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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.
Technical part is not interesting. Many ways to do it. I am not sure how exposing this capability now helps Israel.
This is one of those - it can work only once things. So they either had some imminent threat to deal with or...?
It happened again today, this time with PTT radios. This is great, I hope it keeps happening and people treat known Hizballah members like lepers.
Do you really think that would actually happen?
Assuming you live in Israel (given your flair), would IDF soldiers randomly exploding due to surreptitiously placed Iranian bombs cause you to start treating known members of the IDF like lepers? I think it would just bolster your determination to fight back against the Iranians rather than treat the soldiers fighting for you like social pariahs. To use a specific example...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/world/middleeast/lebanon-funeral-pager-attack.html
I don't think that murdering this 9 year old girl (which I wouldn't really call "great", personally) is making these people support Israel. In fact, from the photos of the funeral, those Hezbollah scarfs look pretty new - and the quotes they give make it sound like this attack was one of Hezbollah's greatest recruitment efforts to date. I know personally that if my 9 year old daughter was murdered by a foreign state I'd be signing up for whatever military organisation wants to fight back against them as soon as they'd have me.
Did you know that, roughly speaking, Lebanon has 3 major ethnic/religious groups that aren’t super-friendly with each other? So everyone who isn’t a Shia Muslim isn’t really on their side anyway. Christians in Lebanon have already been blaming Hizballah for bringing Israeli wrath on Lebanon for a conflict they have no interest in. When Muslims from Beirut’s Dahieh started looking for places to move to, some Maronites and Druze simply refused to rent them. Now this is further pulling these groups apart, who would want to associate with a group that at any moment could either blow up or be bombed, and you already hated anyway?
You’re modeling this as if it’s all of Lebanon fighting Israel, while in truth it’s one part of Lebanon dragging the rest into unwanted war - AGAIN. Did western media not show you the Syrian opposition groups giving out candy in the streets after the pager attacks? Where do you think that comes from? Or did you not hear of the Sabra and Shatila massacre- blamed on Israel, but perpetrated by Lebanese?
Yes. I just don't believe that will convince any Lebanese people who aren't already Israel supporters that the dying children are to blame rather than the nation which is currently bombing them as we speak.
I don't recall ever claiming that Lebanon was some kind of land of milk and honey where all men lived together in harmony, but I don't see how this really matters. If those distinct subpopulations were already murdering and massacring each other, it isn't like being targeted by Israel is going to change that all that much.
You’re applying contradicting logic to the same group. Once, Shia can somehow hate Israel more because the daughter if a Hizballah operative died, then secondly non-Shia cannot hate Shia more since they’re already hostile to one another. Please pick one lane so we can further discuss.
By the way, you could just go to /r/lebanon and see what they think of Hizballah there.
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