Technology

Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of violence against non-combatants to achieve political or ideological aims.

While it's likely there were civilians hurt by this, the target was undeniably Hesbollah. So no, not terrorism.

Why is it okay for them to bomb Lebanon as well?

no way it was just the batteries.

batteries burn but don't detonate with shrapnel

it was altered devices with explosives added.

Probably not. It was almost certainly the case that these pagers were already connected to explosives, probably to be IEDs. All Israel would have had to do is page the pagers to detonate them. I can’t think of any other logical explanation.

Yeah, I've been wondering how the fuck they pulled this off. If it turns out that the only pagers that exploded belonged to Hezbollah members, then that would signal to me that this was done entirely digitally.

I've heard that batteries (can't remember if it was laptop or phone batteries) contain the energy of a small grenade, but getting it to release that energy all at once without physical access is absolutely fucking wild and has serious fucking implications for device security.

EDIT: To avoid spreading misinformation, I'm providing this edit to say that the batteries absolutely were not the cause of the explosion. This was a supply-chain attack. Explosives were inserted into the pagers. The batteries in these pagers cannot be made to explode like this. I was overly excited when I made this comment.

During the last month there were not 1, not 10, not 100 but 807 alerts in Israel for missile attacks. Some of them weren't fired by Hezbollah, and some might have been the same alert in different areas, but that's still about 7 missile PER DAY even if we assume only 1 in 4 alerts was due to an attack by Hezbollah (side note: during the entire war, about 2,000 missile were launched from Lebanon to Israel, that's an average of about 6 per day). In addition to this, there were 452 aircraft intrusion alerts. Most of these attacks are against civilian targets.

Right now, there are about 79 thousand people (around 0.8% of total population) who are still evicted for nearly a year from northern Israel.

And just in case it needs to be said - the first attack was made by Hezbollah (on Oct. 8th) and without any provocation by Israel.

Not only is this a situation no sovereign country can stand, but it's also a violation of the Lebanon-approved UN Security Council's resolution 1701, that was the basis for ending the 2006 Lebanon War. Hell, just having missiles in the area is by itself a violation of the resolution.

Regarding political reasoning - A war in Lebanon is actually bad for Netanyahu. His interest is a slow-burning war so he can prolong the current situation as much as possible (once the war is over, the pubic will demand an election). In fact, that's probably the main reason you had "a missile here and a bomb there" and not an actual war.

I wonder if you wouldve said the same thing about 9/11

Its not rocket science how they did it. What is the impressive part? Are we really just going to say civilians don't matter? Is it impressive to you because of how many people were hurt?

In no way is it required to respect the craft or the method.

These were pagers specifically ordered by Hezbollah. Random civilians wouldn't have had them.

Why did he have the pager tho?

NYT has a link up which it claims has been verified. It is a video of someone at a market who had one of these in their messenger bag. The video shows a decent size explosion, which blew a big hole in the bag and knocked the guy to the ground.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/09/17/world/israel-hamas-war-news/44771255-fd1d-5028-8228-aff0ca5b8139

I doubt you could make an explosion that big with a AA battery. They must have planted the stuff in some massive supply chain hack.