There is no question if an enemy set off hundreds of bombs in American ambulances we would recognize it as a mass terrorist attack.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2024-09-18/second...
It's reasonable to guess that these devices were made to only explode after a very unique code is is received, and/or only when traffic came over a radio channel known to be used by Hezbollah.
In contrast, an uninvolved civilian medical doctor buying a booby-trapped pager secondhand shouldn't be at significant risk, since before carrying the pager around all day they'll first configure it to use their hospital's radio network, which should only be broadcasting innocuous hospital messages.
> There is no question if an enemy set off hundreds of bombs in American ambulances we would recognize it as a mass terrorist attack.
However if those bombs were only triggered by the code "Immediate Mobilization" broadcast over a CIA/DIA pager network, then the real question would become why so many ambulance staff were holding down a second secret job as spies and soldiers.
Pretty sure any doctor (or anyone else) owning one of those pager wouldn’t want to keep it, even if configured safely. Would you carry an hand grenade in your backpack all day long, as safe as it it because the pin is still in?
> why so many ambulance staff were holding down a second secret job as spies and soldiers
Hezbollah is a legal and popular party in Lebanon and is at war with another country, of course the medic staff is involved what’s else would you expect ? However "all parties must refrain from attacking and misusing medical facilities, transport, and personnel", what happens here is a crime for the Geneva convention.
Hezbollah is an Iran-backed militia whose sole purpose is the destruction of Israel.
> and is at war with another country
No, they're not. They're a militia.
Here is a timeline of major Hezbollah terrorist activities. Left out, of course, is the constant barrage of missiles rained down on northern Israel by Hezbollah. I copy-pasta'd this from another source for convenience:
1983: Hezbollah sends suicide truck bomb against US embassy and murders 63 people
Also 1983: Hezbollah murders 241 American soldiers and 58 French soldiers with another suicide truck bomb
1984: Hezbollah murders 18 American soldiers with bombing in Spain
Also 1984: Hezbollah murders 11 people with another truck bomb against US embassy
1992: Hezbollah murders 29 people with suicide bombing of Israeli Embassy in Argentina
1994: Hezbollah murders 85 Jewish Argentinian civilians in another suicide truck bomb
1996: Hezbollah murders 19 American Air Force personnel with bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia
2005: Hezbollah murders 22 civilians in assassination on Lebanese PM
2011 to present: Helped Assad murder up to half a million Syrian civilians, carrying out starvation sieges and ethnic cleansing against Sunni towns and cities
This is the official position of Israel, yes, but the international community, including the US acknowledges that they are a political entity as well. You actually don't need to be on side with their positions to accept this fact.
Why is this a reasonable thing to guess?
Even if the engineering makes it's a choice of "all blow up" or "none blow up", they'll also want to have control when that moment happens to be, either to pre-empt discovery and defusal or to coincide with other events and factors.
I'm often confused about the incoherent picture that paints Israel as having blatant disregard for civilian casualties while at the same time devises complicated and risky strategies to perform targeted strikes.
The end result is still that innocents are walking around with a bomb planted in their pocket.
Also, if booby traps aren't considered a legitimate tactic in a military conflict, why does noone complain when, say, Ukraine mines a field?
Stepping back though, there are literally millions of mines hidden in Ukraine, creating a vastly greater danger for civilians. Legal or not, for the most part noone cares.
Why are we here scrutinizing Israel for a form of booby-trapping which is vastly smaller in scale, much easier to clean up (figuring out which devices are compromised vs demining 174,000 km^2), and more targeted?
(2) The scale is entirely different - but completely orthogonal to that: Do you see a difference between (per what Ukraine is doing) leaving devices around in areas which are mostly depopulated by now anyway, where people generally know that mines are likely to be there, and which will most likely be clearly enough marked on maps after all of this is over; and in a society where there is basically a solid social consensus that this war needs to be fought, and laying mines out on the frontlines is one of the many heavy costs that they will need to bear in order to bring the war to its necessary end --
And (per what the Mossad is doing) consciously triggering these devices, knowing full well (as they must have) that a 1:2 civilian-military ratio of fatalities and maimings (the current boxscore on this per WP) was not just possible, but entirely to be expected? In a population that definitely did not chose to be at war (or even to support a necessary defensive war like Ukraine is doing), and where the targetted/responsible party is but one faction among many?
I do.
We'll have to see how effective future demining efforts are, but historically, civilian casualties from unexploded mines have been quite significant. Despite the risks, Ukraine can't realistically stop inhabiting 20-30% of its territory indefinitely.
Where do you get 1:2 from? There isn't much credible information yet about civilian vs militant deaths. What we do know is that the 5,000 affected pagers were ordered by Hezbollah and issued to its members. Less is known about other devices.
Even if that is true, the fact remains that "Hezbollah members" and "combatants" are not, even to a first approximation, the same thing; Hezbollah is a political party that has an armed wing and also has a substantial civilian social services (including healthcare) operation.
In that sense we can say Ukraine's current operation in Kursk is operationally offensive, even though the war itself is entirely defensive on Ukraine's part of course. (One might still disagree that Israel's current adventure in Lebanon is overall "defensive", due to factors you haven't mentioned, but that is also completely orthogonal the distinction we are clarifying here).
Where do you get 1:2 from?
From the source I indicated ("per WP"), though the acronym may not have been clear:
The total death toll from the attacks stood at 37, and included at least 12 civilians killed according to Lebanese authorities, including a 9-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy. At least two health workers were also killed.
Which in turn cites L'Orient-Le Jour, ABC, AP, CNN, WSJ, and the BBC. I don't know what sources you might find more credible, but these do appear to be in rough agreement at least, and I'll take them as a decent enough approximation to the truth for the time being.
What we do know is that the 5,000 affected pagers were ordered by Hezbollah and issued to its members.
That was the theory, anyway. Mossad also knew that many of these devices would have been at the militants' homes when they exploded, thus directly targeting innocents and minors.
There's also an indication that some of the devices may have in use by healthcare workers (for whatever reason - perhaps the supply chain intercept wasn't quite as precise as the Mossad intended; or they know perfectly well that some of the devices would end up in non-militant hands, and per their usual MO just didn't give a fuck), though this will require further investigation. From the same section on the same page:
Health Minister Firass Abiad said the vast majority of those being treated in emergency rooms were in civilian clothing and their Hezbollah affiliation was unclear.[119] He added the casualties included elderly people as well as young children. According to the Health Ministry, healthcare workers were also injured and it advised all healthcare workers to discard their pagersI would take "12 civilians" with a grain of salt, given the fog of war and conflicts of interest at play, as well as Hezbollah's secrecy around who is involved in their military operations. As Abiad acknowledged, it's "very difficult to discern whether they belong to a certain entity like Hezbollah or others". It's similar to Gaza, where only Hamas knows how many fighters they lost.
> thus directly targeting innocents and minors
You're not using "directly targeting" in the usual sense. If a strike was aimed at a combatant but also happens to kill a random passerby, we wouldn't say that the passerby was targeted, let alone "directly". Conventional strikes always carry risks of civilian harm as well; that's why we have standards of proportionality rather than demanding guarantees of no collateral damage.
Which would make these deployments offensive, then (though the war itself is defense for them).
I would take "12 civilians" with a grain of salt
Yes of course, and indeed there can be fluctuations both ways as apparently a large number of people are still in IC, and may yet expire from the effects of their wounds after weeks or months of agony. By which time world attention will have shifted to the next atrocity.
You're not using "directly targeting" in the usual sense.
You are correct here, also. My phrasing was intended moralistically, in the sense of "They knew very well that the pagers would be noisily distributed, and that a large number of civilian deaths, likely including minors, would inevitably happen as a direct result of their actions.") In retrospect it was a poor choice of words.
The one alleged (with, AFAIK, strong evidence, and Ukraine just declined comment rather than denying it) Ukrainian use of anti-personnel land mines (others aren't banned by the treaty they are party to) was an operationally offensive use of rocket-delivered mines in and around Izium during the Summer of 2022.
The latest round is handheld radios, not even cellphones or even pagers. You are trying to stretch justification far beyond the breaking point.
This is a good point. The LA Times does not report incidents involving ambulances other than in the first half of the sentence that you quoted:
>They are not usually used by fighters, but by ambulance and civil defense crews and administrators affiliated with Hezbollah.
And the report of a video of an ambulance exploding
> Video from a funeral ceremony in the country’s south depicted an explosion inside an ambulance, leading bystanders to run away in panic.