Exploding Pagers and International Law

The widespread explosions of Hezbollah’s pagers on Tuesday and other equipment on Wednesday have caused both astonishment and debate. While the vast majority of the casualties appear to be members of Hezbollah, there have been some civilian casualties. The civilian to Hezbollah ratio among victims might be extremely low, but the mere existence of civilian casualties has prompted the debate.

Although Israel has not accepted responsibility, Iran described the injury of their ambassador to Lebanon as an Israeli terrorist action; while some might wonder why he had a pager provided by Hezbollah, a terrorist organisation.

Josep Borrell, Vice-President of the European Commission, stated on Wednesday that, “Whoever is behind these attacks aims to spread terror in Lebanon,” thus implying that it was a terrorist attack against Lebanon rather than an attack against Hezbollah.

The Middle East Eye reports various Lebanese people calling it a terrorist attack on social media, including academic and writer Marc Owen Jones.

And in the Sky News Press Preview on Wednesday 18th September, Kevin Maguire, Associate Editor of the Mirror, said:

“If it’s Israel, it`s state terrorism when it`s indiscriminate in that,
you know, civilians, kids are being killed.”

In response to this debate, the Middle East Eye has published a detailed article reviewing the question of whether this attack broke international law. This highlights a disagreement over the legality of targeting non-combatant members of a terrorist organisation.

In the following discussion on Fox News, a former CIA counterterrorism specialist is reported as saying this was “probably the most impressive kinetic intelligence op I`ve ever seen”, and Hillel Neuer, Executive Director of UN Watch said,

“There`s no question that in the history of modern warfare we`re not aware
of a more precise, pinpoint, targeted operation which exemplifies the principles
 that the UN is supposed to care about like proportionality.”