Last week, thousands of small explosions rocked Lebanon, as pagers presumably carried by Hezbollah members exploded simultaneously. The following day, as mourners gathered to bury the dead, a fresh series of additional explosions erupted, this time targeting walkie-talkies.
Since then, international law commentators have made numerous cases arguing that the attacks might have been unlawful. Most of these critiques center on civilian harm, challenging former Israeli military spokesperson Jonathan Conricus’ characterization of the attack as “the most surgical strike in history.” However, even if not a single civilian were harmed in these attacks, they might still violate the laws of war, because those laws also protect soldiers.
To be sure, as law professor Giacomo Biggio details, civilians were harmed in the attacks. When the Israeli military intentionally detonated the pagers, it had no way to monitor or track where they were located or who was holding them. As a result, the explosions took place in busy markets, traffic jams, homes, funeral processions and other places where significant harm to civilians was almost preordained. In other cases, children or other civilians were in possession of the devices when they exploded, making this tactic arguably akin to laying landmines in a civilian area.
Even if one could argue that some harm to civilians is allowable in war when military necessity demands it, and the ratio of civilian harm to “military personnel” neutralized was proportionate, there is also the psychological component of the attacks, which was clearly calculated to be much farther-reaching. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has therefore described this as an act of state-sponsored “terrorism”—defined as the use of political violence, often by nonstate actors but also by states, to inflict a relatively small amount of physical harm in such a way as to have outsized psychological effects on a much wider civilian population. Such violence, when designed to spread terror among the civilian population, is also prohibited under the laws of war.
Worse, civilians may have been targeted directly here, because in asymmetric wars against irregular forces such as Hezbollah, low-level supporters of an armed group are considered legitimate targets only when directly engaged in an armed attack. This is not true of regular military troops in an armed conflict, who may be targeted anytime unless they are surrendering or wounded. And as Michael Walzer, a philosopher specializing in just war theory, pointed out, “the attacks came when the operatives were not operating; they had not been mobilized and they were not militarily engaged.”
What’s more, as Oxford University’s Janina Dill told Deutsche Welle in an interview, even the most permissive reading of that rule only applies to the military wing of Hezbollah, not all its rank-and-file members, who would otherwise be civilians unless and for so long as they were directly engaged in an attack.
What is not being discussed as much is that the laws of war do more than just protect civilians. In fact, while observers often focus on civilian harm in today’s wars, and the discussions of the pager bombs is no exception, the original rules of war were primarily focused on limiting its impact on military personnel. A separate set of rules banning inhumane means of warfare and those causing unnecessary suffering and superfluous injury is also meant to limit the kinds of harm that may be inflicted on even those troops that are otherwise considered lawful targets. And there is good reason to think that Israel’s pager attacks, even if they had satisfied the principle of distinguishing civilians from combatants, would have failed other important principles designed to limit suffering to soldiers in war.
While observers often focus on civilian harm in today’s wars, the original rules of war were primarily focused on limiting its impact on military personnel.
The rules against inhumane weapons are different than the rules against indiscriminate attacks. For the latter, belligerents must use weapons capable of distinguishing civilians from combatants and aim only at the combatants. But the law also limits when and how combatants may be targeted. They cannot be “finished off” while wounded, for example, or struck down while surrendering. And even in battle, it is unlawful to cause a combatant to suffer unnecessarily or to inflict wounds calculated to prolong their injuries. These rules are also laid out in Article 51 of the 1977 Additional Protocols of the Geneva Conventions and are grounded in older principles dating to the St. Petersburg Declaration of 1868, which declared that the only legitimate goal of war is to “weaken” the military forces of the enemy, for which “it is sufficient todisable the greatest possible number of men.” In short, soldiers should not be wantonly killed, made to suffer or hampered in their recovery from their wounds.
By this logic it is not enough to aim away from civilians, for it is entirely possible for a weapon to be highly discriminate and yet terribly inhumane. Consider the “dum-dum” bullet, the earliest weapon banned under the dual principles of “superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering.” This category of munitions would either explode, expand or flatten upon impact with soldiers’ bodies, thereby tearing up flesh, shattering bone and generally causing grievous and extensive damage well beyond that necessary to remove them from battle. The resulting wounds were also less likely to be treatable, thus reducing the survival rate of combat troops in late 19th century wars. Governments that came together to negotiate the Hague Conventions at the turn of the 20th century agreed to forswear the use of such bullets, not because they were indiscriminate, but because it was deemed unethical to condemn troops to greater suffering and mortal injury than that required to remove them from combat.
The normative prohibition on causing unnecessary suffering or superfluous injury to troops has also underlaid other formal and informal prohibitions on inhumane forms of warfare. In 1980, the Convention on Conventional Weapons included an Additional Protocol banning the use of weapons containing glass fragments likely to be undetectable by x-rays, given that such fragments in a human body would be difficult to treat and almost impossible to recover from.
In 1995, another Additional Protocol was negotiated banning the use of lasers designed to blind soldiers and airmen. These weapons had great military utility in downing aircraft, but states chose not to deploy them because the International Committee of the Red Cross, Physicians for Human Rights and a variety of other campaigners convinced states that the weapons failed the “superfluous injury” test: Even if the ability to temporarily blind a soldier had military utility in the moment, it was decided that weapons designed to permanently blind soldiers would inflict harm disproportionate to the military gain.
These two legal instruments in particular are especially relevant to the situation in Lebanon today, where a significant number of the injuries from the exploding pagers have involved direct and intentional blinding wounds to the face. According to the U.N., over 500 people have suffered optical wounds in the form of tiny glass fragments from electronics exploding close to their eyes.
This means something is being lost in the focus on civilians and collateral harm. Suppose these kinetic attacks were conducted in such a way as to contain the explosion to the specific soldier targeted, and that they had caused zero collateral damage. Suppose they took place far away from homes and markets, and in the context of a genuine ongoing armed attack. One could still meaningfully question whether the nature of the injuries inflicted fail the international standard on superfluous injury or violate norms against blinding and the use of glass fragments as weapons of war.
But Israel should not be singled out in this line of questioning. Similar concerns can and should be raised by human rights advocates in other ongoing wars, but too seldom are. In Ukraine, for example, Ukrainian drone pilots have taken to spraying thermite—an unextinguishable incendiary—into trenches, essentially burning Russian conscripts alive en masse. While these soldiers are legitimate targets in a war of aggression where Ukraine has a right to self-defense, they are also human beings who could be removed from the fight using more humane methods.
Unfortunately, today there is much less discussion among law of war experts about the principle of humane targeting of combatants or of other moral questions pertaining to moral harms inflicted on soldiers, especially conscripts in unjust wars, than there are questions over the indiscriminate targeting of civilians. For example, commenting on the use of thermite in the Ukraine war, the NGO Action on Armed Violence seemed primarily concerned with the weapons’ potential to create uncontrollable fires that spread to civilian areas, but curiously silent about the suffering inflicted on troops.
Similarly, much of the international outcry against the attacks in Lebanon has focused on civilian harm rather than the question of whether such attacks would be inhumane and unlawful even if carried out solely against armed fighters. In its Sept. 19 press release, the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights condemned the “war crimes of murder, attacking civilians, and launching indiscriminate attacks, in addition to violating the right to life,” but did not question whether the attacks were inhumane. And the legal debate has almost entirely focused on whether laws protecting civilians are violated when conflict actors hide explosives in electronics in this way. The focus on the weapons as “booby traps,” for example, cites the possibility that civilians would pick up the objects.
The ICRC, for its part, has announced it will “hold talks” with the parties to the conflict before commenting on the pager attacks. As it does so, it should consider both the principle of distinction and that of superfluous injury to fighters. To be sure, it is valuable to ask whether this attack violated the rules on distinguishing civilians from combatants, or the rules against willfully spreading terror, or whether Israel took adequate precautions to avoid collateral damage. But even if Israel followed all these rules, additional rules protect soldiers as well.
The rules prohibiting superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering to military actors are all too easily forgotten in today’s civilian-focused humanitarian debates. But remembering and asserting them is imperative in minimizing the human cost of war.
Charli Carpenter is a professor of political science and legal studies at University of Massachusetts-Amherst, specializing in human security and international law. She tweets at @charlicarpenter.