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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   32642 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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Crazy news out of the Middle East today.

While Iran plots its big revenge via Hezbollah, Israel isn't just waiting around for them to strike. They're pre-emptively disrupting their operations. And today's attack is next-level.

Somehow, Israel hacked the pagers used by a couple thousand Hezbollah members. And then they made the pagers explode simultaneously, leaving over 200 of them seriously injured. People on Twitter are speculating that Israel confiscated the pagers, then implanted explosives, and then returned them to Hezbollah who stupidly continued to use them . It seems unlikely that a software hack could make a battery explode. Edit: A better explanation is that Israel somehow intercepted the pagers during shipping and implanted explosives.

Whatever happened, its more evidence of both Israel's ability to strike at its enemies, and also the incompetence of those enemies.

From a strategic standpoint, it seems that Israel is now grimly determined to win the war militarily as they (accurately) perceive their enemies as unreliable partners in peace.

That's a pretty cool trick but how is it going to achieve the political goal?

Israel has blown up leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah with bombs and now pagers. They have all these sci-fi ways of killing Iranian scientists, remote controlled machineguns and such.

No war in history has ever been won by assassination. If they want to win militarily they need to actually march in and crush Hezbollah, there's no shortcut. Hamas shows that much. If Russia blew up Zelensky, that wouldn't solve their problems. They have to smash the Ukrainian army until it stops moving, or come to a negotiated peace.

If Israel actually follows this up with an air and ground campaign that blasts through Hezbollah and achieves their surrender or obliteration, that will be really impressive. But if it just leads to more skirmishing with rocket and airstrike exchanges, then what's the point?

I don't think there was any intent to achieve a significant political goal, they were forced to use it because it was about to be discovered.

https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2024/09/exclusive-hezbollah-suspicions-forced-israel-expedite-lebanon-pager-attack

It was not Israel’s preferred course of action to detonate the pagers ahead of a full-scale war with Hezbollah, but security officials made an 11th-hour decision after at least two Hezbollah members suspected something was amiss with the devices.

Israel has been posturing for an invasion of Lebanon but clearly aren't ready for it just yet.

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