That’s patently ridiculous.

I disagree.

This took -likely- years of planning. If your enemy is "on to you", you are faced with a choice: abandon all that work, or trigger it early and hope it has some effect. Likely they would never be able to get away with it again, so you roll the dice and hit the button.

That's what I would do if I had an operation years in the planning that was in jeopardy of being thwarted. (Caveat: no Israeli assets were in jeopardy by pushing the button...if there were assets in jeopardy, the decision may have been different.)

It also served as a major disruption to their communications since Hezbollah is going to be more suspicious of any new devices, which will delay deployment while they inspect them for booby traps.

I'm still not convinced it complied with international law, but I have to concede it was very clever.