Smoke rises from Kfar Kila, amid cross-border hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, as pictured from Marjayoun, near the border with Israel, Lebanon, Aug. 6, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Karamallah Daher

A Sept. 18th Guardian editorial on the targeted Hezbollah pager and walkie talkie explosions is seething with contempt for Israel, whose spy agency was thought to be behind what US intelligence agents have called the most effective and audacious counter-terror operation in recent history.

Of the several thousand reported Hezbollah operatives injured, only a handful of civilians were reportedly harmed. According to John Spencer, Arsen Ostrovsky, and Mark Goldfeder that is “an extraordinary feat in modern warfare and the textbook definition of a precision and proportionate attack.”

The pager and walkie talkie attacks were a response to Hezbollah firing more than 8,500 rockets at Israel since October 8, 2023, which have murdered 47 people, mostly civilians — including 12 children killed while playing soccer in the July Majdal Shams massacre.

In the meantime, roughly 80,000 Israelis have been displaced from their homes in the north of the country as a result of these attacks — barrages of rockets fired into sovereign Israeli territory, despite Hezbollah having no territorial dispute with Jerusalem.

Finally, let’s remember that, according to multiple  UN resolutions, Hezbollah’s presence in southern Lebanon is illegal, as Hezbollah’s forces aren’t supposed to be south of the Litani River — about 30 km from Israel’s border.

With all that being said, how did The Guardian frame Israel’s counter-terror triumph against an Iranian proxy militia into a “war crime”?

They effectively sided with the illegal, Iranian proxy militia, in an editorial titled “The Guardian view on Israel’s booby-trap war: illegal and unacceptable”:

A global treaty came into force which “prohibited in all circumstances to use booby-traps or other devices in the form of apparently harmless portable objects that are specifically designed and constructed to contain explosive material.” Has anyone told Israel and its jubilant supporters that, as Brian Finucane of the International Crisis Group points out, it is a signatory to the protocol? [emphasis added]

Has anyone told the purveyors of anti-Zionist vitriol at the Guardian about the caveat to that treaty — that, pursuant to Article 52 of the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Convention I, such acts are indeed permissible in circumstances where the objects in question are no longer used for civilian purposes?

So, given that the hand-held devices were distributed specifically to operatives of Hezbollah — which, let’s remember, is proscribed in its entirety by the UK — and were being used for communication, planning, and conducting terror operations, they ceased to be considered “civilian objects” and became legitimate military targets.

The Guardian piece then lies again, complaining that “the pager bombs were clearly intended to target individual civilians – diplomats and politicians – who were not directly participating in hostilities“ — when, in fact, as we noted, the terror group  is proscribed in its entirety, meaning, according to the UK, there’s no distinction between the group’s military and political wings.

Finally, true to The Guardian’s refusal to assign agency to Islamist terror groups, the editorial blames Israel — and only Israel — for bringing the region (and the world!) to the brink of chaos. This means that we’re to believe that it wasn’t Hamas’ barbaric antisemitic massacre, or Hezbollah’s decision, the day after Oct. 7th, to align with Yahya Sinwar’s bloodthirsty pogromists, but, rather, Jerusalem’s year-long efforts to protect its citizens from these threats, that ignited violence and chaos.

As this post is being published, the long awaited full-out war between Israel and Hezbollah has likely begun. As such, we can expect the Guardian’s coverage of this conflict to mirror their editors’ take on the pager explosions, which effectively mourned the humiliating blow to the terror group.

As Alistair Heath of the Telegraph wrote of the immediate rush to impute guilt to Israel for their “brilliantly audacious booby-trapping of thousands of Hezbollah pagers”: “Robbed of its moral bearings, bereft of any sense of right and wrong, incapable of distinguishing heroes from villains, the West can no longer celebrate when good triumphs over evil.”

There’s arguably no Western media institution that more accurately reflects this moral rot than The Guardian.

Adam Levick serves as co-editor of CAMERA UK – an affiliate of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), where a version of this article first appeared.