"Cohen (former head of Mossad) insisted that the publicly recognized success against Hezbollah was merely one element of a far wider, systematic deployment of sophisticated devices worldwide, although notably abscent in the Gaza Strip."
His claim there did not necessarily imply rigged explosives, but supply chain attacks either for surveillance or assassination purposes.
And his limiting it to "virtually every potential theater" would suggest that it's mostly present in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, most likely Iraq as well.
But let's be honest here, this isn't civilian equipment that's been compromised. It's supply chain attacks where the buyer is manipulated into buying goods that they've tampered with, or re-engineered. They weren't pagers anyone could pick up at Radio Shack. (Everyone who got hit was a target, or a direct relative of a target.)
Or just standing next to someone in the line at the supermarket.
Also, lets be clear and admit that if your notion of "target" is "anyone close to a device I sold years ago", you're not the type of person that cares if the balled up paper made it to the trash can: so long as it left your hand you would be satisfied.
The pager operation has been one of the most targeted ones in history for its size. The ratio of civilian by Hezbollah member casualties was very low compared to other military operations or a war.
The perpetrators of pager attack had no way at all to know who would be closest to the pagers when they exploded, nor any way to know that the nominal owner of a particular pager were a combatant in the first place.
So the perpetrators did not know they would actually hurt a lawful target, they just hoped it might.
Oh yeah, just random chance that the Hezbollah combatants would have their military pagers close to them rather than with some random civilian. What an incredible coincidence!
Go get some life. I believe Hitler had the same mentality. Reducing casualty. He asked everyone to wear their stars if they had had circumcision and targeted them systematically. He could have bombed them all but decided to be more deliberate. Yes yes, flipping the script is antisemitism. Of course it is.
Completely bizarre how you are equating killing Hezbollah combatants (a terrorist group known for indiscriminately firing tens of thousands of rockets targeting civilians) with the Nazis exterminating millions of (obviously peaceful) Jewish people simply for being Jews.
You keep repeating than an operation, functionally equivalent to poisoning the water in an area you have seen combatants, is "targeted". It simply isn't, and you are just lying to yourself to feel better about the war crimes you support.
A water source the entire population of an area relies upon is in no way the same as a specific, small organization's private means of communication that it distributed to its members.
Or are you under the impression Israel simply loaded a Lebanese RadioShack with explosive pagers and hoped Hezbollah would be the ones buying them? You could argue that it was not discriminate because there were pagers distributed to civilian Hezbollah members, who may not have been valid targets, but that is not the same argument.
Every bit of reporting on it tries heart-string tugging, just to quietly reveal one of the unintended targets picked up the pager to bring it to a Hezbollah member father, uncle, or brother.
Wait but all the Israeli reporting is the same. Flipping the script, how many military age abled men/women were taken as prisoners? I’d argue y’all over obsess on the few elderly/young ones they took. They weren’t targeted, they just happened to be the grandmothers, sons, nephews of IDF reserve/active members. This sounds good dum dum?
How does one accidentally kidnap someone like Kfir Bibas? A kidnapper has to be physically present, at which point it's rather obvious that a baby is not a soldier.
I bet they feared for his life. Leaving a kid there could have meant death for him/her. Knowing the kind of weird cultist behaviors certain Israeli groups exhibit. Not to talk about fratricide. ;) certainly better than distributing fentanyl laced diapers. A kid could have worn those
I'm confused: you acknowledge the possibility that there could be non-valid targets in Hezbollah, yet you cannot see parallels to the case of an attack against a water supply?
The one distinction I can see you raise is about the spatial concentration of the affected persons, but I don't see how this essential to the point.
You are of course free to put your delineations such that the matter of concentration results in two different arguments, but frankly I think you should just reject the use of analogies altogether and save everyone else a lot of grief.
I do not argue that civilian members of Hezbollah as a political movement are unacceptable targets, I simply acknowledge that perspective exists.
And the location of the target is entirely the point when the alternative to the pager attack is a JDAM, an attack with greater collateral damage, but still a valid target. Imagine instead of an explosive charge, these pagers were somehow phoning home and providing location data that Israel could use to perform airstrikes. Based on that intel, those air strikes would be entirely legitimate, and they would include far more collateral damage than the charge in the pager.
An attack on the water supply is indiscriminate. A water supply poisoning makes no attempt at differentiating between the targets and the civilian population.
By your own definition that same civilian population is 1) actively sponsoring genocide through their vote and their taxes, 2) actively supporting it through military service. Aren’t Israelis using the same language for Palestinian these days?
Btw, y’all called the old Mandela terrorist too. No one cares who you call terrorist.
Also, it's interesting you think the comment about Hitler being more careful in his targeting than the IDF is persuasive enough you need to reply to it.
Unfortunately there is an unimaginable amount of ignorance on the internet so I think it's good to be very explicit about even the most basic things. I would also reply if it were some other insane comment saying that e.g. the Holocaust didn't happen or that "Hitler was right".
Now can you be explicit about what you are implying? You are implying that I found the comment persuasive. If I chastised some absurd comment saying that the Holocaust didn't happened or that "Hitler was right", would you say that implies I actually think those things are true?
I did not imply anything, I stated outright what I meant to say.
However, to clarify further I will say that your reply seems to indicate you confuse the property of being "persuasive" with the state of being "persuaded"
>And his limiting it to "virtually every potential theater" would suggest that it's mostly present in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, most likely Iraq as well.
Except we don't know. "virtually every potential theater" is intentionally very vague language that could mean anything.
That's actually a great point. Out of the hundreds of pagers that were out in the wild you'd think one of them went through an airport check at some point and got flagged.
Why would it get flagged? Weren't they just slightly modified pagers essentially rigged to overheat, rather than they actually put explosives in them?
Besides, if I was in a terrorist cell, had a pager for communicating, and was taking a vacation flight, I think I might leave that pager behind for a week.
They weren't flagged because they went into Lebanon which has very little import security, and because it was a supply chain attack.
The batteries were swapped for a combination battery / explosive charge. The follow-up attack where Hezbollah moved to using walkie-talkies that were also rigged to explode was the real shocker, though.
Today they are targeting people shooting rockets, tomorrow they will target people commenting on these posts, the day after they will target specific group of people.
So you may be safe today, what happens when they don't like your opinion ?
> limit the number of apps ... lower attack surface ... If paranoid
While true in general, super apps that do too many things and used by billions (WhatsApp, Chrome, TikTok, Instagram, CleanMaster etc) are big enough of an attack surface already.
Defenses (compile-time / runtime memory safety & control flow integrity, media coders/decoders, sandboxes, for example) are getting better & so exploits are getting expensive.
> use a different device to access suspicios apps/sites with nothing on it
While using different devices is good enough, it requires the end user to maintain strict isolation (and sometimes may require appropriate features from the OS). Using burners is an extreme version of this practice.
Burners seem extreme, but old used hardware still seems the best and only way you can sort of prove isolation on your own.
You can't trust software not to be buggy and both, hardware, and software not to be purposely compromised because "think of the children" (that the EFs proved to be BS).
I find it interesting that Apple has spun Lockdown mode from a 'we are terrible at security' into a feature for marketing.
Now when someone gets hacked Apple can say: "Well they weren't in lockdown mode, its their own fault."
Gosh I wish I was as good at marketing as Apple. They really need to sell their marketing team as a service. If they did that, I'd buy their stock outright.
iOS generally seems harder than non-GrapheneOS Android, taking a few months for Cellebrite to catch up with. All the other Android phones/variants should make people cry because device security is so bad.
If paranoid, use a different device to access suspicios apps/sites with nothing on it.