What about the guys who lost both eyes? Or both hands? Or both eyes AND both hands? You’re also assuming Lebanon has the resources to rehab several thousand people suddenly blinded and maimed.
I’m not sure where the line is crossed from “bearable maiming” to “fate worse than death”, and it’s going to vary from person to person.
Yes, in the context of a war that would be a good for the side instigating the exploding pager attack.
That’s just plain evil and would guarantee horrific civilian deaths as bystanders would inhale the vaporized compound. It would be a freakin’ chemical weapon. Seriously, what were you thinking when you typed that?
Except we do know some innocents/bystanders were killed. Unless you’re arguing that 8 year old girls are full members of Hezbollah? The question now is whether or not the collateral damage would qualify as “disproportionate”. Not that I think Netanyahu’s government cares about such distinctions.
It is almost certainly more discriminate that the bombing that has been going on in Gaza but that is indeed damning with faint praise.
This is a good point. Then again, it would be very helpful if everyone in that region of the world stopped trying to piss off/kill other people.
That’s precisely how it is used in practice, except for when people are trying to draw false equivalence to a military action the speaker didn’t like.
So you keep insisting, without providing any evidence that this is the case. Neither of your two examples (this incident or drone strikes) fits the definition of terrorism, because neither targets the civilian population with violence in order to scare them into a desired political result.
Only by people who don’t know the definition of terrorism, since this targeted Hezbollah personnel rather than the civilian population.
Were those 8 year olds targeted by the attack? Putting explosive charges in pagers used by Hezbollah seems like a very strange way to target an 8 year old girl.
Apologies if this has been answered, but is anyone aware of any discussion as to the explosive power of these pager/walkie-talkie explosions? For example, was it more or less than an M-80? What would happen if it was in my pants pocket/in my hand with my arm by my side/in my hand in front of my face…
That’s just wrong. The purpose and effect of drone strikes is to produce widespread fear among the population. And this is pretty clearly a terror attack given how it was clearly optimized for maiming rather than killing and to create general fear.
Plus of course I can just read the news and see how “terrorism” is in fact treated exactly how I say.
Much more. An M-80 contains 3.5 g of flash powder. Not a high explosive, so it just burns quickly (though with a bang since it’s confined to a cardboard tube). The pagers contained 1-2 ounces of explosive, or 25-50 grams. And it was undoubtedly a high explosive such as C-4. So probably ~10x as much explosive, plus a high explosive so you get a detonation, plus it’s likely to be more energy dense in the first place (I can’t find the energy density of flash powder, but the pagers probably had about 300 kJ of energy).
All that combined, plus the shrapnel effect probably made them >100x as damaging as an M-80.
The whole pager was supposed to weigh only 95 grams, I doubt it could be 25 to 50 percent explosives. The stories I see say more like 2 or 3 grams. In the battery, according to the NYT.
Your linked story says “Powered by just a few ounces of an explosive compound concealed within the devices”.
I’ve seen varying reports of the weight, from 95 g to 133 g. If nothing else, they could make use of this ambiguity. But regardless, there’s undoubtedly room for reducing weight in other ways.
95 g is already a lot for something as simple as a pager. Wouldn’t shock me if some of that was actually ballast to make the device feel more expensive.
I posted that story because of the “inside the battery” line. The 3ish grams comes from other stories. But even within the NYT story if they thought about it they should see a problem with fitting a “few ounces” of explosives inside the battery, especially while still working as a battery.
|Dimensions (mm)|73(L) x 50(W) x 27(H)|
|—|—|
|Weight|95g including battery|
|Operating Temperature|-10C to +50C|
|Battery and Charging|Lithium battery, up to 85 days with 2.5 hours for full battery charge, USB-C charging|
3 grams seems a little too small to be reasonable. Even if the 95 g is accurate, there’s no reason you couldn’t squeeze 35 g of explosive in there. Maybe you’d have to make the battery a little smaller or carve out the inside of the case a bit, but that’s doable if you have months of planning.
And like I said, there’s a good chance it’s 95 g because they stuck some metal washers in there to give it some heft. Pagers are incredibly simple devices.
Do you have any evidence for this? I have never seen a shred of credible evidence for this claim, as opposed to drone strikes being intended to eliminate specific militants. Certainly part of the goal is to ensure that no militant feels safe anywhere on Earth, but attacking the enemy force’s morale (as opposed to the morale of civilians on the opposite side, mind you) is not terrorism; it’s how every war in history has been won.
Then I’m sure you’ll have no problem citing plenty of times where the news referred to attacks on military targets by non state actors as “terrorism” while not referring to attacks on civilians by state actors as such.
Apologies if this is a hijack - I’ll stop the questions. But I had also heard the 3g figure. Just had no idea of what explosive power of 3g of likely explosives would be.
And I really don’t know flash powder from black powder from dynamite. But my faint recollections from 45 years ago was that M80s - or even Black Cats or cherry bombs - were at least powerful enough that I wouldn’t want one going off in my pocket or next to my ear.
Ok. Still, those seem as speculative as the NYT article. For instance, the AP article just says:
the group is currently investigating what type of explosives were used in the device, suspecting RDX or PETN, highly explosive materials that can cause significant damage with as little as 3-5 grams.
That’s not an actual statement on how much explosive was there, just that a small amount could have caused significant damage.
Even 3 g would be much more damaging than the 3.5 g of flash powder in an M-80. You’d probably lose a finger from one of those, but it would be hard to die from one (though I’m sure someone has succeeded somewhere).
It’s a helluva lot easier to rig up a pipe bomb. Put it in a brown paper wrapped package, set it to go off when the string is cut, leave it on the target’s front porch. And you can get a much higher death/maimed toll, especially if other people are around. Or you can go for a pressure cooker bomb. Carry it into a crowd in a backpack, leave it somewhere inconspicuous, trigger it with an electronic signal when you’re a safe distance away, and there you go – Boston Marathon redux.
Fair enough; I was characterizing the hypothetical suggestion of adding of dimethylmercury to an explosive device.
Just a 30 grain initiator charge would be ~2 grams, and wouldn’t do much more than damage the interior and maybe crack the housing. The damage to the pagers and the extent of injuries indicates at least 20 grams of high explosive, probably some formulation of Semtex or PETN-based plastique.
While non-combatant casualties are part of any broad conflict, particularly where bombs and explosive ordnance are used (and again itself Hezbollah has a specific terroristic objective of intentionally targeting civilians) the use of this kind of ‘booby trap’ contained “in the form of apparently harmless portably objects” is a violation of Protocol II, Article 7, Item 2 of the 1980 “Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons Which May Be Deemed to Be Excessively Injurious or to Have Indiscriminate Effects”, to which Israel is a signatory.
Whether you think it is justified because Hezbollah is awful, or that the United States or another signatory might do a similar thing and be applauded for it, or that such conventions are too restrictive in the face of “The War on Terror”, et cetera does not change the fact that it is definitionally a violation of this protocol and thus arguably a war crime.
No, as stated above, the point of International Law is to create some actors (Hamas, Hezbollah, Russia with their veto power) who it protects but does not bind, and other actors who it binds but does not protect.
What does international law say about the thousands of rockets coming into Israel from Lebanon? Is international law gonna put a stop to that?
International law says that’s not OK, and I definitely don’t support the United States sending military aid to Hezbollah, given their violations of international law.
