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Comment by Zironic | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I can't say I'm a big fan of this massive scale booby trapping devices all over civilian society and I suspect most nation stats are not very happy about this either. The EU is probably not going to be happy at all about Israel using an EU flagged company to do it either.

This is going to create a lot of distrust in the international supply chain.

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Exactly it’s one thing to target operatives it’s another thing to target large number of people when they’re among the civilians.

Phone exploding in a market, doesn’t make it OK if the owner of the phone is a militant.

With that logic the Hamas terrorist attack last year isn’t a terrorist attack because many of the victims served in the IDF, which illegally occupies their territory.

This is getting ridiculous. Israel will loose the last drops of good will, which is a shame considering how much they achieved to do on that barely habitable piece of land. It breaks my heart.

Under International Humanitarian Law it absolutely does make it OK if the owner of the phone is a militant. This is black letter Law of Armed Combat.

Most people are not judges in the international court of justice. The legal technicalities are irrelevant.

I don't know what that is supposed to mean. There are norms of warfare and these attacks fall within them.

It means that those behind it will get the same treatment as known criminal getting away from punishment by the law due to technicalities.

More precisely, the Israeli politicians will not get sentenced by the courts of law but the Jewish people will suffer from increased antisemitism, politicians supporting the country of Israel will get unpopular and Israel will lose support. Israeli business will be considered risky.

When have thousands of consumer devices, in public circulation, been covert bombs set off in unison? This is far, far outside of the norms of warfare.

To the parent's point, I'm looking at my iPhone thinking that Israel would murder me with it if they wanted, and it absolutely does not make me support Israel.

They may do so, but you know perfectly well what the reaction would be if this happened to people in the US pursuant to an ongoing conflict.

I do. We'd go completely apeshit. People would lie about their age to join up, like after Pearl Harbor. So? That's war. War is very bad.

It is war, but I think there's a qualitative difference you're overlooking, which will inure to Israel's detriment. That difference is the use of asymmetric tactics traditionally employed by the weaker party, deployed by a logistically and technologically superior foe at scale.

Consider the incident a month or two back they assassinated a Hamas negotiator in Iran. That was also asymmetric (in that Iran is a super-hostile environment for any Israeli operations). But while people questioned the probity of assassinating a quasi-diplomat with whom you are ostensibly negotiating, and the Iranians were surely mightily pissed off, nobody serious was suggesting it was a war crime.

Here you're not only using something that feels like a 1950s idea of a remote controlled death ray, however selective, but also subjecting the civilian population who witnessed these thousands of parallel attacks to extreme psychological anxiety. The size of the HN threads on this indicate that a lot of people find it distressing because we live surrounded by such embedded electronics (I have 9 or 10 devices on my desk). Imagine how much worse it is for people who are out grocery shopping or whatever and see someone killed or horribly injured by an explosion right next to them.

I'm not sure I understand why this is "asymmetric warfare". I think that's a term that actually doesn't mean a whole lot, and mostly means "the things weaker adversaries use to level the field against stronger ones". I think a lot of what USSOCOM does/trains falls under the definition of "asymmetric", or would if you discarded the part of that definition that said "weaker opponent". Almost certainly†, conventional military tactics would kill far more civilians in Beirut than will ultimately end up dead in this attack.

I have another theory as to why we have very long threads on HN about how distressing these attacks are, but we don't need to dig into it on HN.

† Again, I'm cognizant that we're still getting details about this attack.

Honestly, "norms of warfare" is just a rather ridiculous concept imposed by the winning side.

The international court of justice is irrelevant if you don't have nukes or guns to support your cause.

Attacking millitatns while they are in the middle of civilians, especially when they are not doing that as part of some hostage/human shield operation, is not OK.

The existing conventions do not prohibit attacking militants while they are in the middle of civilians, even if they are not doing that as part of some hostage/human shield operation. It may be considered morally not ok, but doing so does not violate any obligation.

That's not exactly true; it would depend on how you attacked the combatants, and how much collateral damage you caused. Civilian casualties must be proportionate to the military value of the target.

Reporting is still coming in on these attacks so virtually every comment on these huge long threads could end up falsified one way or the other, but from what I can tell, it looks like these attacks will not only clear that bar, but that they'll do so in a way unprecedented in the history of modern warfare. But we'll see!

Were the children militants? What about hospital staff? And, how do you know who these people are? You don't, but you're all over this thread running cover for a terrorist attack. I've already seen plenty of reporting that many of these targeted people were not, in fact, militants, but simply political members of Hezbollah. Would you be running the same cover if Hezbollah, or Iran had targeted Knesset staff? Disgusting stuff man, truly odious.

No!

>Customary international humanitarian law prohibits the use of booby traps – objects that civilians are likely to be attracted to or are associated with normal civilian daily use – precisely to avoid putting civilians at grave risk and produce the devastating scenes that continue to unfold across Lebanon today. The use of an explosive device whose exact location could not be reliably known would be unlawfully indiscriminate, using a means of attack that could not be directed at a specific military target and as a result would strike military targets and civilians without distinction. A prompt and impartial investigation into the attacks should be urgently conducted.

Lama Fakih, Middle East and North Africa Director at Human Rights Watch

https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/09/18/lebanon-exploding-pagers...

These are not booby traps.

still: The use of an explosive device whose exact location could not be reliably known would be unlawfully indiscriminate, using a means of attack that could not be directed at a specific military target and as a result would strike military targets and civilians without distinction

>device whose exact location could not be reliably known would be unlawfully indiscriminate

Nope, artillery shells are not illegal and you can even miss where you are aiming! We once obliterated an entire French coastal village with naval gunfire on D-Day because information in war is imperfect.

Accidentally killing civilians is not illegal in war! If you have a "valid military target" who takes a cab from the airport, you can airstrike that cab and not violate the Geneva Conventions.

Consider that a nuke that you detonate in the center of a military base that also "just happens" to wipe out the entire city that base is in is not a war crime!

Yeah no you are targeting somewhere specific even if you miss.

This was a large scale indiscriminate attack. Which is entirely forbidden in Geneva Conventions.

It was a large scale extremely discriminating attack, from all available reporting, right? The Geneva Conventions and ICRC documentation on IHL are online, and have been cited repeatedly on these threads; could you cite the claim you're making, just so we're all clear what it is? People might agree or disagree, but a lot of pointless flaming is driven by people that don't even agree on what they're arguing about.

Article 51(4 a b c) of Genova.

I really don't see how it can be a "discriminating" attack when they exploded in shops; groceries; family homes (in the face of a child) etc.

4. Indiscriminate attacks are prohibited. Indiscriminate attacks are:

(a) those which are not directed at a specific military objective;

(b) those which employ a method or means of combat which cannot be directed at a specific military objective; or

(c) those which employ a method or means of combat the effects of which cannot be limited as required by this Protocol;

So far as I can tell, this strike clears all those definitions. I think you may be reading 51(4) to be a prohibition on civilian casualties as collateral to military strikes, but that obviously can't be its meaning --- that would ban virtually all air strikes, for instance, and I'm pretty sure that isn't something the victors of WW2 were going for.

Am I misunderstanding the argument you're making? It's not unlikely that I could have!

You cannot specifically target a military objective using a small explosive in a crowded area. It’s not possible other than by pure luck, which negates any assumed specificity.

The whole premise of this attack is that you can, which is what makes it unprecedented. We can disagree that it succeeded! I understand skepticism about this. I've seen the same videos everyone else has, and the explosions we're talking about are quite small, but obviously there have been civilian casualties.

I see two ways history might judge this:

1. History could decide that the Geneva Conventions and current IHL with respect to combatant status, collateral casualties, and proportionality were simply wrong, and so everything done under current IHL is indefensible. Could happen.

2. It could turn out that the military impact of this strike was dwarfed by the direct civilian cost (in deaths and injuries to noncombatants and property they rely on), which we'll know more about in the coming weeks.

I can kind of appreciate where you’re coming from (in a very morbid, cynical way) but I guess I just think the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Civilians died and I’m not willing to accept the grim argument (not necessarily yours) that “civilians die in conflict and we must abide by it.”

Just to be clear: I think that is very much my grim argument. There is no such thing as a modern war that doesn't kill civilians and anyone who claims otherwise is living in a dangerous fantasy. There are moral distinctions between conduct in war (for instance: Hezbollah has evacuated most of northern Israel by firing over 7,500 rockets at untargeted civilian areas, in one case killing half a youth soccer team). Israel presents a clear example of the continuum: if they're capable of remote-detonating the entire leadership structure of the Radwan Force in Lebanon, what possible justification could they have for flattening tent camps in Gaza?

The fantasy is dangerous because it creates the expectation that military force can solve problems at minimal civilian cost. It can't. Wars are fought in cities, not on marked battlefields; unless we reduce ourselves back to a pre-industrial state, they will never be fought on marked battlefields again. Factor dead children into every war that ever happens from now on.

I don't like anything that is happening in the region. I don't think morally scoring Israel and Hezbollah is productive. All I have to say is that Hezbollah and Israel are military peers, and they are extremely at war right now.

If we're getting to a point where two different cadres with a beef can settle their scores by liquidating each other's top guys instead of taking everything out on each other's pawns and unfortunately associated randoms, I say let's take this technology and run with it.

According to that definition they are:

"booby traps – objects that civilians are likely to be attracted to or are associated with normal civilian daily use"

That would hold true for something like a pay phone, but a personal electronic device, only used by the combatant, would not be associated with civilian use.

A pager is a piece of consumer electronics definitely associated with civilian use. There's a story about a little girl who tried to hand her dad his pager from the dinner table and it blew up in her face. Civilians will not expect consumer tech devices to be bombs.

Her father wasn't a civilian. Had this been some other kind of strike, like a 500lb bomb, it still would have been considered legal collateral damage.

You're assuming your premise as your conclusion. I am not at all convinced about how many of those targeted yesterday actually qualify as combatants. Also, just because a combatant owns something does not make the thing military. Pagers are commonly used by people in emergency services, industrial technicians, and so on.

These pagers work only on Hezbollah's own military network. Lebanon literally had a civil war about this specific issue! People are doing a lot of axiomatic reasoning here about stuff they can look up.

How would you even know which network a pager was on just by looking at it? They were thousands of bombs disguised as consumer devices in circulation in public. There are new reports that other consumer devices may also have been rigged with explosives.

I have no idea, but you could not use a Hezbollah pager for your job as an industrial technician, which was the claim made by the comment I'm replying to.

That's not what they said. Pagers are used by civilians, no one would be on guard around them, they are not considered to be weapons. If you saw someone in a grocery store with a pager, you wouldn't distance yourself from them.

I don't agree but also don't care to litigate this point; the only point I'm on this thread to make is that no professional who routinely carries a pager could have mistakenly been carrying a Hezbollah pager. Also: it is interesting that Hezbollah literally fought a war over phone systems in Lebanon! The rest: these are some of the most complicated conflicts in the world and we're not going to settle anything on HN. I don't begrudge you your take, I just had those two claims to make.

Children were wounded and killed because they picked up these pagers (which they assumed to be safe). Explosives were distributed into public disguised as innocuous consumer devices, it's actually not that complicated.

I think the situation is much more complicated than that but can also, in rare circumstances, detect an intractable argument when it shows up on a message board. Does anything you're saying have anything to do with whether industrial engineers were unknowingly carrying Hezbollah military pagers, or whether Hezbollah fought a war against opposition parties in Lebanon to ensure that it had its own phone system? If not: there's not much productive for us to discuss here --- which is totally fine, there doesn't have to be.

You're assuming that. There has been no reporting on the details. For all we know she could have been sitting next to her father when the pager went off.

What if that industrial sector is managed by Hezbollah and you are responsible for making it run smoothly? They more or less run everything in south Lebanon so I imagine that includes key infrastructure like electricity, water, and telecoms. Staffers in those sectors might or might not be in Hezbollah themselves, but one has to assume a lot of the management is. I don't know about private industry.

It seems odd to me that random laborers would be issued military encrypted pagers, and it seems certain that you couldn't simply go buy one on your own (or at least, buy one and then use it on the Hezbollah military network), but we have reached a point of specificity on the thread where I'm comfortable that we're all talking about the same thing --- previously, I've gotten the sense that we were suggesting random workers who happened to need pagers might have these ones. My personal prediction is that everyone who had these things was a member of Hezbollah, based on the reading I'm doing, but that's all it is: a personal prediction.

I know Hezbollah operates their own telecoms, but I don't think it necessarily follows that this is exclusively military. This article (from an Israeli analyst) examines their communications infrastructure in more depth and points out that thanks to their political maneuvering they have de facto control of all telecommunications in Lebanon. I find it easy to imagine that at least some of the erstwhile pager users worked in an administrative or logistical capacity.

https://israel-alma.org/2021/03/09/hezbollahs-communications...

We'll see, but I think --- without claiming that anything we know right now is dispositive --- that this is going to net out as an attack that overwhelmingly impacted military personnel, for the simple reason that they were the ones who needed the pagers; so much so that the highest death toll from the attack thus far appears to be QF fighters in eastern Syria.

according to who? A little girl was killed today precisely because she picked up someones pager. On top of that solar panels (!!!) are blowing up across Lebanon right now, do those count? Are those somehow incontrovertibly "associated" with a combatant?

I think the solar panel thing isn't confirmed? And so far as I've seen, it's only reported to have happened in on place in Dahieh. If it is confirmed, you'll also be waiting for reporting and evidence that it was a supply chain attack on solar panels (seems unlikely), or a direct attack on that building.

(It seems unlikely to me because we have reason to believe the handsets and pagers shared a contract manufacturer or distributor. Mossad isn't like Gambit from the X-Men; they can't just make random things blow up.)

[flagged]

You've been breaking the site guidelines badly in this thread, as well as using HN primarily for political battle over recent months. We have to ban accounts that do those things, regardless of how right you are or feel you are, and regardless of how other commenters are behaving. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Pretty telling that it is me, and not your top karma poster, who is getting this reprimand. You are welcome to ban me, and I'm not going to appeal or beg to stay here, its your site after all. But if all I had to do to make my account more palatable to you was mix in the occasional comment on a js framework, or cooking, or exploit development, while continuing to pour out anti-arab racism, as Thomas here has done, repeatedly, for months, than maybe you are doing me the favor. I have yet to see a single comment from you about that. For the record I have reviewed your the guidelines, and I stand by everything I've posted here. I don't use this site "primarily for political battle", in fact I have avoided "political" threads for years. If posting things like "all Palestinians belong in Jordan" as Thomas has done, in threads just like this, for months, isn't something worth responding to directly by you than your rules don't mean much. Or simply apply to less useful people.

EDIT: I forgot about the part where Thomas here tells pacifist jews they are "getting close to the blood libel". That didn't merit a response from you either. Classy stuff dang.

None of these are things I believe or have said. I don't blame you for thinking otherwise; I think message boards just suck ass for this topic.

Brother, I can link you to your own comments. For example here's your "blood libel" comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40067633 I'm actually working, and just logged in to see if I have actually been banned, but I can absolutely go through your own comment history in the last 11 months and pull out each and every example I mentioned. I used to respect you man, and if you read my responses to you, over these last 11 months, they start off annoyed but charitable, attempting to push you to examine your own position, exactly as you and 'dang and whoever are asking and expecting of commenters to do here, and you just keep posting absurd, racist statements and so they have deteriorated to today. I don't expect you to actually do anything about it at this point, but I want to leave a record on this site that I did what I said I've been doing, and you've been doing what I said you've been doing. Maybe you'll surprise me, I don't know.

EDIT: I'm actually really really glad I linked this exact comment, because right beneath it is one of the other highest karma posters on this site, who is of Jewish descent, making my point for me in the best way possible, in opposition to you, and you are continuing in the thread to do exactly what it is I've been telling you you are doing; speaking out of your own ignorance and giving it a patina of authority for example here by gesturing at the ADL and saying "just google it" which is absurd.

You've misunderstood that comment. I blame message boards. I'm comfortable with what that thread says.

I'm not going to litigate my political beliefs with you here, because I don't think it'll work. But I'll tell you what: if you want to know more about what I actually believe, please feel free to email me and ask. My only warning to you is that my beliefs are a lot more boring than you might think they are.

I don't have any beef with you. For what it's worth: I didn't mean anything personal by the X-Men thing. I don't know who you are or really anything about you. If that read personally snarky, I get it, and will try to be more careful.

"Arguing over minutia to dilute and divest the focus from the main discourse" pattern detected again in this thread.

For those unfamiliar with terms:

"Black Letter Law":

In common law legal systems, black-letter law refers to well-established legal rules that are no longer subject to reasonable dispute.[1] Black-letter law can be contrasted with legal theory or unsettled legal issues.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-letter_law>

Searching for black letter and combat turns up:

International Institute of Humanitarian Law: The Manual on the Law of Non-International Armed Conflict With Commentary (2006)

Among definitions:

For the purposes of this Manual, fighters are members of armed forces and dissident armed forces or other organized armed groups, or taking an active (direct) part in hostilities.

(p. 4)

Civilians are all those who are not fighters.

(p. 5)

Military objectives are objects which by their nature, location, purpose, or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture, or neutralisation, in the circumstances at the time, offers a definite military advantage.

(p. 5)

<https://www.humanrightsvoices.org/assets/attachments/documen...>

(I'll note that one of the co-authors is affiliated with Tel Aviv University in Israel, though others do not appear to be Israeli.)

The US DoD publishes a law of war manual, last updated in 2023:

<https://media.defense.gov/2023/Jul/31/2003271432/-1/-1/0/DOD...>

> This is going to create a lot of distrust in the international supply chain.

Is it? If your threat model includes Mossad (or really any nation state) then you shouldn't have trusted those devices in the first place. Even if you didn't have "tiny explosives" on your bingo card, certainly bugs (hardware or software) should've been on there.

Given that those pagers are commonly used by doctors and none of them have been reported to explode, I think we can guess that it was targeted to the batches delivered directly to Hezbollah.

For instance, when Apollo Gold lisenced their pagers to a little known hungarian company, having their brand used as a bomb delivery device in the middle-east was not something they would have had on their list of potential brand risks.

So now companies engaged in international business not only have to consider exposure to the usual fraud, but also if their counterpart is actively malicious.

It's also likely going to make nation states start thinking about supply chains they maybe didn't before. How do you know someone didn't put explosives in your mice, keyboards, monitors, headsets and various other things that were probably manufactured in china?

There were four ambulance workers and two children in the 12 dead.

I can imagine the EU is far more interested in an EU flagged company doing business with Hezbollah who are a designated terrorist organization and subject to sanctions.

If there's one thing you learn quick in fintech - it's you absolutely do not fuck with sanctions.

If it was a real company that would be the case. However from what I've read the journalists looking into BAC Consulting has found it to be a company in name only with no actual offices or hungarian employees.

It makes me slightly curious which company Israel convinced to actually produce these pagers and radios.

Some more information on this: https://x.com/Osint613/status/1836331854913225172

From the BBC [1].

BBC Verify has accessed BAC’s company records, which reveal it was first incorporated in 2022 and has a single shareholder. It is registered to a building in Budapest's 14th district.

As well as BAC, a further 13 companies and one person are registered at the same building.

However, our search of a financial information database does not reveal that BAC has any connections to other companies or people.

The same database shows no trading information about BAC. For example, there are no records of any shipments between it and any other firms.

However, BAC's website, which is now inaccessible, previously said it was scaling up its business in Asia, and had a goal to "develop international technology co-operation among countries for the sale of telecommunication products".

The website listed one person as BAC’s chief executive and founder - Cristiana Bársony-Arcidiacono - and does not appear to mention other employees.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cew12r5qe1ro

> The EU is probably not going to be happy

Happiness is irrelevant, especially when it comes to geopolitics.

In the US, criticism of Israel is antagonistic to our Judeo-Christian values.

In the EU, criticism of Israel is tantamount to the rise of a Fourth Reich.

Germany, in particular, is scared shitless of this accusation, and will accept any and all actions by Israel. This is a country who can do no wrong, and will get away with whatever they feel like.

> This is going to create a lot of distrust in the international supply chain.

This reminds me of people who were legitimately shocked to learn about the Snowden disclosures. If you don't already know the supply chain is thoroughly poisoned, and has been for decades, there is no helping you.

Germany has pretty much halted weapon supplies to Israel, so perhaps you should temper your cynical posture with occasional factual updates.

https://www.reuters.com/world/germany-has-stopped-approving-...

These aren't civilian devices.

The claim isn't that they're "civilian devices", it's that they're "devices all over civilian society". That's relevant because bobby trapping them is liable to cause casualties.

this was a special shipment created for the terrorists. this isn't just putting a bomb into every pager.

>this isn't just putting a bomb into every pager.

I never claimed otherwise. Again, the claim isn't that innocent people are carrying the pagers, is that the pagers are around innocent civilians. It's not any different than drone striking terrorists at weddings[1], which also drew criticism from human rights groups. Even if we assume the targets are definitely terrorists, that doesn't solve the issue of civilians who happen to be nearby.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wech_Baghtu_wedding_party_airs...

the blast radius is much smaller. from the market video, the people around him were fine, and only the heznobollah guy was considering the impact of terrorism on future generations.

Were the kids killed also terrorists?

Any kids killed were accidental as opposed to the Hezbollah rockets shot at northern Israel. When those rockets killed 12 kids playing soccer those deaths were intentional.

what alternatives would you propose?

1. heznobollas stop firing rockets into Israel?

2. Israel sending smart bombs with much higher collateral damage?

3. an engraved invitation later to members (hehe) of heznobollas to come and be fired upon in an open space to avoid kids?

4. or are you suggesting instead that Jews should just get used to getting fired upon and let their cities be destroyed because you don't care about Jewish kids getting killed?

anything I've missed?

How do you know this? you can't know it. You have no idea how many people had these devices.

it was a shipment of pagers paid for by heznobollas to communicate because they thought mossad was able to listen and track everything else. it was never a general Lebanese market pager that happens to be used by heznobollas occasionally. they bought in bulk and handed them out to their soldiers.

Cool man, checked in on the story lately? Because literal solar panels are now exploding across Lebanon. I'm sure everyone within 20 yards of them is clearly a terrorist.

you know what? this is brilliant.

the news that I can find reasonable sources for is that the terrorists stopped using phones because Israel could track them and send spicy suppositories, so they switched to pagers - and the pagers immediately blew off things they were fond of. At this point, they panicked and went to their 2way radios to ask for instructions from their terrorist leadership..... and their f*cking radios blew up.

I love that now there's completely random stories of things blowing up (which aren't actually happening, otherwise there would be more serious reports and evidence).

So it sounds like they already have ptsd from evil western infidel technology - it's pretty much biblical in its magnitude - can you really trust that electric toothbrush? what about those hair clippers? those Nike shoes? shoelaces next?

it sounds like Israel achieved their objective, these people are now reduced to trusting only stone age technology. their attacks on Israel will now be much less organised and easier to defend against.

it's sad that Israel had to burn this phenomenal trump card, it sounds like they were saving it for a ground invasion?

It's like cluster bombs and landmines. You have no idea where all these things are. You have no idea how many of them exploded and which didn't and it's extremely hard to clean up the duds.

And neither are against the laws of war. The US has decided to reduce their usage, but Russia uses air deployed landmines with high dud rates and it is not a war crime.

Notably, these are not booby traps. (The defining feature of booby traps is that they are triggered by the victim.)

No. That's one definition, but not the only one.

I believe you are mistaken. Please find any source that defines it in a way that isn't victim-triggered. Every single one I've checked includes similar language.

Says who? Pagers are used by doctors and icom are used by pretty much anyone who needs that communication, like construction workers in a site or first responders.

Not the ones distributed to Hezbollah.

Being linked to Hezbollah carries certain occupational risks.

So if somebody turned the phones of all members of X army (say IDF) into bombs, and exploded them at mass when a lot of them would be off duty with their families, would that be ok? This is what happened here.

Fortunately for its members, the IDF is not an amateur terrorist organization and they do check their hardware. Also the exploding hardware attack did occur on a national holiday, but during business hours on a weekday.

During wartime? Yes.

Technically that would be a targeted attack, and if “somebody” were able to pull that off it would be an absolutely massive win for that “somebody.”

I wouldn’t like it, but I certainly could not call that terrorism, as it explicitly targeted militants.

> So if somebody turned the phones of all members of X army (say IDF) into bombs, and exploded them at mass when a lot of them would be off duty with their families, would that be ok?

Yes. Because it would be an attack targeting active military personnel during a time of war, even if they happen to be around non-combatants at the time.

That doesn't seem correct. Israel's enemies are not justified for attacking Israel even if the majority of their "citizens" are military reservists during wartime. If we want to play the non-combatant tally game, then a strike on Israel becomes deeply justified as an attack on an entrenched dual-purpose position.

...but that's ridiculous, and we should apply the same standards of morality to our enemy even when they refuse to cooperate. Lebanon is not and cannot be treated as a zone including nothing but combatants, and neither can Israel. By crossing the line of terrorism (make no mistake: they were aware of the threat to civilians), Israel is further damaging international support and again blurring the lines between the IDF and their enemies. The UN just convened to tell Israel to renounce their occupied territories in the next year - the days of "lawn-mowing" civilian infrastructure without criticism have passed.

If we keep seeing the Dahiya doctrine and Hannibal directive proliferate, there will be no way for a morally defensible US administration to support IDF operations.

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