5 ms·

According to that definition they are: "booby traps – objects that civilians are likely to be attracted to or are associated with normal civilian daily use"

abracadaniel 2y ago
That would hold true for something like a pay phone, but a personal electronic device, only used by the combatant, would not be associated with civilian use.
- newspaper1 2y ago
  A pager is a piece of consumer electronics definitely associated with civilian use. There's a story about a little girl who tried to hand her dad his pager from the dinner table and it blew up in her face. Civilians will not expect consumer tech devices to be bombs.
  - dralley 2y ago
    Her father wasn't a civilian. Had this been some other kind of strike, like a 500lb bomb, it still would have been considered legal collateral damage.
- anigbrowl 2y ago
  You're assuming your premise as your conclusion. I am not at all convinced about how many of those targeted yesterday actually qualify as combatants. Also, just because a combatant owns something does not make the thing military. Pagers are commonly used by people in emergency services, industrial technicians, and so on.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    These pagers work only on Hezbollah's own military network. Lebanon literally had a civil war about this specific issue! People are doing a lot of axiomatic reasoning here about stuff they can look up.
    - newspaper1 2y ago
      How would you even know which network a pager was on just by looking at it? They were thousands of bombs disguised as consumer devices in circulation in public. There are new reports that other consumer devices may also have been rigged with explosives.
      - tptacek 2y ago
        I have no idea, but you could not use a Hezbollah pager for your job as an industrial technician, which was the claim made by the comment I'm replying to.
        newspaper1 2y ago
        That's not what they said. Pagers are used by civilians, no one would be on guard around them, they are not considered to be weapons. If you saw someone in a grocery store with a pager, you wouldn't distance yourself from them.
        tptacek 2y ago
        I don't agree but also don't care to litigate this point; the only point I'm on this thread to make is that no professional who routinely carries a pager could have mistakenly been carrying a Hezbollah pager. Also: it is interesting that Hezbollah literally fought a war over phone systems in Lebanon! The rest: these are some of the most complicated conflicts in the world and we're not going to settle anything on HN. I don't begrudge you your take, I just had those two claims to make.
        newspaper1 2y ago
        Children were wounded and killed because they picked up these pagers (which they assumed to be safe). Explosives were distributed into public disguised as innocuous consumer devices, it's actually not that complicated.
- dtornabene 2y ago
  according to who? A little girl was killed today precisely because she picked up someones pager. On top of that solar panels (!!!) are blowing up across Lebanon right now, do those count? Are those somehow incontrovertibly "associated" with a combatant?
  - tptacek 2y ago
    I think the solar panel thing isn't confirmed? And so far as I've seen, it's only reported to have happened in on place in Dahieh. If it is confirmed, you'll also be waiting for reporting and evidence that it was a supply chain attack on solar panels (seems unlikely), or a direct attack on that building. (It seems unlikely to me because we have reason to believe the handsets and pagers shared a contract manufacturer or distributor. Mossad isn't like Gambit from the X-Men; they can't just make random things blow up.)
    - dtornabene 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - dang 2y ago
        You've been breaking the site guidelines badly in this thread, as well as using HN primarily for political battle over recent months. We have to ban accounts that do those things, regardless of how right you are or feel you are, and regardless of how other commenters are behaving. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
        dtornabene 2y ago
        Pretty telling that it is me, and not your top karma poster, who is getting this reprimand. You are welcome to ban me, and I'm not going to appeal or beg to stay here, its your site after all. But if all I had to do to make my account more palatable to you was mix in the occasional comment on a js framework, or cooking, or exploit development, while continuing to pour out anti-arab racism, as Thomas here has done, repeatedly, for months, than maybe you are doing me the favor. I have yet to see a single comment from you about that. For the record I have reviewed your the guidelines, and I stand by everything I've posted here. I don't use this site "primarily for political battle", in fact I have avoided "political" threads for years. If posting things like "all Palestinians belong in Jordan" as Thomas has done, in threads just like this, for months, isn't something worth responding to directly by you than your rules don't mean much. Or simply apply to less useful people. EDIT: I forgot about the part where Thomas here tells pacifist jews they are "getting close to the blood libel". That didn't merit a response from you either. Classy stuff dang.

abracadaniel 2y ago

That would hold true for something like a pay phone, but a personal electronic device, only used by the combatant, would not be associated with civilian use.

newspaper1 2y ago
A pager is a piece of consumer electronics definitely associated with civilian use. There's a story about a little girl who tried to hand her dad his pager from the dinner table and it blew up in her face. Civilians will not expect consumer tech devices to be bombs.
- dralley 2y ago
  Her father wasn't a civilian. Had this been some other kind of strike, like a 500lb bomb, it still would have been considered legal collateral damage.
anigbrowl 2y ago
You're assuming your premise as your conclusion. I am not at all convinced about how many of those targeted yesterday actually qualify as combatants. Also, just because a combatant owns something does not make the thing military. Pagers are commonly used by people in emergency services, industrial technicians, and so on.
- tptacek 2y ago
  These pagers work only on Hezbollah's own military network. Lebanon literally had a civil war about this specific issue! People are doing a lot of axiomatic reasoning here about stuff they can look up.
  - newspaper1 2y ago
    How would you even know which network a pager was on just by looking at it? They were thousands of bombs disguised as consumer devices in circulation in public. There are new reports that other consumer devices may also have been rigged with explosives.
    - tptacek 2y ago
      I have no idea, but you could not use a Hezbollah pager for your job as an industrial technician, which was the claim made by the comment I'm replying to.
      - newspaper1 2y ago
        That's not what they said. Pagers are used by civilians, no one would be on guard around them, they are not considered to be weapons. If you saw someone in a grocery store with a pager, you wouldn't distance yourself from them.
        tptacek 2y ago
        I don't agree but also don't care to litigate this point; the only point I'm on this thread to make is that no professional who routinely carries a pager could have mistakenly been carrying a Hezbollah pager. Also: it is interesting that Hezbollah literally fought a war over phone systems in Lebanon! The rest: these are some of the most complicated conflicts in the world and we're not going to settle anything on HN. I don't begrudge you your take, I just had those two claims to make.
        newspaper1 2y ago
        Children were wounded and killed because they picked up these pagers (which they assumed to be safe). Explosives were distributed into public disguised as innocuous consumer devices, it's actually not that complicated.
dtornabene 2y ago
according to who? A little girl was killed today precisely because she picked up someones pager. On top of that solar panels (!!!) are blowing up across Lebanon right now, do those count? Are those somehow incontrovertibly "associated" with a combatant?
- tptacek 2y ago
  I think the solar panel thing isn't confirmed? And so far as I've seen, it's only reported to have happened in on place in Dahieh. If it is confirmed, you'll also be waiting for reporting and evidence that it was a supply chain attack on solar panels (seems unlikely), or a direct attack on that building. (It seems unlikely to me because we have reason to believe the handsets and pagers shared a contract manufacturer or distributor. Mossad isn't like Gambit from the X-Men; they can't just make random things blow up.)
  - dtornabene 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - dang 2y ago
      You've been breaking the site guidelines badly in this thread, as well as using HN primarily for political battle over recent months. We have to ban accounts that do those things, regardless of how right you are or feel you are, and regardless of how other commenters are behaving. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
      - dtornabene 2y ago
        Pretty telling that it is me, and not your top karma poster, who is getting this reprimand. You are welcome to ban me, and I'm not going to appeal or beg to stay here, its your site after all. But if all I had to do to make my account more palatable to you was mix in the occasional comment on a js framework, or cooking, or exploit development, while continuing to pour out anti-arab racism, as Thomas here has done, repeatedly, for months, than maybe you are doing me the favor. I have yet to see a single comment from you about that. For the record I have reviewed your the guidelines, and I stand by everything I've posted here. I don't use this site "primarily for political battle", in fact I have avoided "political" threads for years. If posting things like "all Palestinians belong in Jordan" as Thomas has done, in threads just like this, for months, isn't something worth responding to directly by you than your rules don't mean much. Or simply apply to less useful people. EDIT: I forgot about the part where Thomas here tells pacifist jews they are "getting close to the blood libel". That didn't merit a response from you either. Classy stuff dang.