Hezbollah’s Exploding Electronics

[T.G.G. Moogly]

War is the worst consequence of the failure of diplomacy,

Why do people keep offering this up?

Human conflict is the worst consequence of the failure of __________.

The failure of diplomacy is the worst consequence of the failure of __________.

Please fill in the blanks.

Civil society; diplomatic institutions. I'm not seeing what's confusing about this? Like yeah dude, we are a social species and social interaction is necessary to avoid social malfunction. It's not that complicated. Presuming the purpose of social structures is some form of equilibrium, if someone is skinning their neighbor's kids, something has gone awry.

The ancients also tried to figure out why human society was such a "failure" in many respects. Many invented a lost paradise where everything was perfect and there was no unhappiness or conflict. And today many people believe that crap, they think they are going away to a paradise after they're dead. I think such folk simply lack the power of observation.

It's best we don't presume that human society exists for any reason whatsoever anymore than we would presume that trees are here so humans can have wood, food, shelter, heat and light. Not presuming doesn't mean we should start murdering and robbing each other though some believe that would be the case if their magic wasn't real.

 

[Toni]

Israel is killing a lot of people but seems to me to be sprung its wheels. The beeper bombs to me says desperation. Netanyahu faces prosecution when he is out of office, it is in his interest to keep the war going. But it has backfired, the war is not ending and there is growing demand he step down.

In Vietnam it went to retorting body counts implying we were killing more VC and NVA than they could replace. We lost despite superior weapons. We were always 'winning'.

Israel's treatment of Palestinians created the threat in the first place.

We are mainly hearing the conservative Israeli narrative over here not the Israeli opposition to settlements.

Even as this is all going on Israelis are moving into and occupying Palestinian land.

At his point I see no moral high ground for Israel.

I think it was rather ingenious and resulted in much less collateral damage ( uninvolved civilians) than most of other Israeli tactics— not to mention the tactics of Hamas which is to deliberately put civilians directly in the line of fire and then cry about Israel’s inhumanity. Any civilian death is horrible in any armed conflict—but also inevitable.

 

[Politesse]

It's best we don't presume that human society exists for any reason whatsoever anymore than we would presume that trees are here so humans can have wood, food, shelter, heat and light.

It was not my intention to make a teleological claim. Whatever nonsense you believe about the reason for a universe is not germane to a concrete discussion of human social violence, and is an obvious attempt to derail the conversation into theology or whatever.

Which has nothing to do with the subject at hand. My conclusion is still true if you don't believe Purpose has ever existed, the collapse of social systems is an objectively observable phenomenon, and the assumption that perpetual and unlimited warfare is tolerable as long as the blame for it has been appropriately assigned is still subjectively absurd.

 

[Politesse]

Israel is killing a lot of people but seems to me to be sprung its wheels. The beeper bombs to me says desperation. Netanyahu faces prosecution when he is out of office, it is in his interest to keep the war going. But it has backfired, the war is not ending and there is growing demand he step down.

In Vietnam it went to retorting body counts implying we were killing more VC and NVA than they could replace. We lost despite superior weapons. We were always 'winning'.

Israel's treatment of Palestinians created the threat in the first place.

We are mainly hearing the conservative Israeli narrative over here not the Israeli opposition to settlements.

Even as this is all going on Israelis are moving into and occupying Palestinian land.

At his point I see no moral high ground for Israel.

I think it was rather ingenious and resulted in much less collateral damage ( uninvolved civilians) than most of other Israeli tactics— not to mention the tactics of Hamas which is to deliberately put civilians directly in the line of fire and then cry about Israel’s inhumanity. Any civilian death is horrible in any armed conflict—but also inevitable.

But Israel is doing exactly that, goading attacks that they know will force the international community to intervene and help them exterminate their rivals. What exactly do you think an illegal "settlement" is, if not a blatant attempt to attract a violent response against civilians? They know they are putting their settlers in harm's way, that's the whole point. The settlers know it too, though many are given no choice in whether to participate, which is why it is a vicious crime against humanity to use families as bait for violence. This conflict has some unspoken rules that both "sides" are following, but their game and the conditions it plays under should not be tolerated by the international community at large. This cannot be the generally accepted model for international disputes, or we're all fucked in the long term. There are many ancient disputes in the world, we cannot afford turn a blind eye to either Hatfield or McCoy as the world burns on their behalf and behest. Israel has nuclear weapons. No holds barred is not an acceptable option.

 

[Toni]

Israel is killing a lot of people but seems to me to be sprung its wheels. The beeper bombs to me says desperation. Netanyahu faces prosecution when he is out of office, it is in his interest to keep the war going. But it has backfired, the war is not ending and there is growing demand he step down.

In Vietnam it went to retorting body counts implying we were killing more VC and NVA than they could replace. We lost despite superior weapons. We were always 'winning'.

Israel's treatment of Palestinians created the threat in the first place.

We are mainly hearing the conservative Israeli narrative over here not the Israeli opposition to settlements.

Even as this is all going on Israelis are moving into and occupying Palestinian land.

At his point I see no moral high ground for Israel.

I think it was rather ingenious and resulted in much less collateral damage ( uninvolved civilians) than most of other Israeli tactics— not to mention the tactics of Hamas which is to deliberately put civilians directly in the line of fire and then cry about Israel’s inhumanity. Any civilian death is horrible in any armed conflict—but also inevitable.

But Israel is doing exactly that, goading attacks that they know will force the international community to intervene and help them exterminate their rivals. What exactly do you think an illegal "settlement" is, if not a blatant attempt to attract a violent response against civilians? They know they are putting their settlers in harm's way, that's the whole point. The settlers know it too, though many are given no choice in whether to participate, which is why it is a vicious crime against humanity to use families as bait for violence. This conflict has some unspoken rules that both "sides" are following, but their game and the conditions it plays under should not be tolerated by the international community at large. This cannot be the generally accepted model for international disputes, or we're all fucked in the long term. There are many ancient disputes in the world, we cannot afford turn a blind eye to either Hatfield or McCoy as the world burns on their behalf and behest. Israel has nuclear weapons. No holds barred is not an acceptable option.

I don’t disagree, actually. A two state solution seems the only choice as Hamas has long stated its goal is to exterminate Jews worldwide. Both sides have backed themselves and each other into positions that, if not abandoned, will lead ultimately to mutual death and destruction of Israelis and Palestinians entirely.

 

[Derec]

Strikes against Hezbollah positions are heating up.

Israel strikes Hezbollah targets as conflict intensifies

Lebanese sources for casualties seem to be more honest than Gaza sources. Supposedly 492, of which 35 are identified as "children" (i.e. minors) and 58 are women. That leaves 399 adult men, with 341 excess for adult male fatalities. Vast majority of these are most likely Hezbollah terrorists.
Note also that many of the older teens, even though classified as "children", are likely to be combatants.

Israel is going after missile launchers and storage.

Not a good week for the Hezbos.

 

[Derec]

It certainly isn't irrelevant.

Who are you? Internal Medicine?

But using WWII to calibrate one's moral compass is not particularly wise.

Why not? The history does not repeat, but it does rhyme.

In the end, this is about the general well being of all involved. One could get a little more targeted and just say about the well being of the Israelis. What is being gained with these latest attacks? They went from new-age espionage... to bombs and missiles again. Merely weakening Hezbollah, never reaching a viable victory.

Weakening Hezbollah is certainly better than not weakening it. And the previous week has made Hezbollah considerably weaker.
Hezbollah will not be defeated until
- Lebanon unfucks itself and goes after terrorists operating in its territory.
- there is either a regime change in Iran or Iran otherwise stops funding, training and arming Hezbollah et al.

So, the international community should exert more pressure on both Lebanon and Iran.
In the meantime, Israel must do what it can to defend itself.

But is the defense working? Just because someone has the right to defend themselves, that doesn't mean the actions taken are defaulted as moral and/or effective.

I would say targeting Hezbollah commanders is both moral and effective. As is striking missile launchers and rocket stores as is happening now.

 

[Tigers!]

Israel is killing a lot of people but seems to me to be sprung its wheels. The beeper bombs to me says desperation. Netanyahu faces prosecution when he is out of office, it is in his interest to keep the war going. But it has backfired, the war is not ending and there is growing demand he step down.

In Vietnam it went to retorting body counts implying we were killing more VC and NVA than they could replace. We lost despite superior weapons. We were always 'winning'.

Israel's treatment of Palestinians created the threat in the first place.

We are mainly hearing the conservative Israeli narrative over here not the Israeli opposition to settlements.

Even as this is all going on Israelis are moving into and occupying Palestinian land.

At his point I see no moral high ground for Israel.

I think it was rather ingenious and resulted in much less collateral damage ( uninvolved civilians) than most of other Israeli tactics— not to mention the tactics of Hamas which is to deliberately put civilians directly in the line of fire and then cry about Israel’s inhumanity. Any civilian death is horrible in any armed conflict—but also inevitable.

But Israel is doing exactly that, goading attacks that they know will force the international community to intervene and help them exterminate their rivals. What exactly do you think an illegal "settlement" is, if not a blatant attempt to attract a violent response against civilians? They know they are putting their settlers in harm's way, that's the whole point. The settlers know it too, though many are given no choice in whether to participate, which is why it is a vicious crime against humanity to use families as bait for violence. This conflict has some unspoken rules that both "sides" are following, but their game and the conditions it plays under should not be tolerated by the international community at large. This cannot be the generally accepted model for international disputes, or we're all fucked in the long term. There are many ancient disputes in the world, we cannot afford turn a blind eye to either Hatfield or McCoy as the world burns on their behalf and behest. Israel has nuclear weapons. No holds barred is not an acceptable option.

I don’t disagree, actually. A two state solution seems the only choice as Hamas has long stated its goal is to exterminate Jews worldwide. Both sides have backed themselves and each other into positions that, if not abandoned, will lead ultimately to mutual death and destruction of Israelis and Palestinians entirely.

And that is undeniable tragedy of decisions made for decades now. Both sides will not back down for various reasons and will just prolong the agony and destruction.

 

[Arctish]

Israel is killing a lot of people but seems to me to be sprung its wheels. The beeper bombs to me says desperation. Netanyahu faces prosecution when he is out of office, it is in his interest to keep the war going. But it has backfired, the war is not ending and there is growing demand he step down.

In Vietnam it went to retorting body counts implying we were killing more VC and NVA than they could replace. We lost despite superior weapons. We were always 'winning'.

Israel's treatment of Palestinians created the threat in the first place.

We are mainly hearing the conservative Israeli narrative over here not the Israeli opposition to settlements.

Even as this is all going on Israelis are moving into and occupying Palestinian land.

At his point I see no moral high ground for Israel.

I think it was rather ingenious and resulted in much less collateral damage ( uninvolved civilians) than most of other Israeli tactics— not to mention the tactics of Hamas which is to deliberately put civilians directly in the line of fire and then cry about Israel’s inhumanity. Any civilian death is horrible in any armed conflict—but also inevitable.

But Israel is doing exactly that, goading attacks that they know will force the international community to intervene and help them exterminate their rivals. What exactly do you think an illegal "settlement" is, if not a blatant attempt to attract a violent response against civilians? They know they are putting their settlers in harm's way, that's the whole point. The settlers know it too, though many are given no choice in whether to participate, which is why it is a vicious crime against humanity to use families as bait for violence. This conflict has some unspoken rules that both "sides" are following, but their game and the conditions it plays under should not be tolerated by the international community at large. This cannot be the generally accepted model for international disputes, or we're all fucked in the long term. There are many ancient disputes in the world, we cannot afford turn a blind eye to either Hatfield or McCoy as the world burns on their behalf and behest. Israel has nuclear weapons. No holds barred is not an acceptable option.

I don’t disagree, actually. A two state solution seems the only choice as Hamas has long stated its goal is to exterminate Jews worldwide.

Hamas has always identified its enemy as the "Zionist entity" that is the state of Israel, not the Jewish people.

Hamas Charter

Articles 6, 16, and 17 reject genocide whether against against Jews or anyone else. AKAIK there is no stated goal to kill all Jews worldwide that has come from Hamas, only unsupported assertions of such.

And before anyone jumps on this and accuses me of being pro-terrorist or something, I will reiterate once again for the hard of learning:

I believe Hamas is a terrorist organization full of highly motivated haters who want to blow up the walls around Gaza, defeat the IDF, overthrow the government of Israel, and rule Palestine on behalf of the Palestinian people. They are willing to murder civilians to achieve their goals. I do not support them. I believe Hamas must be defeated on the ground and at the ballot box for there to be peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Defeat on the ground will no doubt require war in the streets, and civilians will most likely be caught in the crossfire, leading to the deaths of innocents, which is tragic but IMO inevitable at this point. That does not justify targeting them, refusing to allow them to surrender, or not trying to avoid killing them. And, as always, I support the Two State solution but would enthusiastically support a One State solution that respects and upholds the rights of all individuals regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, gender, sex, hair color, or any other factors that racists and bigots use to justify being assholes to others.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I heard that they bought the pagers from Boeing.

That said, the death toll and the number injured seems awfully maldistributed. Is Hezbollah not indicating deaths among their ranks and only civilian related collateral damage? Because otherwise, 12 or so including civilians killed seems awfully low. Especially for the alleged number hurt. Yes, I get they exaggerate these numbers, but the death toll isn't is the same ballpark (or even sport) as the number hurt.

Because the charges were in the ballpark of 10 grams. Moderate firecracker range, although with a higher detonation velocity.

The other question is who fed them the line about the cell phones being a problem. I'm wondering if Israel successfully trolled Hezbollah into swapping phones for pagers... and then did this, or whether they got word of the shift in plans by Hezbollah and a light bulb went off.

And why do you think they didn't have reason to think phones were a problem? We see it from Ukraine--carrying a cell phone brings down enemy fire. Think that's not the situation with Hezbollah? And even if Israel isn't shooting it can figure out what phones talk to what phones, something very useful for identifying bad guys. Since pagers are receive-only the networks remain far more hidden. That is, until Israel figures out that you're buying a bunch of pagers and provides ones that go boom.

The great thing here is that Hezbollah has to quadruple think buying any electronic communication device now. It sounds like Israel achieved more in this maneuver than they have in 11 months in Gaza against Hamas. And with a substantially muted amount of collateral damage.

I hope that this isn't something Iran can easily try themselves, regarding miniaturized explosives, not pagers. No one uses those.

Nothing special about the charges.

What this did is make it far harder for Hezbollah to communicate. And they got together to talk in private--but Israel figured out where. The Hezbollah command structure just got seriously messed up.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Israel is killing a lot of people but seems to me to be sprung its wheels. The beeper bombs to me says desperation. Netanyahu faces prosecution when he is out of office, it is in his interest to keep the war going. But it has backfired, the war is not ending and there is growing demand he step down.

Desperation??

No. This was clearly a special operation planned years in advance. And an extremely surgical strike. It's about as good as they come.

 

[Elixir]

This was clearly a special operation planned years in advance. And an extremely surgical strike. It's about as good as they come.

I can’t help but agree. It is uniquely humane, and uniquely impersonal and dehumanizing.

I’ll be more impressed with the tech if it can make FoxNews watchers’ TVs explode, of course. /sarcasm
It’s really really really creepy. But cool comic book Dr Evil stuff.
Like, can you imagine what a President Trump would like to do with it?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

From bbc - the number of dead is low, it, it was the number of wounded - some, including more children, severely

Lebanon’s health minister says the number of people killed when pagers used by members of the armed group Hezbollah exploded on Tuesday has risen to 12, including two children and four healthcare workers.

But of the dead, it looks like 50% children and healthcare workers?

You realize there's overlap between Hezbollah and healthcare workers?

And be very wary of reports of deaths of "children". That's often younger members of the terrorist organizations. This is Hezbollah, not Hamas, so figure the reporting has some approximation with reality but is cherry-picked. We have one 12 year old girl--clearly a civilian. No details on the rest--they were probably Hezbollah. Thus 11:1, consistent with Israel's usual record against Hezbollah of 85-90% combatants.

Ms Chamoun said the pagers had “emitted a sound before being detonated to encourage people to take them out of their pockets or from their desks and lift them to their heads”.

This is so cold. It’s like ambushing someone from cover in their own town. This beep is what made innocents pick up the devive to hand it to the owners. This beep maximized civilian deaths, instead of making it go off when it was being used.

No. The beep was the incoming page. The detonation command was sent as a page. The pager responded as a pager would, the electronics identified it as the detonation command and they went off. And the only thing a pager can do is receive a page--how else would it be used? And note the video we have shows pagers exploding while on people's waists--they hadn't looked at them.

And ambushes are completely acceptable in war.

I just don’t see this as helping Israel’s wish to end fighting.

Israel knows there will be no end to the fighting so long as Iran pours billions into paying terrorists to fight. All they can hope to do is keep their enemies weak.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Couldn’t the case be made that Israel committed an act of terrorism?

If Hezbollah, or Hamas for that matter, managed to do something like this, it would be swiftly called terrorism. And rightfully

I agree. If anyone did this it would be an acto of terrorism, and Rightfully So. How is this different than placing land mines?

Land mines have no ability to tell enemy from civilian. As such, they should be avoided other than in marked minefields or other such situations where you know there will not be civilians.

This is not terrorism because it was targeted on Hezbollah. Hezbollah ordered a bunch of pagers, Israel substituted explosive ones. Thus they were targeted on combatants, not civilians.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

If they targeted against members of a terrorist group, no noncombatants are injured. Neither land mines nor explosive communication devices discriminate among combatants and noncombatants. That is how they two are alike.

You continue to fail to understand that war isn't executed with perfection.

 

[laughing dog]

If they targeted against members of a terrorist group, no noncombatants are injured. Neither land mines nor explosive communication devices discriminate among combatants and noncombatants. That is how they two are alike.

You continue to fail to understand that war isn't executed with perfection.

How is that straw man relevant to my comparison?

 

[Elixir]

I assume that among the Gazan or Lebanese population there is not really a distinct line between Hamas/not Hamas or between Hezbollah/not Hezbollah. But as a thought experiment, let’s suppose that a deadly electronic device blew up 100% of all Hezbollahs, as arbitrarily defined by Israel. What/who would be left to bury their scattered remains, and what would those people’s attitude and intent be toward Israel?
I suspect you’d have to do it again in a few years. And again and again, until there was nobody left.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

But how can small devices then lead to so many injuries. The data seems off.

It seems entirely reasonable. There were thousands of devices which mostly hurt only one person each.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Islamist desire to destroy Israel did.

Why?

Because Israelis do not want to be destroyed. Duh!

But some people think Israel not letting themselves be genocided by islamofascists is itself "genocide". Truly an Orwellian instance of reversing offender and victim.

No, why do the Islamists wish to destroy Israel?

Because Israel successfully threw off it's oppressors. As always, the attacks get worse when the victims leaves their abuser.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Settlements not an issue? Un fucking believable if you actually believe that.

Israel was bull on seized Arab lands in the first place.

The Israel propaganda narrative over here for decades has been the only reason they stack us is because we are Jews.

Muslims will differentiate between Jews and Jewish Zionists, much as we differentiate between Mulls and Islamists.


Jimmy Carter who brokered the Camp David Accords wrote that the settlements are the major impediment too peace.

The settlements are not relevant to peace because the war exists because Israel exists. The war predates the settlements, they can't be the cause.

They are attacked because they are Jews that threw off their oppressors. Think of the woman who escaped an abusive relationship and in doing so infuriated her abuser who responds by trying to kill her. Or think of how the KKK types reacted to the civil rights legislation.