Israel’s ‘Booby-Trap’ attacks in Lebanon violate int’l law

Experts from the United Nations and human rights groups said that the device attacks in Lebanon, which killed at least 37 people Tuesday and Wednesday while injuring 2,900, violated international law due to their indiscriminate nature and could constitute a war crime.

The surprise attacks have been widely attributed to Israel, including by unnamed U.S. officials. They came in two waves. On Tuesday afternoon local time, thousands of pagers exploded, killing 12 people, including four children, and injuring 2,300. On Wednesday, another 25 people were killed and 600 injured by the explosion of other communications devices, including walkie-talkies and smartphones. Many of the explosions occurred in supermarkets and other public spaces around Lebanon, leaving civilians maimed.

“These attacks violate the human right to life, absent any indication that the victims posed an imminent lethal threat to anyone else at the time,” a group of more than a dozen U.N. legal experts said in a statement on Thursday, including Ben Saul, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism.

The UN experts called the attacks “a terrifying violation of international law.” Volker Turk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, also denounced the attacks in a statement on Wednesday, calling them “shocking, and their impact on civilians unacceptable,” and saying that “the fear and terror unleashed” was “profound.”

Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of the rights group Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), told Al Jazeera “this is exactly why booby-traps of ordinary civilian objects are illegal—because not only do they cause physical harm and injury, they cause psychological and emotional harm.”

Whitson, who previously worked at Human Rights Watch, called the attacks “inherently indiscriminate”—violating international humanitarian law designed to protect civilians—and a “deliberate decision on the part of Israel” to create chaos. Huwaida Arraf, a US-based human rights lawyer, agreed with Whitson, telling Al Jazeera that the coordinated attack “meets the textbook definition of state terrorism.” The experts cited a 1996 UN treaty that forbids the use of “booby-traps” on devices associated with civilian use. Experts said that even if Israel sought to kill Hezbollah military operatives – the devices that exploded had been ordered by Hezbollah – there was no way it could have precisely targeted them with such attacks. Many Lebanese work for Hezbollah in non-combatant roles.

Luigi Daniele, an expert in international humanitarian law at Nottingham Trent University, toldAnadolu Agency that targeting non-combatants is a violation of international humanitarian law, as written in Article 8(2)(b)(i) of the Rome Statute. Like other experts, Daniele also cited the more general issue of detonating explosives in public places, which carries foreseeable impact on civilians that can violate Article 8(2)(b)(iv) of the statute.

U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) herself called for a congressional investigation, including into whether U.S. played a role in the attack. Members of the Biden administration have so far said relatively little publicly about the attacks. The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention issued a sharply-worded condemnation of the attacks on Thursday. “What we see is a genocidal state that is completely out of control and supported by a Western world that is, in large measure, too racist and Islamophobic to care,” the nonprofit group wrote on social media.

The Tuesday pager attacks also extended into Syria, where 14 people were injured.

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