Did the attack with exploding pagers on Hezbollah in Lebanon violate international law?

LONDON — The series of explosions that rocked Lebanon this week, killing dozens of people and injuring thousands, has sparked heated debate among legal experts in international humanitarian law.

Many, but not all, of the pagers and walkie-talkies that unexpectedly exploded over the past two days in Lebanon and some neighboring countries were owned by Hezbollah fighters, their operatives or allies.

The group is designated a terrorist organization by many countries, including the United States, but many of its members and supporters operate in civilian areas in Lebanon, and some explosions have injured or killed innocent bystanders, including children.

Israel has not officially admitted involvement in the explosions. However, a U.S. official who was not authorized to speak publicly told NPR that Israel notified Washington that it was responsible for Tuesday’s attacks.

The researchers say several international treaties and protocols to which Israel is a signatory could make such actions by a state like Israel illegal under international humanitarian law.

Particular emphasis was placed on Article 7(2) of the amended Protocol II to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, which was added to international law regarding the use of conventional weapons in 1996. Both Israel and Lebanon have agreed to it.

It bans the use of booby traps, which Lama Fakih, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, defines as “items that may attract civilians or are associated with normal, everyday civilian use.”

In a statement, Fakih said the use of “an explosive device whose exact location cannot be reliably determined would be unlawfully indiscriminate, using a means of attack that could not be directed at a specific military objective, and as a result would strike military targets and civilians indiscriminately.” Human Rights Watch called for an immediate and impartial investigation into the incidents.

“Israel is a party to the Protocol,” wrote Richard Moyes, director of Article 36, an advocacy group that focuses on international law as it relates to civilian casualties in conflict zones. In a message to NPR about the provision, commonly known as Article 7(2), he said of the attacks: “I think there are many other legal issues within the general rules of war — but this seems to be a direct violation of that rule.”

Brian Finucane, former legal adviser on the use of military force at the U.S. State Department, told NPR: Morning Edition on Friday that information obtained after the explosions “incriminates Israel in these attacks and also suggests that these attacks violate the ban on using booby traps or other devices in this manner.”

Finucane noted in a post on the Just Security website that the U.S. Department of Defense also cites the same article from the 1996 Revised Protocols in its “Manual on the Law of War,” providing an oft-cited example of the communications headsets that Italian military units used to plant explosives as they retreated during World War II.

Finucane, now a senior adviser at the International Crisis Group, told NPR that the broader, internationally recognized and ratified laws of war included requirements that parties to a conflict take “practicable precautions to minimize harm to civilians” and “take into account proportionality when conducting attacks.”

But he said it was difficult at this stage to draw conclusions about proportionality and targeting when no facts about the attacks were known. “Were they confined to Hezbollah fighters? Were they more widely dispersed within the organization? Were they dispersed among the civilian population?” he said, repeating questions that currently have no answers. “It is also very difficult to know what, if anything, the Israeli officials who carried out the attack knew about the location of the people wearing the pagers.”

A group of U.N. human rights experts called the simultaneous explosions “appalling” violations of international law. “To the extent that international humanitarian law applies, there was no way to know at the time of the attacks who had each device or who was nearby,” the experts said. “Simultaneous attacks by thousands of devices would inevitably violate humanitarian law because each target would not be verified and there would be no distinction between protected civilians and those who could potentially be attacked for directly participating in hostilities.”

Jessica Peake, a professor of international law at UCLA School of Law, told The Intercept that “detonating pagers in people’s pockets without knowing where they are at that moment is clearly an indiscriminate attack” and that the attacks were, in her opinion, “a pretty blatant violation of the principle of proportionality and indiscriminate attacks.”

However, other lawyers and academics say the attacks were entirely defensive under international law.

“The operation meets all the basic laws of warfare necessity, proportionality and distinction,” said John Spencer, chairman of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern Warfare Institute at West Point. Newsweek“This was a very precise sabotage of enemy equipment used for military purposes.”

William H. Boothby, a retired Royal Air Force Air Commodore, wrote for the Lieber Institute at West Point that “it is probably prudent for those planning and executing the operation to assume that military-issued pagers would be in the possession of their military users at the time of detonation.”

However, former deputy director of the Royal Air Force Legal Services, Boothby, said concerns about the way the attacks were carried out would centre on “whether adequate consideration was given to the incidental injuries and damage that could reasonably be expected from these explosions”, because those responsible for detonating the bombs could not have been certain of the circumstances in which so many different explosions occurred.

The attacks drew political condemnation from some U.S. lawmakers for alleged violations of international law, including Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. She posted on X that the explosions, which she attributed to Israel, occurred in public spaces, killing and wounding innocent civilians.

“This attack clearly and unequivocally violates international humanitarian law and undermines U.S. efforts to prevent a wider conflict,” she wrote.