On Sept. 17, just before 3:30 p.m., the small waiting room of Dr. Nour’s three-room pediatrics clinic in southern Beirut was packed. A mother was waiting to get preschool checkups for her three children. Two elderly patients were booked in for cataract treatments at the ophthalmologist office next door. Sitting next to them was a young couple whom Nour, whose name has been changed for security reasons, had not met before. The father bounced a 10-day-old baby on his lap. Clipped to his belt was a Gold Apollo Rugged Pager.
Nour brought the young couple into her examination room. She pulled out a blank file for the newborn and wrote his name: Aiman. She placed him on the scales: a little over 7 pounds. She lay Aiman on his back on an examination table and began to record his weight. As she did so, the man’s pager beeped twice.
“Excuse me,” he said, and reached down to silence it.
As he did so, about an ounce of explosives concealed within the pager detonated, sending shards of metal and fragments of its thick plastic casing out in all directions. The shrapnel tore deep wounds in the man’s abdomen, lodged in the ceiling of the clinic and lacerated the face of the baby as he lay on his back. Nour was thrown backward as the room filled with dust. She could not see through the smoke, but she could hear the woman’s voice shouting: “Aiman!”
I can understand why the people who performed the attack consider it to be “extremely targeted”. All accounts that I have read say that these pagers were used directly by Hezbollah as an alternative to cell phones, which they believe the IDF have the ability to track. I haven’t seen any reputable source claiming that these pagers were in use by the general population. So they consider these attacks targeted at Hezbollah, because only Hezbollah members should have had them.
They were not intending to target children or other civilians, but of course when something goes off at a random time like this there is no guarantee that only the targets are in possession of these devices.
However, I think the attack will end up actually harming Israeli security, for two reasons:
First of all, they put too much explosive stuff in it. If it were a smaller explosion (or even just a short circuit leading to device failure), fewer people would have been hurt, and they would have more claim to say they were targeting communications infrastructure. But if the explosions were smaller, the attack would not have gotten into the news. I think they made the explosions larger than necessary just to make headlines, without regard to collateral damage. I think that’s the part that would get any other country into hot water as a war crime.
But more importantly, they have proven to Hezbollah that Israel cannot track these closed pager networks, otherwise they would not have needed to blow them up! So now Hezbollah has learned to open up every pager before deploying, and once they source more devices they have their secure network back.
So in a few months, Israelis will be in a less secure position than they were before the attack, just because some of their leaders wanted to make headlines.
Pagers are a civilian object though.
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule12
There was no way to know where these people would be when the bombs went off. Israel could have detonated at night, to minimise the chance of civilian casualties. They didn’t. During busy markets.
This was literally textbook terrorism, and against international law (see link).
You know that Hezbollah is a part of their government right? They have seats in their parliament. So even if they just attacked “Hezbollah” they attacked politicians, politicians in their homes with their families. If anyone directly targeted U.S. governors or congresspeople, or godforbid knesset members, all of the same people would be screaming murder and terrorism from the tops of hills. This is blatant racism.
