DW's Ben Fajzullin spoke to Janina Dill, a co-director of the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict, about the pager and walkie-talkie explosions in Lebanon seemingly targeting Hezbollah, a Lebanese political organization and military group.

Hezbollah and the Lebanese government blamed the attack on Israel, which has neither confirmed nor denied its involvement in the explosions.

The US, Germany and others have designated Hezbollah a terrorist organization, while the European Union has only designated its military wing a terrorist organization.

The interview has been edited for clarity.

DW: Does it matter from a legal point of view, do those who appear to have been targeted are suspected Hezbollah operatives?

Janina Dill: Distinction (in international rules of war) requires that each attack in war ... each device explosion is directed against an individual that the attacker knows or reasonably believes to be a legitimate target of the attack. So Hezbollah fighters are legitimate targets of the attacks, but crucially, not every member of Hezbollah is — only the fighting wing or members of its armed group.

Even if these attacks were all intended to target Hezbollah fighters, the question from a legal point of view would still arise whether the attacking party, potentially Israel, had the means or intelligence to verify that the pagers would actually land in the hands of the intended individuals, or Hezbollah fighters. Did Israel take any precautions, for instance, to ensure that the pagers would be in the hands of fighters rather than civilians?

You are an expert in morality in war. What was your first thought when you heard about these attacks?

Well, placing a small explosive device directly on the body of a fighter, in some sense, is the ideal of an attack from the point of international law. Committing hundreds of those attacks simultaneously, on the other hand, is almost impossible to reconcile with international law. We can imagine that Israel had intelligence that its pagers were destined for the fighting wing of Hezbollah, so in that case, we may imagine that it complied with distinction. 

But there are additional considerations here. For instance, the principle of precautions demands that for each explosion, the anticipated civilian harm would be minimized as much as possible — for instance, through the timing of attack. This is obviously very difficult to achieve when many attacks must go off simultaneously. Attackers must also conduct proportionality considerations for each of these explosions, and if they don't have intelligence on where the pagers would be at the time of explosion, that would be very hard to achieve. 

What is the difference between a whole lot of smaller bombs going off, possibly killing hundreds or thousands of people, and one big bomb going off and killing perhaps hundreds of people?

The question is whether the attacker obtains the timing, place and circumstances of the attack and whether there is intelligence with this information to minimize the civilian harm. With one big bomb going off, you presumably have some advanced intelligence of the civilians surrounding the explosion, and through the timing [and] the angle of the attack, you can minimize the expected civilian harm. You can also weigh this expected civilian harm, what we sometimes call collateral damage, to the anticipated military advantage. 

But with hundreds of similar small bombs going off at the same time, the attacker wouldn't know in advance whether there would be civilians surrounding these attacks ... [and] when the attacks should go off to minimize civilian harm, and there would be very little intelligence that is required to conduct a very meaningful proportionality calculation.

Well, in this case, these bombs didn't go off in a warzone. They went off in public places.

Yes, there is currently an armed conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, so international law applies. But it is absolutely correct that most of these pagers, or many of these pagers, would have gone off in the midst of civilian areas. Since it wasn't possible for the attacker to anticipate the civilian harm, a meaningful proportionality calculation wouldn't have been possible, which is why this operation poses very, very serious challenges under international law.

The UN has called for an independent investigation into the explosions. What could that investigation reveal?

Well, many facts that are relevant for a legal analysis and that may be relevant politically, including the attributability of this operation to Israel, are still unclear. Surfacing these facts in a credible way is certainly legally and politically relevant. I think one potential political consequence that should come from this is that states awaken to the operational danger of an overly permissive application of international law to personal communication devices in the context of war. Given how much terror this operation must have caused the civilian population in Lebanon, it will be really critical to clarify and strengthen states' commitment to their existing legal obligations and to clarify how exactly they apply in this particular context.

Janina Dill is the co-director of the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict. She is also a professor of global security at Oxford's Blavatnik School of Government. In 2021, she won the Philip Leverhulme Prize "for her work on analytical philosophy, legal and IR theory with the rigorous empirical study of war in international relations."

This interview was conducted by Ben Fajzullin.