Israel’s pager attack in Lebanon detonated thousands of handheld devices across of a slew of public spaces, seriously injuring and killing innocent civilians.
This attack clearly and unequivocally violates international humanitarian law and undermines US efforts to prevent a wider conflict.
Congress needs a full accounting of the attack, including an answer from the State Department as to whether any US assistance went into the development or deployment of this technology.
Since there are already armchair "international law experts" pretending that the pager attack is a violation of international humanitarian law, it is perhaps the most legal large scale attack in history against people hiding amongst civilians.
The principle of distinction says that belligerents must distinguish between combatants and protected civilians. Only Hezbollah operatives would have the pagers, no one else. Having one proves you are a militant. They are the cyber equivalents of uniforms.
The principle of proportionality says that any harm to civilians must be proportional to the military advantage gained from the attack. The explosives were tiny - the vast majority didn't kill even the people carrying them.
From all appearances, the pagers themselves were purposefully chosen by Hezbollah to be battle ready. They were especially hardened (assuming they were the Apollo AR-924.) Their entire purpose was military communication for a terror army. The pagers themselves were not civilian objects - they were military objectives on their own.
The question for the fake "experts" and "human rights professionals" like AOC is the same as always: what could Israel have done to achieve a valid, legal military objective better than it did? With fewer injuries to civilians?
As always, they can never answer that question except for insisting that Israel should just surrender and let the terrorists have the right to murder Jews.
Hezbollah has shot hundreds of rockets at Israel, killed many, and tens of thousands of Israelis had to evacuate their homes. This is a war. Israel just managed to sideline hundreds of fighters in an instant with close to zero collateral damage.
Nobody could adhere to the laws of armed conflict better than Israel (apparently) did this week. Saying it is a violation of IHL is the exact opposite of the truth - no one has ever mounted an attack that neutralized so many of the enemy in the middle of civilian areas, with almost no civilian casualties, in the history of warfare.
AOC is following the antisemitic playbook. Declare everything Israel does as illegal, and then make everyone think it must be true by calling for an investigation into the nonexistent crime.