Lebanese girl becomes most notable victim of pager blasts
aa.com.tr
10-year-old Fatima Jaafar Abdullah was killed in pager explosions in Lebanon.
Israel murders another kid again.
10-year-old Fatima Jaafar Abdullah was killed in pager explosions in Lebanon.
Israel murders another kid again.
If anyone else did this, it would be universally recognized as a heinous act of state-sponsered terrorism.
Right? Imagine if Iran did this to Israel.
I get going after your ‘enemy,’ but this is even worse than firing randomly into a crowd of Palestinians. They pushed a button not knowing who would die. This is low, even for them.
I can’t even think of a devil’s advocate argument for this.
I believe the devil's advocate argument would be that, based on Hezbollah's internal communications, the Mossad intercepted a shipment of pagers which were being purchased to replace their (potentially compromised) mobile phones, knowing that these were - in theory - being distributed exclusively to Hezbollah operatives. That would make it the most precise military strike of all time.
Everyone who launches a rocket is accepting the possibility of "collateral damage", but this is surely the most surgical of surgical strikes in history. And yet, yes, they must have accepted the risk of bystander casualties, which just serves to highlight how awful that logic is. It's definitely not worse than randomly firing into a crowd, though.
Pretty sure that honor still goes to the R9X Slap Chop. The pager explosions, on the other hand, injured thousands.
Fat electrician had a great video on this.
Soo accurate that if the target is in a car you need to know what seat.
I really don't get it. Other than the "WAOW" factor, this certainly can't have been a good use of resources for Israel.
They already believed their communications were being intercepted so switched to another method.
That method then literally blew up in their pockets.
The amount of fear and distrust of the supply chain can’t be overstated.
I dunno man. I just feel like if you're at the point where you can clandestinely intercept huge amounts of your enemy's personal communication devices, 'turn them into bombs' feels like a bit of a low-yield outcome.
Alternately this proves that they still are intercepting their communication AND can intervene in their supply chain.
I assure you that basically every nation state in FVEY (and then Israel by proxy) has the ability to intercept your communication.
This is something that ought to be considered as a basic entry level accepted threat.
NOW they know they have to worry about shit blowing up randomly, brand new stuff.
Consider it backwards: Israel sees this attack happening so valuable, that they were willing to forego using the pagers for spying.
Considering Israel's history, I don't know how much agreement there would be between my estimation of military value and the current administration's.
They thought the pagers were secure communication devices. Now they know they are not. Hezbollah was maybe planning to escalate its attacks on Israel, without good, secure communications, they probably can't. On the flip side, if Israel decides to invade Southern Lebanon to escalate things with Hezbollah, Hezbollah is going to have a much tougher time coordinating its defense since its supposed 'secure' communication system has just been blown up, the previous system (cell phones) what already suspected of being compromised, and now today, walkie-talkies used by the senior Hezbollah leadership have also exploded.
This is not normal for cyber ops. The only thing really that makes sense is if they needed to buy time so set off the pagers. Otherwise they just set their compromised communications devices on fire and told them they did it.
In which world getting thousands of Hezbolla operatives unwittingly keeping a bomb in their pocket would not be a good use of resources for Israel?
Because it changes nothing in the long run. So what exactly was so imminent that this had to happen?
Hezbollah has been saying for a while it 'might' escalate its actions against Israel. Now... that does not seem as likely.
What was so imminent that Hezbollah had to fire that rocket barrage some days ago?
You don't seem to understand the nature of this conflict
I meant it more like, why blow up the pagers you spent all this effort to compromise. I would have thought that having access to those devices would be worth more covertly.
I suppose its possible the only thing they could manage to sneak into the devices was explosives though, since you have to take the board apart to find it. Its likely it looked like a board component too.
These were one-way pagers that, given the scale, were probably used to disperse global messages to footsoldiers or the level right above. Like: "come if for a briefing to the usual spot". That's information that Israel can already intercept
Since they compromised the supply chain to plant explosives, they could have also put other tracking equipment in. Its possible though that it would be too hard to conceal an outgoing signal from testing.
We probably will never know the exact details, but it just seems like a lack of creativity to me. Seems more like a military attack than a cyber ops style thing.
I guess I should have qualified that to exclude individual assassinations, otherwise you'd have to include snipers and whatever. I almost don't believe that "knife missile" is real (quotation marks because the only real knife missiles are Culture technology).
I feel like people are missing one of the more heinous aspects of this, which is that it injured thousands of people and only managed to kill ~10 of their targets. The outcome of this attack is going to be general terror and potentially hundreds of life altering injuries but very little military advantage.
They injured thousands of their targets, killed a few, and only got very little collateral damage
Nasrallah would shit down his prophet's throat to get this kind of outcome
How did something that only killed 10 targets injure thousands, especially when you are considering explosives.
I don't think I could injure 1000s of civilians with only 10 targets killed with an explosive hidden on their person if I tried.
The advantage is huge. 1000s of militants are now seriously injured and are no longer battle ready. Many will never be again. Massive success for Israel, and one of the most precision strikes ever used. Now there will be fear from any communication devise exploding, there will be 1000s of man hours wasted taking other stuff apart to check it, and morale will be down as well.
Now westerners will worry when lining up for concerts or flights and the increased security expenditure will impact their economy
I guess you support ISIS terror attacks as a brilliant play too?
Correct.
Killing civilians isn't a war crime. Deliberately killing civilians, or not taking reasonable steps to minimize civilian casualties is a war crime.
"Small" explosive that is embedded in something passed to and likely worn by the target is unlikely to be a war crime. If they somehow snuck a 1000lb bomb into one it absolutely would be however.
Booby trapping objects associated with daily civilian use is a war crime
These pagers were distributed to doctors and nurses, so I would also argue that they were booby trapping medical supplies, which are protected.
Close - you're looking at letter, not action and intentions.
Booby traps are banned for use in ways that are likely to be used by civilians and remove protections on the civilian population. Things like placing explosives on public transport, the side of the road, in marketplaces or protected places. Targeted strikes, like on a piece of civilian equipment that is likely to only be used by the target (cellphone, personal vehicle, laptop) are permitted as they are unlikely to be set off by a random civilian.
What is a question, however, is if the targets were actually combatants.
There is no chance Mossad wasn't aware that these pagers were distributed to civilians.
Turns out they weren’t.
It’s literally a war crime to attack people who are not actively participating in combat. That includes people who are members of your enemy’s military.
No, members of an enemy's military are combatants regardless of whether they're holding a gun or in a firefight at the time. The only exception is personnel such as chaplains and medics.
How do you have less votes than the wrong person?
Hmmm I guess with Israel having a conscript army then rocket barrages aren't acts of terrorism. If a large portion of the country is considered "combatants" then any non-coms can be written off as "acceptable collateral damage".
Not unless you're making a meaningful attempt to target combatants. "All civilians are combatants" is the kind of Nazi shite that Israel indulges in, so I'd thank you to not peddle such grotesque views.
I don't ascribe to it.
Then repeating things like this
in attempting to equate collateral damage with attacking civilians should probably be avoided.
It's pointing out the hypocrisy, that is all.
Would you like to more precisely outline the hypocrisy that is comparable in this case - between the targeting of combatants that results in collateral damage, and the assertion that attacking civilians with rocket barrages is valid because Israel has a 'conscript army', implicitly asserting that all Israeli civilians are legitimate targets?
The way israel will commit acts of terrorism because there may be hezbola, and civilian bystanders are "acceptable" because they are "targeting" hezbola, or Hamas. It is seen as "ok" by some because "Hamas or Hezbola". When Hamas or hezbola launch rockets into israel to "target" Israeli combatants, on the clock or off, those acts of terror are considered the worst thing, and it continues the circle of violence.
On the prohibition of indiscriminate attacks:
“(c) those which employ a method or means of combat the effects of which cannot be limited as required by this Protocol; and consequently, in each such case, are of a nature to strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction.”
https://www.justsecurity.org/81351/the-prohibition-on-indiscriminate-attacks-the-us-position-vs-the-dod-law-of-war-manual/
It’s important to note that this is the consensus of much of the international community and the US (and I presume its surrogate Israel) have not signed on to the above provision despite speaking to support it. The weasely approach we (the US) have taken to these standards really demonstrates how hollow our sentiments are when we feign moral authority in international affairs.
Would you like to explain how setting up bombs within the personal devices of enemy combatants is striking civilians or civilian objects without distinction? Or do you think all collateral damage is a war crime?
Like, fuck's sake, not every dogshit act by a criminal state like Israel is a war crime. Jesus H. Christ.
Was this really all just to say "US BAD" and "US PUPPET ISRAEL"? Holy shit.
First of all, there was no way for Israel to know whether the people they claim to be targeting were combatants when the attack occurred since Israel had no information about the status of these bombs when they chose to detonate them.
Secondly, placing a bomb in a common device that you have every reason to believe will spend much of its time in the proximity of civilians, in homes, markets and other public spaces, and choosing to detonate it without knowledge of the location of the bomb, or it’s proximity to your supposed target, is actively avoiding distinguishing between ‘combatants’ and civilians. I can’t believe that western brain rot requires this to be spelled out for it.
Israel learned that Hezbollah was ordering new pagers to be given to members of Hezbollah and no one else. Every member of Hezbollah is a sworn enemy of Israel. These pagers were to be used for secure communications between members of Hezbollah. It was highly likely that nearly every one of these pagers would be carried by members of Hezbollah at the time they went off (IIRC 3pm local time).
So it's your view that any explosive that isn't tracked at all times with 100% accuracy is a war crime.
Uh. 'Interesting'.
'Western brain rot', apparently, is when someone else disproves your utterly and blatantly incorrect claim about the definition of a war crime and then you flail around desperately seeking another justification for your claim once disproven. Okay.
This is terrorism and a violation of International humanitarian law. It's not a war crime because Lebanon and Israel are not formally at war; yet Israel just attacked civilians in public, including health workers, and even officials in Parliament.
As an attack on Hezbollah militant fighters, sure, fair game. But this didn't just attack them.
War crimes are not restricted to polities formally at war.
Unless there's some proof that Israel targeted civilians or was exceptionally lax in targeting combatants, this has no relevance as to whether what they did was a war crime.
Hezbollah is a paramilitary group. It's going to be a hard sell to any lawyer or judge that targeting their members is targeting noncombatants.
That's a very curious claim regarding international law on booby traps.
Sure, my point is that this is still terrorism and a violation of international humanitarian law. It's worth noting that Hezbollah members aren't just militant fighters. There are also social services and Parliamentary members, which are not combatants.
The SS also included members that weren't 'militant fighters', running a vast economic, political, and charitable apparatus, but few would dispute that attacking members of the SS would be attacking members of a paramilitary organization and legitimate targets.
18 U.S. Code § 2441 - War crimes
Prohibited conduct: “(D) Murder.— The act of a person who intentionally kills, or conspires or attempts to kill, or kills whether intentionally or unintentionally in the course of committing any other offense under this subsection, one or more persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including those placed out of combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause”
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2441
It is a war crime to intentionally attack non-combatants.
Which explains why the IDF has had so many "accidents" recently.
That would make every crime a war crime going back thousands of years where they would lay siege on villages until the citizens starved
Yes?
That means the term “war crimes” is meaningless because it would just mean war. The point of specifying some actions as war crimes is to denote things that even in war you shouldn’t do not just say that all wars are crimes
Now you are getting it! War is bad!
Not that I think the Israel is the good guy in this conflict, but your argument is pretty weak.
Pager are designed to be trackable. If you have such deep access to these devices, you know exactly who got called by whom and when.
Yes, there will be collateral damage, but that's almost a given in any armed conflict.
If these were one-way pagers,they are not easy to track, as they don't transmit messages, but only receive and display them.
...and you know which telephone numbers send data to the pager and at which time. That is sufficient to track or identify individuals.
If this is a supply chain attack, the attacker already knows, which pagers are part of the organization they want to target.
What this thread here shows really well, is that the general population vastly underestimates the abilities of intelligence agencies and technology in general.
You wrote a bunch of things that have nothing to do with my comment.
The terrorist organization Hezbollah used dumb pagers exactly because they don't transmit anything, and therefore are very hard to track.
No, they are not.
As I wrote, you can track which pager got paged when. And you can identify who uses that pager. The pager itself does not need to transmit anything for that.
You obviously don't know how tracking works.
You can't track a pager.
A mobile tower will send it a message, but since there's no two-way communication, theres no way to track where the pager received the message. (Even if it was a two-way one, you need at least three good points of connection to be able to triangulate it.)
So how exactly do you identify who's using a pager you don't even know the location of?
Ditto
By tracking who sent what to whom?
If you know the phone number of a Hisbollah member and they send messages to a set of pagers, these are likely Hisbollah pagers. If you do that to several phone numbers, you get a pretty comprehensive list of members. You don't need to know, where exactly they are. That's simply not relevant.
And again: if it's a supply chain attack, you don't even need these contacts. Just a single entry point into the supply chain of the organization.
And since tracking the devices is actually impossible, how would you know which pager is where and held by whom,
Say one of the pagers wasn't delivered to the person who you "know" it to belong to. Say it got dropped in front of a school. Say another person who has one and even is a Hezbollah member, is visiting a children's hospital, because they're people too and usually have reasons to fight (even if their fighting style is immoral to some). Say another is eating dinner with his family. Etc. Etc. Etc.
There's no way to verify any of that. It's basically just as bad if not worse than carpet-bombing. Unless you implant a device like this on a person and then have surveillance on that person to know where they are and who with when you detonate the device, you're probably doing a war crime.
You obviously don't know how one-way pagers work.
You can't easily track a device that doesn't communicate outwardly.
Please track the location of my ceiling fan, it receives wireless transmissions from a remote and beeps in response. Kind of like a pager.
I don't need your location.
Pager transmissions contain a sender and a receiver. That's all the information you need. If a known Hisbollah sender sends to a receiver, that receiver obviously has some ties to Hisbollah.
These are literally one-way receivers. It's like how I can't track your fm radio receiver
I agree. Although in this case the receiver does that and only that. No delivery confirmation or anything. Good luck tracking its location.
How so? How do you track said dumb pager?
This is a reasonable point. But that doesn't mean you can pinpoint the recipients location.
So which armed conflict in the middle of Beirut are you talking about now?
Maybe the guys shooting rockets at Israel?
Don't play dumber than you are.
They were shot from inside Beirut?
YoUrE ArGuMeNt is WeAk
If iPhones had explosives planted in them straight out of the factory and would've went off in New York all at the same time, injuring thousands and endangering people around them, the 24/7 news cycle would've already called for total annihilation and what not.
Indeed. I'm paging Nasrallah right now that he should update his manifesto
Oh, wait...
Oh man, the bill to go to war with China would have been ratified in milliseconds.
Israel continues doing bad things. Not much of a shock.
Still needs to be called out each time it happens.
Frustrating to do another long-form argument of "actually, when you distribute a bunch of explosives and set them off in crowded areas, you're not fighting terrorism but doing terrorism"
For some reason people struggle to believe flinging hand grenades into a crowd is bad public policy when a US ally does it.
this is considerably more targeted at the actual bad guys than their usual MO of bulldozing palastinian neighborhoods though so... an improvement?
'hey at least it's not genocide, it's just terrorism light
There's no proof of that and I'm not trusting mossad lies.
Truly the depravity of Israel knows no limits.
It seems they did learn some stuff from WW2.
I have
asome question(s).Did all pagers in Lebanon just explode or was it only targeted pagers of terrorists that exploded? where they rigged with explosives? how can such a small device in the hands of so few people hurt so many people if they were not rigged with explosives? Was it only terrorist using pagers or is this still a thing i Lebanon?
Allegedly the shipment was intercepted and there was semtex installed
Hezbollah decided to switch to using pagers because you can't track them. Not sure if anyone else (eg. Medical personnel) was also using them.
Doesn't matter if it was hizbollah pagers or not. Hizbollah fighter also had to live normal life, go to shops to buy food etc
This is why i also ask if they were rigged with explosives or they somehow made the batteries explode or smth. There are no details in the local news but clips of some guy falling over because something in his pocket exploded. This made no sense that omething like that, could cause 2750 injuries unless almost 3000 pagers exploded in a similar way, especially because everything around these guys, was barelly affected!
Hezbollah fighter could choose to live normal life and not be a member of Hezbollah. Lay down with dogs, wake up with fleas...
I don't care about hizbollah. I care about the civilians who didn't choose to be with a hizbollah fighter in the same place. Israel did the plan knowing really well that civilians and members of the fighter families would die.
And Hezbollah doesn't care about any civilians that get killed near them. 'Involuntary Martyrs' is the term I believe they used. According to reports, only 14 people have died, which is an extraordinarily low number considering that Israel went after thousands of targets that don't wear uniforms and deliberately intermix freely amongst civilians.
Yes hizbollah doesn't care about civilians, the problem is that you are removing alll the blame from israel. You are forgetting the hundred of injured too. If you think it's ok for israel to sacrifice civilians to kill militants you are a terrible human being
I wonder about the technical part of this.
Was it timer based?
Was it based upon which number sent a message?
A lot of the ideas I have would require a huge technical operation, instead of the "just added explosives" angle.
It is a huge technical operation to intercept an order and replace it with modified devices without the target knowing. Particularly when the target has to be extra careful in ordering things in the first place to avoid sanctions.
In contrast sending out an "execute order 66" message is pretty trivial to trigger them
How would this message trigger the explosive?
Taking control of a shipping container, opening all of pagers and adding some explosives is obvious and not too hard for people with that power.
Replacing all the chips, or hacking their firmware, is different, and is what I'm asking about.
Most bombs that use a phone as the trigger use the speaker for example. But in these pagers that would have already set off loads.
Not a ton is known, by from what I understand the explosives were part of a secondary board added to the pagers, which would also have the ability to listen for a separate signal or look for a specific one the pager received.
Thanks. This is more along the lines of what I'm interested in.
A custom made board for this increases the difficulty and size of this operation by a lot.
I believe they triggers a cell in the LIPO batteries to overheat causing the explosive material to explode.
May have been done at the source of the manufacturing.
Not sure that falls under "intercepted"
There are videos capturing lots of explosions going off simulataneously. Since pagers already can recieve messages and these devices were deeply infiltrated, they likely added a special trigger message to set them off. THis could also allow other scenarios, like only setting off one (for whatever reason).
Well yes but then you'd have to send all those messages, not too hard for a big organisation, but to make a specific message trigger it you would have to do something to the chips on it. And that's what I'm wondering.
If they can plant explosives they can 100% tap into the circuit or maybe reprogram the board. The CIA is known to be able to do this to specific devices by plucking them from the mail. Mossad could likely do their own production run and ship that to Hezbollah.
Yes I want to know more.
you really might not.
before there were mobile phones there was analog dtmf wired telephones. they replaced pulse dialing and allowed for all kinds of additional signalling and triggering. ring a bell, operate a relay, kick people off so you could call the president, entire automated analog switching centers, you name it.
when mobile networks came on the scene there were all sorts of additional triggers but because the (second gen? the ones that could do sms) signals were actually digital, there was a much wider array of possibilities. dtmf had a handful of frequencies it supported and if you wanted to do something more you had to basically make sure the entire network you were using could send, transport and receive those frequencies.
now imagine instead of sixteen combinations of frequencies played at the same time you have access to thousands of possible triggers. once you have simple stuff like the basic receiving of text and lighting a led or playing one of several legally distinct jingles covered, you could do do much more. and people did. there were all kinds of things pagers could do through combinations of local interface and digital communication with a cell tower, all mediated through a handful of baseband chips on the pager pcb that could have the pins for stuff they wouldn't be used for disconnected.
but how would you make a pager set off an explosive?
well, the same way you use a casio f91w wristwatch to. you use its built in functionality (the speaker when the alarm goes off) to trigger a battery that can deliver enough electricity into a resistor to heat it up enough to make your (primary) explosive detonate.
in the case of a pager, those baseband chips have all kinds of on and off switching built in. it's not hard to imagine that basic, out of the box functionality would include pulling a pin high when it gets "*97" or some such. now tie that pin to the base of a transistor across the positive and negative terminals of the battery and sitting against a little petn and you got yourself a remotely triggered explosive.
you wouldn't even need a pcb.
there's probably a lot of stuff thats incorrect in this reply. it's late and this is off the dome.
If they can intercept the message where it isn't encrypted, they can simply sniff the messages coming on the page and wait for their signal.
Then, they can trigger the explosive to a specific message.
That's a wild guess though.
Reported as a biased source and MBFC backs that up... when talking about Turkish issues, they are very pro government.
As this doesn't readily involve the Turkish government, I'll allow it.
"MBFC" is basically a single dude's opinion, containing a shitton of bias. Using it to verify credibility of anything is wrong.
If you have a better solution involving an API we can use for free, I'm open.
I see no issue with the MBFC assessment on this source.
LOL this is the hilarious response of "oh yeah don't have anything better than putting a biased source of credibility attached to every article for no reason other than for people to use to dismiss articles and not read them? Well too bad removing it isn't an option! Find me a different one cause it makes me feel good" said the minority.
Lots of people said openly "we'd rather not have it at all". The bot gets downvoted every thread with comments criticizing it. It doesn't need to exist and is openly harmful.
I understand someone put a lot of work into it, but it simply doesn't work for what it needs to do. Unless you want to be spreading misinformation, then it works perfectly.
Lmfao this attack is aimed at nailing terrorists. Well lookie there. Lemmy you never let me down
I don't understand what you're trying to say. Is it OK for a nation state to plant bombs in suspected opponents and then explode them at random without respect for collateral damage? If Russians did the same to Americans, you'd be all "fair play, mate"?
If there were an anti-Russian militia that set up shop in America and occasionally attacked Russia and Russia figured out a way to target many members of this militia and a few innocent bystanders were also injured or killed, the rest of the world would say "yeah... that is what you get" and Americans would say "Why are we allowing these armed assholes to set up shop in America and attack Russia?"
You really believe this is is how it would play out? Astounding...
At wartime, sure. Using explosives on enemy combatants outside of military-exclusive areas is not inherently a war crime.
Israel is in the wrong here because it's part and parcel of their continuing strategy of escalation in service to Netanyahu's forever war so he can stay in power, and the collateral damage is thus pointless from any perspective except that of keeping an authoritarian in power.
They're not in the wrong because they chose explosives as their choice of attack against Hezbollah. Unless it comes out that their distribution of rigged pagers was utterly untargeted or something of the sort. Which I would not discount the possibility of, considering Israel's history, but doesn't seem to be the case according to what's come out so far.
No way this is a tergeted attack.
Something tells me this guy isn't a reliable source
"No BS kNews"
if they have to tell you it's not BS it probably is
Not even subtle about it
I was a little surprised I didn't see an 88 in his username
ty
Fuck off.
Source: trust me, bro
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