As have the Israeli citizens who have been subject to indiscriminate rocket attacks over the last 11 months from Hezbollah. Personally,If had the choice between enduring rockets versus not taking a pager on a flight, I’d prefer the pager ban.
I wish there wasn't so much conflict but sometimes the people resorting to violence have been essentially left with no other meaningful solution. People with power can politely ruin your life and murder you and yours and then claim you are the bad guy when you fight back less politely.
1. That is a completely different subject - Beirut is in Lebanon, not Gaza.
2. Israel _supplies_ Gaza with water. So Israel controls the water supply in Gaza just like your own water company supplies you with water. And if you were to walk into the offices of the water company and burn the workers' children to death and murder them and kidnap them, well, don't be surprised if they turn off your water supply.
Israel "supplies" Gaza with water because the source of Wadi Gaza (the Gaza River) happens to be on Israeli land.
That's like saying "The US supplies Mexico with water" because the Colorado River originates in the US and the mouth of it is on Mexican soil. Reality: America does all in its power to give as little water as possible to Mexico and the water that reaches the Gulf is a mere trickle, having been largely syphoned off by multiple US states before that point.
What I've read indicates Israel controls the water supply to Gaza and uses and abuses that fact in a hostile fashion.
I think what the author of the parent post meant was that Israel supplies Gaza with water via water pipes. The river that you're talking about is too small to be a significant source of water. The Palestinians (like Jordan, who also enjoys benefits coming from the peace accords it signed) buy water from Israel. Water is a scarce resource in that area, so it's no surprise that it has political significance.
I don't intend to single you out, and this goes for everyone posting about some far away region that's a bit more complex than what this or that source claims. I guess it's a matter of personality, but I don't feel comfortable talking about politics of far away regions, or even of my own region in some areas. I would rather talk about the simple easy stuff that I feel confident about, like this weird paragraph in the latest C++ standard. Then I wouldn't make embarrassing claims that are basically pre-chewed propaganda for the usefully ignorant foreigners. Except the Rust people. They are the devil!
No. Israel supplies water via pipes. There is not enough water in the region and Israel has turned water purification/desalination into a large scale operation, yet it provides it to Gaza despite being under attack from Hamas for decades (rockets, suicide bombers etc., 7/10 etc.).
Some stupid Israeli politicians tried to stop that water supply claiming that it's insane to provide your enemy with resources during war (Israel also supplies electricity and fuel to Gaza, both are used in the Hamas tunnels to pump in air). Unfortunately, this stupidity by the current government became the basis of the stuff you're repeating.
> I wish there wasn't so much conflict but sometimes the people resorting to violence have been essentially left with no other meaningful solution.
They've been trying to kill each other for years, even when they had other solutions and when Israel was the underdog. The difference in power now is huge, but it's always the same story... if some on both sides had their way, the other side would be wiped without a thought.
This is an ongoing culture war like Sunni vs Shia or Protestant vs Catholic.
The original people involved in the fight are long dead from old age, replaced by generation after generation claiming to be the victim (on both sides, of course).
This is why it’s best to stay out of it and watch from a safe distance. There is no right or wrong, good vs evil, victim and oppressor. It’s A vs B, cats vs dogs, my sports team vs your sports team.
Israel happens to have the technological edge at the moment, but that’s after a couple of thousand years of being a powerless diaspora victim to oppression and actual genocide.
Conversely, their opponents cry victim while we all full well know that if they got the military upper hand they’d do to the Israelis the same or worse.
It’s depressing to see this from the outside, watching the long term damage wrought by what amounts to mind viruses.
That’s all religions are: particularly addictive memes. Memes that kill hosts to protect themselves from other memes.
If you’ve picked a side, you’ve picked a meme you’d like to be infected by.
>This is why it’s best to stay out of it and watch from a safe distance. There is no right or wrong, good vs evil, victim and oppressor. It’s A vs B, cats vs dogs, my sports team vs your sports team.
It serves the interests of the US to have a reliable ally in the region. Previously to the US fracking revolution, Middle East oil was very important to the oil supply for US allies.
Of course now oil has less geopolitical importance and the US has no great interest in protecting Asian-European trade we'll see how far that partnership will continue.
OPEC still sets the price of oil, albeit their control seems to be faltering. It’s a global market of a fungible raw material, so everywhere it is produced matters to domestic interests…
That's not my impression. Some time ago, I tried to sort out why there was conflict in Gaza and there's a complex history going back at least a thousand years.
Saying conflict between Israel and Lebanon is wholly unrelated to conflict between Israel and Gaza is like saying stuff happening in the US state of Georgia has nothing to do with its neighbor Alabama.
I'm failing to readily find an online blurb that supports my understanding. But that detail fails to convince me my understanding is wholly in error.
I wouldn't say that currently there's a conflict between Israel and Lebanon, but Hezbollah is in Lebanon and has a lot of power there. They've been launching rockets at Israel and Israel has been killing their higher ups and targetting their ammo.
Depending on how you look at this, you can even call it a proxy war as Hezbollah is supported by Iran. Curiously (or not), one of those injured by the pagers blowing up was the Iranian ambassador... https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/irans-ambassador-l...
I'm not the one who brought up Lebanon as a proxy for Hezbollah. I'm just attempting to reply as best I can in a good faith fashion knowing that's not how most people are trying to reply.
Most people on the Internet are looking to win an argument, not engage in discussion. I appreciate your comment as it adds information rather than picking a fight, but I'm somewhat inclined to step away from this nonsense at this point.
That complex history goes back to the 7th century. Feel free to ask me anything about it - I'm not an expert but I've spent the past year and a half learning Arabic language and learning both their and our own history here. I'll try to give you as balanced an answer as I can.
You are right - the conflict in Lebanon is related to the conflict in Gaza. That is because despite efforts to frame the conflict as "Israel against 2 million poor Palestinians" the real conflict is "2 billion Muslims against Israel". Every time we have a conflict with one of them, the others jump in to attack us. What's worse, they deliberately keep the Palestinians impoverished and suffering to fester conflict - they say this blatantly. The Palestinian cause is not about creating a state to care for the Palestinian people. The Palestinian cause is about creating an Islamic state to displace the Jewish state, and the Palestinian people are the tool to use to pressure the Jewish state and other interested states. They say this clearly - both the Palestinians and the other Arab nations. But that line is so different from Western line of thinking that I know you find it incredible. I implore you to simply read what they themselves say.
(Assuming your take is correct) Well perhaps if Israel would try to help Palestine care for its people, Palestine would be less willing to be used as a tool for Jewish oppression by other Muslim nations.
At the moment, they are in horrendous crisis, the most obvious and immediate cause of that is Israel and Israel is effectively cooperating with the (according to you) Islamic agenda of painting them as the bad guy so they have a good excuse to exterminate them.
I'm an environmental studies major. I've read for years that our next wars will be fought over water. It looks to me like that's what we are seeing in Gaza.
Water is life. You can't survive without it. Politics aside, if Gaza can't get adequate water to survive, well, most organisms have a survival instinct and will fight like a cornered rat when given no viable means to survive while playing nice with their neighbors.
Raping and killing innocent civilians is an abhorrent crime. So we both agree that what Israel has done in Gaza (40,000 killed) and the systemic rape of Palestinian prisoners is abhorrent as well? What say you, Ben?
Whether your Al Jazeera source is true or not, Doreen was the one who suggested rape and murder is a justifiable means of resistance. What don’t you go ask her?
The difference is that Western media only refers to the detonation of boobytrapped devices that have injured thousands of civilians as an “intelligence operation” rather than a terror attack.
Do you have a source for that number of civilian injuries? Everything I can find (incl. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz04m913m49o) gives every indication that Hezbollah members were the target, that these pagers and radios were primarily/exclusively issued to Hezbollah members, and that the civilians killed/injured were those in close proximity to said Hezbollah members.
I don’t consider Hezbollah as “civilians”and I highly doubt your “injured thousands of citizens” and more like “injured thousands of Hezbollah terrorists and a few dozen civilians”
Hezbollah is a terrorist organization that killed hundreds of Americans. Not to mention Frenchmen, Israelis and Arabs. It recently bombed a football field and killed 12 kids. It fires indiscriminately at civilian population and had itself used a phone with a bomb within it...
No one who works for them is a "civilian". One of the "victims" is an Iranian ambassador to Syria. This shows you who Hezbollah really is. They are an Iranian puppet working against the interest of the Lebanese people dragging them into a war they don't want with Israel. They are hiding behind civilian populace and avoiding the "price" of their actions. This was the first time where these a*holes actually paid a price for their actions, for putting the people of Lebanon at such risk.
Calling Hezbollah a "political party" is akin to calling the Nazi party a political party. Technically true, but also deeply misleading.
Yes, Hezbollah is a political party and militia rolled into one that uses terrorism achieve their goals. But there are no good guys here.
Likud is a terrorist organization that killed thousands of Palestinians through the IDF. Not to mention Frenchmen, Americans, and Arabs. Their forces recently bombed schools, refugee centers, and other "safe" zones in Gaza. They've fired indiscriminately at reporters and humanitarian aid groups. The party's espoused policy is against statehood for Palestinians and instead encourage settlement of their territory, even through violence.
What I'm interested to see is how this will spur additional divestment from Chinese supply chains in Western countries. Now that Israel has set a precedent, Western governments will likely be even more hesitant to use any goods that touched Chinese territory during production.
If that were the case, I think China would have the incentive to remove this from their own supply chains, they don't want to be excluded from world trade because of this stuff. But as others have noted, China was not the link in this specific instance, rather a European country was
Well the classic route for electronics manufacturing is chips get fabricated in Taiwan/Japan/SK/America -> the PCB and other mechanical elements get integrated in China -> the finished product gets exported to the West. So you could certainly have the explosives adding process be done in step 2 regardless of if step 2 occurs in Europe or China.
I don't think the current Hungarian government could be trusted with this. The only participation from Hungary was that the company selling the tampered devices was supposedly registered there.
But we all know that company was just a front for Mossad, and in all likelihood the devices never even touch Europe.
interesting strategy, make the cost of modern communications to be too high due to hard to verify risks and subsequently push your enemy back to adopting slower modes of communication.
Thuraya handsets don't work without reporting their GNSS position to the network in cleartext, they only work outdoors (ie they don't work inside tunnels and "hospitals"), and because of their cost they tend to be carried by senior leaders.
If I were the IDF, this is the communications system that I would prefer the enemy to use.
The cell network knows a lot about handset position without handset gps participation. UTDOA is good to several meters, CGI-TA to a lesser extent, etc.
This isn't entirely true.
Cellphones are actively transmitting and checking in with the towers, so they're pretty easy to track.
Walkies transmit sporadically, so they can be tracked when activated. It's not instantaneous, but with a decent logging system you can keep track of users to a large degree. Even when you have multiple units all of the same model on the same frequency, there are various tricks to sorting them out to individual units.
One-way pagers don't transmit typical signals, buy like all RF devices, they're still emitting some signals and are trackable to a large degree with an antenna network deployed for that purpose. You might not be able to track them deep within enemy territory, but there is still a lot that can be done to track general movements or to find where clusters of the oscillators associated with the pagers turn up in large numbers.
If you transmit, you can be tracked. If you could modify a device to include an explosive, you could also modify it to include an undisclosed transmitter.
Which would then require Israel to use missiles. Which would be more complicated. Both logistically and politically. Also, it would be like playing whack-a-mole and risk of lot more collateral damage. Not to mention expensive.
At least with the pager attack, Israel hasn’t directly admitted it was behind it. Even though pretty much everyone knows it was them. But kinda hard to deny missile attacks.
Of course they can, just not as easily or conveniently.
EDIT: I meant walkie talkies. Old school pagers probably can't. Also I guess if you just use walkie talkies to listen to instructions. The station broadcasting can be tracked, however.
A traditional FM walkie-talkie, yes, passive, but a P25/DMR handheld radio, especially operating in trunked mode, not necessarily. One notorious example of this is P25's use of packet retransmission requests: https://www.mattblaze.org/papers/p25sec.pdf
A lot of worksite-oriented handheld radios these days are not just oldschool FM and use digital protocols to efficiently manage bandwidth, which can involve transmitting when not actually sending voice data. I haven't seen any confirmation of whether the affected devices were digital or not, but if they were buying COTS radio equipment there's a decent chance that they were.
Its hard but its not impossible. Functionally you need some very accurate equipment and some knowledge of the receiver. This is one of those areas where the military and government likely have approaches that are secret.
If the walkie talkie remains a passiv listener, then no, but then it is also only half as useful. And a unmodified pager is a passive listener by default and cannot be tracked, which is why they were bought in the first place from Hezbollah.
9/11 happened long enough ago that most people don't remember what it was like flying before all the security theater and TSA bs happened, so they don't know how nice it could be.
But if personal smartphones/tablets are banned people will riot.
They don't have to remember they just have to take a train. At least in Europe I can take a high speed train cross country carrying more people than an airplane and I can have whatever I want in my luggage.
That's specious reasoning. I have a rock that keeps tiger away. How does it work? It doesn't, it's just a stupid rock. But I don't see any tigers around here, do you?
Yea they added flight deck doors that you can’t get through and a policy that the doors stay closed through a flight. The TSA did nothing to help, the planes are a hard target now.
> we have not had a plane blow up into buildings since, so something must be working
Yeah, 10 minutes after the event every person on earth now knows the best strategy is to rush the cockpit, not sit calmly and wait for the hijackers to ask for a ransom, which was the previous norm.
Between that and reinforced concrete doors flying planes into buildings is no longer a viable strategy.
> Lots of different explosives exist and if it is sealed in an airtight container, good luck finding it
The new scanners take a CT scan [1]. Airtightness is irrelevant. It's not foolproof, largely because we man the scanners with idiots [2]. But it would be detectable and, particularly after the element of surprise has been lifted, likely to be caught.
Interestingly, "Lebanon has one of the highest number of computed tomography (CT) scanners per capita in the world" [3]. Hezbollah being Hezbollah, they could repurpose these from healthcare.
I don’t know how those scanners work, but I’ve always presumed they’re looking for individual chemicals. There’s not many you’d need to detect to find explosives (probably just high concentrations of carbon, nitrogen and metals?)
There are lots of different explosives. High concentrations of nitrogen you can also find in the air for example. And metal all around in an airport. Carbon as well.
There’s not a lot of solid state nitrogen or metallic powders in an airport. The rest of the high explosives that I’m aware of are all rather dense organics. Possessing those things is how you get yourself selected for secondary screening.
Again, I’m not an expert in how these things work, so I’m happy to be corrected. That to me just seems like the most obvious way the new dual energy scanners would be put to use.
Lots of ink has been spilled on whether this operation was "legal" in a war or not. The Guardian points out a global treaty, which is signed by Israel, that prohibits booby trapped innocent looking devices:
I'm afraid that the only sensible answer might end up being no more right to repair, no more phones from smaller manufacturers and no more unauthorized parts.
Something like, if it goes through an airport, it has to have enough charge to turn on, and all the parts need to deliver a cryptographic signature (via an USB-C connection) that they're genuine and that they haven't been tampered with. Your phone is from a Chinese manufacturer? Good luck entering the US.
It's that or no electronic on flights, not even in checked-in luggage,, and that won't fly (no pun intended) in 2024.
That's assuming airport scanners are genuinely incapable of detecting this kind of sabotage, and I hope that this assumption is wrong.
W/regard to the method used… that open a new vector for all kinds of bad things. These were working devices that would function like normal but could be remotely detonated. What else would a terrorists want in a tool?
The answer might be “you can’t trust a flight with potential terrorists onboard”. There are obvious, but high-false-positive and non-PC, methods to make that estimation.
And the security services have done an amazing job of mostly ignoring the white supremacists, Sovereign Citizens, Christian fundamentalists and other white guys with a penchant for politically motivated violence.
More than that, it's basically a mini-state within a state... and at this point more functional than the government of Lebanon. The attack was by all accounts pretty well targeted, but that still means there are probably a bunch of dead or maimed civil servants of the sort that a traditional military offensive would never care about.
Which accounts are you listening to? The accounts that I've heard is that they set every single one of these off all at once with no targeting and they blew up all over Lebanon in markets, theaters, schools, public transportation, etc.
They were distributed randomly throughout the country before detonation. The fact that they were likely purchased by Hezbollah members is kinda beside the point when Israel knew they were going to be all over the place in public places and crowds when they blew up. Thousands of people were injured and some killed for the crime of being near a member of Hezbollah (or even just their belongings) when the bombs went off.
If thousands of bombs were distributed to members of a large criminal syndicate in the US or other western country and then all detonated as these people went about their lives and interacted with normal citizens, we would be absolutely horrified.
>They were distributed randomly throughout the country before detonation.
They were distributed through and to the Hezbollah network of members and collaborators. As far as they're 'randomly distributed through the country' it depends where Hezbollah members go in the country with the pagers in their pockets.
> were distributed randomly throughout the country before detonation
We have literally zero evidence of this. Either way. If you think you can pierce the fog of war by looking at one side's official announcements, you're going to spend a lot of time confused.
That is a "beard" they use to legitimize a large terrorist group that murdered hundreds of Americans. Fires on civilians, killed children and is conducting a war with Israel without the consent of the people of Lebanon.
One of the "victims" was an Iranian ambassador to Syria. They are an arm of Iran serving their interests within Lebanon which are in conflict with the interests of the Lebanese people. They fight Israel but then hide behind civilians within tunnels.
For once they became a direct target without the ability to hide behind anyone. Just recently there was declassified intel on them planting bombs within Israel trying to assassinate politicians. They already bootstrapped a phone in the past too.
The reason they have popularity is due to funds they get from Iran which they use to provide loans to poor people. To make this even more attractive they push for a situation of dependency and poverty so the poor would be even more dependent on their loans. Lebanon is in deep distress (financially and politically) and these are the a*holes pushing for it on the behest of Iran.
> if you were trying to look for militants when you should be looking for civilians with pagers… you’d be wrong
We're speaking within the fog of war. It's unclear, for example, what fraction of Hezbollah's ranks had a pager or walkie talkier. And what fraction of those were military. I'd still challenge that the collateral damage from such an attack constrained to Hezbollah members--even arbitrarily--is less than a conventional strike on suspected militants.
But overwhelmingly Shia, and has token Christian and Sunni membership due to Lebanon's constitution.
Hezbollah is not Lebanon, and Lebanon is not Hezbollah.
Lebanon is an equal 3 way split between Sunni (Future Movement/Hariri), Shia (Hezbollah), and Christian (Kaateb and smaller parties).
All 3 fought a vicious civil war from the 1970s into the 1990s, and then multiple invasions and interventions by Israel and Syria lead to factional conflicts.
The Sunni bloc and Christian bloc both oppose Hezbollah in Lebanon, and this helped the Israel-Saudi rapprochement, as it is Saudi that supports Hariri and Israel supported the Christian bloc during the civil war and occupation.
Edit: Love the downvotes from idiots who can't even find Tripoli or Beqaa on a map for pointing out how Lebanon is a very complex and split country.
My understanding is cooperation between Hizbollah and some christian communities is a lot more than token, but that is mostly talking from friends with family (christian) in Lebanon
> cooperation between Hizbollah and some christian communities is a lot more than token
Yep. I made a broad strokes statement because it gets complex very fast.
The Christian community appears to be split between anti-Hezbollah and anti-Palestinian groups like Kaateb (that were also historically pro-Israel during the civil war and intervention), and historically Syrian supported parties who supported Syria during their intervention in Lebanon such as Tashnag, Marada, etc.
FPM was historically opposed to Syria but Michel Aoun made a strategic deal with Hezbollah in order to become M8's face in Lebanon, and because Hezbollah was never going to get Sunni support.
Hezbollah will only accept Shia and are Shia-first, but allied with Syrian-then-Iranian backed parties because they all fought together on behalf of Assad in the Syrian Civil War, along with the alliance of convenience with FPM.
The Pro-Syrian/Iranian coalition is the March 8th Coaliton (of which Hezbollah is the lynchpin), and the anti-Hezbollah/Saudi-funded coalition was the March 10th coalition before it splintered due to political infighting, corruption, and the Syrian Civil War.
Furthermore, now that the Syrian Civil War is largely over, a LOT of battle hardened nuts from all sides in Lebanon have started returning, plus the economic collapse exacerbated an already tense political environment.
Seems like the citizens have been successfully terrorized.
As have the Israeli citizens who have been subject to indiscriminate rocket attacks over the last 11 months from Hezbollah. Personally,If had the choice between enduring rockets versus not taking a pager on a flight, I’d prefer the pager ban.
Israel controls the water supply in Gaza. They aren't even allowed to collect rain water.
It rains something like 2 inches a year there. People collecting rain water someplace with so little rain are likely quite desperate.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2017/11/the-occu...
I wish there wasn't so much conflict but sometimes the people resorting to violence have been essentially left with no other meaningful solution. People with power can politely ruin your life and murder you and yours and then claim you are the bad guy when you fight back less politely.
> Israel controls the water supply in Gaza.
1. That is a completely different subject - Beirut is in Lebanon, not Gaza.
2. Israel _supplies_ Gaza with water. So Israel controls the water supply in Gaza just like your own water company supplies you with water. And if you were to walk into the offices of the water company and burn the workers' children to death and murder them and kidnap them, well, don't be surprised if they turn off your water supply.
Israel "supplies" Gaza with water because the source of Wadi Gaza (the Gaza River) happens to be on Israeli land.
That's like saying "The US supplies Mexico with water" because the Colorado River originates in the US and the mouth of it is on Mexican soil. Reality: America does all in its power to give as little water as possible to Mexico and the water that reaches the Gulf is a mere trickle, having been largely syphoned off by multiple US states before that point.
What I've read indicates Israel controls the water supply to Gaza and uses and abuses that fact in a hostile fashion.
I think what the author of the parent post meant was that Israel supplies Gaza with water via water pipes. The river that you're talking about is too small to be a significant source of water. The Palestinians (like Jordan, who also enjoys benefits coming from the peace accords it signed) buy water from Israel. Water is a scarce resource in that area, so it's no surprise that it has political significance.
I don't intend to single you out, and this goes for everyone posting about some far away region that's a bit more complex than what this or that source claims. I guess it's a matter of personality, but I don't feel comfortable talking about politics of far away regions, or even of my own region in some areas. I would rather talk about the simple easy stuff that I feel confident about, like this weird paragraph in the latest C++ standard. Then I wouldn't make embarrassing claims that are basically pre-chewed propaganda for the usefully ignorant foreigners. Except the Rust people. They are the devil!
Potable water is a scarce resource on planet Earth. Most water is salt water.
And that's not even talking about all the water we've horrifically polluted.
No. Israel supplies water via pipes. There is not enough water in the region and Israel has turned water purification/desalination into a large scale operation, yet it provides it to Gaza despite being under attack from Hamas for decades (rockets, suicide bombers etc., 7/10 etc.).
Some stupid Israeli politicians tried to stop that water supply claiming that it's insane to provide your enemy with resources during war (Israel also supplies electricity and fuel to Gaza, both are used in the Hamas tunnels to pump in air). Unfortunately, this stupidity by the current government became the basis of the stuff you're repeating.
Israel supplies Gaza with electric power as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_crisis_in_the_Gaza...
> I wish there wasn't so much conflict but sometimes the people resorting to violence have been essentially left with no other meaningful solution.
They've been trying to kill each other for years, even when they had other solutions and when Israel was the underdog. The difference in power now is huge, but it's always the same story... if some on both sides had their way, the other side would be wiped without a thought.
Millenia.
They’ve been at this since biblical times.
This is an ongoing culture war like Sunni vs Shia or Protestant vs Catholic.
The original people involved in the fight are long dead from old age, replaced by generation after generation claiming to be the victim (on both sides, of course).
This is why it’s best to stay out of it and watch from a safe distance. There is no right or wrong, good vs evil, victim and oppressor. It’s A vs B, cats vs dogs, my sports team vs your sports team.
Israel happens to have the technological edge at the moment, but that’s after a couple of thousand years of being a powerless diaspora victim to oppression and actual genocide.
Conversely, their opponents cry victim while we all full well know that if they got the military upper hand they’d do to the Israelis the same or worse.
It’s depressing to see this from the outside, watching the long term damage wrought by what amounts to mind viruses.
That’s all religions are: particularly addictive memes. Memes that kill hosts to protect themselves from other memes.
If you’ve picked a side, you’ve picked a meme you’d like to be infected by.
I prefer the vaccine.
>This is why it’s best to stay out of it and watch from a safe distance. There is no right or wrong, good vs evil, victim and oppressor. It’s A vs B, cats vs dogs, my sports team vs your sports team.
It serves the interests of the US to have a reliable ally in the region. Previously to the US fracking revolution, Middle East oil was very important to the oil supply for US allies.
Of course now oil has less geopolitical importance and the US has no great interest in protecting Asian-European trade we'll see how far that partnership will continue.
OPEC still sets the price of oil, albeit their control seems to be faltering. It’s a global market of a fungible raw material, so everywhere it is produced matters to domestic interests…
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Which has absolutely nothing to do with Lebanon.
That's not my impression. Some time ago, I tried to sort out why there was conflict in Gaza and there's a complex history going back at least a thousand years.
Saying conflict between Israel and Lebanon is wholly unrelated to conflict between Israel and Gaza is like saying stuff happening in the US state of Georgia has nothing to do with its neighbor Alabama.
I'm failing to readily find an online blurb that supports my understanding. But that detail fails to convince me my understanding is wholly in error.
I wouldn't say that currently there's a conflict between Israel and Lebanon, but Hezbollah is in Lebanon and has a lot of power there. They've been launching rockets at Israel and Israel has been killing their higher ups and targetting their ammo.
Depending on how you look at this, you can even call it a proxy war as Hezbollah is supported by Iran. Curiously (or not), one of those injured by the pagers blowing up was the Iranian ambassador... https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/irans-ambassador-l...
I'm not the one who brought up Lebanon as a proxy for Hezbollah. I'm just attempting to reply as best I can in a good faith fashion knowing that's not how most people are trying to reply.
Most people on the Internet are looking to win an argument, not engage in discussion. I appreciate your comment as it adds information rather than picking a fight, but I'm somewhat inclined to step away from this nonsense at this point.
That complex history goes back to the 7th century. Feel free to ask me anything about it - I'm not an expert but I've spent the past year and a half learning Arabic language and learning both their and our own history here. I'll try to give you as balanced an answer as I can.
You are right - the conflict in Lebanon is related to the conflict in Gaza. That is because despite efforts to frame the conflict as "Israel against 2 million poor Palestinians" the real conflict is "2 billion Muslims against Israel". Every time we have a conflict with one of them, the others jump in to attack us. What's worse, they deliberately keep the Palestinians impoverished and suffering to fester conflict - they say this blatantly. The Palestinian cause is not about creating a state to care for the Palestinian people. The Palestinian cause is about creating an Islamic state to displace the Jewish state, and the Palestinian people are the tool to use to pressure the Jewish state and other interested states. They say this clearly - both the Palestinians and the other Arab nations. But that line is so different from Western line of thinking that I know you find it incredible. I implore you to simply read what they themselves say.
(Assuming your take is correct) Well perhaps if Israel would try to help Palestine care for its people, Palestine would be less willing to be used as a tool for Jewish oppression by other Muslim nations.
At the moment, they are in horrendous crisis, the most obvious and immediate cause of that is Israel and Israel is effectively cooperating with the (according to you) Islamic agenda of painting them as the bad guy so they have a good excuse to exterminate them.
I'm an environmental studies major. I've read for years that our next wars will be fought over water. It looks to me like that's what we are seeing in Gaza.
Water is life. You can't survive without it. Politics aside, if Gaza can't get adequate water to survive, well, most organisms have a survival instinct and will fight like a cornered rat when given no viable means to survive while playing nice with their neighbors.
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Raping and killing innocent civilians is an abhorrent crime. So we both agree that what Israel has done in Gaza (40,000 killed) and the systemic rape of Palestinian prisoners is abhorrent as well? What say you, Ben?
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-ham... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sde_Teiman_detention_camp#Sexu...
Whether your Al Jazeera source is true or not, Doreen was the one who suggested rape and murder is a justifiable means of resistance. What don’t you go ask her?
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I am opposed to the practice of raping people as a war tactic.
And I wish Israel would get its boot off of Gaza's water supply.
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Death to whataboutism.
This tired reply can't be used as rebuttal to any & everything. Eye for an eye is no praxis at all.
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The difference is that Western media only refers to the detonation of boobytrapped devices that have injured thousands of civilians as an “intelligence operation” rather than a terror attack.
Do you have a source for that number of civilian injuries? Everything I can find (incl. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz04m913m49o) gives every indication that Hezbollah members were the target, that these pagers and radios were primarily/exclusively issued to Hezbollah members, and that the civilians killed/injured were those in close proximity to said Hezbollah members.
I don’t consider Hezbollah as “civilians”and I highly doubt your “injured thousands of citizens” and more like “injured thousands of Hezbollah terrorists and a few dozen civilians”
Hezbollah is a political party that holds seats in Lebanon’s parliament. It’s bizarre to paint them with a broad brush.
Hezbollah is a terrorist organization that killed hundreds of Americans. Not to mention Frenchmen, Israelis and Arabs. It recently bombed a football field and killed 12 kids. It fires indiscriminately at civilian population and had itself used a phone with a bomb within it...
No one who works for them is a "civilian". One of the "victims" is an Iranian ambassador to Syria. This shows you who Hezbollah really is. They are an Iranian puppet working against the interest of the Lebanese people dragging them into a war they don't want with Israel. They are hiding behind civilian populace and avoiding the "price" of their actions. This was the first time where these a*holes actually paid a price for their actions, for putting the people of Lebanon at such risk.
Calling Hezbollah a "political party" is akin to calling the Nazi party a political party. Technically true, but also deeply misleading.
Yes, Hezbollah is a political party and militia rolled into one that uses terrorism achieve their goals. But there are no good guys here.
Likud is a terrorist organization that killed thousands of Palestinians through the IDF. Not to mention Frenchmen, Americans, and Arabs. Their forces recently bombed schools, refugee centers, and other "safe" zones in Gaza. They've fired indiscriminately at reporters and humanitarian aid groups. The party's espoused policy is against statehood for Palestinians and instead encourage settlement of their territory, even through violence.
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What I'm interested to see is how this will spur additional divestment from Chinese supply chains in Western countries. Now that Israel has set a precedent, Western governments will likely be even more hesitant to use any goods that touched Chinese territory during production.
If that were the case, I think China would have the incentive to remove this from their own supply chains, they don't want to be excluded from world trade because of this stuff. But as others have noted, China was not the link in this specific instance, rather a European country was
You mean European supply chains. Devices were produced in EU (Hungary)
Devices were procured through Hungary, they were made in Taiwan
The parts maybe, but they were assembled and the explosives put in in hungary as of current information.
(And Taiwan is not China, but the 3. World war might be fought over the question whether they must be the same)
Well the classic route for electronics manufacturing is chips get fabricated in Taiwan/Japan/SK/America -> the PCB and other mechanical elements get integrated in China -> the finished product gets exported to the West. So you could certainly have the explosives adding process be done in step 2 regardless of if step 2 occurs in Europe or China.
I fear we might see an opposite trend in the "Global South" countries which now constitute >80% of world population
Why would they? It was likely our ally and NATO member Hungary who did it.
I don't think the current Hungarian government could be trusted with this. The only participation from Hungary was that the company selling the tampered devices was supposedly registered there.
But we all know that company was just a front for Mossad, and in all likelihood the devices never even touch Europe.
interesting strategy, make the cost of modern communications to be too high due to hard to verify risks and subsequently push your enemy back to adopting slower modes of communication.
Cellphones can be tracked. Walkies and pagers can't.
Thuraya handsets don't work without reporting their GNSS position to the network in cleartext, they only work outdoors (ie they don't work inside tunnels and "hospitals"), and because of their cost they tend to be carried by senior leaders.
If I were the IDF, this is the communications system that I would prefer the enemy to use.
The cell network knows a lot about handset position without handset gps participation. UTDOA is good to several meters, CGI-TA to a lesser extent, etc.
This isn't entirely true. Cellphones are actively transmitting and checking in with the towers, so they're pretty easy to track.
Walkies transmit sporadically, so they can be tracked when activated. It's not instantaneous, but with a decent logging system you can keep track of users to a large degree. Even when you have multiple units all of the same model on the same frequency, there are various tricks to sorting them out to individual units.
One-way pagers don't transmit typical signals, buy like all RF devices, they're still emitting some signals and are trackable to a large degree with an antenna network deployed for that purpose. You might not be able to track them deep within enemy territory, but there is still a lot that can be done to track general movements or to find where clusters of the oscillators associated with the pagers turn up in large numbers.
If you transmit, you can be tracked. If you could modify a device to include an explosive, you could also modify it to include an undisclosed transmitter.
Which would then require Israel to use missiles. Which would be more complicated. Both logistically and politically. Also, it would be like playing whack-a-mole and risk of lot more collateral damage. Not to mention expensive.
At least with the pager attack, Israel hasn’t directly admitted it was behind it. Even though pretty much everyone knows it was them. But kinda hard to deny missile attacks.
Of course they can, just not as easily or conveniently.
EDIT: I meant walkie talkies. Old school pagers probably can't. Also I guess if you just use walkie talkies to listen to instructions. The station broadcasting can be tracked, however.
A walkie-talkie receiving a message should be a passive device no?
One can triangulate a radio broadcasting, I don't know how one would track receiving the broadcast.
A traditional FM walkie-talkie, yes, passive, but a P25/DMR handheld radio, especially operating in trunked mode, not necessarily. One notorious example of this is P25's use of packet retransmission requests: https://www.mattblaze.org/papers/p25sec.pdf
A lot of worksite-oriented handheld radios these days are not just oldschool FM and use digital protocols to efficiently manage bandwidth, which can involve transmitting when not actually sending voice data. I haven't seen any confirmation of whether the affected devices were digital or not, but if they were buying COTS radio equipment there's a decent chance that they were.
They were Icom IC-V82s. A long discontinued VHF FM radio.
Interesting, thanks!
Its hard but its not impossible. Functionally you need some very accurate equipment and some knowledge of the receiver. This is one of those areas where the military and government likely have approaches that are secret.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_detector_van
If the walkie talkie remains a passiv listener, then no, but then it is also only half as useful. And a unmodified pager is a passive listener by default and cannot be tracked, which is why they were bought in the first place from Hezbollah.
Tracking radios like that is very hard when the signal is far away and in urban environments.
How would you track a pager? It's a receive only device
Maybe they once were. Are there features now like receipt confirmation?
There was for a while (Motorola ReFLEX), but it was never popular.[1]
The pagers in this case were very boring POCSAG receivers, no transmit capability.
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReFLEX
how soon will US overreact and start banning within US airport and other public places?
9/11 happened long enough ago that most people don't remember what it was like flying before all the security theater and TSA bs happened, so they don't know how nice it could be.
But if personal smartphones/tablets are banned people will riot.
They don't have to remember they just have to take a train. At least in Europe I can take a high speed train cross country carrying more people than an airplane and I can have whatever I want in my luggage.
we have not had a plane blow up into buildings since, so something must be working. yes, it's also inconvenient.
That's specious reasoning. I have a rock that keeps tiger away. How does it work? It doesn't, it's just a stupid rock. But I don't see any tigers around here, do you?
Yea they added flight deck doors that you can’t get through and a policy that the doors stay closed through a flight. The TSA did nothing to help, the planes are a hard target now.
> we have not had a plane blow up into buildings since, so something must be working
Yeah, 10 minutes after the event every person on earth now knows the best strategy is to rush the cockpit, not sit calmly and wait for the hijackers to ask for a ransom, which was the previous norm.
Between that and reinforced concrete doors flying planes into buildings is no longer a viable strategy.
Reinforced cockpit doors have backfired in pilot murder suicides on Germanwings 9525, LAM470, MH370, CES5735. It’s not the silver bullet..
Or the threat has subsided. Not saying get rid of security, but I think it’s okay to allow water bottles again.
The new scanners (ones that can differentiate water and explosives) would pick this up.
It does make me wonder if there delay in the UK/EU is related to this; the delay happened within the same time frame of these devices being delivered.
How would you know this?
Lots of different explosives exist and if it is sealed in an airtight container, good luck finding it.
> Lots of different explosives exist and if it is sealed in an airtight container, good luck finding it
The new scanners take a CT scan [1]. Airtightness is irrelevant. It's not foolproof, largely because we man the scanners with idiots [2]. But it would be detectable and, particularly after the element of surprise has been lifted, likely to be caught.
Interestingly, "Lebanon has one of the highest number of computed tomography (CT) scanners per capita in the world" [3]. Hezbollah being Hezbollah, they could repurpose these from healthcare.
[1] https://www.internationalairportreview.com/news/32019/analog...
[2] https://abcnews.go.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-...
[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09698...
I don’t know how those scanners work, but I’ve always presumed they’re looking for individual chemicals. There’s not many you’d need to detect to find explosives (probably just high concentrations of carbon, nitrogen and metals?)
There are lots of different explosives. High concentrations of nitrogen you can also find in the air for example. And metal all around in an airport. Carbon as well.
There’s not a lot of solid state nitrogen or metallic powders in an airport. The rest of the high explosives that I’m aware of are all rather dense organics. Possessing those things is how you get yourself selected for secondary screening.
Again, I’m not an expert in how these things work, so I’m happy to be corrected. That to me just seems like the most obvious way the new dual energy scanners would be put to use.
Don’t worry Clear will be there to offer a priority package that allows to bring personal electronic devices through TSA.
I wonder how many decades this rule will persist.
Ah yeah banning pagers will solve all the issues.
If explosive materials were planted in pagers, then god only knows where they could be planted in the future.
Lots of ink has been spilled on whether this operation was "legal" in a war or not. The Guardian points out a global treaty, which is signed by Israel, that prohibits booby trapped innocent looking devices:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/sep/18/the-gu...
So now we have new fodder for the TSA and others, probably justified this time.
> The Guardian points out a global treaty, which is signed by Israel, that prohibits booby trapped innocent looking devices:
If the last 3 years (Ukraine onwards) have proved, international law and treaties mean nothing, other states are too cowardly to enforce them.
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Wonder if any of these electronics passed modern airport security, someone must have travelled with 1000s of devices out there for months.
Are the models of walkies talkies and pagers known?
Did they use batteries or rechargeable batteries?
I guess one of those might get banned as well.
Why didn't/can't they catch the explosives in the X-ray scanners?
see https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2024/turning-everyday-gad...
The law of unintended consequences…
That is entirely sensible, I wonder how long it will last or if it will spread?
How difficult was the sabotage to detect? Would it be detectable by ordinary airport scanners/explosives detection methods?
What do we do if the answer is "you can't trust a flight with an electronics device onboard"?
AI detection of anomalous Xray readings from known hardware?
The explosive material presumably not detected for some months, so probably not very easy to detect
Is it sensible? Explosives can be in many items other than pagers and walkie-talkies.
The first rule of airport security is to close barn doors that horses have bolted through previously.
Like most airport security, it is sensible to bring people a feeling of security, not being secure.
I'm afraid that the only sensible answer might end up being no more right to repair, no more phones from smaller manufacturers and no more unauthorized parts.
Something like, if it goes through an airport, it has to have enough charge to turn on, and all the parts need to deliver a cryptographic signature (via an USB-C connection) that they're genuine and that they haven't been tampered with. Your phone is from a Chinese manufacturer? Good luck entering the US.
It's that or no electronic on flights, not even in checked-in luggage,, and that won't fly (no pun intended) in 2024.
That's assuming airport scanners are genuinely incapable of detecting this kind of sabotage, and I hope that this assumption is wrong.
Yep, no-brainer with regards to the decision.
W/regard to the method used… that open a new vector for all kinds of bad things. These were working devices that would function like normal but could be remotely detonated. What else would a terrorists want in a tool?
The answer might be “you can’t trust a flight with potential terrorists onboard”. There are obvious, but high-false-positive and non-PC, methods to make that estimation.
I don't really get to choose the other people on my flight...
Do you think that estimation works for airlines in the middle east?
Probably about as well as “you can’t have electronics”
You forgot "high false-negative". There are plenty of white guys that want to do a terrorism as well.
And the security services have done an amazing job of mostly ignoring the white supremacists, Sovereign Citizens, Christian fundamentalists and other white guys with a penchant for politically motivated violence.
hizbollah is a broad political party in lebanon, not simply a paramilitary group
i know blonde hair blue eye people with relatives involved, so you are just making false inferences
More than that, it's basically a mini-state within a state... and at this point more functional than the government of Lebanon. The attack was by all accounts pretty well targeted, but that still means there are probably a bunch of dead or maimed civil servants of the sort that a traditional military offensive would never care about.
> attack was by all accounts pretty well targeted
Which accounts are you listening to? The accounts that I've heard is that they set every single one of these off all at once with no targeting and they blew up all over Lebanon in markets, theaters, schools, public transportation, etc.
They weren't a random shipment of pagers to Lebanon, they were specifically ordered and used by Hesbollah.
They were distributed randomly throughout the country before detonation. The fact that they were likely purchased by Hezbollah members is kinda beside the point when Israel knew they were going to be all over the place in public places and crowds when they blew up. Thousands of people were injured and some killed for the crime of being near a member of Hezbollah (or even just their belongings) when the bombs went off.
If thousands of bombs were distributed to members of a large criminal syndicate in the US or other western country and then all detonated as these people went about their lives and interacted with normal citizens, we would be absolutely horrified.
>They were distributed randomly throughout the country before detonation.
They were distributed through and to the Hezbollah network of members and collaborators. As far as they're 'randomly distributed through the country' it depends where Hezbollah members go in the country with the pagers in their pockets.
> were distributed randomly throughout the country before detonation
We have literally zero evidence of this. Either way. If you think you can pierce the fog of war by looking at one side's official announcements, you're going to spend a lot of time confused.
That is a "beard" they use to legitimize a large terrorist group that murdered hundreds of Americans. Fires on civilians, killed children and is conducting a war with Israel without the consent of the people of Lebanon.
One of the "victims" was an Iranian ambassador to Syria. They are an arm of Iran serving their interests within Lebanon which are in conflict with the interests of the Lebanese people. They fight Israel but then hide behind civilians within tunnels.
For once they became a direct target without the ability to hide behind anyone. Just recently there was declassified intel on them planting bombs within Israel trying to assassinate politicians. They already bootstrapped a phone in the past too.
The reason they have popularity is due to funds they get from Iran which they use to provide loans to poor people. To make this even more attractive they push for a situation of dependency and poverty so the poor would be even more dependent on their loans. Lebanon is in deep distress (financially and politically) and these are the a*holes pushing for it on the behest of Iran.
> hizbollah is a broad political party in lebanon
To be fair, so were the Nazis. (Trying to think of a less-combustible example.)
The Bolsheviks? Southern Democrats in 1883 after the Supreme Court ruled the federal government lacked jurisdiction over racist terror?
right, so if you were trying to look for militants when you should be looking for civilians with pagers… you’d be wrong
> if you were trying to look for militants when you should be looking for civilians with pagers… you’d be wrong
We're speaking within the fog of war. It's unclear, for example, what fraction of Hezbollah's ranks had a pager or walkie talkier. And what fraction of those were military. I'd still challenge that the collateral damage from such an attack constrained to Hezbollah members--even arbitrarily--is less than a conventional strike on suspected militants.
> broad political party
But overwhelmingly Shia, and has token Christian and Sunni membership due to Lebanon's constitution.
Hezbollah is not Lebanon, and Lebanon is not Hezbollah.
Lebanon is an equal 3 way split between Sunni (Future Movement/Hariri), Shia (Hezbollah), and Christian (Kaateb and smaller parties).
All 3 fought a vicious civil war from the 1970s into the 1990s, and then multiple invasions and interventions by Israel and Syria lead to factional conflicts.
The Sunni bloc and Christian bloc both oppose Hezbollah in Lebanon, and this helped the Israel-Saudi rapprochement, as it is Saudi that supports Hariri and Israel supported the Christian bloc during the civil war and occupation.
Edit: Love the downvotes from idiots who can't even find Tripoli or Beqaa on a map for pointing out how Lebanon is a very complex and split country.
My understanding is cooperation between Hizbollah and some christian communities is a lot more than token, but that is mostly talking from friends with family (christian) in Lebanon
> cooperation between Hizbollah and some christian communities is a lot more than token
Yep. I made a broad strokes statement because it gets complex very fast.
The Christian community appears to be split between anti-Hezbollah and anti-Palestinian groups like Kaateb (that were also historically pro-Israel during the civil war and intervention), and historically Syrian supported parties who supported Syria during their intervention in Lebanon such as Tashnag, Marada, etc.
FPM was historically opposed to Syria but Michel Aoun made a strategic deal with Hezbollah in order to become M8's face in Lebanon, and because Hezbollah was never going to get Sunni support.
Hezbollah will only accept Shia and are Shia-first, but allied with Syrian-then-Iranian backed parties because they all fought together on behalf of Assad in the Syrian Civil War, along with the alliance of convenience with FPM.
The Pro-Syrian/Iranian coalition is the March 8th Coaliton (of which Hezbollah is the lynchpin), and the anti-Hezbollah/Saudi-funded coalition was the March 10th coalition before it splintered due to political infighting, corruption, and the Syrian Civil War.
Furthermore, now that the Syrian Civil War is largely over, a LOT of battle hardened nuts from all sides in Lebanon have started returning, plus the economic collapse exacerbated an already tense political environment.
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