At least nine people have been killed and 2, 750 wounded in Lebanon on Tuesday after pagers used by Hezbollah - and medics- exploded in unison, in an attack that the movement and Lebanese government blamed on Israel.
Among the dead was a 10-year-old girl, who was killed in eastern Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley when the pager of her father, who is allegedly a Hezbollah member, exploded. Many have posted a photo of the girl on their X accounts and Instagram stories to pay their condolences.
Several social media users drew attention to the reckless and casual nature of the attack which targeted many people including civilians. A human rights lawyer on X cited the International Humanitarian Law Databases of the ICRC, saying that “there was no way to know if they would be in shopping markets, homes, or streets with busy traffic”, pointing to the indiscriminate nature of the attack.
Anthropologist and researcher Philip Proudfoot cited a section on indiscriminate attacks of the ICRC Geneva Conventions of 1949 and said that Israel is committing a war crime due to the indiscriminate nature of this attack with possible collateral damage. Many other users cited the same section of the convention, drawing attention to the fact that people had no means of knowing who was holding the explosive devices when they went off.
A pager is a rectangular device which is able to display the phone number of someone calling your number. Several thousand years ago all cave men wanted to get one. They instead drew paintings on walls by spitting chewed chemicals from their mouth. Later on we indeed had some which made people look way smarter and important than they really were. Now we have cellphones which can transfer billions upon billions of phone number worths of text and image spam and ads. Sometimes people send their cave paintings to one another. But they are strictly for the purpose of sending ads for things we should buy to prevent the economy from collapsing under the rich and powerful.