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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.