall hezbollah did crash drone into netanyahy private residence (scratched windows) and iran tried to blow up secretary of defense with ied.
there was 0 discussion about "legit, legal and fair". the only discussion that took place it's that security measures need to be improved to prevent things like this in future.
They could do that now and it might be legal under international laws of war.
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.
If US and Venezuela are in a state of war, then the head of the US Armed Forces is a legitimate target.
Not sure why you have doubts about this.
The US and Israel do the equivalent of that and have been for years. An assassination is an assassination. The weapon makes little difference.
I mean of course they could, and should[0] how is that a question?
[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.
Hezbollah is an organization that tries to destroy Israel. If any law doesn't have an answer to that problem, it isn't worth to discuss legality.
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.
> Firstly, generals, like anybody else can be terrorized.
This isn't part of any modern definition of terrorism, otherwise war is terrorism, stalking is terrorism, bullying is terrorism &c.
> Firstly, generals, like anybody else can be terrorized.
You know terrorism doesn't mean people were terrorized, right? Surely you understand that.
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...
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 want some deeply studied anthropological journal article on “The use of pagers in Lebanese society “?
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.
I'm not deriving who had the pagers from first principles. They were military pagers, on a military network that Hezbollah fought an actual civil war to establish and maintain, with subverted devices that Hezbollah itself acquired directly. There's a lot of reporting on this. Israel did not booby trap the whole supply of pagers into Lebanon. The Hezbollah combatants carrying these pagers did not acquire them at a Beirut Cellular Retail Outlet.
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.
>Do you know of any civilians anywhere in the world that currently use pagers?
Dennis Duffy, but he is the Beeper King.
It’s almost like explosives… explode, and hit the people and surroundings near them. Shrapnel travels. You’re trying to derive who had the pagers from first principles, yet you don’t seem to understand how a bomb actually works.
(1) We have videos of the explosions and their scale.
(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!)
Further:
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.)
The bomb in the pagers was so weak it could only harm someone directly holding it or if it was in a pocket.
I think we have in fact pretty strong reporting that at least 2 children were killed, and while the explosions and payload were nowhere nearly as devastating as a grenade, they were still much bigger than a firework mortar (which themselves have killed children).
I think a stronger argument is that in the aggregate, the devices overwhelmingly targeted combatants.
The 2 kids killed picked up their dad's pager.
There are videos where the surrounding people were hurt by the pagers, so, what's the explaination for that?
I'm sure those exist --- it has never been my claim there there were zero or even just few civilian casualties --- but the videos I've seen had people standing next to the person carrying the pager walking away, startled but apparently unharmed. The explosions were quite small (I quantified them downthread from what Reuters reported).
Please provide links to these videos because every video I saw showed only the person holding the pager getting hurt. They only had 6 grams of explosives.
No, it isn't.
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!)
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.
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...
This is really good. (As you say, it's mostly framing the question, rather than settling on a final disposition).
> 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?
No, they're basically the same, and this Substack has some additional primary source material the MEE piece doesn't (MEE and this Substack have approximately the same editorial slant).
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.
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?
Premise 1: I accept that they could have been on coffee tables! The problem isn't that I'm sure every pager was in a combatant pocket; it's that they were microcharges (we have videographic evidence!), and unless most of the pagers were for whatever reason not on hand to a combatant but rather for some reason close to a civilian, the Lebanese civilian/combatant casualty figures can't be made to make sense.
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.
Israel was able to monitor communications on the pagers for years and this allowed them to be quite certain of who they were targeting.
"Footage from Reuters, Al Jazeera, AP, and local Lebanese reporters shows numerous injured civilians"
How do you know they were civilians?
How do YOU know they were terrorist? What would you call people who were around the individual with that pagers?
Mostly, "uninjured".
So, we established that there were injuries among people surrounding those with the pagers. Therefore, the parent comment’s claim was false — the explosions could hurt people nearby and weren’t small enough to affect only the combatant.
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.
"we established that there were injuries among people surrounding those with the pagers"
No we haven't. You haven't provided any proof.
Sources show, the source commenter I was discussing with in this thread agreed, why are you challenging this that were established in the thread? Why are you insisting that we don't use the context in the thread to continue discussion?
He never provided any evidence. Every video of a pager explosion I saw showed it only injuring the person holding it. The amount of explosives in the pagers was so small it would be unlikely for it to harm bystanders much if at all.
I'm not moving the goalposts. Instead, what I'm pretty sure is happening is that you see this as an argument about whether the strike was good or justified. I don't. I'm not interested in that question, which will never, ever be resolved on a message board. I'm just interested in getting the clearest picture of what actually did happen.
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.
They weren't terrorists they were Hezbollah members during a time when Hezbollah was shooting thousands of missiles at Israel that forced 60,000 people to evacuate. This made them fair targets. The pagers contained about grams of explosives which only injured the person holding it.
Premise 2 is false. The vast majority of the injured were Hezbollah terrorists. You say The Times of Israel reported "many of the injured were civilians, including children, women, and non-combatant" - show me a source, please.
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.
Cmon man, there are sources pasted all over this thread from my discussion with OP. I'm not going to post the same source that was already discussed with him, why would I waste my time to do so?
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.
They knew who purchased those devices. Did they know that at the moment of detonation only military personnel had those devices on them? Military propaganda of course will nod at “intelligence” to defend any actions in public, as there is no way to prove these statements.
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?
It's not splitting hairs it gets to the point when people falsely accuse them of every single thing in the book. Weapons have always been imprecise but things that don't have any benefit to the war effort and target innocent civilian deaths are war crimes. You may ask how much the difference matters morally(it still does matter a lot intent it rule based vs consequences based morality systems I'd argue for somewhere in between) but yes targeting matters when it comes to usually false claims of crimes
They do care about not killing civilians the question is how much? And is that enough? There will almost never be any operation near cities without civilian casualties.
This particular operation was an extremely Targeted operation that included tricking Hezbollah into selling pagers meant for Hezbollah internal military use and only deploying small explosions minimizing any unnecessary casualties.
It's not a very good piece of rhetoric asking about nukes because Israel actually has nukes. They didn't use them.
They have carried out other heavier strikes on Lebanon that had worse ratios but were justified by military targets such as Hezbollah leader Nasrallah.
Your suggestion also seems to totally not understand how Israelis view Lebanon. Until recently and still Lebanon does not control violence within it's borders. Hezbollah (a militia/terrorist group that takes orders from Iran) was more powerful then the Lebanese army and decided what happened on the ground. Iran which had a countdown clock counting down to the destruction of Israel. Of course they were supposed to be disarmed after the Lebanese but unsurprisingly the UN resolution didn't have any effect so when they attacked and threatened to invade Israel did what they could to take them out. Israel would love to have peace with Lebanon but that's not likely if Iran and Hezbollah have anything to do with it.
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.
Sure you do. Just like MAGA voters who are suffering from the decisions from their vote "didn't vote for this". Except you explicitly did. Zionism necessarily removes land and homes from people to carve out a "safe space" for Jews without any consideration for the generations you're fucking over. Just like you conveniently ignore the decades of "settlers" taking over other people's land. Just like you ignore the destruction of Palestinian wells and hospitals. Just like you ignore the rape of prisoners and the celebration among Zionists for it. It's a nasty belief system that puts Jews above other humans. It is explicitly bigoted and xenophobic and it is proudly announced and broadcast throughout Israeli society.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-hamas-war-idf-palestinia...
> A member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party, speaking Monday at a meeting of lawmakers, justified the rape and abuse of Palestinian prisoners, shouting angrily at colleagues questioning the alleged behavior that anything was legitimate to do to "terrorists" in custody.
> Lawmaker Hanoch Milwidsky was asked as he defended the alleged abuse whether it was legitimate, "to insert a stick into a person's rectum?"
> "Yes!" he shouted in reply to his fellow parliamentarian. "If he is a Nukhba [Hamas militant], everything is legitimate to do! Everything!"
That is what you are defending. It's fucking disgusting.
Some Zionists are some crazy people, some others might have learned from their enemies. Some just want Israel to exist. Some people just dislike Jews.
Not only military leadership was killed, there was a significant amount of civilians being harmed.
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.
The Irish terrorists that were mostly the responsible to put word "terrorism" into political discourse targeted almost exclusively politicians and military. And targeted way better than that Israel attack.
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How is communication devices procured by Hezbollah and directly given by Hezbollah to their own members not a directed attack?
Hezbollah is an organization consisting of civilian infrastructure besides its military wing (political party, media, hospitals/medical centers, schools, banking, etc) . These devices were distributed amongst different personnel of whom nobody knows their military activity and can safely be assumed it's highly likely they're civilians (hence the randomness of this, not targetted at all). Besides the fact that these targets weren't in active duty but rather targeted in their homes, workplaces, and other random whereabouts (supermarkets, playgrounds, etc) again emphasising how random and not targetted any of it is and the danger it imposes on others (physical or psychological) around them. It's just insane.
The pagers had strictly military use.
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> 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:
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...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):
Right, now I'm not South African so I can't speak to that angle of what he's writing. I can speak to the angle of Jews in post-WW2 Europe. Mamdani's thesis here has the problem of rather dramatically, in fact insultingly, ignoring the most basic fact: almost nobody in the displaced-persons camps for Jews after the war wanted to go back into post-war European societies, and most of those who tried were murdered or faced state repression (eg: from the Soviet Union) for their trouble. After surviving the Holocaust and/or the war, everyone was much more interested in getting the hell away from people they perceived as their murderers than in a theoretical project of "denationalization" that wouldn't be invented for several decades more anyway.
> 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.
And this is, de facto, Nazi apologia on Mamdani's part, because he willfully refuses to see significant differences between alternative regimes within the paradigm of the nation-state, as against the post-national ideal he wants to realize in post-colonial Uganda (but which, of course, post-colonial Uganda has never actually implemented).
>It requires that we stop accepting that our differences should define who benefits from the state and who is marginalized by it.
I would also say Mamdani is an entire paradigm behind the times here. Whether you define it via educational credentials, income, or relation to the means of production, politics has been repolarizing around class, not identitarian belonging. "Who benefits from the state" is a deepity concealing Mamdani's social-democratic imaginary in which nation-states rule nations, rather than network-states administrating international markets in labor, capital, and goods.
Why is an Israeli visitor to the US commenting on our politics? You are welcome to return to Israel and genocide innocent civilians. Can we report this SOB to ensure his visitor pass is cancelled? He is a hate filled propagandist for the greatest evil of this generation (I-L)
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 ;)
I didn't say "undeserved". I said "deserve's got nothing to do with it". Sovereigns relate in the state of nature, not under the rule of any specific law.
> i.e. intentionally creating a state of terror
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.
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?
Its a war between two organized armies, however lopsided, with one army recieving support openly to defend against a larger state. Isreal is not only a belligerent state, it openly commits war crimes from every single human war convention in existence, if not outright genocide, what is it?
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:
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?
> No, I am not a lawyer. Does that preclude my having an opinion on the [...] legality of a military strike?
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.
> 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.
I read "I think" for "brilliant operation".
As long as it's other people's children being killed by Zionist terrorist attacks I'm sure you're perfectly okay with it. Typical conservative response to any tragedy. You'll only ever change your tune when it personally impacts you and then you'll be all confused about how anyone could support that.
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The most brilliant part about the civilian casualties from this operation is how many fewer of them there were than there would have been with any alternative means available to Israel.
Both of these sound like non-terror, internationally legal methods. Commanders are military.
Terrorism targets civilians. So no, this isn't terrorism.
> Terrorism targets civilians.
This can be true, but terrorist acts can also be indifferent to the target, which is where the debate here comes from.
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That's very true, when Israel consistently bombed and destroyed almost every hospital in Gaza. The media tried very hard to narrowly frame it this as legitimate.
Unfortunately for people, Israel will further be tightening its grip on the world (and has already) by buying and censoring platforms such as TikTok.
So there goes one of the main ways news was being shared defying the main stream narrative.
These are the facts and you will be labelled for stating them.
I don't see how. It was intended to paralyze and undermine a militia which it did. A lot of war actions create terror that doesn't make most war terrorism
How are all acts of war not “intentionally creating a state of terror?”
i think there are internationally recognized lawful terminology that several institutions and countries recognize that permit the use of "act of war" and "terrorism". but at any given time a country _does_ act of war/terrorism, they likely would deny claims of terrorism if it was recognized as terrorism by said institutions.
Attacking a civilian population is a war crime.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> This is one of the most sophisticated attacks to avoid civilian casualty. 127 civilians Lebanese civilians killed since the ceasefire by the party you claim is avoiding civilian casualties, btw. very careful bunch
"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...
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.
(We're conversing in multiple different parts of this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46227021)
Hezbollah is a legal political party in Lebanon. This is an important detail buddy.
No, it isn't. Hezbollah is an occupying military force in Lebanon, responsive only to a minority of its population, that happens to have a political party attached. It is the IRGC's faction of the Lebanese Parliament, except to the extent that it operates its own parallel government when that body is inconvenient to it.
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.
Several of those initially claimed to be civilians were later acknowledged by Hezbollah, so that number is still a bit fuzzy.
I'm not claiming absolute knowledge of numbers, just going off the public reports which are all we can go on.
Source? Can't find anything stating this
The report is 4,000 civilians injured (which means they just didn't die -- people lost fingers, limbs, eyes, etc.)
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.
I haven't seen a report of 4000 civilians injured. I have seen a report of 4000 people injured across the two attacks, but presumably some fraction of these are targets.
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.
You didn’t see 4,000 because you didn’t look for it. It’s literally in the wikipedia article linked in the thread you’re responding to with multiple associated citations.
The distinction is /civilians/.
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.
The problem is, 2750 + 750 injured is less than 4000, and it doesn't make sense that none of the injured were targets but >30/42 of those killed were.
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.
To be clear, that claim of 4,000 comes from a member of Hezbollah:
> 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.
but we have the benefit of seeing live videos from actual shops where these hezbollah members were, and you can see the explosion was small enough to not hurt anyone in the vicinity
even if very close, one of the videos shows a supermarket line, and no one around is hurt
>I didn't say 42 targets.
You quite literally did.
What? It's possible I had a previous typo, but please show me where I said that.
>42 people were killed total, but that does not mean that there were 42 targets.
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…
> The reports are 4,000 wounded and 12 killed unintended targets
Which reports? According to whom? Hezbollah?
I vouched for your post because your question is legitimate and asked in an appropriate manner; there is no good reason to flag it.
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.
source?
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).
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.
Thank you for that correction.
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
Seems some say even the named may be fabricated:
>> 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. <<
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The IDF did not dispute this, so unclear why you are.
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According to Hezbollah sources 1500 of their terrorists were taken out of commission due to this attack. Making the death ratio 42/1500 or 3% while if only taking the civilian ratio that's even lower.
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
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Hezbollah is designated as a terrorist organization by:
but calling them terrorists is biased?They're military and political personnel. Terrorist designation is a made up political thing as Trump has made obvious. Hezbollah has done nothing that Israel hasn't also done.
Military personal wear uniforms, are clearly identifiable in their operations & movements and have standards of behavior in line with jus ad bellum & jus in bello.
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The numbers you state are from the Lebanese government and Hizbollah. So I don't think we can assume they are accurate. I don't have any better numbers, though.
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.
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.
> People tend to easily forget that the civilian casualty ratio for conventional warfare is around 50%
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.
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.
HAMAS? We're talking about an attack in Lebanon my friend, not Palestine.
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"?
These pagers weren't purchased in stores by civilians. You see, Hezbollah had a problem: Their phone network was totally compromised. Israel was using operatives' phones as tracking beacons. So Hezbollah purchased a few thousand pagers through specialty channels (which we now know had been compromised by Israel) to distribute to their commanders. They believed this would improve their security, because unlike the two-way radios in cell phones, pagers use a one-way broadcast radio, and there is no need to know or report the pager radio's location.
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.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/pagers-drones-how-...
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
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Doctors don't use pagers anymore, just like tech on calls used to and don't anymore. Mobile phones are far superior for that, and are very available anywhere in the world, and especially to doctors
Regarding whether that's brilliant, that is not my wording, but generally it was quite mild compared to the methods of Hezbollah and was highly successful in ending a war with very little bloodshed. The other alternative was tried in 2006 and in Gaza, and fighting a terror organization entrenched in an urban setting means bombings and killing civilians in the process. This was not the end result as Hezbollah fell apart relatively quickly afterwards, so I think it was good compared to any alternative for Lebanese and Israelis
Doctors still use pagers. I don’t know about Lebanon in particular, but I would wager they still use them there too.
The rest is a bunch of hypotheticals. I am also unsure where the conclusion that Hezbollah is dead is coming from. Was their operational capability degraded? Of course. Is the group dead? Absolutely not.
Regarding the pagers in any case these were specially imported by hezbollah, so these were not used by doctors, even if we assume they only use pagers in Lebanon.
Regarding the group, it has signed a cease fire agreement with very unfavorable terms which essentially let Israel bomb any of its members or locations that violate the terms of the cease fire agreement and the lebanese army did not work to resolve, this happens on a weekly basis since the end of the war
If you compare this state to the state just prior to October 2023 where Hezbollah had setup a tent in Israeli territory which Israel was too afraid to do something about for months over fear of starting a war, then this is essentially a complete break up in my opinion.
Is it dead? no. it's alive enough to keep lebanon in its permanent failed state status due to fear of all other sects of civil war. But together with what happened to its patron, and the local popularity it lost it might break up completely
Hezbollah has a political/civilian arm.
This is my last reply in this thread.
I am aware of that, and hopefully they will become a Lebanese political party without an armed wing, similar to all other political parties, which are most essentially led by former warlords involved in mass killings
Hezbollah operates hospitals and medical services. It's not just a political party.
> Doctors don't use pagers anymore,
The UK's National Health Service (NHS) is widely considered the single largest user of pagers in the world, with over 130,000 devices in use as of recent years. This figure represented an estimated 10% of the total number of pagers remaining globally.
They didn't put bombs in pagers that were freely sold. They put them into shipments for Hizbollah specifically.
1. I was responding to the incorrect point that pagers are not used by civilians.
2. You are aware that Hezbollah has a civilian/political arm, right?
3. Surely Israel - the most moral country on the planet - painstakingly vetted pager possession before detonating them en masse?
> Unless you’re a Lebanese doctor?
Where would a Lebanese doctor get an encrypted pager bought by Hezbollah and given to Hezbollah members with the explicit use for communicating with other Hezbollah members?
Growing tired of repeating the same response to the same points. Please see on of my other replies to sibling comments.
The idea that only criminals or terorists have pagers is ridiculous(you mentined doctors). But Israel didnt target pagers in Lebanon. They sold equipment for Hezbollah internal use om their own network (they convinced Hezbollah to pay a front company for the walkies).
That is the opposite of indicrimante.
as for
> white Judeo-Christian variety
Judeo Christian is a silly concept. Either say christian or say Abrahamic. While most casulties were affiliated with Hezbollah and therefore overwhelmingly Shia Muslim enough of the general public of Lebanon is Christian that they would make at least some of civilian bystanders injured. Also Lebanese people aren't any whiter in average skin color then the average Israeli
That's not the argument. Presumably a broad cross-section of Lebanese people have pagers. But only Hezbollah combatants had these pagers, which were specifically procured by Hezbollah through an idiosyncratic suppler, linked to Hezbollah's own military encrypted network, and triggered by a pager message encrypted to that network.
> linked to Hezbollah's own military encrypted network, and triggered by a pager message encrypted to that network.
I am not sure where you’re getting this information from. For instance, you seem confident that this network used exclusively by the armed wing.
Regardless, absolutely none of this negates the fact that this was an indiscriminate terrorist attack.
If the sides were reversed, or if virtually any other state executed this kind of attack, it would be rightfully condemned. But Israel, as always, gets a pass. And it was indeed a brilliant plan, but only in how comically evil it was.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lebanon_electronic_device...
The most obvious citation is Reuters, which did a whole article on this, including the specific circumstances in which the pagers exchanged hands. And, whatever the rest of the moral circumstances of the strike may have been, the fact of the devices being combatant communication equipment does mean that it was neither indiscriminate (it was in fact very discriminate) nor terroristic (it had combatant targets, not civilians).
The attacks can still be immoral for a host of other reasons. Pearl Harbor was deeply immoral. It was also not an indiscriminate terrorist attack. Words mean things.
I have expanded in other comments in this same tree, but it was indiscriminate in timing, location, and possession (unless Israel individually verified possession).
If it were a “discriminate” attack as you claim, then we wouldn’t have seen thousands of civilians (non-combatants, Hezbollah affiliated or otherwise) being injured.
> Words mean things.
Small aside: not saying this applies to you specifically, but I have found that most people who use this adage (if you will) are quick to apply it to situations they don’t agree with, but become more flexible when it aligns with their interests.
The typical example I use is how Western politicians vehemently deny/denied usage of the term “genocide” or even “war crimes” for Gaza, but apply it liberally to Ukraine, even though the latter is objectively (by any metric) “less” of a genocide than Gaza is. Bernie Sanders only came around just a few months ago.
I don't love "words mean things" and winced after I typed it, but I think we both understand what I meant by it.
My contention is that we did not in fact see thousands of noncombatants injured. I went into some pretty serious depth on this point elsewhere on the thread.
I think, for what it's worth, that I can pretty easily make the argument that Ukraine is a genocide and Gaza is not. In fact, I could say that about the Al Aqsa Flood as well! That argument will annoy the shit out of you. But I'd say that's because you've affixed undeserved gravity or finality to the term "genocide", as a sort of "worst possible crime". What Israel is doing in Gaza can be as bad as what Russia is doing in Ukraine without establishing genocidal intent (which Russia pretty clearly does have).
I think the push to label the Gaza campaign as a "genocide" has been a fairly spectacular own goal on the part of western Palestinian rights activists. Unless the situation on the ground changes (I grant that it could), people are just going to keep shooting that claim down, and advocates for Palestinians will be stuck explaining instead of persuading, against relatively powerful countervailing arguments.
The case for ethnic cleansing, atrocities, and widespread war crimes is trivial to make. It's just not enough for online advocates; it's like they're trying to get an in-game trophy for the term "genocide".
I understand we won’t come to an agreement here, but I wanted to respond to two of your points:
1. Re: the term genocide, do you know why Palestinians have been insisting on this specific word to be used? Because genocidal intent was clearly communicated from virtually day 1, and was backed by actions to prove this intent. Cabinet members were calling Palestinians “human animals” and “amalek” for God’s sake - and that’s not even close to the worst of it! Palestinians didn’t just wake up one day and say “well, it’s arbitrarily a genocide, and we want everyone to call it that”. And South Africa rightfully pursued a case at the ICJ. Firstly, because they recognized the shared suffering from their experience with apartheid, but most importantly, because they saw that there was a mountain of incontrovertible legal evidence to support their case.
1. Re: Ukraine, you simply cannot make that argument in good faith. Russia’s goals in Ukraine are in direct opposition to Israel’s goals in Gaza and the West Bank.
Russia ultimately wants to annex Ukraine to expand its influence and reinstate its past glory with the USSR. This requires that it absorb Ukrainians into Russia proper. Russia uses the shared culture and language as a justification in its propaganda, but I think there is a kernel of truth there when it comes to Russia’s motivations, particularly in eastern Ukraine. Given all this, genocide is a non-starter for Russia - how can you claim annexation when you are also working to genocide the local population?
On the other hand, Israel wants to cleanse the land of its people - in fact, the absolute last thing it wants to do is absorb Palestinians into Israel proper. From day 1, its intentions were crystal clear: Palestinians as a racial/ethnic group cannot remain in Gaza. They used all tools at their disposal in pursuit of this goal, including mass starvation, collective punishment, mass bombardment, forced relocation, and so on. Taken together with the statements made by top gov officials, this constitutes genocide.
This is all setting aside that Ukraine is a fully sovereign nation with an equipped and supported conventional military fighting a conventional war against a nation state aggressor.
Let me say first of all: super chill response and I really appreciate that.
On point (1), I've got reason to question the claims of genocidal intent that get bandied about in these kinds of conversations. Yair Rosenberg wrote a piece for The Atlantic debunking one of the most frequently cited "amalek" claims. It's easy to find people on either side of the conflict espousing genocidal views, but harder to map specific actions to realistically genocidal intent (especially when the views are ascribed to people with no decisionmaking authority over how the campaign is being waged).
I hate having to be so hedgy but I'll do it anyways: none of that is to say that the Gaza campaign was waged ethically or with meaningful concern for civilian life, and I fervently hope many of its architects end up imprisoned for their roles in it. But that's a cards-on-the-table statement, not a clinical assessment.
On point (2) about Ukraine: Russian decisionmakers at the highest level have repudiated the existence of Ukrainian ethnicity; Russia has deliberately --- in ways I don't think map cleanly to how the IAF has prosecuted the war in Gaza --- targeted civilian populations (Bucha is an obvious example), and, most damningly, Russia embarked on a campaign of family separation and coerced adoption with the specific intent of disrupting Ukraining ethnicity.
You point out that Israel wants to "cleanse" the land (call it Greater Israel, from the Jordan river and including the Gaza strip) of Palestinians. I'm not as sure about that, but I can stipulate to it. That by itself does not constitute genocide!† (Ethnic cleansing? A crime against humanity? Very possibly!) Genocide as a concept does not encompass any link between blood and soil.
It really pisses Palestinian advocates off to hear this, and I get why, but there is by rights already a Palestinian state in the Levant: it's called Jordan, where Palestinians have, at multiple points over the last 50 years, made up a majority of the resident population. Similarly, if we're doing comparative statecraft, Assadist Syria successfully cleansed itself of its concentrated Palestinian population, over just the last 10-15 years. See how often you see Palestinian advocates make claims about Yarmouk camp, though. You start to understand why advocates for Israel (I am not one of those) are jaded about this whole thing.
† You get a similar thing about "apartheid", a term I'm more comfortable using with Israel, from people who correctly observe that Israeli Arab citizens, of whom there are a great many, have vastly more rights than black Africans had under apartheid, to the point where the term makes more sense applied to other larger, more salient ethnic divides elsewhere in the world. But like, preemptively: I'm with you, it's effectively an apartheid system in the West Bank.
This is the kind of discussion that I feel would be better to have in-person; I am not a great writer :)
Re: Israel & the term genocide, if you closely look at the combination of:
(1) the words that came/are coming out of the mouths of Israeli cabinet members, Knesset members, and the Israeli media (especially in Hebrew!)
(2) the policies enacted on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank
(3) the actions taken by the IDF in Gaza since Oct 7 (I won't enumerate them here)
(4) the clear cut plans for a "greater Israel"
(5) the extra-territorial conflicts & attacks (esp. the 12 day war and Qatar strike), and the ground invasions in Lebanon & Syria, the latter under the guise of "minority protection" (a tale as old as time)
You must conclude that Israel is at the very least committing war crimes, and is the least rational actor in the Middle East. Palestinians, their allies, and (at the nation state level) South Africa & observers took it a step further and argued that the sum of the above constitutes genocide.
> Russian decisionmakers at the highest level have repudiated the existence of Ukrainian ethnicity
What Russia is doing here - and what it did with the USSR - may constitute "cultural genocide", but this is not legally defined. Keep in mind that Israel also denies the existence of Palestinians and reduces them instead to "Arabs".
> in ways I don't think map cleanly to how the IAF has prosecuted the war in Gaza
Three questions that I find helpful when comparing the two situations generally:
1. Does Hamas have an air force or access to air defense systems? If not, does that make it easier or harder for mass killing to take place when compared to the situation in Ukraine?
2. Does Russia regularly level entire buildings - with civilians present - in exchange for so-called "high-value targets"? All AI-driven btw, giving us a glimpse into the future of warfare.
3. Does Russia control the entire border of Ukraine? And has it ever enforced a total blockade on all goods entering Ukraine?
> but there is by rights already a Palestinian state in the Levant: it's called Jordan, where Palestinians have, at multiple points over the last 50 years, made up a majority of the resident population.
It pisses off advocates because it actually ties back into how Israel erases the Palestinian national identity, and is a common hasbara talking point :)
From day 1, Jordan has been a malicious actor of sorts in opposition to the Palestinian national movement. The West Bank post-partition was supposed to be given to a Palestinian ("Arab") state, but Jordan invaded under the guise of protection, which was a valid excuse, but also an excellent opportunity to establish Transjordan. The Jordanians held control until 1967. In 1967, many Palestinians were forced to relocate to Jordan in a second Nakba (called the Naksa[1]). Soon after this, the PLO escalated its fight against the Jordanian monarchy, culminating in Black September. Today, there are a large number of self-described (very important!) Jordanian-Palestinians residing in Jordan, but they still have ties to Palestine, and claim it as their homeland even after multiple rounds of expulsion. In other words, even in Jordan, there still is a separate Palestinian national identity that lives on.
As far as the camps go in Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, that's a separate topic of discussion. A big part of the continued existence of these refugee camps in Arab countries throughout modern history is the optimism of Palestinians & the host Arab states that a solution will be reached soon.
> from people who correctly observe that Israeli Arab citizens, of whom there are a great many, have vastly more rights than black Africans had under apartheid
South African apartheid is the model, but not the only form. I believe that there is sufficient evidence for the argument that Israeli Arab citizens do indeed live under apartheid, mainly due to the ethno-religious nature of citizenship in Israel proper.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naksa
I think you're doing great, but I'll keep my response brief to avoid dragging you into a longer thread.
* I agree, Israel appears to me to be guilty of war crimes; quite a great many.
* We disagree about the black-letter genocidal intent Russia has exhibited in Ukraine. Organized mass kidnapping and coerced adoption of children is a per se genocidal action under the 1948 Genocide Convention.
* The US outclasses almost every armed service in the world to the same extent Israel outclassed Hamas (which no longer exists as a military force). That doesn't make US involvement in any given armed conflict genocidal or immoral.
* If your point was simply that Israel is capable of putting into practice genocidal intent, of course, I agree with that. They have a mechanical advantage in doing that, to the point where they shoulder additional burdens to avoid genocidal outcomes, and I preemptively agree they haven't satisfied those obligations. But flip it: Hamas has essentially no capability to successfully commit a genocide of Israelis. And yet their attack, under the Convention, was more clearly genocidal.
* I agree with you about the governance of Jordan! I think all the surrounding states share significant moral burden with regards to the Palestinian people,and launder it through Arab enmity towards Israel and Jewish ethnicity.
* I want to be very clear: I also believe the Palestinians have a moral claim to Gaza and the West Bank, and that there is no practical resolution to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict that won't involve two states on land Israel now controls. When I bring up the Jordan thing, I'm making a broader claim about the sustainability of Palestinian ethnic identity, not the "Palestinians should be remigrated into Jordan" argument the neo-Kahanists make. Kahanism is vile.
"You're telling me that the 2,800 injured were mostly Hezbollah operatives?"
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.
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 Israeli military did not dispute the existence of the database or dispute the data on Hamas and PIJ deaths when approached for comment... <<
https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/aug/21...
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Most sides in most wars aren't expected to classify every person they killed. Identifying certain people as Hamas(and they could be wrong about some of them) doesn't mean that every single other person is not a member of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or other millitant
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Not all Israelis (or most) are reservists and most of the civilians were murdered by Hamas death squads execution style, not by the fabled Hannibal directive
While Hamas does not wear uniform in combat and publishes its dead as civilians, so no, my logic holds
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.
Pagers are used by more then just criminals(see doctors) and targeting random criminals as opposed to millitants wouldn't be justifiable. But these particular pager that were wired up were specifically intended only for Hezbollah internal use and were sold to Hezbollah by Israel through a third party front.
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
I don't agree, but we don't have to agree on this point to recognize the illegitimacy and coerciveness of Hezbollah and the IRGC. Even factoring Israel's most recent strikes in, the largest military losses Hezbollah has incurred in the last 10 years weren't with Israel, but rather in Syria, on behalf of the Assad regime, a client of the IRGC's, where Hezbollah (and the Lebanese security forces Hezbollah dragooned into the conflict) gleefully targeted civilian populations.
Does a political party shoot missiles over international borders and stockpile arms?
"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
Huh? Lebanon is not being held to war crime laws, and is the poorer nation. They bombed Northern Israel for over 2 years, including a soccer field full of children that weren't their targets but are very much dead.
If anything, it's the opposite.
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.
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.
A state that considers its enemies to be the modern day incarnation of "Amalek" may use such bombs...
Yes, agreed.
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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?
Hamas is in Gaza, this attack was against Hezbollah and civilians in Lebanon.
>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.
If you are part of the American electorate (including a voter who is eligible but choosing to abstain out of protest or indifference) you are part of a political organization that chooses military action.
That's fine if you think that, but I hope you know that your position is not common at all.
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.
If you're registered to vote, you are. Congrats.
> Afaik they intercepted a shipment for Hamas members only.
What? Hamas didn't have any of the pagers, Hezbollah did.
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...
3,400 bystanders? Or 3,400 mostly-Hezbollah but some bystanders?
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@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.
Indeed, my reply to his reply was downvoted as well. Along the lines of: "I have a preconceived opinion and don't want to deal with facts." Quite popular in some circles these days.
* * *
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.
"planting a bomb in front of a military camp" is like the textbook goal for bomb-planting devices (airplanes, artillery, MRLs), its one of the most normal scenarios out of all of normal war scenarios.
Planting a bomb on each soldier would be even better.
Yes, but planting a bomb in front of a military camp is absolutely legal.
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.
so you agree that nobody in IDF was found guilty of war crimes ?
been accused it's not same as been found guilty. at least last time I checked.
Many of the people who had the pagers were doctors, lawyers, bureaucrats...
Maybe I'm wrong, but, I think Hezb0-lla-h is pretty much the "government", especially in southern Lebanon
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You cannot quarantee who is holding the pager at the moment of explosion.
You can have a reasonable expectation secure military pagers are only going to be used by soldiers. Given how few collateral deaths there were this was a reasonable assumption.
“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.
I found this thesis from some guy doing a master in international operation law at the Swedish defence college, https://fhs.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1974147/FULLTEXT...
and I interpret his analysis as that it was targeted enough to be legal.
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 ...
The topic at hand is a military operation in Lebanon, not Gaza.
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Hezbollah was actively launching thousands of missiles at Israel when these pagers blew up. They stopped launching missiles at Israel en masse soon after these pagers blew up. What a odd coincidence.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wech_Baghtu_wedding_party_airs...
No war in history has completely avoided any civilian casualties or attacks on civilian populations, as even limited conflicts often involve indirect harm (e.g., from stray fire, blockades, or displacement), and larger wars almost inevitably affect non-combatants.
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.
might is right. /s
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That's a relatively new concept, certainly not true historically.
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
Yes! Like the 18,000 children as well!
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.
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.
You have that luxury. Israel doesn't.
With civilians under constant rocket and ATGM fire (actual, real war crimes BTW), under threat of Oct 7th-style infiltration and invasion, with tens of thousands of civilians displaced and numerous civilian casualties, Hezbollah had forced this war upon Israel. And they forced it on Oct 8th, in coordination with the IRGC and Iran's "Ring of Fire" proxies.
Israel had a legitimate right to self defense and any country in Israel's position would be obligated to defend their citizens from such aggression. And any objective observer would admit that Hezbollah's actions went beyond mere casus belli to just simply open war--including constant actual war crimes--against Israel.
So Israel had not just a right to wage war against Hezbollah, but a duty. The next question is: How best to prosecute the war?
The traditional prosecution of this war would have resulted in tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties. These exquisitely targeted small (3g of PETN) explosions short-circuited that war and undoubtedly saved thousands of innocent lives.
Far from terrorism or war crimes, these attacks indirectly saved many innocent lives, spared hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Lebanese infrastructure, were highly targeted at combatants, and even direct civilian casualties were minimal.
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.
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> So? You aren't off the hook because someone did something unexpected or "was exercising poor operational security."
You might be. If it was Hezbollah's guns that exploded and not their pagers, I would expect most people to agree that you would be "off the hook" if someone else was handling that gun.
Not saying pagers = guns, but it's a spectrum surely.
The laws of war don't expect a military to attack a target only if there was no risk to civilians. That would be so unrealistic that nobody would even attempt to follow the laws of war. There has to be some consideration of relative risk and proportionality.
Where you draw the line is complicated. If you look at what the allies did in WWII for instance, there are some decisions that are highly problematic (firebombing wooden Japanese cities or the RAF deliberately bombing German civilian populations) but there are also some decisions that I think were reasonable even with a very high civilian death toll (e.g. the US Eight Air Force conducting bombing raids on German industry with limited precision, leading to high civilian casualties).
I think this specific incident was lawful. Hezbollah was the aggressor here, and it spent the war launching attacks that were far less justifiable than this one (much more limited targeting). I think this was a reasonable act of self-defense. That doesn't mean that I think that everything Israel did in the war was lawful.
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> 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.
Kids love to grab anything that is interesting to them.
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Well, I guess we disagree on this, but I think it's a shit move to blow up a bunch of any object that is normally benign and which could logically be sitting next to or in the hands of an innocent. I'll die on that hill. I know it goes against most people's opinions on HN but I don't mind that. As you can see, I have some points to spare so feel free to downvote me to oblivion, even though that downvote button is meant for people who go against the rules; I don't believe I have in any of my posts in this thread, but I am willing to apologize if so.
Also, I have a thought for you: what would you call it if a foreign nation which your country had poor relations with, possibly open hostility, had blown up the work laptops (which they might take home) of a bunch of high ranking military members in your country? Would that be terrorism or a legal attack to you? What would you think of the innocent lives lost to such an attack?
This incident did not occur in a vacuum. If this had been a surprise attack during peacetime, the calculus would be different, but it wasn't.
Hezbollah began firing rockets at Israeli civilian populations more or less indiscriminately very soon after the October 7th terrorist attack. Just a few months before the pager incident, a Hezbollah rocket killed 12 children in a Druze town in the Golan Heights.
Israel was justified in defending itself against an aggressor. Not to do so would mean continuing to let their civilians be killed. Once you start from that premise, then blowing up pagers that only belong to Hezbollah members is a much better option than any alternative.
The standard can't just be "you aren't allowed to take any action that could kill innocent people". To have that as the standard is the same as to have no standard at all, because it's so unrealistic that nobody would follow it. The standard has to take into account whether the action is offensive or defensive, what the relative risk of killing innocent people is, and what the alternatives are.
That's why I talked about the allied bombings during WWII, which killed enormous numbers of German and Japanese civilians. To suggest that the allies should not have used bombers in, say, 1941 because they would inevitably kill many civilians is unreasonable. But you can distinguish between, say, the RAFs nighttime bombing campaigns, which were intended to strike civilian targets for the purposes of demoralizing and starving the population, and the USAAFs daytime bombing campaigns, which were intended to destroy factories. Both killed many, many innocent people, but there are clear moral differences.
I too, wouldn't join the IDF.
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)
>the weapons were first and foremost effective at maiming, not killing, which is generally frowned upon by the laws of war
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.
FYI: Hezbollah is a legal political party in Lebanon.
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
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.
Israeli technology doesn't know the motivations of the people holding it when they blow up.
How about we just stop socializing with Israel and its supporters while we're at it
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> "laws of war"
What you want to appeal to are just war principles.
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?
Of course not. The IDF aren't civilians. Hezbollah officials, unless they are part of its military sub-organization, are civilians.
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.
The idea that it's a war crime is ridiculous. They specifically inserted it into the Hezbollah supply chain specifically Hezbollah internal use. They didn't just sell them at Lebanons markets they specifically sold the entire special order to Hezbollah directly. I think if any one other then Israel pulled it off a lot fewer people would be baselessly claiming it was a war crime
It's quite clearly not. Only Hezbollah agents had the pagers.
If this attack had been carried on US soil it would have been grounds enough to justify another pointless war in the Middle East. But since it was committed by Israel unto a random Arabic country most Americans would fail to place on the map, it's "probably legal".
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.
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Do you know what the word "Indiscriminate" means?
Yeah, that's when you plant a bomb in a device and then make it beep and subsequently explode even though you have no idea whether it's in someone's home and a kid might pick it up to bring to a parent or perhaps in a crowded civilian market where non-combatants might get hurt and so on.
If the israelis weren't indiscriminate it would obviously make their actions in this case even worse, i.e. they somehow were looking at those kids being close to the explosives and still initiated the detonation sequence to draw their attention and hurt them.
That's the position you'd take if you wanted to smear the israelis.
It wasn't indiscriminate, is the main point. Almost exactly the opposite.
If it wasn't indiscriminate, then they intentionally killed and maimed kids.
It being indiscriminate would be the lesser evil out of these two options and it is unclear to me why you would prefer this interpretation of the events.
My view is based on the technicalities as I found them reported in mass media and directly from individuals in Lebanon at the time, which gave me the impression that the israelis went ahead and detonated the gadgets at the time they did because they suspected that Hezbollah was onto them, and that they had basically no idea where exactly these devices were at the time. To me this explains why they were detonated at the same time and not 'surgically', as state terrorists like to put it.
I can sympathise with the impulse to believe that the IDF is almost omniscient and able to organise a simultaneous attack against thousands of people individually, they sure want to promote such an image of themselves and put a lot of effort into doing so. But I don't believe it, in part because they have shown themselves to be quite unprofessional and sloppy, as well as lacking in strategic sophistication. Basically, I don't think they have enough disciplined personnel to pull something like that off, and instead they just broadcast a detonation signal to all the devices based on the suspicion that their operation might be revealed and countered.
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Monitoring people for... Supporting opinions that don't agree with you?
There's a specific group of people that have this notion of thinking and I don't even need to explain further because most people will know who I am talking about
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It's not legal, the consensus among human rights organizations and UN experts is that it's a violation of international humanitarian law. But I guess the American urge to see middle eastern people suffer is alive and well.
> 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.
If Hezbollah executed this same attack against the IDF it would also not be terrorism.
Why is it inappropriate to be outraged that international humanitarian laws are actively being violated by Israel, in Gaza? Can someone help me understand?
Because in the long book of history, HN wants to look absolutely neutral during this episode.
That’s apparently the good look
Because defending civilians who Israel is targeting is, in today's world, considered antisemitic
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I can't imagine why Israel was carrying out strikes in Lebanon after October 8th. It's a total mystery.
I can't imagine why the attacks on October 7th happened. It's a complete mystery given life started on October 7th.
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
These pagers did not bring down buildings as shown in here. This 'documentary' is all over the place factually with sources from many of the most anti-Israel (not pro-Palestinian) organizations.
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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...
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.
> In my opinion Israels actions in Gaza fall well within the actions of a legitimate wa
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.
The United Nations is only providing Sudan refugees around 400 calories per day. When Israel was claimed to be doing war crimes and starving Gaza it was providing over 1000. Should the ICC go after the UN program for Sudan refugees?
* * *
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?
> 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.
So it’s either drop a bomb on them or mass detonate explosive devices? Love it.
@Cyph0n, if you think Israel's approach led to too much collateral damage, why don't you propose a solution that would have led to less collateral damage while still taking the Hezbollah leaders out of action?
I bet you won't do this, because I think we can ultimately agree it wasn't possible for Israel to take all these men out of action simultaneously and minimize collateral damage much beyond what it did.
I think where we disagree is that you think Israel should not have taken these men out of action.
Nice deflection. All I need to care about as a lowly SWE is that this attack injured thousands of Lebanese civilians. This is the real world, not a movie or simulated war game.
And I would wager that you would immediately condemn such a barbaric attack if the sides were reversed.
So you weren't able to propose a solution that would have led to less collateral damage because no such solution exists. You know it. I know it. Everyone reading this knows it.
Instead of answering directly you make a comment about deflection, and insist an obvious falsehood (the attack injured thousands of Lebanese civilians) is all you care to believe. On this, we agree. It's all you care to believe, the evidence be damned!
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.
> Israel has a laudable and low civilian: militant kill ratio, possibly the best in the history of modern combat.
Right, that’s my cue to stop engaging :)
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.
This reminds me of other 20th century atrocity denial I read online. There is adequate evidence of the Truman bombing attempt.
Regarding Lehi and Irgun, they were small because terrorist cells usually are. They operated with the permission of the government (evidence by the government ultimately demonstrating this when it dissolved them and incorporated many of them into itself), and involved people celebrated today in Israel for their terrorism, including future PMs of Israel. It is entirely accurate to say that the terrorist organizations Irgun and Lehi represent the nature and spirit of the Israeli people today in a pure and honest form. And I doubt many over there would disagree with you, as long as you're speaking Hebrew lol
The “20th century atrocity denial” comparison is disgusting and transparent. Holocaust denial is rejected because it contradicts a mountain of primary evidence. You are doing the opposite. You are trying to manufacture certainty where the documentation is missing, then calling anyone who asks for records a “denialist.”
On the Truman claim, you keep saying “adequate evidence” while producing none. The best you have is a biography by Truman’s daughter decades later that does not cite sources and newspaper blurbs repeating those claims. That is not “well documented.” That is the stuff of conspiracy theory.
Here is what you still have not provided: a contemporaneous Secret Service report, a White House mail log entry, an FBI memo, a case number, a preserved device, photographs, lab notes, arrests, indictments, or any archival file tying an actual bomb to Lehi. In fact, a FOIA request to the Secret Service for records of this alleged incident came back “no responsive documents,” and the Truman Library reports it has nothing and explicitly notes that Margaret Truman’s biographies rarely cite sources.
So no, you do not get to say “adequate evidence” and then hide behind moral outrage.
Your next move is equally sloppy. “They operated with the permission of the government.” In 1947 there was no Israeli government. When the state did exist, it disbanded Lehi, arrested members, and fought Irgun in the Altalena affair.
If you have a primary document tying a Truman mail bomb to Lehi, post it. If you do not, drop the Holocaust baiting and admit you are repeating an allegation you cannot substantiate.
And your finale, that Irgun and Lehi represent “the nature and spirit of the Israeli people today,” is just collectivist bigotry. “Terror cells are usually small,” you say, and then you claim two fringe militias somehow define millions of Israelis. That is not analysis. It is an ethnic smear.
>The “20th century atrocity denial” comparison is disgusting and transparent
I was talking about the Holodomor, obviously.
“Obviously” is a nice rewrite, but you did not say Holodomor. Holodomor or Holocaust, the move is the same: you are trying to smear “denialism” over a claim you cannot document. Denialism is rejecting mountains of primary evidence. I am asking you for primary evidence and you have produced none. Post a contemporaneous Secret Service or FBI record tying a Truman bomb to Lehi, or admit you are repeating hearsay. Either way, I appreciate you providing a written record of your conspiracy theories and holocaust bating here on Hacker News.
If you know history, it's quite obvious. The Holodomor is an alleged genocide with no absolute evidence that it was planned and intentional, just a great deal of credible hearsay and correlating patterns of behavior. Much like there's no reason to think the allegation made that Israel was sending a mailbomb to Truman was false given all the other Western politicians they were mailbombing at that time.
Thanks for finally stating your epistemic standard out loud: “credible hearsay and correlating patterns” is enough for you to accuse Jews of trying to assassinate a U.S. president. That is not “knowing history.” That is how conspiracy theories work. "Quite obvious" and "no reason to think false" don’t count as proof. You started with a claim you probably genuinely believed in, realized there was no evidence for it, and instead of admitting to that, reverted to trolling. That's bad faith discussion and against HN rules. I’m not playing “atrocity analogy” whack-a-mole as you pivot to minimizing the Holodomor to cover for a claim you cannot document. Absence of evidence isn’t evidence.
I didn't accuse "Jews" of trying to assassinate a US president, I accused Israel of doing so.
>You started with a claim you probably genuinely believed in, realized there was no evidence for it, and instead of admitting to that, reverted to trolling.
I still believe it, as the claim was from Margaret Truman Daniel, who had first hand knowledge of what happened to her parents. You clearly don't agree, despite Israel having done the same thing at the same time to other Western politicians. There's no "trolling" or violation of "HN rules" going on, other than perhaps the antisemitic conflation of Jewishness with Israel, particularly when it comes to who is blamed for the terrorism committed by the latter. It is a form of ethnoracial essentialism and bigotry that also impacts Muslims in the US and other ethnic and racial groups (such as the targeting of Chinese citizens in Indonesia as a form of blame for the country of China's actions).
Nice dodge, but switching from “Jews” to “Israel” does not make you more precise. It makes you chronologically wrong. Israel did not exist in 1947.
And the sermon about “conflating Jewishness with Israel” is rich coming from the person who already declared that Irgun and Lehi represent “the nature and spirit of the Israeli people today.” You do not get to smear an entire people, then clutch pearls about conflation when the smear gets noticed.
Also, Margaret Truman Daniel is not “first-hand evidence” of a 1947 mail bomb plot. First-hand evidence would be a Secret Service or FBI file with a case number, a White House mailroom log, the device itself, lab reports, arrests, indictments, or any archival record from the time tying a specific package to a specific group. You have produced none. A biography written decades later, with no citations, is hearsay until it is anchored to contemporaneous documentation.
“No reason to think it was false” is not how history works. Post a primary document or retract the claim. Everything else here, including your sophomoric word games, is noise.
>Israel did not exist in 1947.
Doing the pushes up glasses "Ahem well ackshully it was Mandatory Palestine" shtick doesn't really give your terrorism apologia narrative any more legitimacy.
>First-hand evidence would be a Secret Service or FBI file with a case number, a White House mailroom log, the device itself, lab reports, arrests, indictments, or any archival record from the time tying a specific package to a specific group
Which would certainly be classified.
Frankly, this is all just a diversion. Classic Z tactic. I really don't care if someone believes that (the future) Israel's paramilitary terrorists, out of their extensive mailbombing campaign against Western politicians, did or didn't target one specific person. It's really tangential to my point that Israel is a terror state that was born of a campaign of death and atrocities against not only the original inhabitants of the land they stole, but also against Western victims whose only crime was not helping the genocidal Zionist project enthusiastically enough.
This is you admitting you were never discussing history in good faith. You started with “adequate evidence of the Truman bombing attempt.” When asked for records, you pivoted to “it would certainly be classified.” Now you say you “don’t really care” whether it happened. That is not an argument. That is a bluff collapsing in real time.
Your “pushes up glasses, Mandatory Palestine” sneer is also a self-own. You accused “Israel” of an act in 1947. Israel did not exist in 1947. Correcting the actor and the date is not “apologia.” It is basic competence. And I literally called the King David Hotel bombing terrorism and said I’m not defending it, so your “terrorism apologia narrative” is just you lying about what I wrote.
The “classified” excuse is especially weak because this has been FOIA’d. The Secret Service response that’s publicly posted comes back “no responsive records.” Agencies do not answer “we found nothing” when they are sitting on a neat classified case file that exists. They either locate records and exempt them, or they Glomar. “No records” is what it says on the tin.
Then you retreat into “Classic Z tactic,” which is just coded insinuation for “I can’t support my factual claim, so I’ll smear you as part of a tribe.” You do not get to throw that kind of ethnic shorthand around and then pretend you are the one worried about “conflation.”
Bottom line: you used an unverified rumor to call me a denialist. When challenged, you switched to “classified.” When cornered, you admitted you don’t care if it’s true. That tells everyone exactly what this was.
… and it’s not just that Israel woke up one morning and decided to take Hezbollah to the cleaners, either. Hezbollah started a military campaign against Israel on October 8th, 2023, one day after the most horrific attack Jews have experienced since the holocaust.
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.
This substack doesn't support the claim at all it just quotes a book that makes the claim. The headline is basically as informative as the whole article. Trash content only useful for riling people up.
Not even the quoted passage from the book makes the claim in the title. It basically says Palantir had a contract with the IDF during the same time the IDF executed the pager attack. There is zero substantiation of the claim that Palantir assisted with the attack itself. It’s mostly a breathless description of Palantir’s standard operating practice — namely, sending “forward deployed engineers” (consultants) to customers — garnished with some emotional (but clever) wordplay like “Operation Grim Beeper.”
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.
So rather than point us at more Palantir marketing and YouTuber conspiracy theories, why not be a little more specific (if you can) and just tell us a bit more about that since you are allegedly an ex-Palantir?
EDIT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42882440
> 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 :)]
Yeah, but Foundry is so ahead, not seeing DataSphere competing there honestly. The only reason is, you already are on SAP and don't want a second system.
Also the engineering / product culture @Palantir is diametrically opposed to what exists at SAP, so I favour Palantir.
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?
You forget that the whole idea that public companies sell on the stock market is that any management, any idiot with an MBA, could just come in and take it over, making roughly the same profit as the people that sold.
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.
Maybe they aren’t optimizing for user experience and are instead optimizing for how much data they can suck into their central db?
I will never understand how people honestly think that there is a such a thing as a central DB. Do you really think that Gov Agencies from all over the world deploy Gotham just connected to the internet without controlling inflow / outflow of data? I would bet money that 99% of critical systems are not even connected to the internet but air-gapped because, believe it or not, people at those agencies are not that stupid.
Like most very complex and powerful software it takes a long time to learn and configure it correctly.
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?
Funny you think they are the only tech firm willing to engage with the DOD.
“The tech was used” but how, specifically, in regards to Operation Grim Reaper? The implication is that it was used to select targets but if that it true then does that mean there are still unexploded pagers in use?
[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.
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?
There are various software filters based on past abuses by related accounts.
[flagged]
I don't agree, and there are many counterexamples in this thread alone.
People who are passionate about a divisive topic often feel like the site/moderators/community are hopelessly biased against their view. The people with opposing views feel exactly the same way—which, ironically, becomes the one thing they can agree about, although they disagree about the direction.
This is ultimately a function of how the passions work, so I don't believe there's much we can do about it.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
you are avoiding the actual topic in question and try to divert discussion into different direction.
flags are been abused and you don't do anything about it, short of "show me wrongly flagged comment and i'll unflag it if i think it was flagged wrong"
can you openly admit that flags are been abused and misused to silence opinions that people disagree with ?
if you can't agree with such a trivial statement, I don't think there is anything to discuss here.
ps. obviously after i made 3 comments i am throttled and cant post this comment
I've addressed this question countless times, and am always happy to answer good-faith questions. But I'm not interested in being cross-examined.
> ps. obviously after i made 3 comments i am throttled and cant post this comment
Your account is rate-limited. We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments and/or get involved in flamewars (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40043551).
If you want to build up a track record of using HN as intended for a while, you'd be welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and we can take a look and hopefully take the rate limit off your account.
if by "addressed" you mean ignored - yes. I saw multiple people raising with you and with other moderator issue of "abuse of flagging of comments" (not submissions), and I never saw neither of you trying to address it. I saw you only trying to avoid it.
just like you did now twice, first time when I asked, you diverted it to different topic and second time you accused me of asking questions in bad faith.
ironically, you violated yourelf site guideline: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
something funny i saw a couple of weeks ago: some dude that was here for 10-15 years and wrote only 200 or so comments (but really good comments. i went through his comment history and it was really good and insightful), wrote in one of discussions that abuse of flagging of comments is crazy and it used to suppress discussion and that he leaves the site.
his comment got flagged.
this is the atmosphere that you been fostering here. either by inaction against abuse or by "pardoning" people that according to you violate guidelines in multiple ways https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46227648
edit. and how you decide "low quality comment" ? is it your objective opinion or is it all the downvoting from people that don't like facts that i preset (it's common here to downvote and flag comments with link to factual data) ?
A lot of my comments calling out Israel for this terrorist attack are flagged.
Also, this should certainly not be flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46219097
That last sentence is arguably on the wrong side of the line, but ok, I've unflagged it.
Thank you (even though it's not my comment). I feel like if people are free to say the pager attack was "brilliant", then saying it was an act of terrorism (which obviously I agree with) is the equivalent on the other side.
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.
Agreed, and I unflagged that one a while before you posted your comment here - most probably you had a non-refreshed version of the page.
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.
They need to use it more then.
At least one of mine, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46219068
The last sentence breaks the site guidelines.
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.
@dang Here is another comment of mine on this thread that is substantive, responding directly to the issue, and not a personal attack, but was still flagged. I'm an HN user for 15 years, have reviewed the rules, and don't think this violates any (except that I used the word "balls"?). I agree with the other commenters that flagging is being abused here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46223274
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".
To be clear, I am not suggesting to eliminate any form of moderation whatsoever. I think threads like these require intensive manual moderation.
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.
Perhaps it's worth considering an algorithmic review of flagging abuse. You can feed a table of flagged comments with the user, the comment the user flagged, and the context, as well as HN's rules, into GPT or a similar AI to get a first approximation of which users are abusing flagging, and on which topics flagging is most abused. I bet you'd find some interesting data!
immune system is great analogy.
- immune system flagged this story because it thought that this story doesn't deserve to be on this site and it won't contribute/create any productive discussion (you can see this sentiment from many people who flagged it). Based on your comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46218920) you turned off flags on this story and created gesturing around this. You essentially did what you just here criticized.
- immune system comes with interesting thing: autoimmune diseases
A better approach IMO would be to simply turn off comments entirely on controversial topics.
Whether flagging is available or not, nothing is gained in such polarized discussions. Of course it would be best if we could lower that polarization over time, but I am pretty skeptical that discussion boards & comments are a mechanism that will achieve that. I suspect their actual effect is to increase it.
I know, right? Check this perfectly reasonable one: https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=46218955
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).
Comment sections are not the only venue for us to speak to each other and we must be able to consider that they might actually make the problem worse.
Other venues - real life, talking to people in person - telephones, audio & video calling, talking to people - writing op-eds, blog posts, sub-stack newsletters - podcasts
None of these of course produce the dopamine hit of seeing your likes/retweets/karma go up and that of your opponents going down though, so we would have to give that up. I think that's a good deal.
We can call internet comment infrastructure "community" but that doesn't mean it actually is one or functions to enhance community.
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.
> I advocate concerning yourself with the things you can control, which do 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.
> 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.
I don't know what the numbers are, nor is it possible to determine this from the data we have, but I am reasonably sure that most of the commenters who post about this to HN are doing so in good faith. That doesn't make it any less tough to discuss (or to moderate the discussion). If anything, it makes it tougher.
Isnt this just a very effective ad for Palantir? Anyone considering Palantir is of the opinion Pager operation was super successful.
Palantir is just 'CIA as a service'.
If this happened to us would we invade Iraq again?
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.
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...
This is obviously false. Hezbollah was indiscriminately firing artillery into Israel and managed to kill, among other people, 12 Druze soccer players in the Golan Heights.
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.
I've been following this very closely from the start. Hezbollah was targeting radio towers and IDF personnel. Hezbollah denied that it was their rocket that hit the Druze and they certainly didn't have any other attacks that matched that type of target. Again, it's well documented that Israel has caused orders of magnitude more civilian damage and casualties than Hezbollah: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Hezbollah_confl...
> 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
You haven't responded to any claim I've made other than to advance a claim that Hezbollah, which fired tens of thousands of mostly unguided rockets into Israel, did not in fact kill 12 Druze children in the Golan Heights.
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.)
Unguided doesn't mean unaimed. Here's an example (of many) of the types of attacks Hezbollah had been executing: https://x.com/ME_Observer_/status/1710938611858780314
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
* https://x.com/ME_Observer_/status/1810011590118305895
* https://x.com/ME_Observer_/status/1791216213785268522
You don't want to miss a step holding Israel to account. I'm not interested in pushing back on you about that. But to accomplish that, you're defending Hezbollah. Hezbollah is indefensible. If you want to keep hashing out why, I'm willing to keep talking about it, but I suspect this isn't a productive conversation.
You all will figure out it's all about the Jews eventually.
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
>This is obviously false. Hezbollah was indiscriminately firing artillery into Israel and managed to kill, among other people, 12 Druze soccer players in the Golan Heights.
That is very indiscriminate. They targeted Israel but the rockets landed in Syria. But some how managed to hurt Israelis.
Israel has killed at least 83 people since the ceasefire agreement in Lebanon. They are terrorists.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/1/28/how-many-people-has...
I'm not interested in litigating this claim because it has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. If it helps, you can be as angry at Israel as you'd like without getting much flak from me (I'm angry too), just as long as we don't get to the "enemy-of-my-enemy" stuff that legitimizes Hezbollah.
I don't think "terrorist" is a useful label for either side. It wasn't "terrorism" when Hezbollah besieged Madaya; they did that as a military force.
As a US citizen I have absolutely no problem with Hezbollah. Why would I? They're no threat to me and indeed, are fighting people who are a threat to me.
> If I were Israel, I would have not invaded Gaza
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?
Israel has been attacking Palestinians and its neighbors since its inception. They are the aggressors and always have been.
> It has achieved the best civilian-combatant death ratio of any urban war in modern history.
False.
The Yom Kippur and Six Day war were instigated by Israel?
Yes. Those are downstream from The Balfour Agreement and Nakba.
That's nonsense, do you know what Nakba means?
And I don't mean it's modern reinterpretation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba
I didn't ask you for a link.
I'm talking about what you think it is
I think it’s exactly what is stated in Wikipedia. A brutal crime of occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, land theft and genocide.
The Intifada has come to Bondi beach
Roughly 4x more civilians were killed every day in Gaza.
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> Israel has been attacking Palestinians and its neighbors since its inception. They are the aggressors and always have been.
False.
See? I can play that trick too.
I have sources, do you?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba
I just skimmed through your comment history. I'm going to take a cue from tptacek and say that this isn't going to be productive. Good day.
Not only was Israel unprovoked, they have been the brutal aggressor for almost 100 years.
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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
Yeah, I agree with them there. That’s just being anti-Zionist, which is a position held by most the world. That’s the equivalent of saying “our struggle will end when Nazi Germany is obliterated”.
"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.
That's not really true. The point is that there's a difference between how you feel about a topic and how you express it. People will have different feelings and different intensities of feelings about a topic like this. That's normal, understandable and valid.
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.
This might help. Appropriate = your outrage(not shared here) in general. Inappropriate = sharing your outrage here.
It's not inappropriate to be outraged. What's inappropriate is to post comments to Hacker News that vent aggression at other commenters and/or those on the other side of the conflict. Doing that is against both HN's rules and, more importantly, the intended spirit of this community (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). A certain amount of processing or, if you like, metabolization needs to happen between those two steps.
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.
This seems fitting:
> 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...
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).
Grim Beeper was coined by Michael Doran of the Hudson Institute, it was not an internal code name
It was one of the greatest acts of deception in history. Absolute genius. Even at our peak we never did anything comparable.
It’s like blowing up every single member of the gestapo simultaneously. The resistance could only have dreamed of such a mission.
The perception gap between Zionists and everyone else around this is astonishing. Zionists are gleeful and the rest of us are horrified and disgusted. I don’t see how we don’t eventually end in an armed conflict as this difference seems unreconcilable.
This reads like an ad for the geriatrics in power. They don't even mention what the hell they contributed but did mention that whatever it was was "AI powered" rofl.
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"?
There's also the option of "Do Some Evil".
evil(x) -> not(do(x)) which equates to not(evil(x)) or not(do(x)).
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).
Do Evil, Yes!
Was this by chance a "No, money down!" Simpsons reference?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yuL6PcgSgM
it is now lol
HN let this one fall through the cracks I guess. Usually this article would get flagged in under 10 minutes of being up.
It was flagged and enough people complained about censorship that is was resurrected with a pinned post from dang about how we should be civil
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We stopped using the word 'civil' years ago.
Commenters here need to follow the rules, and the rules don't go away when the topic is a tough one. On the contrary, they apply more, as https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html makes clear.
Happy to follow the rules when free discussion is allowed. Watching this topic get censored aggressively on here during some of the darkest months for Palestinians eroded my respect for your “rules”.
We've specifically protected, carefully moderated, and kept open many threads about this topic, at considerable cost, because each time one of these appears on HN, the mods can kiss the rest of their day goodbye, not to mention look forward to streams of abuse [1]. Forgive me therefore if I dispute your claim of "censored aggressively". To me that feels like not taking yes for an answer.
That's understandable, because the people who feel passionately about any topic (call it X) always feel like X is vastly underrepresented, and even "censored aggressively", on HN. We can say things like "frontpage space is the scarcest resource" and "we can't have too much repetition" till the cows come home, but it won't take this feeling away. Even when X is literally the most discussed topic on HN, we get people claiming that X is being censored aggressively—it's not even uncommon [2]. This is a function of how people feel and nothing else.
[1] I'm not comparing this to the suffering of the people in the actual situation. That is obvious of course, but since someone will accuse me of doing that if I don't say this, I'm saying this.
[2] If you want an example, this one is engraved in my memory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23624916. How someone could turn the most-discussed topic on the entire site into "not any mention" and "censored aggressively" still zaps me with pain and anger every time it comes back to me, which fortunately is not all that often.
As someone who is extremely online and often bored at work, I spend a lot of time checking the top ~100 or so posts here. Any article related to Israel was getting rapidly flagged and taken down. It’s possible that these posts are being mass-flagged by users and automatically taken down, but if that’s the case it appears to be an abuse of the flag function. I understand it’s difficult to moderate these threads and that Israel/Palestine is a contentious topic, but that just doesn’t explain the rapid (~10 minute latency) take downs prior to ANY inflammatory comments. Again, I don’t know exactly how your system works, but maybe some additional transparency would be helpful. It’s clearly already being gamed so it wouldn’t hurt.
Edit: I think it’s also important to be conscious of the central role that Y combinator and Silicon Valley in general have played both in the Israel / Palestine “conflict” and domestic US politics. “Hackernews” is not a neutral zone. It is directly associated with the most powerful forces in the world today. I’m not casting judgment because I work in this industry to. But it undoubtedly raises serious questions about the moderation (automated or otherwise) of speech around these topics on here.
The key word in your comment is "any". If you really mean that "any", I propose consing an 'm' onto it, because HN has hosted dozens of threads totalling many thousands of comments, probably tens of thousands by now, about this topic. That shouldn't be hard to verify. One could start here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
> maybe some additional transparency would be helpful.
No amount of transparency will help, alas, for two reasons: (1) people decide these things based on how they feel, and (2) the measure-zero internet law: no matter how often you repeat something, the set of users who receive the information has measure zero (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
> the central role that Y combinator and Silicon Valley in general have played both in the Israel / Palestine “conflict” and domestic US politics.
I don't remotely believe that YC has played a "central role" in any of that, but even if it had, Hacker News is moderated by me and tomhow, and no one at YC has ever put any political pressure on us. If you're talking about HN moderation, that's who you're talking about—and we're quite accessible and willing to answer questions and address objections. (That's why I've posted 81k comments over the last 10+ years, what-am-i-doing-with-my-life-god-help-me.)
p.s. I've always felt that people being bored at work are HN's core constituency, so thank you!
I don’t want hacker news to be neutral or biased, I want it to be a site or I can nerd out about tech stuff. Then when I feel like reading about the news of the day or arguing about politics, I’ll leave hacker news, and go to Twitter.
I don’t want hacker news to become Twitter. I don’t want hacker news to become a 24/7 critical theory struggle session.
All I can do as one person, acting within the guidelines, is to exercise my ability to flag stuff too focussed on politics.
Thank you for trying to keep HN from devolving into 24x7 culture war like every other site.
I have so many places I can go if I want to read and discuss Israel and Palestine. I don’t need another, and I especially don’t want to lose the one spot I have that’s relatively free of it.
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Yeah... requires serious mental gymnastics to argue otherwise.
Military/terrorist group procures communication devices to coordinate military operations. Explosive is sized to injure the holder, not bystanders - per CCTV videos, eg:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2024/sep/18/cctv-cap...
Hard to get more precise/targeted than that!
In contrast to:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEoK6oihqhs
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What is really annoying is the same people saying this incredibly targeted attack on Hezbollah is a horrible act of terrorism are completely silent on WHY Israel did it, which is because Hezbollah started shooting thousands of missiles at Israel in support of Hamas after the horrific attacks on Oct 7 2023. Just imagine the reaction the US would have if Mexico started shooting thousands of missiles at a US city?
Yep
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The pager bombs injured and maimed many civilians including children.
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And here you are regurgitating some dissent, blissfully ignorant that Hamas has precisely zero to do with this event.
I am simply pointing out OP's double standard: when it comes to Israel, everything is to be distrusted; when it comes to Israel's enemies, everything is to be believed. I am well-aware of the differences between Hamas and Hezbollah and have studied this conflict for well over two decades.
> when it comes to Israel, everything is to be distrusted
Correct, with a good reason for it. Israelis have been caught lying so many times that now when they make a claim, it is on them to prove that the claim is correct, rather than on others to prove that it is not. Just a few examples off the top of my head include:
- The killing of medical workers in a convoy of ambulances and burying them in shallow graves, then lying about doing it until someone dug the bodies up and found footage confirming that they lied on the phone of one of the buried aid workers. [1]
- The hunting down and killing of World Central Kitchen aid workers via multiple air strikes [2]. This was repeatedly denied by Israelis until too much evidence was stacked up and they settled for "it was a grave mistake".
- The high profile case of killing of Hind Rajab [3] who for a brief period of time was the sole survivor of a tank attack in a shelled vehicle filled with her dead family members. Aid workers were dispatched to rescue here, coordinated with Israelis. Neither the girl nor the aid workers were ever seen alive after that. Israelis repeatedly insisted that there were no troops in the area, until too much evidence was stacked again.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-isr...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Central_Kitchen_aid_conv...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Hind_Rajab
Hi there, I see you too trust Hamas sources (the origin of the Hind Rajab sotry) and not Israeli sources, so you too are in the camp of "believe hamas" and "doubt israel".
1. Hamas used World Central Kitchen vehicles, according even to the head of World Central Kitchen, who initially condemned the attack and then later admitted Hamas used WCK vehicles. You didn't know this, did you?
2. A few questions on the Hind Rajab incident: Was the car stationary or moving? was it travelling north to a combat zone or south away from one? According to the original Arabic reports, did the family get out of the car or were they trapped inside? In the audio of this attack, was there any crossfire? When was Hind Rajab killed? Was it at 8:10am or at 2:30pm? What happened in those 6 hours? How can you be sure this was not a "fog of war" incident as opposed to a deliberate targeting of a civilian?
As per my previous assertion, it is now on Israel and their sympathizers to answer all those questions in a manner that leaves no doubt about their veracity. Watching what they are doing and what they are saying for two whole years, and the results of it all, leaves them with zero benefit of the doubt with the vast majority of people in the world.
You simply invent crimes and claim Israel is guilty until proven innocent. That's not how it works.
Nothing's invented, what I listed are real events with extensive documentation and evidence behind them.
You are stating some questions which are supposedly going to lead to IDF's innocence in the matter if they are truthfully answered. The burden of that additional proof is now on you. Mere questions being enough to dispel a case against the IDF is a thing of the past. They worked very hard to earn such a reputation, and now there are consequences for it.
There's no burden of proof on me, it's all on you.
You're the one claiming Israel purposefully killed Hind Rajab and yet you refuse to answer the specific questions I asked you about the incident. You say this is because you answering is "going to lead to IDF's innocence." On this we agree. The facts of what actually happened matter.
In the case of Hind Rajab, I hope this does go to court so we can find out what happened in this tragic incident. If there were war crimes, I'd like to see the soldiers who committed them face legal justice. But I still believe in the concept of presumed innocence and the burden of proof.
You don't get to make up crimes and declare a party guilty of them, even if you're totally sure they're the baddies. That's what enlightenment thinking and four centuries of western jurisprudence teaches us. Innocent until proven guilty.
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Everything you say here is false. 1. Israel's stated goal is to neuter Hamas and return the hostages, not kill civilians. 2. Arabs speak a semitic language; the "semites" in "anti-semite" has always referred to Jews. 3. Jews, including white Ashkenazi European Jews, are levantine in origin. Their lineage traces to Judea. 4. "Antisemitic" means anti-Jew. You are using it to mean anti-Arab, but arabs are not semites 5. You did make all that up!
>Israel's stated goal is to neuter Hamas and return the hostages, not kill civilians
Sure, yeah, just like it was in any number of previous operations, which at the time they declared successful, even though they did quite a bit more of the latter. Per Occam's razor, either they are prodigious bunglers, or you are overly credulous.
> 1. Israel's stated goal is to neuter Hamas and return the hostages, not kill civilians.
And yet so many dead civilians. It's almost like a genocial terrorist country like israel always lie. Also, I was referring to israel's genocide of the semites in palestine to found "israel" up to present day. You conveniently forgot about it.
> 2. Arabs speak a semitic language; the "semites" in "anti-semite" has always referred to Jews.
Arabs are ethnic semites who speak a semitic language. "Israelis" are non-semitic europeans pretending to be "jews". Ethnic europeans are not semites and can never be semites because they come from an entire separate branch of the human family tree.
> 3. Jews, including white Ashkenazi European Jews, are levantine in origin. Their lineage traces to Judea.
No they do not. Maybe a handful.
> 4. "Antisemitic" means anti-Jew.
No it does not because semite doesn't mean "jew". A semite and a jew are two different things.
> You are using it to mean anti-Arab, but arabs are not semites
No. I'm using semite to mean semite. Arabs surely are semites. Europeans are not though.
> 5. You did make all that up!
If arabs are not semites, then what are they? You say arabs are not semites and I'm the liar? I'm making shit up?
1. There aren't a lot of dead civilians given that this was a 2 year war fought in a built-up urban environment fought against a plainclothes terrorist enemy that violated every law of war, including using hospitals and schools as military bases.
2. Semites is not an ethnicity, it's a language family, sorry. When used colloquially it has always referred to Jews.
3. “Semitic” is a language group, not a racial caste. Jews—including Ashkenazi—have documented Middle Eastern ancestry, and about half of Israelis are Jews from the Middle East and North Africa. The idea that Israelis are “non-Semitic Europeans pretending to be Jews” is just antisemitic nonsense, not a serious factual claim.
4. See above. Semitic is a language family, not a people. "Anti-semite" as a term has always meant "anti-Jew."
5. Correct, Arabs are Arabian. You're not "making shit up" you're repeating evidence-free nonsense you want to be true without examining its validity.
> 1. There aren't a lot of dead civilians given that...
It's amazing how similarly zionists/israelis and nazis rationalize.
> 2. Semites is not an ethnicity, it's a language family, sorry. When used colloquially it has always referred to Jews.
"Semitic people or Semites is a term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group[2][3][4][5] associated with people of the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, including Akkadians (Assyrians and Babylonians), Arabs, Arameans, Canaanites (Ammonites, Edomites, Israelites, Moabites, Phoenicians, and Philistines) and Habesha peoples." --wiki
> 3. “Semitic” is a language group, not a racial caste.
Germanic is a language group and an ethnic group. Using your logic, germans are not germanic peoples because germanic is a language group.
> Jews—including Ashkenazi—have documented Middle Eastern ancestry,
They have less documented middle eastern ancestry (none) than elizabeth warren has of native ancestry.
> The idea that Israelis are “non-Semitic Europeans pretending to be Jews” is just antisemitic nonsense, not a serious factual claim.
Considering that most "israelis" are ATHEISTS and most "israelis" are non-semitic and most "israelis" do not adhere to or respect the torah, it is a factual claim.
> 5. Correct, Arabs are Arabian. You're not "making shit up" you're repeating evidence-free nonsense you want to be true without examining its validity.
Why do you lie? People can literally google "semites" or "semitic peoples". If you lie about something like this, what are the odds you are lying about israel killing civilian semites in palestine?
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> 1. What's the similarity in your view between "zionist rationalization" and "nazi rationalization"?
Penchant for rationalizing away acts of genocide and dehumanize peoples. The only difference is zionists dehumanize actual semites ( palestinians) while nazis dehumanized european "jews". Zionists/"Israelis" are actual anti-semites. While nazis were anti-european "jews". Heady stuff.
> To me this sounds like more antisemitic nonsense, you comparing zionists to Nazis.
I'm comparing apples to apples.
> So using “Semitic” to argue that Israelis are “fake” or “non-Semites” is simply incorrect.
"Israelis" are europeans. Europeans are not semites.
> 3. The germanic language group is a family of languages that includes dutch, english, yiddish, afrikkans, etc. The germanic people includes germany, not brits and americans.
But germanic people includes ENGLISH though. It's pathetic what you are trying to do here.
> 5. I'm not lying.
That's all you have done. "Arabs are not semites". Lie. "Israel wasn't trying to kill civilians". Lie.
You seem to think that asserting something makes it true. I particularly love that you call yiddish speakers, americans and dutch "germanic people" - a novel claim, haha.
You literally do not understand antisemitism or semitic people or genetics or ethnic and national identity.
Israel's goal since the beginning was to exist, to be able to live. Antisemitism has literally never meant hatred against various semitic people such as Ethiopian semites or Assyrians it has always been a term to describe Jew hatred, coined by a German Jew hater. Also semitic is not a genetic thing, its a language thing and various identities tied to various semitic languages largely do not see it as a useful grouping. I have never heard of pan-semitic movement similar to pan Germanic or pan Slavic ones(those were not universally popular when they existed but they did exist and had some popularity). About half of Israeli Jews ancestors didn't recently live in Europe (and most of those had ancestors who lived elsewhere in MENA). Finally when it comes to genetics both Jews and Palestinians have substantial overlapping ancestry to the ancient Levant region as well as ancestry from outside of it, but that doesn't really change people's minds on ethnic identity and nationalism
You are exactly correct, and this is all 101 level stuff. I wonder where they get their confidence from.
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The pager bombs injured and maimed many civilians including children.
Yes that’s why I said minimal AOE and also why I said in a war (keyword - we live in real world and war is a very real thing whether we like it or not) minimizing harm to innocents is key.
The alternative is 10s of thousands of civilians suffering because their leaders drag them into hell with them. We already see how bad that is..
It's a shared property of bombs.
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According to many US politicians, it's a thing to celebrate (Fetterman stands out as one, having received a golden pager from an Israeli official).
And the mildly veiled threats on social media to people speaking out about Palestine referencing the pager attacks that goes unpunished by social media platforms.
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This is why Grim Beeper was so enlightening for me. It proved that Israel could go above and beyond to limit collateral damage with some brilliant attack no one has even contemplated before and there would still be people online saying it was a war crime.
Calling people psychopaths isn't productive.
In my opinion, it's important to call out extreme abhorrent behaviour. A disregard of international humanitarian law and human rights qualifies imo.
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Have ye any citations?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israeli-mossad-pager-walkie-tal...
> Gabriel said Mossad had learned that Hezbollah was buying pagers from Gold Apollo, a company in Taiwan.
> "When they are buying from us, they have zero clue that they are buying from the Mossad. We make like the 'Truman Show,' everything is controlled by us behind the scene," Gabriel said. "In their experience, everything is normal. Everything was 100% kosher."
> To further the plot, Mossad hired the Gold Apollo saleswoman Hezbollah was used to working with, who was unaware she was working with Mossad. According to Gabriel, she offered Hezbollah the first batch of pagers as an upgrade, free of charge. By September 2024, Hezbollah had about 5,000 pagers in their pockets.
https://cybernews.com/cyber-war/how-did-israels-mossad-spy-a...
> Going analog has been a signature move for terror groups ever since the September 11th attacks as a way to successfully mask communications from Western militaries and government defense agencies.
> A source cited by the Wall Street Journal said many of the affected devices were from a new shipment delivered to Hezbollah militants in recent days.
> Apparently, the encrypted pagers currently in use by Hezbollah were brand new models and bought in bulk for the members just a few months ago, several sources told Reuters.
I'm sure you can find more if you look; there's a lot of articles about it.
They literally sold the beepers to Hezbollah. This is common knowledge.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-planted-exp...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-former-mossad-agents-det...
etc...
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It's a war, you know. People die. Sometimes in perfectly legal and justified strikes, sometimes in attacks that contravene the laws of war. And given that Hamas uses the civilians under their control as both a sword and a shield, and that Egypt simply refuses their obligation under IHL to allow refugees to flee, collateral damage is an unfortunate inevitability.
Lumping together all civilians killed by Israel in the course of war is overly reductive: Some were killed in unlawful intentional acts, some were unfortunate collateral damage of lawful acts, and some were intentional victims of Hamas brutality, sacrificed at the altar of making Israel look bad.
There’s more evidence of Israel using Palestinians as human shields than hamas using them as human shields just fyi
>It's a war, you know.
It's an occupation that has been ongoing for almost 80 years, not a 'war' that began unprovoked, along with recorded history and the universe itself, on October 7th.
>Sometimes in perfectly legal and justified strikes, sometimes in attacks that contravene the laws of war.
More than half the time, these 'perfect justifications' don't hold water and in fact rest on the hope of total impunity from IHL.
>Hamas uses the civilians under their control as both a sword and a shield
Not according to any sane definition that is internationally agreed upon. Conversely, the IDF's use of human shields - as defined in IHL and in their own propaganda - is abundantly documented.
>Egypt simply refuses their obligation under IHL to allow refugees to flee, collateral damage is an unfortunate inevitability.
Rather odd that rendering Palestinians stateless is just a law of nature in your books, and that Israel's obligations as an occupying power and the agent that created a refugee crisis - ie, prosecuted a campaign of human cleansing - is not part of your calculus at all.
It's okay to dislike both parties
This is exactly one group wants to do. Be vocal, throw out many lies.. and people will start thinking both sides are (very) bad and there is no reason for them to be involved. This thinking allows Israel to commit genocide, extend its borders, bomb journalist, cut aid, arrest..
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False equivalency.
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The Lebanese Ministry of Health stated that the attack had killed a confirmed 12 civilians, while killing 30 Hezbollah members. 1 civilian death for every 2.5 combatant deaths.
For comparison, in World War II, there were an estimated 2 million civilian deaths and 5.3 million combatant deaths. 1 civilian death for every 2.6 combatant deaths.
Those are remarkably similar ratios. Take that as you will.
> The Lebanese Ministry of Health stated that the attack had killed a confirmed 12 civilians, while killing 30 Hezbollah members.
Source? AFAIU The Lebanese Ministry of Health stated 12 total were killed in operation grim beeper, this number did not appear to exclude Hezbollah members.[0] They listed 2 children which AFAIU were friends/family members of Hezbollah members. They list four of those killed as healthcare workers but don't appear to identify if those healthcare workers were also Hezbollah members. Keep in mind the attack was more designed to injure rather than kill, with nearly 3000 injured.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2kn10xxldo
Were the children terrorists too?
> Were the children terrorists too?
They were family members of terrorists, that's how they got a hold of the pagers.
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what side is the terrorist here?
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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/world/middleeast/lebanon-...
> 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.
They don't mind maiming children.
She died.
I think there are also rules against attacking combatants in civilian contexts, like their homes.
Israel made the entire world a less safe place by using consumer electronics as bombs shipped out into the public in one of the worst acts of terrorism ever recorded.
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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)
Yes the foundations can mandate that the tools are forbidden to use in military and intelligence applications.
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.
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Ironic that it's already full of flag bombed comments (just from the opposite side of what you are complaining about).
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I thought this was old news. I remember commenting on this almost a year ago?
Anyways, it's war against a known terrorist group.
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.
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.
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
hmm maybe you don't know there's "intentional homicide" and "unintentional homicide", and those two differ extremely in court?
seems like you like being sarcastic, but don't know basic stuff even 15 year olds know
The comment I was answering above above was saying that explosions were so weak that people inches away were unarmed. The doctors in Lebanon would probably dissent
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.
You're strawmanning.
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.
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"
Hezbollah has not been known to behead and rape civilians and has in fact condemned the use of these tactics by Islamists. This conflation really draws into question the quality of your analysis.
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They go off around civilians, in homes and public spaces, including hospitals because guerrillas and terrorists are not regular soldiers and imbed themselves in homes and public spaces, including hospitals.
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.
The pagers that were targeted were exclusively used by Hezbollah combatants, procured by Hezbollah, linked to an encrypted military network Hezbollah fought a civil war in Lebanon to established, triggered by a message encrypted to that network. The bombs consisted of 6 grams of PETN, yielding a 35kJ blast, approximately the size of 5-10 cherry bombs, or 2% of the raw explosive yield of an M67 grenade --- with the key difference that the pagers were just pagers, with no metal parts introduced (deliberately, to avoid detection by Hezbollah), unlike fragmentation grenades, whose lethality (at 5m) stems from the hardened steel shrapnel they project.
(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.
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> One of the most effective acts of terrorism in history.
It's what "israel" specializes in. When you read the history of "israel", it's literally a series of acts of terrorism.
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