Leon Panetta, the former head of the CIA, said that the indiscriminate nature of these attacks makes him consider these attacks to be a form of terrorism:
Volker Türk, the UN commission for human rights "explained that international law prohibits the use of booby-trapped items used in daily life, and 'it is a war crime to commit violence intended to spread terror among civilians.'"
These takes are problematic because it's clear to most observers that the attacks were, by the standards set by ground combat in Fallujah, NATO air operations in Kunar Province, or operations against ISIL in Inherent Resolve, the pager/radio attacks were drastically more discriminating, and caused a tiny fraction of the noncombatant casualties. This, of course, is also a distorted standard capturing only NATO/aligned combat operations; the picture gets much worse if you pull in Gulf State military operations, Azerbaijan, or Russia/Ukraine.
(Turk's booby-trap argument is challenging for two additional reasons; the first is that the encrypted pagers and ICOM radios we're discussing are military command & control equipment, not items used "in daily life" in the sense contemplated by the booby trap convention, and further the definition of a booby trap in that convention involves a device triggered when random people approach it, not one detonated at a specific instruction by the party that placed it. The history of the booby trap convention is tied up in the human cost of unwinding booby traps after conflicts have wound down, which is not a problem the pagers posed.)
I'm concerned that people attempting (reasonably!) to communicate disapproval for IDF operations generally are damaging their credibility by trying to fold the pager/radio attack into their message. To me, the pager/radio attack is damning for an entirely different reason: with proper seriousness and resourcing, it's clear that Israel was able to incapacitate a near-peer military adversary with vastly lower noncombatant cost than what they've managed in Gaza.
I think the bit that this misses is that the root of all the problems we've seen over the last few decades is that Israel keeps doing their settlement thing. In spite of decades of pretty much the entire rest of the world – including the US – saying they should not be doing that.
I don't approve of Hezbollah or Hamas; but if you strip away the violence and Islamic extremism and all of that then the uncomfortable reality is ... they're not wrong in their core objections. Israel has consistently maintained that no, actually, the core problem is that Hezbollah and Hamas exist, and once we get rid of these people all the problems will be gone. It's certainly true that these organisations have become part of the problem, but they're not at the root of it.
"We will keep our bad faith settlement policy, and if you behave like a good boy to our satisfaction long enough then maybe perhaps we will consider granting you rights" doesn't really work. All these gun-toting "don't tread on me" 2nd amendment absolutionists people full-on supporting Israel wouldn't accept that either. Israel must resolve the settlement issue first, and THEN we can dismantle the violent extremist groups (which will take time and won't happen overnight – there will be a "Real Hamas" splinter group just as there was a "Real IRA"). This is the only way peace can happen.
This is why I think you can't really compare it to operations against ISIL or Taliban, whom have a far less legitimate complaints. This is also why "IDF is the most moral army in the world" that I have seen some people say, and what you're kind of echoing here, is completely besides the point. I don't know if it's true and I don't really care. This conflict would be non-existent on the scale that it exists today if not for the settlement policy, which is 100% in Israel's control.
What makes you think that the Iraq war was not terrorism? You're comparing Israeli terrorism to United States terrorism. Israel and the United States are a prominent terrorist alliance, and they have been terrorizing the Middle East for decades.
The pager attack cannot be considered a discriminating attack as they had no idea where the explosions would happen. Even assuming that only military personnel used the pagers they had no way to know where they would be or who else would be near them, especially since a pager is something you always carry with you.
I for one am much more comfortable with the military nature of the radio/pager attack as legitimately military now than I was in the days after it happened.
But I completely agree with your last point. It makes the Gaza invasion look _more_ like collective punishment than it already did (which is pretty wild).
tptacek, it’s hard to take any of your analysis seriously when you label Hezbollah, a non-state controlled armed resistance militia , with no tanks, fighter jets or submarines a “neer-peer military adversary” of Israel, which essentially has full & unlimited access to US weapons stockpiles and latest defence technology (minus nukes and subs).
You are wittingly or unwittingly utilizing the same propaganda strategy of the IDF to lionize their enemies and exaggerate threats so they can use it as an excuse to commit war crimes and inflict severely disproportionate attacks on civilians. With all due respect, we can’t all be experts in everything so please stick to talking about tcp.
> Leon Panetta, the former head of the CIA, said that the indiscriminate nature of these attacks makes him consider these attacks to be a form of terrorism:
This was the exact opposite of "indiscriminate". The Israelis blew up pagers belonging to members of a known terrorist organization.
People love to try an claim that they're anti-Israel and not antisemitic, but no other country in the world would be held to this kind of ridiculous standard in the face of constant terrorist attacks on a civilian population.
If a similar and equally large-scale attack was done by a nation at war with US, targeting US military command, would that be a low-casualty operation or an act of terrorism?
And would it matter if the technical interpretation differed wildly from the general perception?
For what it's worth, I consider both parties in their forever war to be irredeemable bastards. As I learned early on, the network of tunnels in Gaza has no civilian shelter space, a clear indication that their general population's safety has not been a concern. On the upside, if there is any to be found, at least it means there won't be human shields to speak of down there.
That said, I don't know if that would make a difference. Both sides have demonstrated that they are perfectly happy to slaughter civilians.
I haven't seen any actual data on who died as a result of this attack, but is it confirmed that it was essentially only members of Hezbollah's militant wing? I've heard reports that that wasn't the case. Are other members of Hezbollah considered legitimate targets? From memory, the Iranian ambassador had one. Were they a legitimate target?
You have to think about the counterfactual. If Israel hadn’t utilized the pagers what would they do instead? The obvious answer is that they would bomb the residences where these people live. That would cause much much worse collateral damage than the pagers did.
Uh, does anybody not "consider this to be a form of terrorism"?
Of course it is terrorism, very much by definition. Obviously, it would be very unpalatable for any involved politician to call it as such, because of the connotations the word has (or rather "has assigned"), so they will exercise doublespeak, doing which perfectly is their core expertise. But it would be funny, if anybody at all buys into that.
Key components are 6 grams of white pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) and "highly flammable material" as a detonator. PETN was developed in 1906, and is accessible to more advanced hobby chemists.
So we have explosive device that passes through airport security scanner. And can be made at home by dedicated individuals... What are the implications for air travel?
The trick is probably not to make PETN, but to package it in such a way there are no traces of it outside?
There are likely no implications for air travel. At least I always assumed that advanced state actors can make explosives that are undetectable by airport security scanners.
> we have explosive device that passes through airport security scanner
I don't think it passes through modern American scanners--they can theoretically discriminate plastic explosives (and presumably detonators) from water, though whether it gets caught is a matter of TSA competence.
I mean, the implication is that they either tested the pagers on an airport's security scanner (pointing to state built explosive devices making their way onto consumer flights).
Or they tested them on their airport security scanners (and the question of why this group needs an airport security scanner to test things on).
Either way, the implications for air travel are not all that great!
Wow, they did a licensing deal with a legitimate manufacturer in Taiwan to get the battery listed on official websites? This runs so much deeper than I expected.
Supply chains are one heck of an attack surface...
The battery wasn't actually for sale; they just created fake product pages for it so that if anyone looked up the part number, it wouldn't be immediately obvious that it was fake.
The term "terrorism" is often misused. According the the actual definition, terrorism is about inciting fear and the unintended consequences that this entails, and it does not necessarily have to involve civilian casualties.
For example, imagine firing a gun in a shopping mall without killing anybody. The entire mall still has to be evacuated, people start screaming, the firefighters, paramedics, and SWAT team show up, the stores have to hire a security guard, and shoppers are afraid to return. Everyone blames the mayor for not preventing the incident from occurring in the first place, and the mayor is pressured to enact new gun laws and set up a new checkpoint. These things happen even if there was no actual danger because it was a blank cartridge and not live ammunition.
The same effect occurs when you drop bombs on a city. All of the sudden it is no longer desirable to live in that city, even if it was a very precise bombing.
If you infiltrate supply chains and plant bombs, nobody trusts the global markets, people have to spend more money on inspections, manufacturers have to pay more for insurance, there are endless consequences
> Gold Apollo’s chairman, Hsu Ching-kuang, told reporters a day after the pager attack that he was approached about three years ago by a former employee, Teresa Wu, and her “big boss, called Tom” to discuss a licence agreement.
> Hsu said he had scant information about Wu’s superior, but he granted them the right to design their own products and market them under the widely distributed Gold Apollo brand. Reuters could not establish the identity of the manager, nor whether the person or Wu knowingly worked with Israeli intelligence.
These make me wonder whether major players would quickly allocate production to their own countries as well as their vassal countries where they can comfortably spy on. It is not that difficult for a major player to infiltrate a foreign civilian product factory, say, produces lower end MCUs that are used in infrastructure, find a list of customers and plan accordingly.
And in this case it is very suspicious that Hsu did not even ask any questions.
It was lucky none of the thousands of pagers employed in this terror attack blew inside some airplane and made it much worse. It's dismaying we have a state doing this.
My thought: what if some extremists, who are not in short supply given the current condition decide to do a copy-cat attack on major airports simultaneously? Are the machines guaranteed to identify each one of them? I mean the tech doesn't look too hard even for dedicated individuals, let alone quasi-state actors.
Readit News
https://thehill.com/policy/international/4893900-leon-panett...
Volker Türk, the UN commission for human rights "explained that international law prohibits the use of booby-trapped items used in daily life, and 'it is a war crime to commit violence intended to spread terror among civilians.'"
https://newrepublic.com/post/186244/leon-panetta-israel-leba...
Also covered by Human Rights Watch here criticizing the indiscriminate nature of the attacks means they were against IHL:
https://www.hrw.org/the-day-in-human-rights/2024/09/19
(Turk's booby-trap argument is challenging for two additional reasons; the first is that the encrypted pagers and ICOM radios we're discussing are military command & control equipment, not items used "in daily life" in the sense contemplated by the booby trap convention, and further the definition of a booby trap in that convention involves a device triggered when random people approach it, not one detonated at a specific instruction by the party that placed it. The history of the booby trap convention is tied up in the human cost of unwinding booby traps after conflicts have wound down, which is not a problem the pagers posed.)
I'm concerned that people attempting (reasonably!) to communicate disapproval for IDF operations generally are damaging their credibility by trying to fold the pager/radio attack into their message. To me, the pager/radio attack is damning for an entirely different reason: with proper seriousness and resourcing, it's clear that Israel was able to incapacitate a near-peer military adversary with vastly lower noncombatant cost than what they've managed in Gaza.
I don't approve of Hezbollah or Hamas; but if you strip away the violence and Islamic extremism and all of that then the uncomfortable reality is ... they're not wrong in their core objections. Israel has consistently maintained that no, actually, the core problem is that Hezbollah and Hamas exist, and once we get rid of these people all the problems will be gone. It's certainly true that these organisations have become part of the problem, but they're not at the root of it.
"We will keep our bad faith settlement policy, and if you behave like a good boy to our satisfaction long enough then maybe perhaps we will consider granting you rights" doesn't really work. All these gun-toting "don't tread on me" 2nd amendment absolutionists people full-on supporting Israel wouldn't accept that either. Israel must resolve the settlement issue first, and THEN we can dismantle the violent extremist groups (which will take time and won't happen overnight – there will be a "Real Hamas" splinter group just as there was a "Real IRA"). This is the only way peace can happen.
This is why I think you can't really compare it to operations against ISIL or Taliban, whom have a far less legitimate complaints. This is also why "IDF is the most moral army in the world" that I have seen some people say, and what you're kind of echoing here, is completely besides the point. I don't know if it's true and I don't really care. This conflict would be non-existent on the scale that it exists today if not for the settlement policy, which is 100% in Israel's control.
But I completely agree with your last point. It makes the Gaza invasion look _more_ like collective punishment than it already did (which is pretty wild).
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You are wittingly or unwittingly utilizing the same propaganda strategy of the IDF to lionize their enemies and exaggerate threats so they can use it as an excuse to commit war crimes and inflict severely disproportionate attacks on civilians. With all due respect, we can’t all be experts in everything so please stick to talking about tcp.
Dead Comment
This was the exact opposite of "indiscriminate". The Israelis blew up pagers belonging to members of a known terrorist organization.
People love to try an claim that they're anti-Israel and not antisemitic, but no other country in the world would be held to this kind of ridiculous standard in the face of constant terrorist attacks on a civilian population.
And the people who happened to be next to them when they went off?
And would it matter if the technical interpretation differed wildly from the general perception?
For what it's worth, I consider both parties in their forever war to be irredeemable bastards. As I learned early on, the network of tunnels in Gaza has no civilian shelter space, a clear indication that their general population's safety has not been a concern. On the upside, if there is any to be found, at least it means there won't be human shields to speak of down there.
That said, I don't know if that would make a difference. Both sides have demonstrated that they are perfectly happy to slaughter civilians.
Of course it is terrorism, very much by definition. Obviously, it would be very unpalatable for any involved politician to call it as such, because of the connotations the word has (or rather "has assigned"), so they will exercise doublespeak, doing which perfectly is their core expertise. But it would be funny, if anybody at all buys into that.
Dead Comment
Deleted Comment
So we have explosive device that passes through airport security scanner. And can be made at home by dedicated individuals... What are the implications for air travel?
There are likely no implications for air travel. At least I always assumed that advanced state actors can make explosives that are undetectable by airport security scanners.
I don't think it passes through modern American scanners--they can theoretically discriminate plastic explosives (and presumably detonators) from water, though whether it gets caught is a matter of TSA competence.
Part of the reason why this is one of those "cat out of the bag" type things.
I wonder how many duds are currently being processed by Hezbollah right now.
(0): https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/07/world/middleeast/emirates...
The threat vector OP refers to is a terrorist packaging this into e.g. a laptop.
Or they tested them on their airport security scanners (and the question of why this group needs an airport security scanner to test things on).
Either way, the implications for air travel are not all that great!
Dead Comment
Supply chains are one heck of an attack surface...
For example, imagine firing a gun in a shopping mall without killing anybody. The entire mall still has to be evacuated, people start screaming, the firefighters, paramedics, and SWAT team show up, the stores have to hire a security guard, and shoppers are afraid to return. Everyone blames the mayor for not preventing the incident from occurring in the first place, and the mayor is pressured to enact new gun laws and set up a new checkpoint. These things happen even if there was no actual danger because it was a blank cartridge and not live ammunition.
The same effect occurs when you drop bombs on a city. All of the sudden it is no longer desirable to live in that city, even if it was a very precise bombing.
If you infiltrate supply chains and plant bombs, nobody trusts the global markets, people have to spend more money on inspections, manufacturers have to pay more for insurance, there are endless consequences
> Hsu said he had scant information about Wu’s superior, but he granted them the right to design their own products and market them under the widely distributed Gold Apollo brand. Reuters could not establish the identity of the manager, nor whether the person or Wu knowingly worked with Israeli intelligence.
These make me wonder whether major players would quickly allocate production to their own countries as well as their vassal countries where they can comfortably spy on. It is not that difficult for a major player to infiltrate a foreign civilian product factory, say, produces lower end MCUs that are used in infrastructure, find a list of customers and plan accordingly.
And in this case it is very suspicious that Hsu did not even ask any questions.
Deleted Comment