Halifax Tar
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Thank you. Its so hard to keep up with all these Islamic Terrorist organizations and their names...
Hamas invaded Israel 2023
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Thank you. Its so hard to keep up with all these Islamic Terrorist organizations and their names...
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Curious if any pagers exploded on any campuses or street blockades in Canada today.
Halifax Tar
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I feel like that would have made the news...
I had no idea pagers were still so prevalent, beyond the Sackville, Civic driving weed dealers.
That’s by no means a sure thing, and not even necessarily likely. We here are not equipped with the information to assess that.
What jumps at me is that this was clearly intelligence driven. Pagers are antiquated technology, it’s an anomaly that they were being used at all. If reports that Hezbollah has ordered it’s people to reduce tech are true, and if Israel had actionable intelligence of a pager procurement by and for Hezbollah, it’s absolutely plausible that a claim could be made that this was targeted with sufficient precision at Hezbollah personnel, that those carrying these pagers were largely valid military targets, and that the identification of these pagers as specifically a Hezbollah C2 tool made the strike precise enough.
Zero civilian casualties is an aspirational goal but it’s not a legal standard. Necessity, proportionality, discrimination.
It’s likely that a lot of working professionals in Lebanon are ‘dual hatted’, filling both a civilian role and working for Hezbollah on the side in direct military, or political or logistical roles.
While it’s right to be critical about and to question the precision and discrimination of this means of attack, that critical eye also needs to be in good faith. Israel may have successfully stricken a wide array of, in some cases, reasonably senior Hezbollah leaders, and a bunch of (validly targeted) lower ranked members/enablers. Some civilian collateral casualties, while awful, can be generally expected and justified if they weren’t disproportionate.
I don’t have the answers to call this one conclusively, but you don’t either.
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So you are saying that Hezbollah issued pagers (pagers issued for purpose of coordinating/carrying out terror attacks) were found to have been in the possession of said children, medics, doctors, civilians when they exploded (i personally have not seen either video or news reports of anything other than injured fighting age males, but I would be willing to accept other evidence).
Does that maybe suggest some culpability on the part of the pager carrier?
I am not sure that I see the war crime here. You play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.
OldSolduer
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OK so 2700 pagers. How big are they? How much explosives can you stick in one?
It would depend on where the terrorists carried them on their person that would determine the injuries. I have no idea where one carries a pager - on your belt? Shirt pocket? Backpack?
It would depend on where the terrorists carried them on their person that would determine the injuries. I have no idea where one carries a pager - on your belt? Shirt pocket? Backpack?
GR66
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Every report I've seen describes these pagers as having been used by Hezbollah. Even Al Jazeera is reporting it as such:
Unlike the Hezbollah missiles fired intentionally at Israeli civilian targets this was an attack specifically targeting members of the combatant group. Were there civilians killed/injured as collateral damage in this attack? I'm sure there were. However, comparing targeted attacks specifically against members of the enemy military using small explosives which (as seen in some of the videos of the devices exploding) had a quite limited blast radius to large unguided rockets indiscriminately fired into civilian neighbourhoods is misinformed at best.
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Also, any UNRWA or other UN workers mysteriously no longer have the balls to go to work?
medicineman
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Depended on how many I had at a time and where I was...I've worn them on neck lanyards, clipped them inside of my front pants pocket, worn them on my waist band. Have had more than one before - would wear them on opposite sides to tell which was which going off...sometimes in nutsack range, sometimes butt cheek range. Regardless - they'd cause damage if Mossad or Shin Bet took a dislike to me...
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*Hezballess
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tomydoom
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Perhaps literally.
On your belt likely. But then, what you do is call the pager, they grab it to see who is calling/called then boom. In the face…
Israel put explosives in thousands of pagers Hezbollah imported, reports say
Taiwanese company says firm in Europe made devices used in extraordinary attack in Lebanon and SyriaIsrael planted explosives inside thousands of pagers imported by Hezbollah months before Tuesday’s unprecedented attack in Lebanon, according to sources cited by Reuters and US media.
The operation, which the Lebanese group blamed on Israel’s spy agency the Mossad, marked a major security breach. Thousands of pagers detonated across Lebanon and also in Syria, killing nine people and wounding almost 3,000 others, including the group’s fighters and Iran’s envoy to Beirut. Lebanon’s health minister, Firass Abiad, said a young girl was among the dead, and that more than 200 people had critical injuries.
Hezbollah accused Israel of being behind the blasts. It said it was carrying out a “security and scientific investigation” into the causes of the blasts and Israel would receive “its fair punishment”. The Lebanese information minister, Ziad Makary, condemned the attack as an “Israeli aggression”.
The Israeli military has not commented directly on the blasts but said senior commanders had held a situational assessment “focusing on readiness in both offence and defence in all arenas”.
The Taiwanese manufacturer linked to the pagers that exploded said the devices were made by a company in Europe.
Exploding pager attack in Lebanon is another blow for US peace hopes
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Images of the pagers emerged in the aftermath with stickers on the back appearing consistent with pagers made by the Taiwanese company Gold Apollo, according to analysis by Reuters.
On Wednesday, the company’s founder, Hsu Ching-kuang, denied it had made the pagers, saying they were manufactured by a company in Europe that had the right to use its brand. “The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it,” he said. “We are a responsible company. This is very embarrassing.”
Journalists gather around the Gold Apollo founder and chief executive, Hsu Ching-kuang, at the door of the company’s office in New Taipei City on Wednesday. Photograph: Helen Davidson/The Guardian
The blasts appeared to exploit the low-tech pagers that Hezbollah has adopted in order to prevent the targeted assassinations of its members, who could be tracked by mobile phone signals. Those wounded in the attack included Iran’s ambassador to Beirut, Mojtaba Amani, according to reports.
A Hezbollah source said they believed the attack was in response to an alleged assassination attempt by the Shia militia on a former top Israeli defence official, revealed on Tuesday by the Israeli Shin Bet security agency.
Hospitals across Lebanon were overwhelmed with an influx of patients, and a field hospital was set up in the southern city of Tyre to accommodate the wounded. The sound of ambulance sirens was constant in Lebanon’s capital city more than three hours after the initial attack.
US officials are trying to de-escalate tensions between the two sides and remain concerned that the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, could order a ground invasion of Lebanon. The attack came hours after Israel announced it was broadening its aims in the war sparked by the Hamas attacks on 7 October to include its fight against Hezbollah along the border with Lebanon.
Hezbollah pager explosions: questions over strategy behind unprecedented attack
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Hezbollah confirmed in an earlier statement that the deaths included at least two of its fighters and a young girl. Later media reports said the son of the Hezbollah MP Ali Ammar also died in the explosions.
The pagers exploded in southern Lebanon, the southern suburbs of Beirut known as Dahiyeh and the eastern Bekaa Valley – all Hezbollah strongholds.
One Hezbollah official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the detonation was the group’s “biggest security breach” since the Gaza conflict erupted on 7 October, when Hamas launched attacks in southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking about 250 people hostage.
Jonathan Panikoff, the US government’s former deputy national intelligence officer on the Middle East, said: “This would easily be the biggest counterintelligence failure that Hezbollah has had in decades.”
The apparent sabotage attack follows months of targeted assassinations by Israel against senior Hezbollah leaders and has ratcheted up tensions between Israel and Hezbollah. An uneasy calm had prevailed in the past three weeks when both parties had appeared to step back from the brink of a regional war after a limited Hezbollah response in late August to Israel’s assassination of its top military commander, Fuad Shukr, in Beirut.
The attack also threatens to derail efforts by the US to prevent Iran, which backs Hezbollah, from retaliating against Israel for the July bombing in Tehran that killed the Hamas political leader, Ismail Haniyeh.
The US state department spokesperson, Matthew Miller, said it was “too early to say” how it would affect Gaza ceasefire talks. He told a briefing the US was not involved and did not know who was responsible.
Hamas described the attack as an “escalation” that would lead to Israel’s defeat.
- Reuters contributed to this report
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This is the equivalent of firing cluster munitions into a civilian park because you know a bunch of Hezbollah members are currently convening in there. Sure, the pagers may have initially been distributed to 2700 Hezbollah members, but do you really believe that 2700 pagers stayed with their intended targets, and none got lost, stolen, or lent out to non-Hezbollah members? Further, there was no way to know exactly where each of those targets would be when the bombs go off. How many of them were carrying their children to school? How many were at a hospital visiting and at the bedside of a sick relative? How many were squeezing through a crowded marketplace? Necessity? Israel has not demonstrated that there was an immediate necessity to execute such a large and violent attack. Proportionality? Again, what was the military objective that justifies then. And discrimination? Like I said above, there was no way in advance whether or not these would be accurately targeted. There are now 4000+ casualties and rising, but only 2700 pagers were sent out. How the hell is that proportional?
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Not that we could ever really know, but I’m guessing it wasn’t just set on a timer. There was probably some sort of targeting trigger.
It’s been a long time since I’ve had a pager, but I don’t see the point of lending out a pager because in the end, they’re trying to contact you if they’re paging you.
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Entirely disagree.
Cluster munitions, fired into a civilian park are indiscriminate.
Booby trapping a comms device that you know will be issued to your opponent’s key leaders is the very opposite of indiscriminate. Short of using a sniper rifle, this is about as clean and precise as it gets in warfare. I’ve seen the video of pager exploding in the fruit market. There is an employee standing right next to the Hezbollah dude when it goes off and he was uninjured. Pretty surgical.
As Brihard pointed out above, that there may have been collateral injuries or deaths is not the standard. The standard is- was the targeting precise? Yes, very. If you were not Hezbollah or Hezbollah associated you would have virtually no chance of of being injured or killed in this attack. Unlike when Hamas, houthi or Hezbollah forces indiscriminately toss rockets or missiles into Israel.
Sorry, but you are reaching.
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