Comment by BobaFloutist
4 days ago
The prohibitions on booby-traps are that they're indiscriminant, not that they involve mundane objects.
I totally get the instinct to condemn the attack, since it's truly, deeply viscerally horrifying (not to mention terrifying!), but most of the rules about how you're supposed to conduct war basically boil down to 1. Make a reasonable effort to avoid disproportionately harming civilians 2. Don't go out of your way to inflict pain and suffering on your enemy beyond what's a necessary part of trying to kill or neutralize them 3. If your enemy is completely at your mercy, you have an extra duty to uphold 1 and 2.
Again, the pager attack is new, unusual, and just very upsetting. But it harmed civilians at a remarkably low rate, and the method of harm wasn't meaningfully more painful than just shooting someone. It compares very favorably with just bombing people on every metric other than maybe how scary it is if you're a combatant.
Given the apparently-terrible injury-to-death ratio, another angle to attack the legality of the action might be that the weapons were first and foremost effective at maiming, not killing, which is generally frowned upon by the laws of war (if they were intended as lethal, their success on that front was so bad it might fall into "guilty through incompetence" sort of territory)
(I agree the targeting per se seems to have been remarkably good for the world of asynchronous warfare—or even conventional warfare)
>the weapons were first and foremost effective at maiming, not killing, which is generally frowned upon by the laws of war
Can you cite something for this? Most people would rather be (even permanently) injured than killed, so I'm not sure why using the minimum necessary force would be frowned upon, other than it typically being incredibly difficult and impractical.