On 18 September 2024 several thousand pagers exploded in Lebanon. On 19 September 2024, several hundred walkie-talkies exploded in Lebanon. As of late afternoon on 19 September, the death toll stood at 32, with many thousands more injured. Later on 19 September Israel launched airstrikes against missile batteries and launch points in Lebanon. This has escalated in the following week to include further attacks on Lebanese territory. This blog explores the legal and security implications of this cyber-attack, apparently initiated by Israel.
Background – alliances
Whilst technically a state, Lebanon is not really sovereign in any meaningful sense of the word. Lebanon has a government, but it is largely controlled by Syria. The anti-Israel militia group Hezbollah operates from Lebanese territory. Hezbollah is back by Iran and Syria. Iran and Syria are historic allies. In the context of the current conflicts in the Middle East, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Ansar Allah (Houthi) rebels in Yemen constitute an anti-Israeli axis. There are plenty of states in the region which criticise Israel, but the only one that really does anything about it is Iran – by sending military aid to all three groups. Other states are critical of Israel but do nothing. Some are publicly critical of Israel, but privately are more concerned about the potential threat from one, two or even all three of these groups. This means that they act against these groups and thus end up fighting the same battle as Israel. They may not do so consciously in the specific context of Israel’s catastrophic operation in Gaza and now the West Bank as well.
Background – recent history and escalation
Hamas triggered the Gaza operation by attacking Israel on 7 October 2023. Israel has overreacted and the results are clear to see. This blog does not need to rehearse these arguments. What is needed is an explanation as to why the conflict shows signs of escalation.
For the first six months, the violence was largely confined to Gaza and Western Israel. The Israeli Defence Force (IDF) operated in Gaza and some rockets continued to be launched into Western Israel in response. On 1 April 2024, the IDF attacked the Iranian Consulate in Damascus, Syria, in order to achieve the targeted killing of Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). This was probably linked to Iranian support for Hamas, although there is also the possibility that it was part of an ongoing series of such targeted killings and the link to Gaza is mere coincidence. Israel has been carrying out such targeted killings for decades. On 13 April 2024, Iran responded by attacking Israel directly, with a combination of drones, cruise and ballistic missiles. Although the attack is described as being the first direct strike by Iran against Israel, many of the missiles were clearly fired by Hezbollah in Lebanon and Ansar Allah in Yemen. These groups are so closely associated with Iran that journalists do not bother to make much distinction.
This brought Hezbollah directly into the conflict and forced Israel to deploy more forces to its Northern flank. There was always the dim suspicion that Hezbollah might choose this moment to attack Israel. This was never likely: Hezbollah is not strong enough to achieve much from this and the IDF is capable of managing an operation against both Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon at the same time. It is not ideal: no military wants to fight on two fronts at the same time, but it is logistically manageable and something Israel has done before in wars in 1967 and 1973.
On or around 29 August 2024, the IDF began kinetic security operations in the West Bank, the hitherto relatively peaceful part of the occupied territories. Israel’s precise goals in this area are obscure, but there was always likely to be some cooperation between oppressed Palestinians in the West Bank and even more severely oppressed Palestinians in Gaza. This operation meant that IDF forces were present in greater numbers on the border with Lebanon, and hence closer to Hezbollah, than before.
The potential involvement of Iranian proxies like Hezbollah and Ansar Allah, together with the direct Iranian attacks on Israel, are what the media mean when they discuss a ‘wider war in the region’, or sometimes the even more silly ‘full-scale war’. The likelihood of a classic international armed conflict breaking out is slim. The Lebanese military is irrelevant. Israel and Iran are inconveniently located for a direct conflict, with several states getting in the way. Throwing missiles and drones at each other can of course continue and armed conflicts can be solely airpower based. But even this seems unlikely, because Iran is not in a position to pursue this: its attack on Israel was not very successful, partly because many states in the region cooperated in helping to reduce the effectiveness of the Iranian attack. One would expect this from the UK and US, who used Air and naval assets in the region to help Israel. But Iraq and Jordan are also annoyed by Iran’s disregard for the sovereignty of their airspace. Jordan has acknowledged that they shot down several of the drones, whilst Iraq almost certainly handed on radar data, if not to Israel itself, then to its allies.
We do not know the precise reason why Israel decided that 18 September 2024 was the day to begin strikes against Hezbollah assets in Lebanon. There had been relatively low levels of rocket fire from Hezbollah into Northern Israel for months. The IDF had responded in kind and Israeli civilians were forced to evacuate further South, but there was no sense of an impending major flare up in violence. The IDF and Israeli government may have had specific or general intelligence that Hezbollah was about to become more actively involved in the conflict. Or they may have simply decided that it was not worth the political risk of waiting for this to happen. The attack came just hours after Israel’s security cabinet made the safe return of residents to the North of the country an official war goal. On 18 September 2024, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said the country was “opening a new phase in the war” and the “centre of gravity is shifting to the north through the diversion of resources and forces”.[1]
These statements give an insight into Israeli rationale, but still don’t really answer the most compelling question: why now? Since the disaster of October 7, 2023, Prime Minister Netanyahu has been compelled to be constantly on the offensive against Israel’s enemies, both real and imagined. Netanyahu may believe he is genuinely acting in the interest of Israel, but he is certainly acting in his own interests: once the war hysteria in Israel dies down, it is likely his coalition will collapse, and he will lose power. Perhaps he calculates that if he can keep the conflict going long enough, presenting enough miliary successes to the people, they will eventually forget that he was in power when Hamas launched their attacks. It is suspicious that just as IDF operations in Gaza were starting to wind down (because there is no infrastructure left for Hamas to exploit), the IDF started to move into the West Bank and pre-emptively attack Hezbollah. Israel’s security situation is starting to look like the game of whack-a-mole that you play at the amusements at the beach. Gaza has been whacked enough, now it’s the West Bank’s turn. After that, Hezbollah in Lebanon then Iran itself, by which time Hamas will be regrouping in Gaza and they can be whacked again. It’s a forever war, and this suits the right wing of Israeli politics. It also suits the right wing of the Palestinian liberation movement. It is thus unlikely to change any time soon.
The security implications
The pager and walkie-talkie attacks have clearly been planned a long time in advance. Hezbollah commanders largely stopped using mobile phones (used once and then discarded, these are known as ‘burner phones’) as long ago as 1996, when bomb-maker Yahya Ayyash was killed when his phone exploded in his hand. In the 2006 conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, it was evident that Israel had almost total access to all of Hezbollah’s communications. Pagers were adopted as being more secure. Most people are too young to remember how they work, because they died out around the turn of the century, but a pager message is usually just something like ‘Contact George ASAP’. The recipient then calls George on a landline (which in Western Democracies are typically not subject to Police surveillance) or else arranges to go and see George in person. Pagers are far less convenient than mobile phones, but far more secure. Walkie-talkies use radio communication technology to allow point to point oral communication over relatively short distances. These can be listened to by third parties, but the users can always change frequencies in line with a pre-discussed pattern that the eavesdroppers are unaware of.
Israel has been aware of this, and in a development that seems like something out of a bad Bond movie, has been discreetly supplying Hezbollah with pagers and walkie-talkies that have between 1-3 grams of high explosives in them. The precise details of which company, where did what, with what knowledge, to whom and precisely why, are not of concern here. Major news outlets are falling over themselves to put the pieces together. Israel certainly would have used several layers of deception, involving shell companies in different parts of the world. This is not that complicated to organise, and Israel has experience with this type of activity through its procurement of both conventional and nuclear weapons technology. It is certainly not as simple as the pagers arriving in Lebanon with a ‘Made in Taiwan sticker’ crudely plastered over another that says ‘Made in Israel’.
The security implications are frightening, because if this could be done once, it could be done again. Several Western states have already refused to allow Chinese telecoms firms to operate 5G networks, citing security fears that the Chinese government might be able to infiltrate and attack such a vital communications network.[2] This was before phones were exploding. The level of anti-Chinese paranoia is unlikely to go down in the meantime. One can already imagine the scenes on the floor of the US Senate. There is also the concern that a terrorist organisation might infiltrate a factory where phones, tablets and laptops are produced and do the same thing. They could then announce that thousands of such devices were in circulation, causing a global panic. It would not matter that the chances of your iPhone exploding when you received an odd text message were very, very low. Humans have a tendency to be afraid regardless.
The law
Distinction and other principles
The main concern with this method of armed attack is the law on distinction between combatants and civilians. This is a fundamental part of International Humanitarian Law (IHL). Even allowing for the unlikely assumption that all the users of pagers and walkie-talkies in these attacks were legitimate targets, this attack would inevitably produce a high number of civilian casualties. Article 48 of the Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 sets out the basic rules as:
In order to ensure respect for and protection of the civilian population and civilian objects, the Parties to the conflict shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operations only against military objectives.[3] The International Committee of the Red Cross are also clear that this is customary international law, so there is no real need for state to have signed up to the Additional Protocol.[4] This kind of attack was never envisaged by the drafters of these documents, but that does not matter. The precautionary principle[5] should also work to prevent states from carrying out this kind of attack. There is also the principle of proportionality in attack codified in Article 51(5)(b) of Additional Protocol I and repeated in Article 57.
Necessity
The doctrine of necessity is particularly interesting when applied to the September 18/19 attacks. Necessity requires that there be some immediate need for an attack to occur, to achieve a military objective. The ICRC commentary on necessity states that it ‘permits measures which are actually necessary to accomplish a legitimate military purpose and are not otherwise prohibited by international humanitarian law. In the case of an armed conflict the only legitimate military purpose is to weaken the military capacity of the other parties to the conflict.’[6] Yet it is very hard to see how this applied in the instant example. The individuals targeted were not engaging in any specific ongoing operation or even immediate plan to attack Israel. There was nothing in the works that would indicate the doctrine of necessity was met. This was simply an attempt to kill some individuals and generally cause chaos throughout Lebanon.
Targeted killings in international law
Even if it were possible to argue that the rules of distinction, precaution, proportionality and necessity had been followed, these attacks would fall under the category of targeted killings: in a great many cases, Israel must have known exactly who was using certain devices and intended for them to die. Targeted killings have undergone a legal make-over in the last quarter century. In the 1990’s, they were disreputable. In 1976, President Gerald Ford had signed Executive Order 11905, which banned assassinations from being carried out by the US government. The specific focus on the word ‘assassination, which has no real meaning in international law, left some loopholes. When The United States attacked Libya on 15 April1986,[7] Colonel Gaddafi seemed to be a target, but it was argued he had made himself a military target by his actions in organising global terrorist attacks. Targeted killings had a respectable heritage. There are at least two clear cut examples from The Second World War: German General Reinhard Heydrich was killed in Operation Anthropoid, on 27 May 1942;[8] Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto was killed in Operation Vengeance on 18 April 1943.[9] But in the intervening 30 years, United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operations in Central and South America, Africa and Asia had given targeted killings a bad name. Israel remained enthusiastic users of this tool. It is difficult to know precisely when it began, but the most obvious date is in 1972, when Operation Wrath of God was implemented to kill the leaders of Black September.[10] This group was behind the Munich Olympics massacre on 5/6 September 1972, when 11 members of the Israeli Olympic delegation were killed.
In the intervening years, targeted killings have again become respectable in other states. It is noteworthy that the ICRC manual only describes them as ‘problematic as, oftentimes, those targeted are geographically far removed from hostilities, and/or not necessarily directly participating in hostilities at the time they are targeted.’[11] There may be an argument for disposing of the objection that the pager and walkie-talkie attacks were targeted killings and focusing on the other, more concrete reasons for objecting to them
Cyber-warfare with kinetic effects
International law has a sad tendency to focus on technological developments that international lawyers may only dimly understand. The current obsession is Artificial Intelligence (AI), with the very specific niche of Quantum Computing (QC) at its tip. For the last two decades, politicians, soldiers and international lawyers have been obsessed with cyber-warfare. The author has always been sceptical of this, because these technologies do not really produce social problems until they also produce kinetic effects. A cyber-attack on a nuclear power station for example, could simply be treated the same as directing a weapon at a nuclear power station. It is harder to attribute responsibility to cyber-attacks, but this is to confuse factual proof with legal rules. It is also frequently hard to work out who is responsible for a drone strike, but this does not lessen their general prohibiting in international law. Yet the attacks of 18/19 September 2024 were unusual in being cyber-attacks that produced direct, kinetic results. This may be more common in the future.
Conclusions
The mass weaponisation of communication devices that are used away from the field of combat is impossible to justify in international law. There is also the specific question of whether it is legal to supply equipment with a built-in flaw, under clearly fraudulent pretences. This is a question the other leaves to others to answer.
References
[1]M. Murphy, J. Tidy ‘What we know about the Hezbollah device explosions’, BBC News Online, 20/09/2024
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz04m913m49o
[2] C. Kroet ‘Eleven EU countries took 5G security measures to ban Huawei, ZTE’, euronews.com, 12/08/2024, https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/08/12/eleven-eu-countries-took-5g-security-measures-to-ban-huawei-zte
[3] Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), 8 June 1977
[4] https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule1
[5] There are several treaty bases for this principle, but it is consolidated by the ICRC at https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule15
[6] https://casebook.icrc.org/a_to_z/glossary/military-necessity
[7] https://www.afhistory.af.mil/FAQs/Fact-Sheets/Article/458950/1986-operation-el-dorado-canyon/
[8] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-18183099
[9] https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/operation-vengeance-killing-isoroku-yamamoto
[10] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/israel-mossad-assassinates-enemies-munich-olympics-hamas-rcna132908
[11] https://casebook.icrc.org/a_to_z/glossary/targeted-killings#:~:text=Targeted%20killings%20occur%20both%20within,the%20time%20they%20are%20targeted.
