🎥 VIDEO OF THE DAY :: “We Seeded Booby-Trapped Equipment in ‘Every Country You Can Think Of.’”

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The clip

Watch the video above. That is Yossi Cohen, former head of the Israeli spy agency, Mossad, sitting comfortably on a podcast and boasting that Israel seeded “manipulated / booby-trapped equipment”—like the pagers that exploded in the hands of women and children across Lebanon —“in every country you can think of.” He brags about developing the method in the early 2000s, about infiltrating supply chains worldwide, about how much “treated gear” is out there right now. Then he scolds Israel’s own security chiefs for not using more of this in Gaza before Oct. 7.

That’s not a slip. That’s a confession—delivered like a victory lap.

What he’s actually admitting

Strip the bravado: this is a senior official describing a policy of disguising lethal/intelligence devices as ordinary civilian objects, distributing them across borders, and detonating or exploiting them when useful. The whole point is that the devices look non-military—phones, pagers, radios, chargers, chips—because that’s how you get them through civilian supply chains.

That is not just “creative tradecraft.” In law, there are names for it: perfidy, indiscriminate booby-traps, failure of distinction, extraterritorial sabotage, and sovereignty violations. And when such devices predictably maim civilians, you are squarely in war-crimes territory.

Why it’s blatantly illegal (the short, plain-English version)

• Perfidy (Additional Protocol I, art. 37): you may not kill or injure by treachery—e.g., by feigning civilian/protected status to gain the enemy’s confidence. Disguising lethal devices as ordinary civilian equipmentis perfidious when used to harm.

• Booby-traps / disguised munitions (CCW Amended Protocol II): prohibited when indiscriminate, attached to protected objects, or used in ways that will predictably harm civilians; the whole method turns civilian objectsinto weapons.

• Distinction & Proportionality (customary IHL; AP I arts. 48, 51, 57): attacks must distinguish civilians and may not cause excessive harm relative to concrete military advantage; seeding consumer devices across “every country you can think of” collapses that distinction by design.

• Outside armed conflict, these acts are criminal under domestic law (homicide, explosives offenses) and violate the sovereignty of targeted states.

Put differently: you cannot turn phones and pagers into landmines and call it intelligence.

The normalization machine

What floors me is not only that a former spy chief said this publicly—it’s that Western media barely blinked. If an adversary admitted to planting lethal consumer devices across borders, we’d have wall-to-wall coverage about state terrorism. But because it’s Israel, it’s treated like clever craft—“tradecraft,” the word they love to use when the targets are Arab.

And we’re living with the fallout: civilians terrified to trust any device, chaotic blast scenes blamed on “internal accidents,” and a license structure where everything can be weaponized—chargers, batteries, chips, comms. That’s not security. That’s globalized creeping terror, engineered in a lab and laundered as “intelligence.”

This is part of the pattern

Yesterday the UN’s Commission of Inquiry told the General Assembly that Israel committed four genocidal acts in Gaza and that top officials incited genocide. We’re told to treat that as “controversial.” Meanwhile a former Mossad chief goes on a podcast and admits to a method that obliterates the line between civilian and combatant—and it’s treated as content.

Rogue behavior is not less rogue because the guest wears a suit.

Accountability, not awe

Enough with the winks and nods. Here’s the minimum owed when a state actor publicly confesses to methods that violate core rules:

• Investigations with teeth—inquiry into the supply-chain operations, device provenance, targeting criteria, and all known civilian casualties linked to “manipulated equipment.”

• Export & arms controls—sanctions on the units, firms, and intermediaries that helped seed or route lethal devices through civilian channels.

• Prosecution—support the ICC, and use universal jurisdiction where appropriate. Perfidy and indiscriminate booby-traps are not PR problems; they are prosecutable crimes.

• Media honesty—stop normalizing what you would denounce if any other state bragged about it.

If the rules don’t bind the powerful, they are not rules—they are costumes.

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Love and appreciate each of you.
Your friend and brother,
Shaun

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