cramsessionIsrael used Palantir technologies in pager attack in Lebanon
https://the307.substack.com/p/revealed-israel-used-palantir-technologies
I actually consider the pager attack to be legal. There's obviously criticism of it, but I'm fairly sure you're allowed to do this kind of thing by laws of war.
Obviously this creates a huge problem for pretty much everyone though, since we can imagine that our ordinary consumer products from all sorts countries could similarly explode if we ended up at war with the manufacturers.
I don't know if it's "legal" or not and by who's laws, but it certainly seems like terrorism to me (i.e. intentionally creating a state of terror).
I think if Lebanon found a clever way to assassinate the top 45 military commanders in Israel the same people who are defending this wouldn't be calling it a "Legal act of war".
Targeted attacks against military/militia leadership is not terrorism - almost by definition.
If it was just random devices exploding, then sure, that could be considered terrorism. But it wasn't random devices, it was communication devices procured by Hezbollah and directly given by Hezbollah to their own members for their own purposes.
The issue is that Israel has no idea where those pagers were at the time of the attack, civilians were directly hurt by the explosions: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/survivors-of-israels-page...
Survivors of Israel's pager attack on Hezbollah last year struggle to recover
The Associated Press explores the human toll of Sept. 17, 2024, when thousands of pagers distributed to the Hezbollah group blew up across Lebanon, remotely detonated by Israel. Over 10 months later, more than 3,000 wounded Lebanese are on a slow, painful path to recovery. The AP spoke with six survivors of the attack.
Israel had in fact very clear intelligence that the specific pagers they were detonating were overwhelmingly going to be in the custody of combatants. This was very probably the most precisely targeted large-scale military strike of the last 100 years. That's not a value judgement; it's a descriptive claim.
Do you have any sources at all for your assertion “This was very probably the most precisely targeted large-scale military strike of the last 100 years”? It is hard to engage with your statement in any reasonable fashion without knowing where you are getting your information.
Here is an excellent and HN-worthy writeup of the argument for legality, and the counterargument that it was an improper booby trap.[1] It seems to me most of the polarizarion on this board could have been avoided had the original article recognized (as does the one linked here) "that the legality or illegality of the pagers attack can only be determined on the basis of a detailed factual analysis and that the relevant facts are still not fully known."
I disagree with @dang's decision to leave the original link up, as it is nearly valuless in framing this discussion.
[1] https://lieber.westpoint.edu/well-it-depends-explosive-pager...
> I disagree with @dang's decision to leave the original link up, as it is nearly valuless in framing this discussion
I'm open to replacing it with a better link, but the one you've listed here (even though it's a much more in-depth article) isn't about this specific topic.
I found https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-used-palantir-its-... by googling. Is it better than OP?
No, they're basically the same, and this Substack has some additional primary source material the MEE piece doesn't (MEE and this Substack have approximately the same editorial slant).
For whatever it's worth I think it's fine that the resource posted in that comment just makes it an especially valuable comment, without altering the story itself.
Just start from the premise that Israel targeted exclusively handheld military comms devices that would in ordinary practice only be in the custody of Hezbollah combatants, and from the additional premise that the explosions in the strikes were relatively small, so small that the overwhelming majority of the Hezbollah casualties were wounded and not KIA. Then try to make another story make sense.
We have significant evidence for both these premises!
This is not an argument that the strike incurred no civilian casualty, that no child of a Hezbollah combatant was in close proximity when one of the bombs went off, anything like that. It's rather a sanity check on arguments based on statistical claims about the casualties. There might have been quite a lot of civilian casualties! But for there to have been significantly more of them than combatant casualties, I would argue that you have to break one of my two premises.
Premise 1:
The pagers were military devices, but based on what we know about them, it is impossible to assert that all were in the custody of Hezbollah combatants at the moment they exploded. One would need to prove that the pagers were physically on the combatants’ persons—and not, for example, sitting on a coffee table or elsewhere—at the time of detonation.
Premise 2:
The physical location of the pagers directly affects the pattern of civilian injuries. Hospitals reported that many of the injured were civilians, including children, women, and non-combatants who were at home, at work, or in public areas. Even pro-Israel outlets, such as the Times of Israel, reported the same distribution of casualties.
Footage from Reuters, Al Jazeera, AP, and local Lebanese reporters shows numerous injured civilians with bandaged hands and faces, including people hurt inside homes, markets, farms, and workplaces, as well as children with hand and facial burns.
Now I would pose the question to you, why is your (likely novice) understanding of explosives and the footage you seen enough to overwrite the opinions of the hospitals and government of Lebanon?
Premise 1: I accept that they could have been on coffee tables! The problem isn't that I'm sure every pager was in a combatant pocket; it's that they were microcharges (we have videographic evidence!), and unless most of the pagers were for whatever reason not on hand to a combatant but rather for some reason close to a civilian, the Lebanese civilian/combatant casualty figures can't be made to make sense.
Premise 2 just repeats Premise 1, from what I can tell.
The footage argument doesn't rebut any claim I made. You're treating this as if it's an argument that the pager strike was clean, or even morally justifiable; I have made neither claim.