Did Israel's pager attack on Hezbollah violate international law?

Description

Senior Lecturer at Kings College London Dr Andreas Krieg told The New Arab that the attacks could violate article 51(3) and 48 of Protocol One of the Geneva Convention.

Where Article 51(3) pertains to civilians being afforded protection if they don't take part in hostilities, Article 48 ensures that parties to conflicts should distinguish between civilians and combatants, as well as civilian objects and military objectives.

"Any weapon you choose should adequately distinguish between a combatant and civilian, and the weapon as such was basically unable to adequately distinguish between a combatant and civilian."

"The excess and the disproportionality of violence against targets is due to the fact that Israel has a different metric when it comes to measuring who is a combatant and who isn't and that is problematic," he added.

"We should problematize this attack yesterday because if it's normalized, it set the precedent, and if no one in the international community is condemning it, then this might be a sort of attack that we could see being played out time and again."

Period	18 Sept 2024
Held at	The New Arab, United Kingdom