In 1948, eleven days before the declaration of the establishment of Israel, the Zionist organisation Lehi killed a young British man, Francis Rex Farran, after he opened a booby-trapped parcel sent to target his brother, Officer Roy Farran.

The parcel missed its intended target and killed the younger brother, in one of dozens of booby-trapped packages used by Zionist gangs to target British people and others.

Discussing the legal implications of this type of crime is, in a sense, an exercise in futility when the law itself is absent, and “Israel” will hardly be troubled by another crime added to its record.

Yet the entity justified the detonation of thousands of pagers in civilian environments on the grounds that they belonged to Hezbollah fighters or members.

The Israel Democracy Institute even deemed the operation “proportionate overall, given the exceptional military advantage it achieved.”

The women and children affected in the surrounding communities were thus reduced to collateral losses deemed negligible in its legal calculus.

Very well, then. Let us assume that everyone who carried a pager or stood near one was an active participant in the resistance.

Will “Israel” stop weeping before international and legal forums when the children of the pagers apply that very same ruling to it?

In an official explanation of Israel’s Security Service Law of 1986, as amended and currently in force, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs states:

“The obligation to perform regular military service applies to every fit male aged between 18 and 29, and every female aged between 18 and 26, with the exception of physicians … The law applies to Israeli citizens both inside and outside the country, including those who hold additional citizenship and those who reside permanently abroad.”

That is where the quotation ends, leaving the rest to be weighed against the standard of “exceptional military advantage.”