Pagers carried by thousands of Hezbollah operatives exploded within a short period Tuesday, injuring nearly 2,800 people and killing nine. The explosions spread across Lebanon in areas where Hezbollah had a heavy presence. A Hezbollah official said many fighters had such devices, speculating that malware might have caused the devices to explode.
Yeah, that justifies putting explosives in thousands of devices shipped to civilians and/or used directly in the vicinity of civilians; causing thousands of innocent people to be injured and killed indiscriminately.
Fuck off.
This was an act of pure terrorism,
and (another) clear violation of the Geneva conventions.The Geneva conventions do not contain the level of protection for civilians that you think.
In particular, Israel has ratified and is a party to the conventions of 1949. After much debate in 1949, those conventions ultimately allowed things like indiscriminate carpet bombing of cities (which the US practiced extensively in the previous war).
Later protocols from 1977 added more civilian protections more along the lines you propose. These protocols banned carpet bombing and introduced the concept of proportionate response into the conventions.
Israel and the United States have not ratified the 1977 protocols 1 and 2 concerning additional civilian protections. According to the text itself, they are not bound by the provisions if they do not agree.
Huh, while I knew the civilian protections came later, I didn’t know both Israel and the US never agreed to abide by them… TIL
It’s still terrorism and incredibly wrong.
I think theres a lot of similar treaties that the US didn’t agree to.
They did not ship to civilians. They shipped to Hezbollah members, aka terrorists
(source)
I highly doubt every one of those pagers made it exclusively into a terrorists hands; but that’s also why I included the second half of that sentence:
Regardless, it’s evident many civilians have been harmed by this, and it was easy to predict this was the obvious outcome.
They were provided from an Iranian supplier who added encryption hardware to them. These were not used by the wider public. Hezbollah has already announced that all but one of the fatalities were senior leaders. The one that wasn’t was one of their daughters. Killed in the car her father was driving.
These were carried only and exclusively by active commanders of Hezbollah and their direct partners.