How Israel Built a Modern-Day Trojan Horse: Exploding Pagers
How Israel Built a Modern-Day Trojan Horse: Exploding Pagers
The Israeli government did not tamper with the Hezbollah devices that exploded, defense and intelligence officials say. It manufactured them as part of an elaborate ruse.
The Israeli government did not tamper with the Hezbollah devices that exploded, defense and intelligence officials say. It manufactured them as part of an elaborate ruse.
Is that a text book terrorist attack?
Depends on your defined of terrorism, and what these actions are.
The usual one i see is to the effect of "non state actor using violence against a civilization population to further political objectives". By that one:
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no, Israel is a state
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violence, yes.
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civilian population is a maybe, depending on your definition of Hezbollah actions and position. Are they civilians, combatants, terrorists themselves?
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further political objectives is likely, however I don't see what the objective is. Kill people we don't like is murder, not terrorism.
Of note, if its not a terrorist act it could very well be an act of war, invoking the right of self defense (Art 30???). If so, and civilian casualties weren't minimized its leading towards war crime territory. I wouldn't say it was - small explosive, on an object usually carried by the target, which was unlikely to be used by civilians.
Israel could use the same article to call this attack self defense against actions already taken. You can look at gulf War for the whole discussion around preemptive strikes for self defense.
Personally, I say no. Same way Chinese vessels "only" ramming and using waterguns on Philippine vessels isn't terrorism.
Israel has already been fighting a war with Hezbollah that Hezbollah declared. These attacks were fairly specifically targeted at Hezbollah's military equipment. They have been arguably successful at disrupting Hezbollah's communications, and likely command and control systems. That by itself is a valid military objective.
To the extent that these attacks directly hurt Hezbollah personnel, and to the extent that they damaged Hezbollah's morale: those too are valid military objectives.
So "war crime" gets thrown around here quite a bit just because there are high civilian casualties. The facts are twofold: Civilian casualties have always been a part of warfare; and there is no specific number or proportion that makes some act into a war crime. That's just not how these kinds of laws are written.
I have not yet seen a strong argument for a specific war crime rooted in a specific basis in international law. A lot of people bring up protocols 1 and 2 to the Geneva conventions, but Israel and the US have not ratified those.
There are other conventions that regulate weapons of war, but I'm pretty sure none of them are going to address pager bombs directly. An argument there would have to be at least somewhat creative.
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Paywalled