Pager Bombs and Just War
The leading scholar on the subject dissents.
The pre-eminent contemporary thinker on Just War Theory,* Michael Walzer, takes to the NYT op-ed pages to argue “Israel’s Pager Bombs Have No Place in a Just War.”
To set the stage, I should note that his classic 1977 volume Just and Unjust Wars was required reading at West Point 40 years ago and his work is still assigned throughout the U.S. professional military education continuum. While he decidedly comes from a leftist perspective, he’s taken quite seriously by the American military. Further, while he’s an ardent critic of the Netanyahu government, he’s steadfastly defended Israel’s right to defend itself in the wake of the October 7 attacks.
The exploding pagers and walkie-talkies targeting members of Hezbollah in Lebanon were certainly an espionage and technological coup. Few people on the spot or reading about them from far away could fail to be amazed. But the explosions on Tuesday and Wednesday were also very likely war crimes — terrorist attacks by a state that has consistently condemned terrorist attacks on its own citizens.
Yes, the devices most probably were being used by Hezbollah operatives for military purposes. This might make them a legitimate target in the continuous cross-border battles between Israel and Hezbollah. But the attacks, which killed at least 37 people and wounded thousands of others, came when the operatives were not operating; they had not been mobilized and they were not militarily engaged. Rather, they were at home with their families, sitting in cafes, shopping in food markets — among civilians who were randomly killed and injured.
While I have studied the laws of armed conflict, I’m not a lawyer. And, certainly, Walzer has thought more deeply on this subject than I have. That said, while I share his discomfort with the timing of the attacks and the likelihood that innocents would be killed, I strongly disagree that terrorists are only legitimate military targets when they are actively engaged. That’s an absurdly high bar not required by either law or morality.
The theory of just war depends heavily on the distinction between combatants and civilians. In contemporary warfare, these two groups are often mixed together in the same spaces — often, indeed, deliberately mixed together, because the killing of civilians invites moral condemnation. The war that Hamas designed in Gaza is a grim illustration of the strategy of putting civilians at risk for political gain. Still, a military responding to this strategy has to do everything it can to avoid or minimize civilian casualties. Israel claims to be doing that in Gaza, although serious criticism of its conduct there has appeared in media around the world, not to mention a case brought against Israeli and Hamas officials alike at the International Criminal Court alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity.
No similar claim of minimizing risk to civilians can be made for the decision to explode the devices. They were not distributed by Hezbollah in order to put its people at risk. This was not a plot to force Israel to kill or injure civilians. The plot was Israel’s, and the plotters had to know that at least some of the people hurt would be innocent men, women and children.
Walzer has done more than any thinker before or sense to establish that the questions of the justice of the war (jus ad bellum) and the just conduct of war (jus in bello) must be considered separately. While I agree that these are both separate moral and legal matters, I do believe they are intertwined. Israelis responding the October 7 attacks and Ukranians responding to their Russian attackers ought to be given more latitude than their foes because of the injustice of those attacks and the resultant righteousness of their retaliation.
We’re in agreement that the perfidy committed by Hamas in Gaza has intentionally given Israel no way to fight without killing noncombatants and that must factor into how we judge the IDF’s actions. But it seems obvious to me that the same applies to Hezbollah fighters who commit violence and then fade back into the civilian population. While I think exploding the pagers at 3:30 in the afternoon was problematic precisely because it maximized the likelihood of noncombatant harm, I don’t think Israel had a duty to avoid any possibility of noncombatant harm. That’s next to impossible given the circumstances.
Israel’s recent assassinations of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders requires a more complicated, but still critical, political and moral response. These were men actively supporting terrorist attacks on Israel, who certainly knew themselves to be targets — I would say legitimate targets — of assassins who could be operating from close up or far away. But when a government authorizes the killing of men it is directly or indirectly negotiating with, such as the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in July, we have to conclude that the government isn’t committed to the negotiations’ success. That is politically and morally wrong, not only from the standpoint of the large number of Israeli citizens (including my friends in Israel) who are strongly, even desperately, committed to ending the war and bringing the hostages home, but also from the standpoint of all the victims of the Gaza war.
This strikes me as not a just war question at all but rather one of policy disagreement. Does killing the leadership of the two terrorist groups make it harder to reach a peace? Maybe. It might also radically enhance reaching peace on Israel’s terms. That’s the whole premise of war, after all.
However, let me make a distinction here. Condemning an act of war is not the same as condemning the war itself. Hamas and Hezbollah are fighting against Israel for an immoral and unjust purpose: the elimination of the Jewish state. Long ago, Abba Eban called this the crime of policide. In his day, Israel’s enemies were motivated by a nationalist determination to reverse (literally) the nakba, the flight and expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 from what became Israel. Today, the goal is religiously driven and zealously pursued. That this crime has found supporters and apologists in the United States and Europe, often among secular leftists, is even more amazing than the exploding pagers. So it is important to distinguish the judgments we make about the conduct of war from the judgments we make about the decision to go to war.
One can fight an unjust war justly and vice-versa. But, to the extent Israeli leaders believe they’re fighting foes that wish to wipe the country off the map, it’s hard to blame them for erring on the side of military advantage when assessing the proportionality of their means.
Hamas’s terrorist attack on Oct. 7 was meant to start a war, and Israel’s response, though Hamas expected it and wanted it, was nonetheless justified. It is hard to imagine any country responding differently. Hezbollah in Lebanon joined Hamas almost immediately by lobbing rockets into northern Israel continually but also carefully, seemingly intending a limited engagement. In this way it has been supporting its Islamist ally, despite their Sunni-Shia differences, without committing itself to full-scale war.
Israel has helped maintain those limits with its own controlled responses, although it has not refrained from targeting Hezbollah commanders. The result has been the forced evacuation of destroyed towns and villages on each side of the Israel-Lebanon border, without significant damage to the rest of the countries. But the exchanges have become deadlier, and pressure has been building in Israel (which is, unlike Lebanon, a functioning democracy where political pressure is possible) to act in a stronger way to make the northern border communities safe. Perhaps the exploding electronic devices represented an attempt at strong action. I can’t believe it will make anyone safer. It invites retribution, and even if retribution is for the moment difficult, the desire for revenge won’t go away.
But, again, this is a disagreement over policy, not law or morality. I suppose, if the Netanyahu government authorized the operation—which was initiated well ahead of the October 7 attack—to increase the likelihood of a wider war, that would be worthy of condemnation. But it seems far more likely that they thought it would help them disrupt enemy command and control and lessen their support from the local population in a war they see as inevitable, if not already underway.
At this moment, any political proposal is bound to be called naïve. Leaders on both sides seem to believe that war is the only way forward. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has said as much. Hamas’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, and the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, are committed to a policy of doing whatever it takes to destroy Israel, even if what it takes is eternal war.
One war may be just and the other unjust, but today anyone who aims at continuing the fight must be condemned. The victims of the exploding pagers and walkie-talkies, the general amazement at what is possible in war today, the fear of what will come tomorrow — all this proves the necessity of a political solution.
By definition, all wars end with a political solution. All sides here are trying to achieve one that is maximally favorable to them. I don’t believe the use of exploding pagers, per se, is an illegitimate means to that end.
I agree completely, though I have less respect than you for the very concept of international law. A law that not only isn’t enforced, but cannot be enforced, isn’t a law it’s a lecture. Furthermore, laws are only just when backed by the will of the people. We elect people to legislatures and executive positions, but no one has ever asked me, as a voter, to cast a vote related to international law.
Had we been hampered by these restrictions in WW2 the Nazis and the Japanese Imperialists might well have won. Almost certainly more people would have died in the long term. Jews, Roma, the handicapped, might have been thoroughly exterminated, and any number of Asian nationalities impoverished and denied any say in their own lives.
Also, the entire notion of Mutual Assured Destruction violates every international law on war. But it also kept us from having a nuclear war. Civilization persists because we were were willing to threaten mass annihilation.
I would also point out that precision weapons, which have cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and are the factor that make it possible to drastically reduce collateral damage, have often been opposed by liberals who profess their devotion to international law.
I like idealists, I really do. But they are often unserious people.
According to WaPo
That would suggest that this was a war crime. Especially with the indiscriminate nature of setting off explosives in civilian areas without taking steps to minimize harm to civilians.
However, I would ask whether a more conventional attack would have been more successful with fewer civilian casualties. If not, I’m inclined to call this more of a war misdemeanor than a war crime.
@Gustopher:
Exploding pagers that maim the intended target and sometimes innocent bystanders, that’s a war crime. But tracking a cell phone and dropping a cruise missile on it isn’t. Sure.
Except that this isn’t what Walzer is arguing. The problem is that those pagers went off when these Hezbollah operatives were surrounded by civilians.
Cf: Additional Protocol I, art. 51(5)(b):
Which leads to the million-dollar question: what concrete and direct military advantage was Israel anticipating?
Side note: if you are disagreeing with someone, at least do them the courtesy of not strawmanning their arguments.
@Gustopher: A Just Security article on this topic notes,
It would certainly seem that exception (a) was satisfied and (b) was not. But note that it’s an OR not an AND.
@drj: I quote Walzer’s argument in its entirety while repeatedly noting that he’s widely recognized as the preeminent scholar in the field. I’m not straw-manning him.
It seems pretty obvious that killing or maiming hundreds of Hezbollah leaders has a significant impact on the organization’s command, control, and morale. That’s a pretty significant military advantage. Especially when followed up days later with a strike that killed the senior-most leadership that was quite likely facilitated by destroying their confidence in their communications infrastructure.
@James Joyner:
Yeah, but what is the concrete and direct military advantage, i.e., on the battlefield?
Words matter.
@drj:
Hezbollah apologists and Israel haters want to pass this off as, ‘just a flesh wound.’ Of course all wounds are flesh wounds, and when you’re hanging around with your fellow terrorists and notice that a lot of them have had their dicks blown off, that’s not great for morale. Or recruitment. Let alone planning and communication. It’s much easier to play off a dead martyr as a hero, than it is a dickless, handless, or assless dude.
Any op that kills or sidelines people high in the military hierarchy, in addition to giving common soldiers the heebee jeebees, and hampers communication, is an impactful op.
It also, as I mentioned yesterday, may have the effect of strengthening the hands of the more practical, governmental side of Hezbollah.
It’s an incoherent piece, mostly because the idea of ‘just war’ might be useful in certain limited contexts but as a guiding moral philosophy it’s insane. Pretending that ‘just war’ that does anything that serve the interests of militaries who wish to have a moral justification is naive beyond belief. It’s like a very creepy man tracking the birthdays of various girls so he knows exactly when they turn 18.
Walzer is flailing in trying to find a logical line where this reasoning works and where it goes too far. But there isn’t any line.
@James Joyner:
Israel has been struggling to defeat Hamas and get the hostages back in their current war. The last time they invaded south Lebanon it did not go well for them.
If anything, I suspect this was more for Israeli morale. I might be wrong, I don’t get the sense that there’s a great optimism in Israel over the possibility of opening a second front.
If there weren’t thousands of innocent people dying in the process, the juxtaposition between some people’s “shit happens in war, who cares?” attitudes toward Arabs and their fury toward anyone who suggests a similar approach toward Israel would be almost comical.
@Michael Reynolds:
Didn’t you previously argue that Israel should simply ethnically cleanse the Occupied Territories because law is meaningless in armed conflicts in the Middle East?
And now we should give greater weight to your legal opinion on “concrete and direct military advantage” than to the corresponding opinion of “the pre-eminent contemporary thinker on Just War Theory?”
GTFO.
At least pick one argument – i.e., “ethnic cleansing is fine” or “Israel behaves in accordance with International Humanitarian Law.”
Trying to argue both makes you look like a fool, a liar, or both.
@drj:
I’ll Venmo you a thousand dollars if you can find an example of me supporting ethnic cleansing.
Obviously I don’t support ethnic cleansing. On the contrary, I have repeatedly suggested that cutting Israel off entirely from Western support would leave Netanyahu free to expel Gazans, which he may well have wished to do. Ethnic cleansing was the thing I feared, and still do, because 2 million people standing in the middle of the Sinai would be a very bad thing. In fact it would bear a strong resemblance to the Turkish genocide of Armenians.
My analysis, repeated ad nauseam here, is that there was no decent solution, and that demanding one without a serious idea of what it should be, was pointless. And I have predicted that Israel in the end, would make of Gaza a large, open-air refugee camp, quite likely intruded upon by settlers, and turn the WB into a reservation.
Prediction is not advocacy.
I’ve also theorized that US influence is declining, because I believe an Arab-Israel entente is forming, in which the KSA and Israel will be frosty allies rather than foes.
Unlike many with strong opinions on Gaza, I did not just discover the issue on October 7, 2023. I’m sorry if my more nuanced understanding of the situation doesn’t fall neatly into your binary world view. No doubt your apology will be forthcoming.
I’m still extremely busy with real life, but I have a moment to jump in here for a comment.
First of all, there’s a difference between “Just War” which primarily involves the reasons for going to war, vs. legal conduct once the war is engaged. Hezbollah attacked Israel on October 8th, unprovoked, for reasons that do not meet any Just War standard. Israel has every right to defend itself from such an attack (and consistent and ongoing attacks by Hezbollah for almost the last year now) – their war, as a defensive war, is entirely just.
As for the use of pagers and walkie-talkies – James, I think you are and have been making several questionable claims.
This is something you keep repeating, even though you’ve walked back your initial claims in your first post on this topic. But even here, the evidence for your claim is not evident. Do you know something of Lebanese society and the operating patterns and “work” hours of Hezbollah mid-level and senior leadership to know that 3:30 “maximized” the likelihood of non-combatant harm? Maximized as opposed to what other time? 9pm, when most Hezbollah operatives are likely at home with their families?
And the reality is that the facts, which keep coming in, do not support your claim. Out of thousands of explosive devices, only two noncombatants were killed – tragically, children who picked up their family members’ devices. As for the claim that Hezbollah fighters were all out and about at this time, which “maximized” the potential for civilian injury, there’s no evidence of this. We have perhaps a half dozen videos from security cameras of these blowing up in public places – out of thousands of detonations. Where, exactly, are you getting this idea that 3:30pm maximized the potential for civilian harm?
Here are the facts. Of the deaths, all were Hezbollah (36 IIRC) except the two children. There were approximately 3,000 injured (estimates vary from 2k to over 4k) – how many of those were non-combatants? Hezbollah claims that civilians were injured, but has not clarified who or how many. Neither has the Lebanese government. The airwaves aren’t full of graphic images of non-combatant injuries.
Now, contrast that to the airstrike you posted about last night in which Israel struck a building that killed most of the leadership of Hezbollah’s Radwan Forces – about 20 leaders total – but also killed at least 13 civilians and perhaps more.
Just on the numbers, the beeper and tactical radio attack were two to three orders of magnitude more precise than that airstrike.
And your quote on Article 3 of IHL is only a portion. I would encourage people to read the full thing here. So many have been selectively quoting portion of international law or various legal handbooks.
IANAL and all that, but I think this attack was entirely legal. It was clearly and precisely aimed at Hezbollah fighters and Hezbollah’s military communication system. As we can see from the actual effects of the attacks, it did not result in large civilian deaths or casualties, especially when compared with the scope of the operation, which hit thousands of Hezbollah fighters. It was more precise and less consequential to civilians than many legal attacks, including the airstrike mentioned above.
Of course, one should mention the narrative asymmetry where everything Israel does is examined Monday-morning quarterback style under a microscope, unlike any other country, while Hezbollah’s near-daily black-letter war crimes in an unjust war that it started to go completely unremarked except in passing or when the Israel-haters are pressured into admitting it.
And before I hear, “but Israel’s our ally, and we give them money and weapons, so we should examine them more closely,” I’ll just point out Egypt, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and numerous other despotic governments engaging in despotism and regular violations of international law do not get similar scrutiny, even for brutal wars that are much more bloody that what is happening in the Levant. I’ve pointed out before that the US was an active participant in the war in Yemen, which killed over 300k, including tens of thousands of children dying from starvation. No one GAF about that until Khashoggi was assassinated, and then suddenly everyone realized Saudi Arabia is despotic, and hey, maybe supporting them in that war in Yemen is bad. No campus protests, no dozens of OTB posts, no strident blog commenters making anything close to the level of opposition that the Israel-haters have for Israel.
There are a lot of legitimate things to criticize Israel on, especially in terms of its West Bank policies – people should not need to make shit up or try to spin everything Israel does into a war crime, much less cheering on the “martyrs,” while ignoring the context of the conflict and the tactical and operational realities along with all the actual war crimes committed with regularity by Israel’s enemies.
@Modulo Myself:
QFT! And thank you for saying it so without reservation.
@Modulo Myself:
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
If you have a coherent alternative to “just war” that is not either
a) absolute pacifism
or
b) eternal “social darwinist” war on the basis of machtpolitik
please let me know.
The overall situation is:
Hezbollah’s missile strikes on northern Israel have forced Israel to evacuate a sizable area of northern Israel.
Israel is not prepared to let this situation continue.
Hezbollah has taken a stance of “you must permit us to attack you.”
Iran has taken a stance of “Hezbollah can attack, because that shows how the artificial Zionist entity will collapse; but not so much as to weaken our deterrence of an Israeli attack on our nuclear sites.”
Hezbollah’s power in Lebanon is based on its image of immunity to attack and to subversion/penetration.
This has been undermined.
Other Lebanese will now be pushing against Hezbollah control in various areas.
Iran will continue to forbid Hezbollah to use its entire missile arsenal to support Hezbollah, because Iran wants those missiles to deter Israel from an attack on Iran.
Israel has obliged both Hezbollah and the Pasdaran to consider the potential vulnerability of its missile strike capability to Israeli intelligence targeting.
And Israel has indicated the Hezbollah claims to being a secured and impenetrable core of “resistance” are bullshit.
(This matters a lot in local terms, where subversion and betrayal are over-emphasized)
So, Israel is “fronting up” Hezbollah: do you wish to try to back up your defiance dance, or back off?
The Israeli position is fairly obvious: either Hezbollah ceases its missile strikes on Israel, or the Isrealis will escalate.
See the recent Hezbollah messaging: “any attacks on our locations in Beirut are a RED LINE!”
Israel promptly conducts air attacks on Hezbollah in Beirut.
The message could hardly be clearer: “Back off, or die.”
@Stormy Dragon:
There’s a massive difference in scale between the pager attacks and either the October 6th attack or the retaliatory war.
This was possibly a war crime (enough reasonable people are making the case that it violates black letter law*), but if it is, it’s a pretty trivial war crime compared to actual things that routinely happen in war and are fine, and the terrorist attacks Israel faces.
I am not a defender of Israel in general, but this doesn’t strike me as bad. If it’s a war crime, it’s a misdemeanor.
*: this hinges on whether you think adding explosive communication devices to the enemy’s supply chain and not knowing who will get one is “targeted”. This also assumes that Israel does not know who got which pager, how many were unaccounted for, etc.
@JohnSF:
When Israel is doing far worse a few miles away, I find it hard to be deeply concerned. Maybe I am a terrible person. Maybe when a deal is struck, it will be Israel, Palestinians and Hezbollah all at the table.
@JohnSF:
When Israel is doing far worse a few miles away, I find it hard to be deeply concerned. Maybe I am a terrible person. Maybe when a deal is struck, it will be Israel, Palestinians and Hezbollah all at the table.
@JohnSF: War is hell, but necessary. The problem with most wars isn’t that they are unjust. It’s that they’re stupid. For example, withdrawing the IDF from the area adjacent to Gaza–especially at the time of a music festival–so that it was vulnerable to attack was stupid. Creating and supporting the creation of an implacable enemy so that you didn’t have to negotiate with the alternate pseudo-government was stupid.
And quite frankly, I will say that if I believed that killing every man, woman, and child in Gaza were necessary to eliminate Hamas (which I helped create in the first place) was necessary, I would do it. The difference being that I’m willing to admit that it’s a war crime and don’t care what you think or do about it.
But I don’t believe that. I believe that the whole situation involving Israel and its neighbors is stupid. Sadly, the people who live in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon, are stuck in the middle of the stupidity with clowns on their left and jokers to their right, while you and the other jarheads congratulate yourselves on being able to justify the slaughter.
Was that clear enough for you?
I am fine with the pager attack on the legal front. It feels very much like pretty fussy pedantry to claim it was illegal. My concern has always been that I am not sure of the utility.
Steve
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Quite obviously, Netanyahu and the IDF both fucked up monumentally re Gaza.
And Netanyahu’s decisions were both stupid, and motivated by his political intrigues and positioning for personal advantage.
For my part, even were I an Israeli decision maker, which I am not, killing every living being in Gaza would probably seem neither necessary nor acceptable, nor likely to work out to the advantage of Israel.
And in any case, not directly related to the situation regarding Hezbollah.
It’s sometimes difficult for some people to grasp, but Hamas and Hezbollah are NOT the same.
If the two were at loose in an Israeli-free Middle East, they would in all likelihood be at each others throats.
I am not much interested in justifying slaughter, more in understanding why the slaughter is happening, and how it might be ameliorated.
Or in some extreme circumstances, increased in order to enable an acceptable outcome.
These things are not always as morally clear as you may think.
Many people who took a pacific stance in the 1930’s considered themselves at the time to be paragons of righteousness, but later on were less prone to preening.
And I might also spend some time explaining why I think the Balfour Declaration was idiotic.
@JohnSF:
We have B) already. Israel and the IDF has been credibly accused of torture camps. There have been numerous reports by doctors of children being shot deliberately by snipers. Same goes with targeting with civilian convoys or anything else that once popped up as an issue that would be investigated and oddly enough faded.
In B) saying that Hezbollah = the IDF = Hamas is an act of moral equivalence, and therefore wrong. Only Hezbollah and Hamas can be targeted wherever they go with acceptable civilian casualties, etcetera.
In a system that’s neither A) nor B) moral equivalence is not a meaningful concept. Whereas in America’s, it’s the key to everything.
@JohnSF: It can’t be ameliorated. The people ordering the killing (and a significant number of the ones doing it) are stupid and evil. No one on either side wants peace, they only want the destruction of their enemy. Israel is not interested in a two-state solution; there are only interested in driving the Palestinians out of the West Bank (do you really believe that settlements are about anything else? [talk about stupid 🙁 ]) and the Palestinians are only interested in driving the Jews into the sea (although I think that some would settle for a two-state solution, if only to keep trying to drive the Jews into the sea). I don’t pay enough attention anymore to remember what stake Hezbollah has in any of this, so you’re on your own for deciding that.
Both sides had a chance for peace. Israel chose to assassinate Begin instead. Israel gets no sympathy from me. Killing Begin and perpetually reelecting Netanyahu is a vote for social Darwinist machtpolitik and eternal war. F*** them.
ETA: To correct your misunderstanding, I don’t think that there is any moral clarity available. I’m a “total depravity of man” guy by religious up bringing. “There is none righteous; not even one.”
You are free to disagree. Your soul. Your decision.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
ETA: To correct your misunderstanding, I don’t think that there is any moral clarity available. I’m a “total depravity of man” guy by religious up bringing. “There is none righteous; not even one.”
The only real moral clarity is that the Palestinians had their land taken from by Zionist settlers. That’s how this began. European colonialism and imperialism merged with anti-semitism. But you can’t blame most of the people who came to Palestine and did the taking. I mean, what’s the argument–it’s 1936 and you had a moral obligation to stick around in Poland and see where all of the anti-semitism is heading?
There’s an implausible counter-factual where the Zionists ended up in the middle of nowhere, i.e. Utah, America. It’s a tough sell for Zionism because of Utah not exactly being Judea, and it would have been a tougher sell for America, which has no problem not understanding why Palestinians have an issue with being displaced but loves getting into the dumbest white people who have trouble with the existential displacement in their racist minds. But had that somehow happened, the Zionists would not become insane reactionaries, the Jewish people in the Middle East would not have been forced to flee to Israel after 1948 and the world would be much, much different. But hey, American bigotry is the gold standard, and you can’t argue against the truth.
@Modulo Myself: Alas, that particular touch of moral clarity doesn’t matter because Hamas–which appears to be the only entity that has agency*.
*After all, we’ve been hearing for weeks that if only Hamas would [fill in the blank] then …
Reports are that the Hezbollah leaders killed in the Israeli airstrike were planning an invasion of Israel similar to the Hamas October 7 massacre. If so, setting off the pagers to disrupt Hezbollah was a prudent decision. And would explain why the intrusion into Hezbollah’s comms was exposed. Even if it only force the meeting that was disrupted by the airstrike and incidentally removed the rape weapons of Hezbollah members.
It does highlight that something might be planned for the next 3 weeks to mark the anniversary of the Hamas rape and slaughter attack.