(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Mass pager attacks ‘a terrifying violation of international law’ [1]

['Matthew Knott']

Date: 2024-09-19

The detonation of thousands of pagers used by Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon, believed to have been carried out by Israel, could constitute a war crime, according to a group of more than a dozen United Nations legal experts.

The experts, led by University of Sydney law professor Ben Saul, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, labelled the exploding pagers “a terrifying violation of international law”.

First responders carry a man wounded after his handheld pager exploded, in the southern port city of Sidon, Lebanon. Credit: AP

“These attacks violate the human right to life, absent any indication that the victims posed an imminent lethal threat to anyone else at the time,” the experts said in a joint statement issued from Geneva late on Thursday night.

“Such attacks require prompt, independent investigation to establish the truth and enable accountability for the crime of murder.”

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/mass-pager-attacks-a-terrifying-violation-of-international-law-20240919-p5kbz7.html

Published and (C) by Common Dreams
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0..

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/commondreams/

You are viewing proxied material from magical.fish. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.