Why the Pager Attack Causes Alarm

Condemnations are biased, but concerns are real

My purpose here is not to pass judgment or even give an opinion as to whether the pager attack was right or wrong. (For a more scholarly and in-depth analysis of the legal aspects see this article on Just Security or this thorough review from West Point.) I also do not want to join (or condone) the many UN officials, human rights groups, or governments rushing to condemn Israel for doing this before even getting the actual facts about what happened. This is particularly so for those who also fail to speak out against the constant, indiscriminate, criminal attacks constantly perpetrated against Israel by Hezbollah and Hamas.

But I do want to help explain why the pager attack has set off so many alarm bells and may be seen as a particularly serious issue under international law.

In General, Booby-Traps Cause Undue Civilian Harm

The overall purpose of the Laws of Armed Combat (LOAC), is to try to limit the destruction caused by war. While LOAC can be traced back to ancient history, for example with regard to agreements to not use poison darts or feathered arrows, it has picked up steam tremendously in the last century. This is in reaction to the vast destruction caused by the world wars, the holocaust, and the development of modern weapons capable of quite literally destroying our planet.

As everyone is by now familiar, one of the key principles of LOAC is the distinction between combatants and civilians, with the requirement that civilians not be deliberately targeted and that precautions must be taken so they are not harmed. This then becomes the most mundane objection to the pagers.

The exploding pagers are booby-traps, which are defined as apparently harmless devices that have been manufactured or altered to cause harm while used for an activity that appears safe. Since booby-traps are left unattended to go off when triggered, it is difficult to meet the obligation to take precautions against harming civilians. For example, an army may assume that a booby-trapped item placed on the side of a road frequently patrolled by enemy soldiers will most likely be activated by them, but there’s no way to stop an innocent bystander from coming along first and triggering the device instead.

It’s possible that with regard to the pagers Israel may have had a way to be reasonably certain that the device would be in the hands of the intended target at the time of detonation. This could have been by sending a message to the target immediately prior or a general knowledge that the targets always keep the pagers on their person. And the explosions may have been small enough to limit harm to others who might be close by. The details of this have not been reliably reported, and anyone accusing the pager attack of being indiscriminate without this information is revealing their own prejudice.

That said, there is good reason why LOAC severely restricts booby-traps. By and large booby-traps are harder to target and have much more potential to cause civilian harm than other types of attacks which can be aimed more precisely and called off at the last minute should circumstances require. It would therefore be unfortunate if this attack makes booby-traps a more common method of warfare.

Scope of Harm

A more fundamental objection to booby-traps is that they undermine the fundamental purpose of LOAC. The first intuition of a soldier, frightened and struggling to survive, is to destroy everything. Any object could potentially be hiding a bomb and any person could potentially be an enemy. But nevertheless, LOAC forbids soldiers from harming certain protected people and things.

For this to be viable, it depends on combatants feeling reassured that these people and objects won’t harm them. So for example, in 1980 additional protocol II of the Geneva Conventions forbid putting booby traps on:

(i) internationally recognized protective emblems, signs or signals;

(ii) sick, wounded or dead persons;

(iii) burial or cremation sites or graves;

(iv) medical facilities, medical equipment, medical supplies or medical transportation;

(v) children's toys or other portable objects or products specially designed for the feeding, health, hygiene, clothing or education of children;

(vi) food or drink;

(vii) kitchen utensils or appliances except in military establishments, military locations or military supply depots;

(viii) objects clearly of a religious nature;

(ix) historic monuments, works of art or places of worship which constitute the cultural or spiritual heritage of peoples;

(x) animals or their carcasses.

The Laws of Armed Combat correspondingly insist that soldiers not harm these items, both in order to prevent excessive cruelty and suffering and also to enable civilian life to continue as normally as possible in spite of the conflict.

While portable electronics are not on that list (perhaps because they by and large hadn’t yet been invented), if common, everyday electronic devices are turned into weapons it may require armies to upend whole civilian ways of life to mitigate the threat. This is true even if the weaponized devices are precisely targeted to avoid civilians. Imagine, just as made-up, hypothetical examples, a refrigerator rigged to add poison whenever someone in military uniform, identified by a camera either on the fridge or another smart device in the home, pushes the lever to release ice. Or a car set so that when it recognizes a soldier as driver, perhaps by their phone linking to Bluetooth, it suddenly disables the brakes.

Militaries will have to regard everything with suspicion. Imagine what would happen if an army decided it had to forbid soldiers both from using and also even being in the presence of any smart device or electronics connected to the internet, even when on leave. Entire homes and the complete civilian transportation system would be upended, particularly in a country like Israel where military service is so widespread.

As I said in the beginning, I am not here to pass judgment on the pager attack. Israel does not have many good options to defend itself against Hezbollah, and there will be moral and legal questions about whatever it decides to do. The immediate, predictable, one-sided condemnations are biased and misguided. But it is fair to say that the pager attack represents a frightening escalation in the methods of warfare. Concerns about the devastating consequences to society should these types of attacks become widespread are real.