Do you consider it worse than conventional alternatives, such as artillery strikes, even if the latter is likely to result in a worse civilian casualty ratio?
Also, if booby traps aren't considered a legitimate tactic in a military conflict, why does noone complain when, say, Ukraine mines a field?
Booby traps and land mines are legally distinct (and, within land mines, anti-personnel and anti-vehicle land mines are distinct), but its also not the case that no one complains about the use of mines, booby-traps, etc., by both parties in the Russia-Ukraine War.
Well, Russia isn't a party to the Ottawa Treaty. Ukraine hasn't formally withdrawn yet, but has hinted that they consider adherence impractical.
Stepping back though, there are literally millions of mines hidden in Ukraine, creating a vastly greater danger for civilians. Legal or not, for the most part noone cares.
Why are we here scrutinizing Israel for a form of booby-trapping which is vastly smaller in scale, much easier to clean up (figuring out which devices are compromised vs demining 174,000 km^2), and more targeted?
(1) Ukraine is using its mines defensively. Israel's use in this instance is intrinsically offensive.
(2) The scale is entirely different - but completely orthogonal to that: Do you see a difference between (per what Ukraine is doing) leaving devices around in areas which are mostly depopulated by now anyway, where people generally know that mines are likely to be there, and which will most likely be clearly enough marked on maps after all of this is over; and in a society where there is basically a solid social consensus that this war needs to be fought, and laying mines out on the frontlines is one of the many heavy costs that they will need to bear in order to bring the war to its necessary end --
And (per what the Mossad is doing) consciously triggering these devices, knowing full well (as they must have) that a 1:2 civilian-military ratio of fatalities and maimings (the current boxscore on this per WP) was not just possible, but entirely to be expected? In a population that definitely did not chose to be at war (or even to support a necessary defensive war like Ukraine is doing), and where the targetted/responsible party is but one faction among many?
Israel is defending itself against Hezbollah. Hezbollah started the current Israel-Hezbollah conflict on Oct 8, the day after the Hamas-led attack. They can end it at any time by merely stopping their bombardment of Israel, but they have indicated that they don't plan to stop until there's an end to the Gaza conflict, which they are not a party to. Of course self-defense sometimes involves preemptive strikes, like Ukraine striking Russian airfields.
We'll have to see how effective future demining efforts are, but historically, civilian casualties from unexploded mines have been quite significant. Despite the risks, Ukraine can't realistically stop inhabiting 20-30% of its territory indefinitely.
Where do you get 1:2 from? There isn't much credible information yet about civilian vs militant deaths. What we do know is that the 5,000 affected pagers were ordered by Hezbollah and issued to its members. Less is known about other devices.
> What we do know is that the 5,000 affected pagers were ordered by Hezbollah and issued to its members.
Even if that is true, the fact remains that "Hezbollah members" and "combatants" are not, even to a first approximation, the same thing; Hezbollah is a political party that has an armed wing and also has a substantial civilian social services (including healthcare) operation.
I meant "offensive" in the operational sense (as in, "going on the offensive"). So the distinction is between bringing flaming hot death (FHD) to your opponent (on their territory) vs. leaving FHD devices on your own territory for them to stumble upon.
In that sense we can say Ukraine's current operation in Kursk is operationally offensive, even though the war itself is entirely defensive on Ukraine's part of course. (One might still disagree that Israel's current adventure in Lebanon is overall "defensive", due to factors you haven't mentioned, but that is also completely orthogonal the distinction we are clarifying here).
Where do you get 1:2 from?
From the source I indicated ("per WP"), though the acronym may not have been clear:
The total death toll from the attacks stood at 37, and included at least 12 civilians killed according to Lebanese authorities, including a 9-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy. At least two health workers were also killed.
Which in turn cites L'Orient-Le Jour, ABC, AP, CNN, WSJ, and the BBC. I don't know what sources you might find more credible, but these do appear to be in rough agreement at least, and I'll take them as a decent enough approximation to the truth for the time being.
What we do know is that the 5,000 affected pagers were ordered by Hezbollah and issued to its members.
That was the theory, anyway. Mossad also knew that many of these devices would have been at the militants' homes when they exploded, thus directly targeting innocents and minors.
There's also an indication that some of the devices may have in use by healthcare workers (for whatever reason - perhaps the supply chain intercept wasn't quite as precise as the Mossad intended; or they know perfectly well that some of the devices would end up in non-militant hands, and per their usual MO just didn't give a fuck), though this will require further investigation. From the same section on the same page:
Health Minister Firass Abiad said the vast majority of those being treated in emergency rooms were in civilian clothing and their Hezbollah affiliation was unclear.[119] He added the casualties included elderly people as well as young children. According to the Health Ministry, healthcare workers were also injured and it advised all healthcare workers to discard their pagers
Ukraine has also been laying mines in Kursk, not only its own territory.
I would take "12 civilians" with a grain of salt, given the fog of war and conflicts of interest at play, as well as Hezbollah's secrecy around who is involved in their military operations. As Abiad acknowledged, it's "very difficult to discern whether they belong to a certain entity like Hezbollah or others". It's similar to Gaza, where only Hamas knows how many fighters they lost.
> thus directly targeting innocents and minors
You're not using "directly targeting" in the usual sense. If a strike was aimed at a combatant but also happens to kill a random passerby, we wouldn't say that the passerby was targeted, let alone "directly". Conventional strikes always carry risks of civilian harm as well; that's why we have standards of proportionality rather than demanding guarantees of no collateral damage.
Ukraine has also been laying mines in Kursk, not only its own territory.
Which would make these deployments offensive, then (though the war itself is defense for them).
I would take "12 civilians" with a grain of salt
Yes of course, and indeed there can be fluctuations both ways as apparently a large number of people are still in IC, and may yet expire from the effects of their wounds after weeks or months of agony. By which time world attention will have shifted to the next atrocity.
You're not using "directly targeting" in the usual sense.
You are correct here, also. My phrasing was intended moralistically, in the sense of "They knew very well that the pagers would be noisily distributed, and that a large number of civilian deaths, likely including minors, would inevitably happen as a direct result of their actions.") In retrospect it was a poor choice of words.
> I meant "offensive" in the operational sense (as in, "going on the offensive").
The one alleged (with, AFAIK, strong evidence, and Ukraine just declined comment rather than denying it) Ukrainian use of anti-personnel land mines (others aren't banned by the treaty they are party to) was an operationally offensive use of rocket-delivered mines in and around Izium during the Summer of 2022.
This isn't about pagers generally, this is about a particular batch of 5,000 pagers ordered by Hezbollah. They weren't distributed to random Lebanese citizens.
Hezbollah employs doctors (heck, it runs hospitals) and Hezbollah personnel (in any of the political, armed, or social services parts of the organization) presumably fairly often live in households with children.
"Doctors and children are among the dead" isn't inconsistent with "this came from an order of devices specifically for Hezbollah" (it does cast doubt on "this was a precisely-targeted attack on Hezbollah combatants", but that's a very different claim.)
We'll need to await more info about the second wave of explosions from other devices, but the first wave was widely reported to be from a specific order of 5,000 pagers for Hezbollah, see e.g. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-planted-exp...
Again, these guys don't go to distributors saying "Hello, we're evil Inc, we want your devices for our nefarious plans!" - they were coming from a batch imported trough local resellers like...basically every other consumer retail channel.
Without taking in consideration that "Hezbollah" as a loosely defined group ranges from conservative politicians and institutions to bona fine terrorists.
These devices were being shipped in equal measure from the guys sending rockets to Israel to the local equivalent of those preppers who like to spend their weekend eavesdropping the police radio waiting for WWIII.
Unfortunately real life is a bit messier than a Tony Scott movie, and we didn't harm 5000 evil terrorists ready to destroy America and Israel from their Cobra underground lair, just a bunch of random people - a few of them genuinely bad guys (how many? thousands? hundreds? less than ten?), and everyone else who may or may have not sympathized with a group that may or may be not considered a terrorist organization, depending on who you ask.
Mainstream sources are saying it was a specific shipment of 5,000 pagers, which Hezbollah ordered from Gold Apollo (a manufacturer, not a local reseller), that was tampered with.
Are you claiming that these sources are wrong, and Hezbollah actually bought them from some retailer who happened to have 5,000 units of tampered inventory?
Per Reuters, "The senior Lebanese security source said the group had ordered 5,000 beepers made by Taiwan-based Gold Apollo, which several sources say were brought into the country in the spring."
I suppose the source could be lying, but what is your alternate theory exactly? Militaries don't tend to procure their communications equipment from the shelves of Radio Shack. Lebanon doesn't have a booming pager market, so it's unlikely that some local distributor just happened to have 5,000+ pagers sitting around.
This was clearly a special order (which doesn't mean no distributor was involved), and Occam's razor suggests that Mossad tampered with that particular order, rather than tampering with random pagers and just hoping that some of them might end up being purchased by Hezbollah later.
"Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah says the group’s leadership was mostly spared during Tuesday’s attack targeting pagers that killed several members in Lebanon as they were using older devices while “new ones were sent elsewhere.”
Sure, there has been at least one civilian death, and others might be reported later. While we don't have numbers yet, the evidence so far suggests a low ratio of civilian casualties, probably much lower than what's possible using convention warfare against an enemy embedded in a civilian population.
It's a reasonable point but this would probably be a losing battle; at this point terms like "classical security", "classical adversaries", etc. are common in the literature.
To me what's worse is "zk" used to describe applications of verifiable computation with no secrets involved, but that seems like a losing battle also.
> They would have had to work with the non-militant parts of Hamas leadership and the PLO of the West Bank and with neighboring Arab countries to bring these murderers to justice
I don't really see how this could work? As far as I know, all Hamas leadership supports the Oct 7 attack. The PLO and neighboring Arab countries don't really have power in Gaza.
Is that surprising, considering how Israel had treated Palestinians before that date?
If mere support is a hangup, then supporters of Israel's genocidal retaliation must similarly be excluded from talks.
I speak sardonically, of course: preconditions to negotiation are rarely helpful to achieving a negotiated outcome.
Here's one example: if Israel starts by treating Palestinians as human beings equal to Israeli people, without preconditions, it would remove a lot of Hamas leverage, plus it's the right thing to do.
Then, a bilateral peace committee seeking to punish genocide perpetrators on either side, perhaps as judged by the ICJ, can be established.
> 4. Referring to the Israeli Independence Day or the founding day of the country as a day of mourning.
So you are not allowed to call it the Nakba, or describe it as anything but something to celebrate as long as you receive funding from the government.
I don’t know how the media, libraries, schools or other institutions work in Israel, but in Iceland this would pretty much amount to a ban, as almost all media, and institutions receive at least some funding from the government, and the most important ones actually depend on it.
I also find it curious how this flies in Israel’s participation in Eurovision. Russia was banned for using state media to spread misinformation. Meanwhile Israel has laws which bans their state media from recognizing previous state atrocities, and is not banned.
Sure, users with some understanding of the tech can get a weak form of privacy (or at least plausible deniability) if they're careful about shuffling funds around different wallets.
Why should that be the limit? Are you against stronger forms of privacy? Sounds a bit like laws prohibiting the export of encryption software with >40 bits of security.
It does avoid KYC, but so does handing someone cash, and we haven't made that illegal yet.
Exactly - we sample uniformly from an extension field, so entropy is proportional to the extension field size. The base field is almost irrelevant from a security perspective, since things like the Schwartz-Zippel lemma just care about the size of the field we sample from, even if the polynomial in question is (also) a polynomial over some smaller subfield.
Right - in case it's not clear to all, the square root metric Vitalik mentions is about measuring both proof size and verifier complexity. Neither the prover nor the verifier is doing any square root computations.
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