What do you think of targeting thousands of Lebanese people using pagers two way radios and electronic equipment without their knowledge ?
One week ago, Israel executed a remote detonation of hundreds of portable pagers utilized by members of Lebanon's Hezbollah, resulting in killing at least 12 people. Two children were among the casualties of the terrorist attack, which also injured thousands and overwhelmed Lebanese hospitals.
The subsequent day, walkie-talkies detonated nationwide, resulting in the loss of 20 people. Two days after that, on Friday, an air strike on a densely populated district in the Lebanese city of Beirut killed many people. On Monday, the Israeli military initiated a clearly psychopathic bombing campaign over multiple regions of Lebanon, killing more than 550 people, including 50 children.
In addition to the physical bombardment, Israel floods Lebanese phones with evacuation alerts—a form of terror in and of itself, given Israel's history of ordering people to evacuate and then targeting them once they do.
An Israeli military helicopter killed 23 residents of the southern Lebanese town of Marwahin at close range during the 34-day war between Israel and Lebanon in 2006 as they obeyed Israeli orders to evacuate their homes. The majority of those killed were children.
The existence of the state of Israel has consistently relied on mass killings, resulting in, among other consequences, the ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip, where officially over 41,000 Palestinians have been killed in less than a year, though the actual death toll is likely significantly higher.
The sudden explosion of Lebanese electronic devices and intensified psychological warfare is propelling Israel's destructive actions onto an increasingly Orwellian trajectory.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines "Orwellian" as “characteristic or suggestive of the writings” of British writer George Orwell, particularly on the “totalitarian state depicted in his dystopian account of the future, Nineteen Eighty-four." The book was released in 1949, one year after Israel's violent establishment on Palestinian land, at a time when 1984 was still 35 years away.
By 1984, Israel had extended its experiment in creating regional dystopia to include Lebanon, following the 1982 Israeli invasion that killed tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians. And what do you know? It was this cataclysmic invasion that prompted the establishment of Hezbollah, creating a convenient "terrorist" adversary whose actions of justified resistance would be utilized to rationalize Israeli aggression for the foreseeable future.
The expression "Big Brother is watching you," a critique of monitoring systems, originates from Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and is particularly applicable to Israel, given its leadership in the worldwide spyware sector. The marketability of Israeli hacking tools is enhanced by the fact that all such skills have been tested on the Palestinians.
The late Palestinian sociologist Elia Zureik noted in an essay for the Jerusalem Quarterly, Strategies of Surveillance: The Israeli Gaze, that Israel began its punitive surveillance of Palestinians before Israel's establishment, collecting data on Palestinian villages to facilitate conquest and dispossession.
Currently, Israel's draconian checkpoints in the West Bank represent one aspect of the many faces of Big Brother, while in Gaza, the deployment of a comprehensive facial recognition system simply adds insult to genocide.
In Lebanon, we are witnessing the repercussions of a situation where Big Brother can trigger the detonation of personal electronic devices—a crime that, despite its clear condemnation as terrorism, some astonished Western media outlets paradoxically celebrate as a "sophisticated" attack.
International humanitarian law says it is “prohibited in all circumstances to use any mine, booby-trap, or other device which is designed or of a nature to cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering." According to the law, “‘other devices’ means manually-emplaced munitions and devices, including improvised explosive devices designed to kill, injure, or damage and which are actuated manually, by remote control, or automatically after a lapse of time”.
Moreover, international law explicitly forbids the intentional targeting of civilians, a prohibition that Israel has consistently disregarded.
During the 2006 war in Lebanon, the Israeli forces killed roughly 1,200 people, predominantly civilians, and, in the concluding days of the hostilities, discharged millions of cluster munitions into Lebanon, many of which did not detonate upon impact and continued to wound and kill. So much for the prohibition on mines and booby traps.
Similar to exploding pagers, unexploded cluster munitions serve not only as weapons but also as psychological warfare instruments, designed to instill fear and terror and maintain control over civilian populations.
As Israel proceeds to normalize lethal monitoring and unchecked psychopathy in Gaza and Lebanon, proponents of last Tuesday’s “sophisticated” attack should remember that dystopia is a slippery slope.
Israel's major influence in developing monitoring systems and fortifications on the United States-Mexico frontier illustrates that Big Brother knows no borders. And as walkie-talkies blow up against a background of US-backed genocide, how will anyone ever draw the line?