The simple fact that there was no way to know who was even holding the pagers the moment they were detonated, nor was there any way to know who was standing near them, Israel's execution of this sinister operation constitutes a serious war crime.
"Indiscriminate attacks are prohibited," explains a section of the Geneva Conventions about how wars are to be conducted.
"Indiscriminate attacks are:
(a) those which are not directed at a specific military objective;
(b) those which employ a method or means of combat which cannot be directed at a specific military objective; or
(c) those which employ a method or means of combat the effects of which cannot be limited as required by this Protocol"
(Related: The West continues to cross all of Russia's red lines, including by waging war on the press.)
Blowing up handheld radios is also a war crime
Israel did not stop after the pagers, though. It proceeded to then also detonate a batch of handheld radios, which similarly injured and killed thousands of people, including innocent children.
Around 4,000 people in total were maimed in the two attacks, sustaining serious injuries to the head and stomach. Some of them are now blind or disabled, including the loss of fingers.
"As is its policy, Israel has neither confirmed nor denied its alleged involvement in the attacks," reported Middle East Eye.
"But multiple media organisations, including within Israel, have reported that the Mossad secret service infiltrated Hezbollah supply chains and planted explosives in the devices."
The reason why the International Court of Justice (ICJ) continues to go after Israel for its actions in the Middle East is because the Jewish state is playing the part of the bully and criminal who rejects what is right and true and instead pursues its own ends through any means necessary.
Before a nation takes any kind of military action, it is supposed to abide by certain core principles, including:
1) Distinction, which stipulates that all parties involved in warfare must distinguish between combatants and civilian populations. Israel is notorious for not abiding by this one.
2) Proportionality, which means not launching outsized attacks that result in lots of civilian injuries and deaths. Israel also blatantly disregards this tenet of war.
3) Military necessity, which means carefully assessing how to best accomplish a legitimate military purpose while limiting civilian casualties. Israel has shown that it is willing to do just about anything while calling it necessary.
"We don't have enough information to know how exactly the pagers were detonated, but if, as it seems from existing reports, they were simply simultaneously detonated, then it is difficult to see how these checks could have been undertaken," commented Alonso Gurmendi-Dunkelberg, a researcher at the London School of Economics.
In order for Israel to meet the above-outlined obligations under the Geneva Conventions, it would need to have checked each individual communication device to make sure its detonation occurred only against a targeted combatant and not against any civilian that might have mistakenly held it or been near it the moment it exploded.
"The question arises whether such a proportionality calculation for each explosion would even have been possible or meaningful given that we are talking about hundreds of explosions triggered at the same time," said Janina Dill, co-director of the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict.
"People typically carry their pagers with them, including taking them home. It is hard to imagine that it would have been possible for the attacking party to limit the effects of these attacks in accordance with the demands of international law."
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