Israel Suspected in Lebanon Pager Attack

Israel sets new war goal of returning residents to the north –

I believe most of these are settlers, and internationally, this “north” isn’t recognized as part of Israel’s territories (still need diplomatic negotiations, like Egypt and Jordan). In BBC fashion, this detail isn’t clarified in the article, so can’t be sure how many of these residents are in Israel proper (such as it is).

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With Israel ‘Emboldened,’ Washington Braces For Fresh Middle East Bloodshed In Lebanon

Back in June. Don’t know if this (unshared-until-after) attack changes the calculations.

As Israel’s chief military and diplomatic backer, the U.S. has the most influence of any outside party over its decisions, and is widely perceived as implicated in them. At the same time, it’s Israel that analysts and officials see as more likely to initiate a full-scale war, because Hezbollah has indicated through its statements and relatively measured attacks that it wants to keep the fighting limited.

Such a conflict could rapidly escalate, and if the two sides start pummeling each other and causing huge damage, the U.S. and Hezbollah’s chief supporter, Iran, will face major pressure to get involved. Tehran and Washington already oppose each other’s regional presence, and in Iraq and Syria, U.S. forces and Iran-backed fighters are in close proximity, raising the human stakes of heightened tensions. A top pro-Iran militia in Iraq recently indicated that should Hezbollah face attacks, it would target U.S. interests.

(…) “We have let Israel face zero consequences for crossing all of our red lines in Gaza so they are emboldened and know they will face no consequences for going into Lebanon, despite us saying, ‘Don’t go there,’” argued the Defense Department official.

If Israel assumes it has full-tilt American support, it could deem it is best to try to weaken Hezbollah now, while many local civilians are out of the central part of the prospective war zone.

Biden is “pushing to not engage (in a war) but our saying ‘We will support Israel’ I don’t believe is helping,” another State Department official told HuffPost.
posted by cendawanita at 11:09 PM on September 17 (6 favorites)

Could someone explain to me what Netanyahu’s endgame is here?

I assume he has one and is not just doing Joker style fuck up everything he can type things.

But so far he’s:

1) Started a genocide via ethnic cleansing in Gaza that is straining the IDF and his budget

2) Expanded the invasion of the West Bank by “settlers” and is spending more scarce IDF resources there to protect the “settlers”.

3) Antagonized Iran, which isn’t exactly diffcult but he seems to have gone out of his way to do it.

4) And now provoking war with Lebanon via terrorist IED attacks.

I’m struggling to see how this matches up with his stated or a subtextual goals.

I can definitely see how invading Gaza and committing genocide matches up with both Netanyahu’s stated goal (“eradicating Hamas”) and his presumptive unstated goal (claiming 100% of all land he believes Israel should have). I don’t like it, I don’t agree with it, but it’s at least a semi-rational action given his starting axioms.

The second, increasing attacks in the West Bank, is also one that flows reasonably from his starting axioms. I think you can argue that he’s seriously overreaching and putting strain on his economy and military he shouldn’t be, but while I consider it immoral and wrong it’s consistent with his positions.

But 3 and 4 are just baffling.

Netanyahu is ALREADY engaged in a two front war that’s hurting his economy and putting stress on his military. Opening up two additional fronts, against two separate nations, one of which isn’t a pushover and has a military worthy of the name is baffling even when I try to look at it from Netanyahu’s POV.

Even if he assumes he can keep attacking other nations and then hiding behind America to thumb is nose at his victims it’s still wasting limited resources.

And maybe he has reason to think that regardless of how blatant his provocation is if Iran does mount a serious attack on Israel then the US is going to send it’s miliary in to defend Israel, but despite America’s horrifying submission to Israeli whim I’m not all that sure America would go to war against Iran if Israel started it.

On the pagers… I said it in the other thread and I think it’s still worth saying: this is going to result in a huge surge of paranoia, massive costs for dismantling all extant equipment for inspection, and a new regime of third party (or more likely, every antion that can bully their way into the deal) inspections at every step of every single manufacturing process for international goods.

Every laptop computer on the planet has places you could hide dozens of times the plastic explosive that seems to have been used in the pager attack.

Every car on the market is assembled out of black box componenents manufactured at facilities located all over the planet. It wouldn’t be trivial, but it would definitely be possible to conceal significant explosive material in any number of automobile components. It’s not like you need to sneek into a car factory all Mission Impossible style and plant big obvious blocks of C4 with blinking detonators. All it takes is compromising a single subcontractor for a single component.

This makes the PLC compromise the US used in it’s Stuxnet attack on Iran look harmless by comparison.

I have a Logitec mouse right beside me, with Bluetooth. I’ve never opened more than the battery compartment. I know that it’s assembled in China by workers slapping togetehr black box components sent to their factory from dozens of subsubsub contractors.

there’s no reason it couldn’t contain anything from a keylogger to a bomb.

We are all surrounded by dozens, if not hundreds, of potential bombs. I work at a nonprofit that’s of no particular interest to any international group. I don’t think I’m at any risk of anything. But if I was the FBI? CIA? Any branch of the US military. Any aerospace corporation? Any satellite contractor?

How many parts of every Starlink satellite Musk has orbited were from third party subcontractors? I’m betting quite a few. They could all be set to blow up, or record and retransmit information, or anything in between.

There’s going to be a huge monitary cost associated with efforts to secure supply chains and review every single device currently in use.
posted by sotonohito at 7:44 AM on September 18 (37 favorites)

The original pager attack was terrifying, unconscionable, and deeply sad, as is the follow-up attack today. I want to add some context to this thread about Lebanon and the war more generally.

1) WHAT IS HEZBOLLAH?

– Many Lebanese people I know hate Hezbollah, which has ensured there’s been no President in Lebanon for the last few years, may have been involved in the port explosion, and has assassinated journalists like Lokman Slim. That being said, the whole story is a complicated!

– Hezbollah was created from the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon in 1982. Who knows if it would’ve ever existed had Lebanon not been invaded? They forced out the invasion as recently as 2000.

– What makes Hezbollah unique is that it is both a militia and a political party that has representation in the Lebanese state: for example, there are Hezbollah members in the Lebanese parliament; the chair of the Media and Telecommunications Committee is Hezbollah. The Lebanese constitution created by the French colonialists essentially means that certain places will always be represented by a group like Hezbollah.

– As Suleiman Mourad writes in the New Left Review blog: “Far from being a puppet of Tehran, Hezbollah must be understood as a powerful political party with a strong militia and a significant influence in several countries beyond its native Lebanon – Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Yemen.”

2) THIS ATTACK TARGETED CIVILIANS IN VIOLATION OF INTERNATIONAL LAW.

– The Lebanese political system is a clientist, sectarian one and Hezbollah represents the people in the south, who have traditionally been the poor peasant farmers. This means that Hezbollah provides substantial services there, sort of between a mafia and a somewhat functional welfare state in a country that experienced the worst economic crash in world history. As Adam Tooze writes, for these people, Hezbollah provides electricity, solar panels, generators, banking, loans, and more.

– That means that you can’t really say that it’s okay just to kill any Hezbollah member because they’re terrorists, since that might include a loan officer at a bank, a solar panel installer, a congressman, an electrician–and all their families and the people they’re standing right next to.

– And that’s what’s happened! From the initial attack, I haven’t seen reports of fighters killed (something Hezbollah usually advertises). The two people killed were children.

– That attack was intended to kill civilians. As Aljazeera reported, the pagers were packed with metal balls so the shrapnel would shoot outwards and injure any bystanders who happened to be around.

– I think more generally, if you say that someone is terrorist, you’ll very quickly be okay with saying it’s okay to kill millions of those people because you’ve put them in the category of killable people. This seems bad!

3) THE CROSS-BORDER ATTACKS ARE QUALITATIVELY DIFFERENT.

– While a lot of news outlets talk of Hezbollah and the IDF “trading fire,” the nature of the attacks have been totally different in scale and intention.

– In August 2024, the BBC wrote: “Data gathered by the US-based Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (Acled) and analysed by the BBC suggest both sides together carried out a combined 7,491 cross-border attacks between 8 October 2023 and 5 July 2024. These figures indicated that Israel has carried out around five times as many as Hezbollah.”

– Since October, as Reuters reported, Israel set fire to Southern Lebanon and destroyed 40,000 olive trees, often using white phosphorus (against international law). White phosphorus is a chemical warfare agent that melts skin and poisons the land so it cannot be used for agriculture.

– A July 2024 strike killed children in the Golan Heights. Israel claims it was Hezbollah and Hezbollah denies it, with some claiming the strike came from an Iron Dome malfunction. What’s important here is that the people killed were Syrian Druze, many of whom want their territory to be part of Syria and who have been outspoken about not wanting to be politically exploited by either side.

4) A REMINDER THAT 300,000 (NOT 30,000) PEOPLE HAVE BEEN KILLED IN GAZA.

The Lancet estimated that the conflict would kill 186,000 by mid-June 2024. Writing in the Guardian, Prof Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, applied their methods to the present. She said that in Sept 2024, the number of people killed in Gaza is probably around 335,500. This is in a place where 40% of the population is children.
posted by johnasdf at 10:44 AM on September 18 (49 favorites)

Some are saying that ‘Metafilter doesn’t do Israel threads well’, which I would disagree with. I think Metafilter has got a lot better at discussions on relating to the modern state of Israel in the past 25 years, as mediareport has emphasised here, the quality of information is more important than how strongly someone holds an opinion. Some people still feel it is appropriate to bring energy into the room that may work in other settings, or with other groups, and it does serve to antagonise, but it is generally not tolerated by the mods or the other users because humanity is a core part of the Metafilter ethos.

What they bring in is quite DARVO in a lot of ways, and a classic rhetorical ploy which is in stark contrast to most of the rest of the dialogue. Painting a state that has just committed a terrorist atrocity as the perpetual victim is desperate, and requires wilful avoidance of the available evidence. The modern state of Israel is an incredibly paranoid and aggressive state, and it’s existence is reliant on it’s position as a de facto arm of the US military. Even with the US giving the Israeli military billions of dollars of weapons the state of Israel is in dire financial straits, as noted above. Media analysis from the 12 months before October 2023 shows regular and persistent calls for war with neighbours coming from government ministers. Coupled with the constant victim complex, this is classic fascist rhetoric. Things are not looking good for the modern state of Israel.

Belazel Smotrich current Finance Minister, and Adjunct to the Defence Department, mentioned upthread, wrote a guide to committing genocide against the Palestinians which was published in 2017 entitled Israel’s Decisive Plan (available online). The recent trajectory of the Israeli government follows the path of the ‘Smotrich doctrine’ to make life so miserable for any surviving Palestinians that they will choose to leave, and to kill as many as possible. The few other colonialist states that are continuing to support and abet the accelerated genocide being committed, which was telegraphed by the far right Israeli government prior to October 2023 as well as in Smotrich’s genocide guide, are going to be found legally culpable. European countries that enjoyed appearing as moral forces for good following WW2 have destroyed any remaining credibility by not withdrawing support for the Israeli government, and imposing violent subjugation on protesters against the genocide. The International Criminal Court will have to act, or become as decrepit as the reputation of Europe and the US. Calling everyone who isn’t in the in-group a terrorist is not going to cut it any more. Israel is a pariah state which is clearly out of control and committing the most documented genocide ever.

In addition to all of that, this latest war crime could bring a new era of violence. Not to trivialise it, but the annoyance to the global population if there are restrictions on battery powered devises might be enough to trigger worldwide support for BDS.

All because the colonialist powers have been unable to see past their desire to ‘destabilise’ all other regions of the globe, and have created the environment where the monster Netanyahu can cause mayhem while he tries to maintain his death grip on power.

And Biden could end it in a phone call if he could muster the moral backbone that Ronald Reagan showed. Ronald Reagan.
posted by asok at 5:19 PM on September 18 (24 favorites)

Hezbollah calls for the destruction of Israel

It’s hard to see this type of reasoning as anything but an attempt to justify heinous acts of violence.

We’ve been hearing this since Oct. 7th, since September 11th, etc. The state response will be 1000% times worse, because its revenge by a much more powerful force. The warmongers don’t even hide their intentions. Only after, the apologists come out to justify these actions, and speak in oh so reasonable terms.

Israel actions are disproportionate. Akin to if some kid punched my kid on the playground, and in return I went to the kids home, set it on fire, and burned their neighbors houses down for good measure.

I want to give you the benefit of the doubt here. I get it. Our machine devalues poor and brown lives, it’s so deeply written into every news media, that even NYTimes et al engage in the passive voice and other parlor tricks to make Palestinian deaths seem just a bit less – when in fact, the numbers are just so much more. Anyone loudly proclaiming “what about the hostages?” is really saying some lives matter more then others.

Justification of state violence needs to be called out and addressed when its trotted out. It’s nearly always accompanied with identifying as the victim, merely fighting for survival. Maybe look at Israeli media, and the right wing Zionists, who are very clear about what they want.

You talk about Hezbollah wanting Israel’s destruction? Right now, because of Israel’s actions, it’s all but ensuring that. What we need now is Netanyahu in his bunker, the regime toppled, Mossad and the IDF prosecuted. Israel as a state may survive. Germany post WWII still exists. But if action doesn’t happen soon, the world will stop seeing this as Netanyahu, and just see Israel, and it may be too late.
posted by iamck at 12:00 AM on September 19 (28 favorites)

Israel can’t but help to kill Lebanese too?

Well, to some people’s surprise, they find Israel isn’t killing people in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or Jordan. But rest assured, if they start firing 10,000 rockets into Israel, they will find themselves on the receiving end too. On Oct 7 I read the news and my first thought was, oh, Gaza is going to get smashed. Then on Oct 8 Hezbollah starts shooting at Israel too, I’m like, Israel isn’t going to forget, they’re eventually going to turn around and head north.

Also Hezbollah choosing to buy product from Europe, despite sanctions, when they could have bought their communications devices from China to begin with, for cheaper? Big brains all around there too.

Even Malaysia (along with around 60 other countries) considers Hezbollah a terrorist organization. I’m surprised they managed to obtain comms from Europe to begin with. We’re not supposed to be selling them anything!

A requirement from clients, is that the whole manufacturing process must be done inside China.

Compromising a manufacturing facility in Taiwan or Europe is borderline fantasy, if that’s what they’re thinking. How would you even smuggle high explosive materials through border control in Taiwan or Europe, and compromise the production process for several days / weeks during their manufacture – ensuring all the line workers and supervisors don’t realise anything despite stringent quality controls?

Far simpler to just buy a pallet of 5,000 pagers yourself, modify them, then intercept the shipment Hezbollah ordered en-route and quickly replace a single pallet of product with your tampered products.

The pagers in question had a 3 month layover at port awaiting clearances (Al-Jazeera) and swapping them out would have taken just a few minutes.
posted by xdvesper at 4:07 AM on September 19 (2 favorites)

Far simpler to just buy a pallet of 5,000 pagers yourself, modify them, then intercept the shipment Hezbollah ordered en-route and quickly replace a single pallet of product with your tampered products.

Ah, so boycotting Israel as a shipping port not to mention other ports in the route too?

lol at the requirement that we say “The Israeli government, who as we all know have nothing to do with Israel as a country”…

RIP international sports commentary. Let’s start with Olympics thread. But my sympathies nevertheless to the people who didn’t vote for Biden (is that how it works?). And where does that leave us with the Lebanese who both may or may not have any Hezb affiliations?

Hmm I wonder if there’s something in the (propaganda) air… Pixie Of Death (Israeli; gone anonymous too): Spent the last 15 minutes listening to an Israeli radio segment about the fact that international law experts are criticizing Israel’s explosive device-rigging in Lebanon, and the level of contempt Israelis have for international law is only matched by their ignorance about it.

Because coincidentally, I have these open in my tabs:

Just Security: Law of War Questions Raised by Exploding Pagers in Lebanon

And from a military lawyer writing for the Lieber Institute in West Point: Exploding Pagers and the Law –

Targeting a device that it is known that the adverse party to the conflict has issued to persons who are lawful targets would not at first glance appear to be an indiscriminate act. The object itself, the pager, if it has been issued for military purposes (e.g. to promote effective communication between commanders and subordinate units and personnel) can be classed as a military objective and thus as a lawful target with the consequence that attacking that pager, destroying it or damaging it are lawful activities.

If the target comprises the persons to whom the pagers have been issued, and if they are classed as fighters in the NIAC, then again in principle the targeting of those individuals will be lawful (International Institute of Humanitarian Law, Manual on the Law of Non-International Armed Conflict, para. 1.1.2.). If, however, it is known that the pagers are likely to be in the possession of persons who cannot be classed as fighters, for example because the individuals in question have exclusively diplomatic, political or administrative roles for Hezbollah and have no combat-related function, such persons should be categorised as civilians, and it would not be lawful to target them.

A key component of the precautions that attackers must take is the duty to take care to spare civilians and civilian objects. This implies a duty to ensure in advance of the attack as far as possible that the attack is directed at a lawful target and that the proportionality rule, explained earlier, will not be breached. Yoram Dinstein makes the vitally important point as follows:

In any post-event analysis, there is a temptation to scrutinize the situation with the benefit of knowledge of the facts as they unfolded rather than as foreseen at the time of the attack. The temptation must be strongly resisted: a post-event reviewer must put himself in the shoes of the planner, decision-maker or actor in real time (possessed with the information actually at his disposal, faulty as it may turn out to have been) (p. 190).
posted by cendawanita at 4:55 AM on September 19 (9 favorites)

I… Don’t know how to square this assertion with the realities of modern shipping plus the need to keep this within opsec limits without implicating a whole portfull of people.

Goods being held for 3 months at port due to legal / customs / tariff related issues – would be placed in an inactive warehouse that literally no one visits for maybe weeks at a time. As opposed to the regular high-traffic warehouse which sees a high volume of shipping and traffic.

I’m not saying it’s trivial, but that it’s at the least 10x easier than the theory that an active manufacturing production line was compromised. These have all sorts of quality control processes and checks and are humming with people.

Having worked in both warehouse operations where we had had stock we literally hadn’t touched for 5 years, and a manufacturing production line. We had automated processes that sort of worked like the “defrag” function of old hard disks (before we went to SSDs) where the algorithm could predict low traffic goods and arrange for them to be stored in the old decrepit warehouse full of asbestos warning signs and zero automation right in the back corner of the site that no one goes to. The most high traffic goods go to the most modern warehouses on site with picking automation. Random thieves still somehow managed to steal stuff from our site despite physical barriers and a 24 hour security detail that patrols the perimeter at random times.

As per the size, the pagers are 7.3cm x 5cm x 2.7cm for a volume of 99cm3. Very conservatively assume the packaging (both individually, and cardboard for boxes of 100 each) adds 10% dead volume, you’re at 108cm3. A standard Euro pallet is 120cm x 80cm x 220cm for a volume of 2,112,000 cm3.

This means you could put 19,482 pagers into a single Euro pallet.

The “battery contamination” theory from Handala is even more insane than compromising the manufacturer. You manufacture batteries with explosives in them, fine – but say the pager company buys a million batteries from you – how do you even control who they sell it to? Does this mean pagers in literally every country in the world right now are bombs, why haven’t they blown up yet? How do you also infiltrate the software and wiring in the pager to ensure a wire lead connects to the explosives? Do Israeli companies not only manufacture the batteries, but also the wiring, and write the software? And also conveniently control 90% of x-ray security systems in the world as alleged so these could be shipped without being detected? Jews would literally have to control the entire world for this theory to be true, or the entire world would have to be united against Hezbollah and complicit in this plan.

Ah, so boycotting Israel as a shipping port not to mention other ports in the route too?

Unlikely this would help either as they certainly were not shipped via Israel… it had to be done with Israeli agents infiltrating a foreign port. Actually, if I was concerned that Israel would target my country, I would go a step further and ban the entry of any Israeli national as well as immediately expelling any Israelis in the country, since they are to be considered a security threat. Also, anyone with an Israeli passport stamp on their passport (indicating they had passed through Israel) would also be banned or expelled on suspicion of being a collaborator. Oh wait, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, and many other Muslim countries already do that today…
posted by xdvesper at 6:54 PM on September 20 (1 favorite)

Almost inevitably this thread may have to metastasize along with Israel’s wartime strategy as Lebanon is now getting the Palestine treatment —

Guardian: Dozens dead as Israel launches strikes on Lebanon after evacuation warnings –

Lebanon says at least 50 killed and Israel says it has hit 300 targets, after thousands in Lebanon advised to flee homes (missing a couple of quote marks there methinks)

Haaretz: Israeli Minister Claims Lebanon Cannot Be Defined as State, IDF Should Establish ‘Buffer Zone’ Inside Its Territory –

Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli said that given the Lebanese government’s ‘failure to exercise its sovereignty over Hezbollah-controlled southern Lebanon,’ the IDF had the right to ‘take over’ areas from which missiles could be fired into Israel (ungated)

Oh hey, a preview: …. in light of Lebanese government’s “failure to exercise its sovereignty over Hezbollah-controlled southern Lebanon,” the Israel Defense Forces had the right and responsibility to “take over” any area from which missiles have been, or could be, fired into Israel.

(…) He also added that by the same reasoning, Syria and Iraq do not qualify as states either.

(…) “In light of these facts,” Chikli wrote, “the State of Israel has a duty to exercise its sovereignty, to protect its citizens instead of keeping them away from their homes, and to repel and keep the enemy away.”

Axios (Ravid, basically): U.S. fears war in Lebanon but hopes Israeli attacks push Hezbollah to a deal

Oh I see: The big picture: Israeli officials said their increasing attacks against Hezbollah are not intended to lead to war but are an attempt to reach “de-escalation through escalation.”

– The officials said Israel believes putting more pressure on Hezbollah could push the militia to agree to a diplomatic deal that would return citizens to northern Israel and southern Lebanon irrespective of the deadlocked negotiations to establish a ceasefire in Gaza.

– U.S. officials told Axios they recognize Israel’s rational and agree with it, but stress this is an “extremely difficult calibration” that could easily go out of control and lead to an all-out war.

Gregg Carlstrom (Economist MidEast correspondent) commenting: The White House has basically given up trying to steer events in the Middle East and is betting the farm on the hope that Israel’s government, which turned its Gaza war into a strategic disaster, will somehow prove to be a strategic genius in Lebanon.

Hah (as this came out before today): The Biden administration asked Israel to refrain from actions like a ground invasion or wide-ranging airstrikes in civilian areas that could escalate the conflict to a war and shut down diplomatic efforts, Israeli and U.S. officials said.

Zeteo: Is the US Trying to Pick a Fight With Hezbollah?

The DNC quietly added platform language hinting at a US escalation in Lebanon.

Erik Sperling, executive director of Just Foreign Policy, warns as much. “This language results from the Biden-Harris administration adopting AIPAC’s extreme regional agenda but giving it a softer edge with ‘Rules-Based International Order’ framing,” he told me, referring to the America Israel Public Affairs Committee. “Now that Israel has seen the previously unimaginable levels of mass killing the US will permit, it’s likely only a matter of time before we see further escalation in Lebanon.”

+972: What Israelis don’t want to hear about Iran and Hezbollah –

For years, Israeli expert Ori Goldberg has tried to challenge commonly-held assumptions about the Islamic Republic and its allies. Will anyone listen?

(Can you explain the significance of this week’s attack on Hezbollah and Lebanon? Why did Israel choose to attack now rather than during a more open phase of the war in the north?)

Israel has no strategy, it excels in tactics only. The reason the pagers and cell phones exploded now is because Israel clearly planned this operation months in advance, and felt like it had to strike while the iron is hot. This is no different than the assassination of Haniyeh. Israel works according to necessities and constraints that it creates for itself.

This attack is a blow to Hezbollah’s image, since Israel shows that it has intelligence superior to everyone else in the region. But on the other hand, it reveals the limits of Israel’s power. I think Israel wants Hezbollah to start a full-blown war — Netanyahu doesn’t feel he has a mandate from the public to start that war, so he needs Hezbollah to launch it. But Hezbollah has repeatedly said that it began firing (after October 7) in solidarity with Gaza, and will settle its account with Israel in the future.

(…) Before we move on, I want to point out the false assumption (of Israelis) in your question — that Hezbollah will continue attacking until Israel is destroyed, for the simple reason that this is Hezbollah’s raison d’etre. That’s simply not true. Israel is Hezbollah’s enemy and the group certainly fights it, but it also has a number of weaknesses vis-a-vis Israel, most prominently that as opposed to Israel, a sovereign state recognized by the UN, Hezbollah is a non-state actor.

Instead of taking advantage of those weaknesses, Israel turns to targeted assassinations, killing Hezbollah’s military leadership deep in Lebanese territory. Meanwhile, Hezbollah accumulates intelligence on Israel, ravages the north, and pins down much of the states’ military capabilities — which is exactly what it said it would do from the beginning.

(…) You would think that Israel has an interest in strengthening the Lebanese state in order to undermine Hezbollah, and the way to do that is to sign an agreement between the two countries. (But Israelis) will argue that this kind of agreement is meaningless when Hezbollah wants to annihilate Israel. And again you’re back to square one. If your working assumption is that Hezbollah and Iran are entirely dedicated to nothing more than wiping out Israel, then you have no choice but to wipe them out yourself.

You see how this exact logic is playing out in Gaza. Israelis say they do not want to kill Palestinian civilians, but (will also say) is it really our fault that Hamas surrounds itself with human shields and hides among civilians? And if we dig deeper, won’t we find out that those same civilians expressed joy on October 7? Or maybe they are allowing the Hamas fighters to enter humanitarian zones? Or maybe all the children who are born in Gaza are going to grow up to be terrorists? So what difference does it make who we kill?

The question isn’t whether Israel or Hezbollah is in the right, but how we can imagine a future. When you sign a peace agreement with an enemy, you don’t know whether it will hold up its end of the deal. You try to build yourselves guarantees, but you build them knowing that you have an interest in making peace. Israel consistently works to achieve the exact opposite.
posted by cendawanita at 8:23 AM on September 23 (14 favorites)

I believe this escalation was mostly predictable. The Washington Institute’s analysis concludes on Aug 6 that the 30,000 Hezbollah fighters at the border will prevent 60,000 Israelis from returning home despite the fact the border security has been beefed up from just two battalions (600 soldiers) up to forty battalions – and that maintaining forty battalions isn’t tenable, as they need to rest and resupply after the campaign in Gaza. So what is unsaid is that there is a very limited window to act – either a massive strike now to secure their border, or stand down their soldiers and admit defeat. The second option is politically untenable, so… a decapitating first strike it is.

Hezbollah has long been considered the most well armed non-state actor in the world, with estimates they have around 100,000 rockets primed and ready to fire at Israel in a lower tech mutually assured destruction play similar to North Korea and their artillery batteries aimed at Seoul. This is ostensibly stayed Israel’s hand over the past year, with a relatively minimal response to the 10,000 or so rockets fired across the border.

Perhaps Israel feels confident enough to gamble with a decapitation strike because it’s degraded enough of Hezbollah’s command and control with their communications attack, so any retaliation would be weaker and uncoordinated.

Given how Israel’s right wing leadership has been accused of being fascist, I can’t help but notice the similarity to Starship Troopers, where Sargent Zim says “The enemy cannot push a button, if you disable his hand.”

Some video footage of the exchange of fire yesterday –

Strike on building sets off a rocket stored inside, shooting out and hitting the building next to it.

Burning building cooks off a rocket inside which spirals into the building next to it.

Burning building with a rocket engine cooking off inside. Distinctive pulsing sound and light effect from a damaged rocket engine cooking off.

Burning building with a rocket engine cooking off inside. Similar cook off as above but at slower frequency.

Iron Dome interceptions over Haifa.

Hezbollah rocket strikes highway in Israel.
posted by xdvesper at 4:06 AM on September 24