Israel used Palantir technologies in pager attack in Lebanon

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46226028

Because mines are untargeted and designed to maim without discrimination as to who they might hurt there is a long running effort to prohibit their use.

For example: say I want to kill someone. I know they live in NYC. So I target them by dropping a nuke on NYC.

Is this a targeted attack? Obviously not. But I said it was targeted! Doesn't work that way.

If you want to target people, you try your best to kill just them. If you're planting bombs in mundane places and setting them off in public, you are not doing that.

I don't know why we feel the need to defend military operatives by essentially claiming they're the stupidest people on Earth and cannot put 2 and 2 together. No no, they can. Meaning, this was intentional.

It doesn't, but why does that justify their aggression towards noncombatants? Does it justify the killing of women and children, who then will go on to be culturally reinforced to hate Israel (for obvious reasons)?

Does it justify having a massive nuclear arsenal?

Wasn't a consequence of this conclusion that the court ordered Israel to change its behaviour because it has an obligation to prevent genocide?

I remember the footage of "that young German woman" but it is to me extremely peripheral and did a lot less of an impression than the thousands of images of destroyed baby bodies I've seen that were caused by the IDF. The criminal actions perpetrated by palestinians on October 7th 2023 were pathetic compared to what the israelis have done for decades.

Punishing a state for genocidal aggression is quite a bit more reasonable than the might is right-ideology you subscribe to.

The palestinians have a right to statehood and self-determination, it's not something they need to be "offered". They also have a right to return to their homelands, and they have a right to oppose occupation, violently if they so choose.

If you think such crimes of occupation and aggression are "very much needed", then I'll have to consider you morally impaired beyond the ability to take part in a reasoned discussion.

Hezbollah is a movement that is many things, among them one of the dominant parties in lebanese parliamentary politics. The name means 'Party of God', which is a hint. They also run hospitals, schools and other social services, as well as financial organisations. Due to the background as a militant mobilisation against israeli aggression they also have several armed factions, which is a very reasonable response to their southern neighbour.

Nasrallah and other Hezbollah leaders stated that they initiated militant action against Israel to support the palestinians and clearly expected it to shorten the genocidal campaign in the Gaza strip. As we now know, this strategy failed and Hezbollah misjudged the bloodthirst of israeli society as well as the degree of backing it would have from the US and european states. They should not have wasted time on a restrained attrition style campaign and instead acted more forcefully if they wanted to slow or halt the extermination of the palestinians.

As for Nasrallah, he is surely missed by many but he also spent his life expecting and preparing for martyrdom.

Obviously he must wear a uniform while actually conducting the attack though.

I'd understand if you were arguing against using excessive force, eg using thermobaric weapons in residential neighborhoods against an individual target, but there hardly exists a more targeted method than the pager attack / arson of specific houses.

I don't think the analogy is apt. Members of Hezbollah do not occupy a positions of similar relationship to Lebanon as US generals does to the US. As far as I've heard, flag officers and others are escorted by personal security for an attack of any sort, such as the 2009 Ft Hood shooting. [0]

Moving past that, a civilian citizen of Venezuela in the US who performed actions against US military targets would not be a valid military strike since that person would not be an identifiable member or Venezuela's military. It would more akin to a spy or assassin. Below is an excerpt from an article representing a US-centric view of history [1].

  But the right to kill one’s enemy during war was not considered wholly 
  unregulated. During the 16th century, Balthazar Ayala agreed with Saint 
  Augustine’s contention that it “is indifferent from the standpoint of justice 
  whether trickery be used” in killing the enemy, but then distinguished 
  trickery from “fraud and snares” (The Law and Duties of War and Military 
  Discipline). Similarly, Alberico Gentili, writing in the next century, found 
  treachery “so contrary to the law of God and of Nature, that although I may 
  kill a man, I may not do so by treachery.” He warned that treacherous killing 
  would invite reprisal (Three Books on the Law of War). And Hugo Grotius 
  likewise explained that “a distinction must be made between assassins who 
  violate an express or tacit obligation of good faith, as subjects resorting 
  to violence against a king, vassals against a lord, soldiers against him whom 
  they serve, those also who have been received as suppliants or strangers or 
  deserters, against those who have received them; and such as are held by no 
  bond of good faith” (On the Law of War and Peace).
  

1. https://lieber.westpoint.edu/assassination-law-of-war/

Edit: /Hamas/Hezbollah/

Except nobody in power actually gives a damn about the Geneva convention or the "laws of war" being thrown around in this topic.

Those laws were made up so that victorious powers can bully smaller countries when they lose a war, but superpower nations themselves don't have to abide by them because there's nobody more powerful than them to hold them accountable when they break those rules. Because laws aren't real, it's only the enforcement that is real.

Like the US also doesn't care about the Geneva Convention with all its warmongering and crimes against humanity in the middle east, and the torturing in Guantanamo Bay, and the likes of George Bush and Tony Blair will never see a day at the ICJ. Hell, not even US marines accused of using civilians for target practices in Afghanistan got to see a day at the Hague because the US said they'd invade the Hague if that happened. Russia also doesn't care about the Geneva convention and Putin won't see a day at the Hague. Israel doesn't give a crap about the geneva convention when bombing Palestinian hospitals, and Netanyahu won't see a day at the Hague. And if China invaded Taiwan, they won't care about the Geneva convention and Xi Jinping will never see the Hague. Trump can invade Venezuela tomorrow, and same, nothing will happen to him or the US.

THAT IS THE REALITY, that is how the world really works, dominance by the strong, subservience of the weak, everything else about laws, fairness, morality, etc only works in Tolkien tales and internet arguments, not in major international conflicts.

Edit: to the downvoters, could you also explain what part of what I said was wrong?

As an American, I certainly hope they would fail. But do I think it's legal? Yes: it's a targeted strike on the leader of an enemy country they'd theoretically be at war with. Do I think it's wise? Well — no, Venezuela has a much smaller military, and assassinating the U.S. President would trigger a massive war that would devastate Venezuela for decades while modestly inconveniencing American taxpayers. But legal? Yes.

We've massed forces for an attack, attacked their ships, violated their airspace with combat aircraft (that's today), and extensively and publicly threatened them. They'd be in their legal rights to strike preemptively, including possibly a decapitation strike (this is why the Dubya administration kept repeating the term "preemptive strike", even though it was obviously nowhere near applying in the case of Iraq—it was a way of asserting its legal basis)

[edit] As thereisnospork points out in a sibling comment, however, this doesn't mean it'd be a good idea.

Not sure why you have doubts about this.

[0] Shouldn't - classic example of a tactical win being a strategic blunder. Killing the American president and would solidify American public support for the war - which would probably be undesirable in the balance.

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...

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.

That's ridiculous

> If you attack a military target that is surrounded by civilians, and that attack injures or kills those civilians, then those civilians were also targeted.

They are not targeted.

You could say that depending on number of innocent casualties or the likely number the attacked could be reckless and/or disproportionate in attacking in a way that was likely to cause such injuries. In certain cases you could claim they broke the laws of war although the laws of war are practical (they're not meant to prevent all deaths of civilians, the countries who agreed to them didn't intentionally make it impossible to fight including in defense).

And even if something is not a war crime you could still claim it might be immoral but that is a more complex argument.

He did prefix it with "I think", highlighting that "this is my opinion / my interpretation", not that he is issuing a ruling as a judge in an international court.

Since the pagers that were targeted were exclusively used by Hezbollah (which fought an actual civil war with the Lebanese security forces specifically in order to establish its own telecom network), I would be extraordinarily wary of any source that has claimed more injuries to noncombatants than to combatants.

You can still tell a story where the pager attack was unacceptable owing to civilian casualties: there could be so many civilian casualties that any number of combatant casualties wouldn't justify it. But if you're claiming that there were more casualties to noncombatants over small explosions from devices carried principally in the pockets of combatants, it is rational to draw the conclusion that your reasoning (and sourcing) is motivated.

In any case, if Hezbollah themselves admit that 1500 of their fighters were injured by the attack (according to your own source), it seems extremely dishonest to claim that all 4000 were civilians or that there were only 42 targets.

>> Sources within the Israeli intelligence community cited in the report raised concerns about how deaths were categorized, with one source claiming people were sometimes "promoted to the rank of terrorist after their death" in the database. <<

Regarding whether that's brilliant, that is not my wording, but generally it was quite mild compared to the methods of Hezbollah and was highly successful in ending a war with very little bloodshed. The other alternative was tried in 2006 and in Gaza, and fighting a terror organization entrenched in an urban setting means bombings and killing civilians in the process. This was not the end result as Hezbollah fell apart relatively quickly afterwards, so I think it was good compared to any alternative for Lebanese and Israelis

Where would a Lebanese doctor get an encrypted pager bought by Hezbollah and given to Hezbollah members with the explicit use for communicating with other Hezbollah members?

That is the opposite of indicrimante.

as for

> white Judeo-Christian variety

Judeo Christian is a silly concept. Either say christian or say Abrahamic. While most casulties were affiliated with Hezbollah and therefore overwhelmingly Shia Muslim enough of the general public of Lebanon is Christian that they would make at least some of civilian bystanders injured. Also Lebanese people aren't any whiter in average skin color then the average Israeli

https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/aug/21...

been accused it's not same as been found guilty. at least last time I checked.

Our premises may be too far apart to usefully discuss this. The core of my argument (the comparative military and civilian body counts in Syria and Yemen) aren't going to be easy to refute by appeals to Hezbollah's PR. (You may also have responded to a by-2-minutes-or-so earlier version of my comment; we may be responding to each other in too-close succession and talking past each other.)

And I don't mean it's modern reinterpretation

flags are been abused and you don't do anything about it, short of "show me wrongly flagged comment and i'll unflag it if i think it was flagged wrong"

can you openly admit that flags are been abused and misused to silence opinions that people disagree with ?

if you can't agree with such a trivial statement, I don't think there is anything to discuss here.

ps. obviously after i made 3 comments i am throttled and cant post this comment

In threads that are, unfortunately, adversarial, abusing the flag button is a stable Nash equilibrium. I think it's a shitty equilibrium, though, and makes real, substantive conversations--ostensibly the goal on this forum--harder to achieve.

I think it's high time to reconsider the current 'flag' mechanics. At the very least I think we would all be better off if flags were simply disabled on highly controversial topics.

I can control my comments, which are a part of this forum's moderation style, and I can advocate in those comments for people to act in good faith, and appeal for help in figuring out how to make it more common.

If we can't discuss important topics in good faith on a nerd website, what hope do we have of discussing them elsewhere? It's not hyperbole anymore to say that if we don't come to some consensus we are going to end up in authoritarianism or war.

There is no state organised war crimes going on, just normal war. If you can't understand the distinction that's your problem not mine. In my opinion Israels actions in Gaza fall well within the actions of a legitimate war, to the extent warfare can be legitimised. I'm not commenting on individual cases, and anyway those are not relevant to my argument.

Re: location - They exploded everywhere you can think of, while these targets were doing civilian activities near other civilians, and not in a combat setting.

Re: possession - Given the above, and Israel’s horrendous kill ratio, there was definitely no consideration for possession of these pagers at the time of the attack. For example, who is to say that some pagers weren’t in use by members of the political bureau, or unofficially resold to a hospital for use by oncall doctors?

This isn't even the most outrageous thing Lehi and Irgun did (trying to partner with Hitler against the British might take that) before the Israeli government disbanded them and merged most of them into the IDF when they no longer needed to terrorize the West.

Edit: I think it’s also important to be conscious of the central role that Y combinator and Silicon Valley in general have played both in the Israel / Palestine “conflict” and domestic US politics. “Hackernews” is not a neutral zone. It is directly associated with the most powerful forces in the world today. I’m not casting judgment because I work in this industry to. But it undoubtedly raises serious questions about the moderation (automated or otherwise) of speech around these topics on here.

I have so many places I can go if I want to read and discuss Israel and Palestine. I don’t need another, and I especially don’t want to lose the one spot I have that’s relatively free of it.

It's amazing how similarly zionists/israelis and nazis rationalize.

> 2. Semites is not an ethnicity, it's a language family, sorry. When used colloquially it has always referred to Jews.

"Semitic people or Semites is a term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group[2][3][4][5] associated with people of the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, including Akkadians (Assyrians and Babylonians), Arabs, Arameans, Canaanites (Ammonites, Edomites, Israelites, Moabites, Phoenicians, and Philistines) and Habesha peoples." --wiki

> 3. “Semitic” is a language group, not a racial caste.

Germanic is a language group and an ethnic group. Using your logic, germans are not germanic peoples because germanic is a language group.

> Jews—including Ashkenazi—have documented Middle Eastern ancestry,

They have less documented middle eastern ancestry (none) than elizabeth warren has of native ancestry.

> The idea that Israelis are “non-Semitic Europeans pretending to be Jews” is just antisemitic nonsense, not a serious factual claim.

Considering that most "israelis" are ATHEISTS and most "israelis" are non-semitic and most "israelis" do not adhere to or respect the torah, it is a factual claim.

> 5. Correct, Arabs are Arabian. You're not "making shit up" you're repeating evidence-free nonsense you want to be true without examining its validity.

Why do you lie? People can literally google "semites" or "semitic peoples". If you lie about something like this, what are the odds you are lying about israel killing civilian semites in palestine?

> Fatima was in the kitchen on Tuesday when a pager on the table began to beep, her aunt said. She picked up the device to bring it to her father and was holding it when it exploded, mangling her face and leaving the room covered in blood, she said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/world/middleeast/lebanon-...

I didn't claim that they were particularly lethal. In fact, they were not particularly lethal. Thousands of pagers exploded and only 12 people were killed despite these devices being held directly up to the face or against the skin (pockets).

They were as close to non-lethal incapacitation, even against targets, as it is possible to get in war. When even the targets are rarely killed by the explosion, obviously that results in fewer unintended victims being hurt/killed.