We can't really do much more than speculate right now, but it seems like the most likely answer is that a shipment of pagers was intercepted and implanted with explosives. Israel has done this before to assassinate a prominent bomb maker. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash#Assassination
> most likely answer is that a shipment of pagers was intercepted and implanted with explosives
I agree, there are photos and videos of extensive damage to furniture and injuries that go way beyond what a small lithium battery would NORMALLY do.
Also, all the CCTV footage I've seen indicates explosions and not fire.
It can be explosives planted, However it can be batteries modified to explode instead of burn&outgas. I recall a video of someone losing their lives when their vape battery exploded. IIRC the vape's metal structure acted as a container that enabled pressure build up and eventual sudden release.
There are many stories about vapes exploding, some causing serious damage similar to these:
> It can be explosives planted, but maybe it can be batteries modified to explode instead of burn.
That is not really a thing, from a technical point of view. Changing the chemistry of the battery (assuming that a suitably explosive one exists; these tend not to be developed very far) would just be swapping an explosive and not a modification. Doing something like adding some vessel to build up pressure within the battery sounds impractical (you’d need something very resistant to heat as a battery fire goes above 2000 K), at which point it’s not worth the trouble.
The most likely is either some explosive besides the battery, or something that looks like a battery from the outside, but is actually half explosive on the inside to at least pass superficial inspection.
This kind of damage really does not look like a battery gone wrong. It would have left all sorts of chemical residues and burned very differently.
> The most likely is either some explosive besides the battery, or something that looks like a battery from the outside, but is actually half explosive
That is the most plausible explanation. It can’t be an obvious thing or someone would notice it. If it looks like a plain battery pack, nobody would think of cutting it open.
The explosive here could be perhaps just 8mm x 8mm x 8mm to do the sort of blasts you see in the videos. Thats fairly small, and could easily be hidden in a device.
Inside the battery is perhaps the best hidden, but you'd need to own a bunch of battery manufacturing facilities (expensive). Cheaper would be to simply remove some other component (eg. one of two speakers) and replace it.
Most (pouch-shaped) Li-Ion batteries just look like square shapes packaged in heavy aluminum foil, with some Kapton tape to keep a small PCB with protection circuitry in place. Any determined hobbyist could buy smaller batteries and the packaging materials off AliExpress to make something that looks visually similar but has lots of space left over for explosives.
With cylindrical batteries it's a bit harder, but ultimately they are just a cylinder with pressed-on end caps. You can disassemble them (lots of videos on youtube), change the contents and reassemble them.
It is pretty high effort compared to just sticking the explosives next to the pager's electronics, but I don't think the barrier to entry is actually that high
Pagers last for a very long time. Some one-ways can last for over a month. At that point, you probably wouldn't notice it's just over 3 weeks, or maybe think the product is lying in the advertisements and lasts less but not enough to replace the "company provided" one.
There are tons of more likely explanations for that, though, with the top of the list being "dang bosses bought low quality pagers".
And if they can make the combined package big enough that the battery life is still acceptable, it's even less likely that someone will pull the pager, notice that they should be getting "great" battery life instead of "just ok", and investigate deeply.
I read elsewhere that Hezbollah recently changed to this pagers to communicate, maybe it those who put the bombs bet on the fact their victims wouldn't have time to realize that the battery have shorter life than advertised
Considering the tech industry of Israel and the bottomless military/security budget, this is very plausible.
Also considering that a plan like that must have taken many months/years start-to-end, this just makes me wonder what else is booby-trapped(?), fridges? laptops? microwave ovens? the next door flat? flower pots?
Stuff like that take the paranoia levels all the way to 11.
I fail really to see the difference between Hezbollah lunching rockets into Israel and Israel's pager bombs. Except the latter are pretty well targeted.
Frankly I believe that the people complaining pagers wouldn't if Hezbollah had managed to do the same to Israel. They'd celebrate it. So really they're just unhappy that the team they're emotionally invested in is getting shellacked.
It’s not unremarkable, or even very common. But lots of countries do this besides Israel (targeted strikes to eliminate targets and remind would-be targets that it’s hard to get out of reach). It’s true that they tend to be on the high-tech side compared to say Iran, and that democracies most of the time at least try to make it look legal.
> Inside the battery is perhaps the best hidden, but you'd need to own a bunch of battery manufacturing facilities (expensive).
Do you?
What stops you from just taking a smaller battery and packing it with some plastic explosive into the typical "battery foil"? I'm sure the IDF is capable of doing that at scale.
Something along these lines is my guess. Focus on the batteries. You can replace individual cells with explosives and cause the remaining cells to overheat to start the explosion.
Most battery packs have integrated power management chips, so you could focus on modifying the battery firmware.
You could have another component send a message to the power management controller to trigger it.
You could also use the power controller's internal current sensor and clock to watch for a device event (power draw from the screen at a certain time or the power profile for a specific set of CPU instructions), giving you means to trigger it without modifying any other part of the device.
A quick google search reveals multiple battery manufacturing facilities in Israel, including domestic and foreign owned corporations. A special order of batteries seems very plausible.
I don't see someone like Iran or Lebanon being able to do that, but Israel has a great technical know-how and a ton of resources. Making custom batteries, with embedded explosives seems plausible.
It's military budget is on the order of $20B which is quite decent for that size of a country. It's enough to build some realistic looking batteries and/or pagers combined with the technical base they have.
$20B is by far less than Google or Microsoft make a year in revenue. It's nothing compared to the amount of enemies surrounding Israel, a country that is literally desert with no natural resources.
What did the "Israeli regime" do to you? Has your pager exploded too?
On a serious note, Israelies are our allies. You don't have to love them, but they are standing on the forefront of fighting against the enemies of the West. If not them, you would be on their place.
The pagers in question is believed to be a dry cell operated model. It could be a rigged AA battery.
...oh no. They must have handed out those USB rechargeable batteries as an upgrade. The bad guys want to be able to charge it, so they would be incentivized to align the charge port with case back and explosives facing the user. Then the battery could be triggered by time since synchronization && backlight current draw && button press beep.
One easy way to conceal the explosive would be to overmold it in a cavity inside the plastic enclosure. This would escape all but the most thorough inspections. And since battery terminals are typically also embedded in the plastic this can provide a clandestine supply of power and signal with something like Dallas protocol to the fuse.
All you have to do is build replacement batteries without the pressure relief vents. You can easily get a Chinese manufacture to do this for a fee and properly some complaining about how stupid it is to do.
Then wrap it in some nichrome wire and have a micro run some power through it. The nichrome wire will overheat the cell really quickly causing the cell to rapidly over pressurize and boom.
Small pouch or prismatic cells that would be used at the size of a pager generally won't burn. And I speak from experience of doing stupid shit to them in the name of testing, nothing like using the nail puller side of a hammer to puncture them, or rigging up a fixture with 3 concrete nail guns to shoot it or well, fun stuff
Explosions are essentially about extremely rapid expansion of gasses. I don’t see how a battery, even one that is rigged to fail, can explode in an instant. Shorting out, overheating, and ultimately exploding because the battery compartment can no longer contain the expansion has got to be too slow by many orders of magnitude. Your theory makes no sense to me.
Sure, but can you get 1,000 of them to explode simultaneously that way? You'd think there'd be some variation in the time of explosion, at least by tens of minutes or hours, maybe even by days.
A puncture causes runaway/explosion in seconds. Overcharging takes 13 minutes. There's not good data on a dead short (because it's unlikely during normal operation), but it's going to be between those on the faster end. From personal experience a shorts cause things to get noticeably hot after about 10 seconds, the graphs show that once you hit 60C things rapidly get worse.
A relay may have been required to hold the short as the battery stops supplying voltage.
A battery pouch is a terrible pressure vessel under these conditions. It’s designed to bulge and deform to avoid catastrophic failure. It would need to be replaced with some very stiff material that can withstand the first step of thermal runaway. A battery not submitted to mechanical stress (e.g. by being punctured, hit very hard or shot at) is going to get quite hot before expanding.
Batteries aren't pressure vessels though. Pressure vessels are generally decently large; how are you going to get one with significant capacity inside something as small and lightweight as a pager? Just putting in some plain explosives makes a lot more sense.
It's a very minimal amount of pressure it can withstand, is the point. Certainly nowhere close to lethal explosive pressure. It's not a pressure vessel in the sense of the kind of pressure vessel it takes to make an effective bomb.
It’s the simultaneous timing thats a giveaway for me. Maybe you could have a few batteries explode but 2000 of them? It’s too clean to be just batteries imo.
The accounts may be serious (even accurate!) but whoever chose the numbers was not being serious in their choice of number. Or it's quite the coincidence.
I agree with this theory even though I am not even sure it would require a specific modification like the mentioned heating wire, if you can simply use the existing circuit with some instruction to cause component overheating with the same effect.
Another reason I do not believe it was an explosive is that a clandestine explosive installation would have resulted in far greater damage and included shrapnel. Because why would you not install very high explosives and shrapnel in a shape charge that directed the explosion into the likely body of the wearer if you are taking the risk of intercepting and making a physical modification.
This is also less Stuxnet and more infiltrating insecure systems of vehicles to drive by wire accelerate cars into objects. There have been examples of this
> a clandestine explosive installation would have resulted in far greater damage and included shrapnel
No and not much. The amount of explosion you get is proportional to the amount of explosives used. Small amount of explosives == small explosion.
Shrapnel is specifically engineered into explosive military weapons - it is not an innate property of explosive reactions. If you want a lot of shrapnel you have to design the case to fragment (e.g. grenades) or pack the area around the explosive with the stuff you want to become shrapnel (as with many bombers packing nails and screws and bolts etc., around their bombs). A small explosion in a mostly plastic device will result in a small amount of small pieces of plastic being scattered, which might harm bystanders but is by no means guaranteed or even intended to do so.
A shape charge would be pointless because you can't guarantee how the device is worn- one news article mentioned most people carry them in their pockets, so a shape charge would be blowing most of the energy away from the target in 50% of the cases.
A shaped charge need not be unidirectional. It could be focuses along an axis, resulting in a two-way explosion that would be more damaging than a symmetrical one. Two copper disks on either side of the charge would constitute a functional two-way shaped charged.
I think the grocery store security video supports the two directions idea. If you watch carefully it looks like a pressure wave away from the target and clearly something takes the target down. Perhaps a pressure wave in the opposite direction too.
With a pager you can be pretty sure the target will be holding it with one hand and looking at the screen. Reports indicate the pagers beeped shortly before they went boom. So if the blast is focused in the plane normal to the screen that would focus it into the hand and face of the target. No idea whether that's actually a good idea or not.
Doing much more damage 50% of the time might be more effective, if an undirected explosion is too weak to kill anyone but a directed (and lucky) one could.
I've seen some videos. Shattered hips, abdominal wounds, hands without fingers. I haven't seen any dead person, just maimed bodies. Mission successful I guess. Oh and one kid.
You are probably right but explosives risk detection, either by the militants or by the airport security if taken to a flight to a country with serious security.
Detection by airport security might probably be avoided using the right type of explosive. I have no real idea about this, but I suspect that any nation-state with enough budget and know-how can manufacture undetectable or very hard-to-detect explosive devices. If the explosive is encapsulated in a sealed airtight container, which is properly "washed" after manufacturing, I guess there's no way to chemically detect the explosive inside. Not sure about how to avoid X-Ray detection but that's generally not the way explosives are actually detected.
And, is the device anyway going to pass through airport security? I guess the owners are not really travelling on commercial airliners.
The scanners only test for the signatures of common chemical structures of explosives, like nitro and nitrate groups, which make up the bulk of mass produced explosives. There are many lesser known chemistries for high explosives that will not be detected by these scanners. Probably the best known example actually used by terrorists are explosives based on peroxide chemistry but there are several others.
A friend of mine who visited Lebanon (and the Hezbollah museum, he gave me a Hezbollah cap by the way) then went to Israel and was subjected to a thorough explosive material search. They basically swiped some kind of broom all over his body (with a focus on genitals) and put it in some device (some kind of spectrometer ?).
These devices apparently were distributed to thousands of operatives. I would imagine that people having those are some of the more elite ones and they probably will travel for business reasons, be it personal business or Hezbollah business. A few who choose to take their pagers with them(i.e. will not be heading straight home after travel, so brings the pager) are huge risk IMHO. Even a single incident may reveal the plot.
I don't know how those detectors at the airports work exactly but they are probably playing cat and mouse game with the people who are into smuggling things and as a result they are probably aware of the more advanced methods like injecting things into the plastic.
This is the reason why I think the explosives were most likely hidden in the batteries. Some explosives have similar enough chemistry that they cannot be told apart from legitimate battery packs by the scanners.
This is a known threat, and this is the reason why some airports do extra checks on some travellers (for example asking them to turn their laptops on, asking them when and where they got the laptop and etc.)
news reports suggest 1000+ of these devices exploded.
In a country where lots of people would happily crack open the lid of a device to replace the battery or otherwise tinker, the explosives must have been well hidden, not just tucked into the case.
I don’t think they’re saying you’d need to change the chemistry though, they’re saying they could have altered way it was packaged so that when it started burning there was nowhere for the gas to go.
Similar to how firecrackers work. If you take a firecracker apart and light the powder, you’ll get a flash and a lot of smoke, but no bang. The explosion comes from the pressure building up in an enclosure.
Disclaimer: not a chemist. Just a former unwisely curious kid
"If you take a firecracker apart and light the powder, you’ll get a flash and a lot of smoke, but no bang. The explosion comes from the pressure building up in an enclosure."
True. But if you open enough firecrackers and put the powder in a small plastic container you will not get a bang but a buff and a fireball the size of a car.
Disclaimer: I am a chemist and a former very unwisely curious kid
Yeah, this should remove any doubt that there were explosives involved. At the 500 to 1000 mA hour capacity typically used in pagers, even tampering with the battery's venting in an attempt to build up gas pressure would at worst result in a pop and some smoke from the top of the bag.
Blowing a hole in the side of the bag and sending debris for several meters is obviously not plausible with that quantity of lithium.
Looks pretty discriminate to me, only the pager holder was affected. I've seen multiple videos with very close bystanders completely unharmed. And whoever holds a pager from Hezbollah is a member of an armed terrorist group officially at war with Israel.
This is incorrect in a disturbing way. How can something be "targeted" if the attackers simply do not and cannot know where the attacks are going to take place, physically and geographically?
How did they make sure that only pagers carried by the armed wing of Hezbollah exploded, and not say an MP, nor one of their media workers, nor a manager in one of their hospitals? How did they know that no civilians were dangerously close when they exploded?
They didn’t. They put explosions in all the pagers which were distributed to all members of Hezbollah, military or not, and indiscriminately exploded them all at the same time, regardless of who was near the pager at the time.
I had a rechargeable battery explode in my kitchen recently and it was like a small grenade went off. I'll see if I can find the photos but it shattered trim and bits went through a screen on the other side of the room.
So, an "excited" AA (which, I believe is what pagers usually use) could do a surprising amount of damage.
Is an interesting problem. Maybe the experts in the area could help here. I assume that a worn battery near the end of its life is more prone to explode, but I wonder...
Would the dead cells in the battery take part in that; or are just dead and not reactive.
In other words: if a battery has only a 30% remaining alive; or a laptop has a very worn battery, would an hypothetical explosion by overheating be much less severe? or is still so dangerous as new?.
That's not to say that they couldn't have put a lithium AA or AAA battery into the pagers or inserted a modified AA/AAA battery that was a combination of lithium (with greater power density) and explosive.
It's also possible that they have fancier 1-way pagers than I'm aware of.
So that Israel couldn't track their locations via cell networks. Sure you could use Signal or w/e but it's the cell IDs and knowing where people are that was the issue. The pagers do far less, if any, two way communication so it's not likely to give away location data.
Even a dumbphone with the GPS physically removed is going to be a lot easier to target than a one-way pager, since they are always chatting with the cell towers.
No, a pager is optimized to be a case size that's comfortable for carrying and reading. The electronics could be the size of the smallest wristwatch, which is already dominated by its own form factor requirements, not the PCB + battery + display subcomponents that are scarcely the size of a nickel.
A typical pager is about 60 x 40 x 20mm. Much of this volume requirement is driven by the 16mm diameter 34mm long CR123 battery, a lot of it could be empty.
That battery is a relatively safe lithium primary chemistry, not a rechargeable Lithium polymer pounch or lithium ion cylinder that would risk fire and explode if the overpressure vents were omitted and the BMS corrupted, but the primary lasts for years.
I bet you could use a CR1216 battery (1.6mm thin, 30mAh, instead if 34mm long and 1500mAh) instead and have quite a good deal of spare volume in the battery for an explosive. If you filled the entire pager, that would be even more room, but much more easily detected.
> I bet you could use a CR1216 battery (1.6mm thin, 30mAh, instead if 34mm long and 1500mAh) instead and have quite a good deal of spare volume in the battery for an explosive.
I'd be fascinated if that was the physical vector...
However, tainting a component pre-integration seems a lot more likely than simply packing explosive in the case.
Israel inserts the compromised components upstream in the supply chain, they're duly assembled into pagers, which then make their way to Hezbollah, where they're inspected, look normal, and work normally, and are then distributed.
That would still require a firmware hack to presumably trigger though (incoming message stack to component trigger).
> The electronics could be the size of the smallest wristwatch
Swatch actually used to sell a wristwatch that includes a pager! Battery life was pretty bad though; it came with a keychain accessoire to store a spare CR2032 and a battery swapping tool.
According to the manufacturer the pagers have a nominal battery life of about three months so it's not likely someone would actually notice if this number is cut in half or less.
Those thin coin cells can't output enough currents to replace most use cases. I've once tried to run ESP32 with couple CR2032, the ESP just browns out.
An ESP32 is a power hog meant to be plugged into a wall. Here are the current requirements for the various modes according to [1]:
Active mode, 260mA to 790 mA (!)
Modem sleep, 20mA
Light sleep: 0.8 mA
Deep sleep: 10 uA
Hibernate: 2.5 uA
Even with fancy DTIM beacons, Wifi and Bluetooth IoT devices just have a really power-hungry protocol stack and radio system to run.
Compare that to something like an STM32U5 microcontroller [2]:
3.1 mA Run mode at 160 MHz
19.5 μA/MHz Run mode at 3.3 V
6.6 µA stop 2 mode with full SRAM
1.7 μA stop 3 mode with 16 Kbyte SRAM
0.5 uA standby mode with RTC
0.3 uA standby mode (24 wakeup pins)
0.1 uA shutdown mode (24 wakeup pins)
And probably more importantly, an actual low-power microcontroller can wake from sleep in something like 4 microseconds, do something for a few cycles, and go back to sleep. Pager protocols are designed for this, putting the pager to sleep for sometimes an hour, and the crystal oscillator restarts the battery-powered device moments before the frame arrives, then goes back to sleep. Conversely, booting up the whole protocol stack on the ESP32 and acquiring a connection can take literally 4 seconds.
That results in a power consumption ratio on the order of 100,000,000. ESP32s are not efficient.
Because it takes a surprisingly small amount of high explosive to cause the kind of damage shown in the footage we’ve seen so far. All it would take is for the battery to be replaced with a combo package - part battery, part explosive. No need for additional internal space.
Disclosure: my first job was in the Australian Defence Science Technology Organisation, Materials Research Lab, Explosives Instrumentation Group.
If cost per unit isn’t a consideration, I suspect you can shrink the size of the electronic components used in the pager to make room for a 20 gram explosive charge.
Pagers—especially commodity models—aren’t profitable enough to warrant cutting edge tech with the latest advances in microelectronics. Lots of room to improve things if you are making a set of them at a loss.
One possibility is to replace part of the battery. The smaller battery can be designed to lie about its charge, or you can replace with a higher energy-density battery and use the space saved for a detonation system (perhaps even incorporating the battery itself into this) and a small quantity of high explosive, which is pretty stable and safe until detonated. Contrary to popular belief, high explosives are actually relatively safe, and usually even burn safely or are hard to ignite at all in some cases. Package it up into something that looks identical to an unmodified battery. Modify device firmware and battery control circuitry to detonate it on receipt of a specific signal and... boom.
Thinner (less durable, but who cares?) plastic shell to free up space for explosives, but would likely be obvious if someone opened it - which might be a common thing if these were being used as remote triggering devices.
If they were using a AA battery, replace the battery with something that provides you space to work (e.g. put in a AAAA or button cell that would provide appropriate power but lower capacity) because you don't really care if the battery life drops from months to weeks.
I can easily envision a scenario that would preemptively “explain” why the pagers are internally different from past models:
Supplier: “Hey, we’ve got a refreshed model of the pager you wanted to buy in bulk. Interested?”
Buyer: “I don’t know, how do they work?”
Supplier: “Same as the other ones, minus a bit less plastic protection. With the weight savings they’ve added a new hardened receiver that’s supposedly more secure and will keep communications private. Also, they are 50% cheaper per unit…”
Exactly that. There is a video of a hole blown through a table surface with one. That is not happening with any off the shelf battery technology as is currently being heavily misreported. They were modified with explosives clearly.
Of course there is paranoia being sewn now about hacking and the batteries which is likely part of the ongoing operation as it will disrupt anyone they didn't explicitly target.
I’m not sure which image you are referring to but there are images of lithium battery explosions blowing holes into counters and faces. There are some linked here.
Ahh so a simple supply chain attack. I was thinking it might have leveraged the built in batteries. But it was always unlikely, especially in a receive-only device.
Still, if you have the capability of such a supply chain attack, I would imagine the rewards of silent surveillance (tracking, audio) would be of much higher value than this kind of attack where 3 out of 1000s targets were killed.
Hezbollah has been escalating their armed attacks against Israel for almost an entire year, parallel with the war in Gaza. Every day tens of rockets hit Israel, almost the entire north of Israel is evacuated of civilians.
I realize that this is not widely known, attacks against Israel receive far less attention in the news than do Israeli retaliations.
Yes, there are blurbs about it if you know where to look and are already familiar with the situation. But a small blurb once about Israel being attacked is drowned out by the literally thousands of articles about Israeli actions, which mention time and again every small detail or infringement.
I don't agree; I think you're pushing some vague nonsense media conspiracy here. I haven't been following the war that closely, but I hear about Hezbollah attacks fairly regularly. I'm very critical of Israel right now, but it's not even remotely unknown that they're facing attacks from multiple fronts.
The "news" doesn't even seem to exist anymore. News providers have adapted to the readers only wanting hear their own views supported.
Not only are there specific providers for specific worldviews, but major providers seem to spit out articles catering to every viewpoint. You can find probably find multiple pro Israel and anti Israel articles coming from a single news source on a single day.
So, I dunno maybe we need some kind of cumulative news app to get any kind of meaningful idea of how things are actually leaning. Like an AI summarizing sentiments of the 20,000 articles on Israel in the last week to determine if the news is slanted.
They advertise pretty heavily, and I’ma bit skeptical of their ability to make money. but it basically uses AI to summarize stories, and it groups stories from many media outlets, categorizes their bias, and shows the slant of the topic overall.
> attacks against Israel receive far less attention in the news than do Israeli retaliations.
I think retaliations are pretty fruitless anyway. Both sides have been lobbing missiles at each other for decades. This eye for an eye thing keeps going even though both sides have run out of eyes a long time ago.
Yes. Killing more of theirs in response to an attack on yours is fruitless. It just perpetuates the situation. And also, every time you kill one civilian there, their kids become terrorists for life (or at least have a good chance to). Hitting military targets is ok, but just lobbing a few missiles that way in retaliation because they fired some on you last week is really not going to help in any way. It only perpetuates the death and destruction.
Netanyahu seems to be very much against negotiations and keeps blowing the situation up because he doesn't want to 'look weak'. But this does nothing to actually help the Israeli people get safer. The only way they can actually be safe is to sit down and make peace. And of course not to keep taking more and more territory as Israel has been doing (and was even condemned by the UN).
Seriously, this shit has been going on since the founding of Israel. If they keep it up they will never feel safe. Neither side will ever be fully bombed into submission. Remember both Russia and the US tried that in Afghanistan, it didn't work there and it won't work here. All it does is keep the military industrial complex fed and wrecking lives in the process.
Someone has to take the first step and stop retaliating. And make some agreements which are fair to both parties. Then they can both build up a society and have less reason to upset things because they have a thriving society to lose.
I'm not defending Hamas nor Hezbollah. But this has to stop and 'responding' or 'retaliating' isn't going to help.
Only the Gazans charge that Israel kills civilians. The Lebanese understand exactly that Israeli targets Hezbollah. Read any Lebanese newspaper - they blame Hezbollah.
There's disagreement on how carefully they try to avoid doing it, but even their closest geopolitical ally the US has urged them to do more to prevent civilian casualties.
Hezbollah has been warning its members not to use cell phones because they get targeted by using them too. Seems like the pagers were supposed to be the workaround for that.
Lots of pagers operate in one-way only mode. Towers transmit messages without expecting acknowledgement a few times, pager is configured to filter out and only alert on messages routed to its ID.
Sure, theoretically one can detect a receive-only radio, but its massively more difficult than detecting something which actively transmits.
Most pagers do, yes. They are also usually unencrypted. And due to the one way nature, even if they are encrypted, PFS (perfect forward security) is impossible. Meaning that if someone captures the encrypted messages they can decrypt them all the way back when the encryption key is obtained.
But the impossibility of any kind of location tracking is definitely a plus of one-way pagers. Not just for terrorists. I'd get one if there were still a network where I live. It'd be really nice to be reachable and not be tracked 24/7 for once.
While the messages are not encrypted, you just have your actual message coded. Have agreed on phrases and what not discussed out of band. Send dummy messages to throw people off and not know what is a real transmission or a dummy one. Is that numbers station just spouting gibberish or communicating with spies?
The market closes at 5, dinner at the hotel, Grandpa will bring home the wine, bring your hat. Charlie 5 Alpha 2 4 7 3 Bravo. Maybe this is just discussing someone's evening, maybe its coordinating a group action.
Many pagers are receive only. The tower has no idea who's listening; it just broadcasts out the messages that it's told to. Pagers are much less trackable than phones.
> Surely a pager message isn't transmitted from every tower everywhere.
They generally are!
Some systems required the sender to select a geographic region to increase bandwidth efficiency, or alternatively the pager owner to update their coarse-scale location with the operator after moving significant distances.
The latter is what the old Iridium satellite pagers did (do?), for example. (Not sure how the new GDB-based ones work.)
The new Iridium pagers are two-way as far as I've heard. Only the old ones were one-way.
I think the service is finally being decommissioned due to the Iridium Next satellites not supporting it anymore. It has been supported for more than a decade without onboarding new customers though.
> The new Iridium pagers are two-way as far as I've heard.
Apparently that's optional:
> Iridium Burst-enabled devices can be configured as receive-only so that no transmissions are made, a feature valued highly by some customer segments.
> I think the service is finally being decommissioned due to the Iridium Next satellites not supporting it anymore.
If that's the case, it would have been inoperable since 2017 – they deorbited the old satellites immediately after confirming deployment of the new ones.
That's exactly how they work, actually. Or at least worked, traditionally. There are assuredly some two-way pagers out there now.
But yeah, you'd usually pay for service in a certain (large) geographic area, and if you wanted to take your pager out of that area while on a trip, or if you moved, you'd have to let the pager company know so they could start broadcasting in the new area.
They might have watched The Wire: you page Alice, and she uses a public phone to call you. Undetectable unless you wire all public phones in the city, or someone is dumb enough to always use the same phone (which is what happens in the series; they eventually switch to burner mobiles).
To be fair, they rotate the burners in the series every 2 weeks and it takes the police more than a week to get up on the new ones.
It was cool to see that it was in fact an opsec fail (the guy buying the phones all over the country got lazy and bought too many from the same shop) to break through that. Pretty realistic. Like most of the wire in fact.
Although one thing in the wire I don't understand. Pagers are really easy to intercept, anyone with a scanner (with discriminator output) can do it and could do it in those times. I did it many times during the days when pagers were still in full swing. I really don't understand why they needed a court order for that (in season 1).
> Pretty realistic. Like most of the wire in fact.
The show creator worked for years as a journalist on the crime beat in Baltimore, I expect most of the opsec seen in the series comes from real cases.
> really don't understand why they needed a court order for [wiretapping pagers]
As others said, you need it from a legal perspective rather than a technical one. This is particularly true in the US, where the "fruit of poisonous tree" doctrine is pretty strict: if your evidence was not gathered in the proper manner, it must be discarded and it invalidates any further effort based on it. In specific, wiretapping is illegal even when done by authorities, unless they've been authorized by judges - the relevant US laws were tightened up after it emerged (with Watergate) that president Nixon was eavesdropping on his political rivals.
They recently introduced pagers because they're less trackable than phones. Presumably the ones which have pagers are more important so its probably more impactful than targeting 1 or 2 percent of the regular terrorists.
They have about 100'000 members, and this attack has killed about a dozen, and injured about 2000. Only one recent shipment of pagers was affected. I don't think they are unable to respond.
Face saving. It's easier to put a PR spin on something only a few people actually saw. It's going to be hard to convince their rank-and-file this isn't a bit deal and deserving of retribution.
A missile is a demonstration of military force. Everyone in the region knows Israel is capable of blowing up a building.
This is a "we've got you hopelessly compromised as an organization" sort of demonstration that's far more humiliating.
For a similar example, see the US response to 9/11 - two decades of war, taking shoes off at airports, etc. - versus the US response to COVID, which killed a 9/11 worth every couple of days, but resulted in a "but I don't wanna wear a mask" response.
> It's easy to sit online and make bold and vague claims like there will be armed escalation in retaliation.
I mean, that's the pretty standard response in this conflict. Permanent tit-for-tat, back-and-forth, for decades/millennia depending on how broadly you count things. For a concrete example, Iran's April strikes.
> What do you think constitutes a major escalation?
Terror attacks on Israeli assets abroad - I'd be keeping embassies/consulates on alert - and rocket strikes against Israel. At least enough to try to save face, although the Iranian strikes offer a "good luck" for that.
Do you think Lebanon will escalate by capturing prisoners? I agree that that could be an escalation given the context and history. That said, I don't know what a path to peace with Hezbollah looks like. It's hard to imagine Israel tolerating it imperfect ceasefire while Hezbollah continues to arm, given how that worked out with Hamas
I think that netanyahu would be very happy to see a de-escalation on the northern border and it would be a big win for his cabinet.
Israel is desperate to provoke?
Hezbollah is bombing Israel since the October 7th attack. 300,000 refugees inside Israel because of this bombing. Who is provoking who ?
How is what you wrote about that Israel is desperate to provoke is related to Gaza ?
Israel is defending itself against Hamas, Hezbollah and other Iranian allies since October 7th 2023.
Why would Israel provoke Hezbollah? What's the point of it ?
We should avoid using the name of the country as a proxy for its current government. The people has nothing to do with this - this is all planned and executed under the auspices of the current prime minister and his associates.
Even though the people largely supports their agenda, an action that targets three people but affects 2,700 people as collateral damage would not pass by their parliament.
We should avoid using the name of the country as a proxy for its current government
I understand your point but synecdoche is the oil on the gears of discourse. This required a lot of people's involvement, from those issuing the orders to technicians at the bottom of the chain of command. It's not Netanyahu's cabinet that did the work of placing explosive charges in thousands of compact devices and then repackaged and shrinkwrapped them.
Obviously once could refer to the 'Netanyahu regime' or some other more specific term, but then someone else would complain that this was a mendacious mischaracterization of the country's political system or suchlike. To the extent that civilians there don't with to be identified with their political leadership or take on the moral responsibility for its decisions, they'd better step up their efforts to topple the government by means of a general strike or some other time-honored method.
I do think we can hold Israel as a country responsible. But what we can't do is blame Jewish or even Israeli people in general. Though I don't see anyone doing this. The current government is always quick to draw the antisemitism card when being criticised but I never see anyone actually doing that.
Why would you assume this targeted three people? I assume the most likely scenario is that the attackers targeted as many Hezbollah members as they could, and were extremely successful at it.
That's a very good point - if the goal was to disable comms and incapacitate as many targets as possible, then collateral damage numbers are much lower.
It's unknown how many were family members of targeted individuals, and whatever the number actually is, it'll be misreported.
Why would the family members of a Hezbollah operative be carrying a pager tuned to Hezbollah's private communications network? A reminder that Hezbollah operates a parallel phone system, and is in many ways more sophisticated and organized than the de jure government of Lebanon, whose military forces Hezbollah outnumbers.
The family member would not necessarily need to be carrying the pager, just near it. Picture a child standing next to adult, pager on hip would be next to the kids head. Pagers are not always worn too, could be on top of a table, etc..
First a style point: I don't think you get very far with things like "the only conclusion we can draw is that I'm right". I know I never sound like it, but the one thing I can confidently state in these kinds of discussions is that nothing is unambiguous. When it comes to conflict in the Middle East, if I have to be potentially wrong about things, so do you!
As I've remarked several times on this thread, the standard I'm using for this attack isn't one in which no innocents (or even innocent children) are harmed or killed. I don't like war and would happily confiscate every firearm in North America, but that standard is one no active military in the world meets. Rather: the "state of the art" in targeted strikes is air-to-ground weaponry, which routinely kills civilian bystanders at ratios far exceeding 1:1.
Here, my guess is that the ratio is something far south of 1:100, making this strike --- I think? --- unprecedented in precision in the last 100 years of warfare. We'll learn more as the day goes on, and if/when I'm wrong, I'll certainly say so.
"Terrorism" has nothing whatsoever to do with my thinking on this. Hezbollah is a large, sophisticated, organized, well-supplied combatant force, a military peer to its neighbors, and it is in open armed conflict with Israel.
We'll see, but I don't think it's very likely that Hezbollah school teachers are carrying Hezbollah pagers. There were a bunch of news stories written about why Hezbollah fighters are carrying pagers. Ordinary Lebanese people, from what I can see (I actually looked up market data here) carry Android phones like everybody else does. And I don't think Hezbollah is handing out pagers to random janitors in Dahieh.
Note Reuters reporting on the concentration of reports of strikes here: it's not uniformly spread across the population of Lebanon.
We will see. But at this point it is ill advised to consider Israel to be in the right. We have seen how they conduct their targeting in Gaza, and we have no reason to believe their targeting practice is any more careful, nor humane in Lebanon.
We have every reason to suspect they had no idea who would be carrying these pagers. That they did consider any Hezbollah member to be a legitimate target, be they senior administrators at a hospital, media workers, politicians, etc.
At the very least they must have known that higher party members (i.e. politicians) would be carrying the pagers, and that they had no idea who was actually close when they detonated, and simply didn’t care if children got hurt.
An army who is on trial for genocide does not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
I think they considered any Hezbollah member carrying one of these pagers to be a legitimate target. Why are senior administrators at hospitals and media workers carrying military command and control equipment?
If it turns out that large numbers of non-military personnel were carrying pagers that blew up, I'll be wrong about this, and I'll say so. My belief that this isn't the case isn't because I have any particular faith in Israel; it's because of the previous reporting about why Hezbollah had people carrying pagers: because it believed Israel was going to target these people through their cellphones. Pagers suck! I think people are carrying these things (or were; nobody's carrying any pagers anymore!) because they have to.
I don't know what "benefit of the doubt" means in this situation. Israel and Hezbollah are at war. War is ruthless.
Anyways all this is to say: Hezbollah is a military peer to Israel (I mean, I think Israel would win, but it wouldn't be easy). "Terrorism" has nothing to do with this. The conflict to me is fundamentally amoral, bilaterally, in a way that isn't the case with Gaza. Israel doesn't occupy Lebanon or control Hezbollah's supply lines. These are two opposing armies doing what armies do during hostilities.
I don't see how an attack launched by one hostile military force against combatants of another, where both forces are in declared open combat, can possibly be described as "state-sponsored terrorism".
Again: all the available reporting suggests strongly that Israel wasn't simply targeting every pager in Lebanon. These were specific pagers procured by Hezbollah for military operations, something widely reported months before this attack.
Even if it targeted only military personnel, they were targeted going about their daily activities, putting their families and others who might, as we saw, just be shopping near them, at risk.
I think this is the reason booby trapping consumer devices which resemble those in use by civilians is an explicit war crime.
You can't guarantee the explode as intended. It is gonna be very difficult for Lebanon to find all of the unexploded devices and secure them. Very likely one of those booby traps will find their way to a thrift store in the next few years and unexpectedly explode when handled by innocent hands.
It is a stretch to call a pager a military equipment and the use of one a “military operation”.
No, Israel rigged consumer electronics used by people during their civilian lives off the battlefield as they posed no threat to anybody. There is no definition of terrorism which doesn’t encapsulate this act.
And no, this act is not justified even if every targeted victim of this attack was a Hezbollah member. As I said before, there are more members of this organization than fighters and generals.
No, that's not what the reporting says. Hezbollah operates its own military networks for these things, procures these pagers specifically for military purchases, and issues them to Hezbollah fighters.
"Off the battlefield" doesn't mean anything here: if they're members of the armed wing of Hezbollah, they are black-letter IHL combatants whether or not they're actively engaged in combat, the same way everybody aboard a naval vessel is a combatant if you sink it, including the cook.
Put it this way: if it turns out that these pagers were widely used by non-military personnel, like school teachers, I'll absolutely say I was wrong, and that this attack was probably hard to justify. If reporting firms up that these pagers exclusively carried by military personnel, does that change things for you?
One of the casualties was the child of an MP. That is not military. So we know of at least one instance of a non-military member being targeted, and their kid killed.
Israel has consistently lied about the military nature of their targets in Gaza. I see no reason to believe they behave any differently in Lebanon.
Also, even if they were all military—which they probably weren’t—they were still going about their civilian lives far away from the battlefield, as they posed no threat to anybody.
Now that some time has passed we know a little more about the victims. Including a press conference by Lebanon’s Minister of Health Firass Abiad. There have been 12 recorded deaths so far. Of those were 4 medical workers, one 8 year old girl, and one 11 year old boy. The press conference noted that many of those carrying the pagers were civilians. And made special mention of the toll this scale of an attack had on their medical system.
The best interpretation for Israel here is that they conducted a terrorist attack in a civilian against an armed group during their civilian lives, inflicting at least some civilian casualties. But we know how Israel conducts it self in Gaza and elsewhere in Palestine, and we have every reason to expect their intentions were far more nefarious.
The answer is no. The nature of the attack does not make it OK even if it turns out that only military personnel had these pagers. It is not OK for Israel to weaponize consumer electronics which are widely used in a civilian area, even if the users at the time are most likely military personnel.
But this question is irrelevant because this is very unlikely to be the case. The victims seem to be many civilians.
Since when did naming a country for their military action signify the opinion or inclination of the majority of civic population? When newspapers report on "country A did X" it almost always means their government did X. So I'm not sure what point you're trying to make
It is some sort of dehumanization. Since it got into fashion, I've noticed some colleges started to refer to companies in China as 'China'. Like as if they are dealing with Xi when procuring washers.
You are lumping together a population that doesn't necessarily agree with the actions. It creates negative attitudes towards citizens of that country (or people who look like citizens of that country).
Why not both? Location data would be relatively easy to collect and forward, audio not so much (much higher storage and transmission throughput requirements for very low quality source data given the limitations of piezoelectric microphones and the fact that pagers are usually worn on belts).
If you're getting GPS data, collecting people's movements for a month or three probably provides 99% of what you will ever want to know. Once the patterns have been established you're into diminishing returns territory, while the risk of discovery goes up, which would neutralize the value of the explosive attack.
The strategic value of such a perfectly targeted surprise attack is massive, notwithstanding the relatively low fatality rate. Injuries are expensive and often devastating, and the psychological impact is brutal. Logistically, Hezbollah (and many other organizations, militant or not) are going to have to review and/or replace part of their communications tech. That's a massive technical disruption, a significant economic cost, and risks further exposing supply chain information. It's also going to create paranoia about many other electronic devices, poison in the food, and so on.
I'm not sure about the ethics of this. If one were certain that only Hezbollah officers were being targeted then it would be an acceptable kind of asymmetric attack through a novel vector.
However this also seems to have impacted quite a few civilians, and there is a claim (unverified so far) that a hospital just replaced all its pager equipment a couple of weeks ago and would otherwise have been impacted: https://x.com/SuppressedNws/status/1836080190855795092
If this happened in the US pursuant to one of the wars we've been involved in, we'd definitely be calling it terrorism and/or a war crime. It's a big strategic win for the Israelis in the short term but can hurt them two ways in the longer term. Hezbollah and other enemies of Israel will be significantly more motivated retaliate in some equally creative/unpredictable fashion, and non-aligned economic partners of Israel are likely to view Israeli products with renewed skepticism, hurting exports.
It would be a bit rich for us to call this a war crime, since our standard M.O. for targeted strikes --- like everybody else's --- routinely kills innocent civilians in much larger numbers than this.
The point was that the US government regularly accepts civilian casualties in trageted strikes, so it would be hypocritical for the US government to complain now.
Notably, this doesn't apply to anyone who hasn't supported such strikes in the war against terror.
From your source: "killing at least nine people and wounding around 2,800 across [Lebanon]". That's a total casualty count, and does not distinguish civilian from Hezbollah casualties.
Hezbollah itself claims 100,000 members, by which this would represent ~3% of the total force as targets of the attack.
The devices in question were ordered by, and delivered to, Hezbollah, per an NYTimes report I've just mentioned in another reply to another of your comments.
Wikipedia reports some civillian deaths, "including four healthcare workers and two children" citing NBC News, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and Associated Press:
Given the very many highly motivated eyes on this story, I'm highly confident that if there were credible reports of a higher civilian casualty rate we'd be hearing about it in spades.
It's clear that there was some broader damage, but overall the attack was highly specific to Hezbollah. Arguments that this wasn't a highly-specifically-targeted attack don't pass the credibility test.
Again, I'm not uncritical of Israel, and try to follow the many nuances of the overall situation. I also realise that it's exceptionally difficult to remain dispassionate when its you and yours who are subject to attacks, and in a conflict spanning generations.
It says thousands were injured, not that the thousands injured were civilians. In fact, it’s likely that most casualties were Hezbollah operatives.
From the first link:
“Reports from Lebanon said Hezbollah recently received a new batch of imported pagers, which were being used to share information about possible Israeli drone strikes and other attacks.”
From the second link:
“The Lebanese armed group Hezbollah said the pagers belonged to the group’s officials and blamed Israel for orchestrating what appeared to be an unusual synchronized attack on Hezbollah’s communications system.”
Based on that, and the limited effective range of the blast (as visible in videos and the fact that the injuries are consistent with a pager in a hand or a pocket), it’s likely that the majority of injuries were of Hezbollah personnel.
Please explain to me how exactly Mossad got these pagers into only Hezbollah hands. It was just a shipment of pagers that was interfered with while in transit. There were absolutely non Hezbollah that had these things. Also please explain to me how nearby innocents were protected. That's right, they weren't.
The pagers, which Hezbollah had ordered from Gold Apollo in Taiwan, had been tampered with before they reached Lebanon, according to some of the officials. Most were the company’s AR924 model, though three other Gold Apollo models were also included in the shipment.
The US would call this terrorism if it occurred in the exact same fashion to itself or allies. The hypocrisy is blindingly clear. It's hypocrisy because they don't complain. Your logic is completely backward.
1. It appears that the AUMBC referenced replaced their equipment but that had nothing to do with this and their doctors weren't impacted.
2. Your note of "...other enemies of Israel will be significantly more motivated retaliate in some equally creative/unpredictable fashion..." is strange considering that this is already the norm. Almost all (perhaps all) of the attacks against Israel have been from terrorists targeting civilians.
Given Israel's successful precision targeting of various senior Hezb members in recent months, I wonder if the pagers were initially used as such, but as suspicion mounted, and chances of an overhaul increased, they decided to hit the kill switch while they still could.
Although as as per an WSJ article: "The affected pagers were from a new shipment that the group received in recent days"
It's possible that they expected a higher kill rate. It's also possible that the kill rate will turn out to be higher after the consequences of injuries have time to play out.
> I would imagine the rewards of silent surveillance (tracking, audio) would be of much higher value than this kind of attack where 3 out of 1000s targets were killed.
The reason they were using pagers, as opposed to phones, was to avoid exactly this kind of potential attack.
Pagers are (typically) a broadcast technology, the pager has no transmission capability. A page is broadcast from every tower, it has no idea where the receiver is. A targeted page is done by the receiver filtering out and ignoring pages that it isn't the recipient for (eavesdropping all pages is trivial).
The pager device is simple, it doesn't contain a GPS or have any concept of it's own location. No microphone or audio capability, very little processing capability. And adding such capability with something like a bug would be reasonably apparent to anyone opening one up and inspecting it.
How did they make sure a large percentage ended up in the hands of the targets? Seems like this could hit a lot of random people, just anybody using pagers. Unless they had way to target certain customers.
I think you're assuming that all pagers of this model were being sent out like this. That's unlikely.
Much more likely is they compromised someone in Hezbollah that was doing the ordering, or the distributor/vendor they ordered from, modified a couple thousand devices and sent them pretty much directly to their enemy, and only their enemy, to distribute among themselves. Then waited a bit, and set them off.
True but so can explosives. Clearly they were not competent.
Radio signals can be detected of course but it's possible to mitigate that a lot by only doing that at specific times and locations, or on request. And send the data out in batch. Ideally while you have the subject under observation so you know they're not monitoring for signals.
The same way Volkswagen hid their engine manipulation from tests by recognising the test and adjusting parameters.
Well, slightly off topic, but in the case of Volkswagen, everybody knew they (and other car companies) were doing it for at least a decade before the scandal blew up : car magazines were even publishing articles about it !
There are several sources online claiming the model used is the Gold Apollo Rugged Pager AR924. This pager is made in Taiwan, a country that has close ties with Israel and it's most important ally USA. Just a week ago Taiwan's Foreign Minister Lin Chia-Lung openly emphasized the critical importance of intelligence sharing and technology cooperation with Israel.
It was reported in Turkish news (allegedly via IRGC on X) that pagers are all Motorola branded, and supposedly at least include the Motorola LX-2 model.[1][2] However, the provided image of a Motorola LX-2 is also the first image on the Wikipedia English page for pagers.
There is also a photo circulating of a destroyed pager[3] which has visible writing "Distri: GOLD" and "Model: AP" (or "AR"). This has been matched to the Gold Apollo AR-924 model pager that is manufactured in Taiwan and is not a Motorola pager.[4][5][6][etc][7][8][9]
Correction after more information has become available:
The Gold Apollo AR-924 model pager is reported to have been manufactured under license by Budapest-based company "BAC Consulting KFT", but the head of this company denies manufacturing the devices and instead described themselves as an intermediary, without providing further information. The Taiwanese company which allowed these devices to be manufactured under license also reported receiving strange remittances from BAC via banking systems in the Middle East (not Hungary).[1]
"Taiwan has no record of Gold Apollo pages being shipped to Lebanon or the Middle East"
"Gold Apollo founder and chairperson Hsu Ching-kuang told reporters on Wednesday that his firm had signed a contract with a European distributor to use the Gold Apollo brand. Hsu said the distributor, which he did not name, established a relationship with Gold Apollo about three years ago."
You are not thinking past the first point. Considering what these people have been doing lately, even if you are currently on their good side, what happens when you’re not or don’t want to serve them anymore? Think places like India and Brazil may be rethinking their supply chains right now?
Any .org should be considering the risk of allowing devices unfettered into onto their businesses premesis which could be used to trigger remote explosions, allies and enemies.
95g, USB-C rechargeable up to 85 days of operation, separate control and charging boards, multiple replaceable components for easy maintenance.
Probably lots of ways to free up space, most notably by using a smaller battery but with a few resources you could probably combine the boards and probably not even be obvious ("generation 2, less expensive to produce"). With state-actor level resources new boards would be easy as would something concealed within a LiPo battery.
I wonder, if these devices could be suspect, why don't they order these cheap
Chinese GSM modules. You can't hide explosives in those.
Also, afaik all GSM modules broadcast their IMEI numbers over the network. Explosives or not, I'm sure they can all be tracked and triangulated, since they talk to the towers. I don't think these things are secure anyways.
Pagers are truly receive only. A pager is effectively a pocket FM radio fixed to one station, that vibrates when a relevant message was digitally read aloud on the radio.
GSM on the other hand is cellular and bidirectional so triangulation problem applies.
That would make sense, since there's no such thing as a one-way GSM device. GSM towers (cells) need to keep track of which devices are in their vicinity and do smooth handovers to neighboring towers.
I'm not sure how the protocol you mentioned works, but I'd imagine it still needs some info about the whereabouts of the receiver to route the messages to him.
A Russian helicopter pilot had his family escape Russia, stole a helicopter, fled to Ukraine with it and cashed out on the bounty money offered. Then he was found and assassinated in Spain by the FSB. We are living in interesting times.
> Then he was found and assassinated in Spain by the FSB.
And that only because he seems to have lost his sense of self-preservation and basically lived his life in the open, in a Spanish town full of Russian ex-pats. And scoffed at the idea that he'd be safer in Ukraine.
Apparently the worst mistake was contacting his former girlfriend in Russia:
>Exactly how the killers found him has not been established, though two senior Ukrainian officials said he had reached out to a former girlfriend, still in Russia, and invited her to come see him in Spain.
>“This was a grave mistake,” one of the officials said.
Questionable opsec is almost always the culprit. Even all these online black markets, it wasn’t some sophisticated operation to catch them. Many times, they use the same username on another website and now there’s a link. Hell, one of them used to send email verification for their black market using their personal email.
It doesn’t just stop there. A 49ers wide receiver got shot a couple weeks back because he posted on Instagram about buying a Rolex and he was lucky to survive. That’s also questionable opsec.
You should check out any of the books written by Ben Macintyre, especially "The Spy and the Traitor". It turns out a lot of spy novels aren't that far off from reality.
That does sound like spy novel stuff but it seems plausible enough? Dude was turned, and he wanted money and an escape to somewhere safe in exchange for cooperation.
Exactly. Snowball's chance anyone could get a series of capacitors and transistor to do too much more than "let the smoke out," even with the largest influx of EM energy. Most batteries give pretty big warnings before they do anything close to explode, making this a pretty obvious 'attack' vector they utilized.
I'm also happy to offer political opinions for anyone that wants to hear ;)
Given history, given adversary, given all facts known thats practically sure. Usually Mosad doesn't say anything so we won't get much more anytime soon.
There will be few movies and documentaries about this for sure once things calm down a bit. I presume they used pagers instead of phones to not be so easily trackable via google/apple software and hardware?
A pager is passive receiver only. It never transmits. So you can't track it. That allows an operative to get to a secure line or obtain a burner device.
Whoever did this just killed that as an information channel as both the devices and the network are now compromised.
>Whoever did this just killed that as an information channel as both the devices and the network are now compromised.
This is also true for Hezbollah. They must now distrust their own network, equipment and procurement channels. The reshuffling resulting from the casualties will make the organization less effective, at least temporarily, thus delaying any attack plans and allowing moles to rise through the ranks.
You might as well be arguing all cell phones are iPhones, because here's a model which is an iPhone. Sure, some are two-way pagers and do transmit, but most aren't.
Loads of pagers are passive, receive-only devices. There's a reason why there's a common distinction between "pager" and "two-way pager".
Until we know the attack vector, I wouldn't say the network is compromised. Perhaps a specific message was used to detonate, that wouldn't require compromising the network. Perhaps there was a separate radio that wasn't using the pager network at all.
It's pretty insane to see remote detonation technology
used and implemented in 1996, considering cell phones looked like Nokia bricks and the RF hardware needed to implement this needs to fit in a pretty tight space in the phone.
Its one thing to figure out how to wire the vibrator in a phone into an external explosive activation circuit.
Its a whole other thing to do a supply chain intercept on an entire factory run of pagers, build a difficult to detect explosive into them, get them into the hands of your enemies, and remotely trigger them over infrastructure you don't directly control.
This is an incredible level of execution. And, presumably, the IDF or some attached intelligence agency demonstrating how deeply they own their adversary's networks.
I'm not sure they necessarily need to deeply own their adversary's networks. I'd be impressed if Lebanese pager tech has any serious kind of encryption, for example. And we're already accepting at face value that they sabotaged the devices, so it's possible this was done with a separate RF signal than their own cellular network, even if it is locked down.
But yes, the supply chain sabotaging is certainly impressive.
You probably need firmware and some major component modification, such as a display or battery, but not more than this, to pull it off. So at a minimum, two components, or perhaps one smart component such as a display.
It seems the model was the AP-900, not the AR-924, which used alkaline (ie removable) batteries, so a new theory is an EFP (explosively formed penetrator) manufactured into the device.
It appears the devices do not function on cell phone networks but instead on internal radio networks such as those used within industrial or medical settings.
Best guess is the displays because:
1) there is enough room for the EFP,
2) you could modify the component to trigger itself, meaning it doesn’t need coordination between any other parts of the device
3) there are a lot of injuries to the face reported — with a display you could trip on button push without needing access to the button, when people tend to be looking right at the EFP
4) in the videos the explosions look very directional
If an entire shipment was intercepted and modified, how many other pagers are out there? How many non-targeted persons are walking around with a bomb in their pocket?
I watched a video of one of these exploding in the pocket of someone at a grocery store with someone standing directly next to him, so close they were rubbing shoulders, and the bystander was fine. No doubt there were many dozens of civilian casualties, but if the numbers net out the way you'd expect they would (ie: people carrying these pagers, which link to Hezbollah's own communications network --- they run their own phone company --- are overwhelmingly Hezbollah operatives) this is going to pencil out as one of the most surgical attacks of all time.
Every military strike in modern warfare will involve someone in some sense not worrying about innocent people getting hurt. This isn't Agincourt. Wars happen in cities now.
There are too many threads and this is too complicated a topic for a technology forum website so I’m not going to weigh in everywhere.
But you yourself recognize that a) Hezbollah is a de facto government, not just a military or terrorist organization and that b) its folly to do some sort of algebra on casualties in these conflicts and intent is what matters.
It’s hard to come up with a plausible intent for a strike that injured 2700 people, with only the weakest of targeting mechanisms across a population that ranges the gamut of occupations, other than terrorism.
We would certainly view it as such if Hezbollah blew up 2700 phones of the Israeli government and military.
That depends on who the 2700 people are, right? If it's 2700 random people, I agree. If it's 2600 Hezbollah operatives, not so much. If Hezbollah managed to surgically strike 2600 IDF soldiers, injuring and killing an additional 100 bystanders, I promise you I would offer the same analysis.
I'm measuring this against the standard of military operations conducted by western countries, the state of the art of which is Hellfire missiles fired into cars and apartment buildings.
I'm trying to be hedge-y as I write this stuff. We could absolutely learn things that would change my take on this!
It indeed does. Unless you are a medic or a chaplain, if you are even under the effective command of Hezbollah, let alone employed by it, you're a valid combatant target. Uniforms and current participation in combat operations has nothing to do with it.
If you want to make the claim that Hezbollah operates schools and hospitals and that employment at those institutions doesn't designate somebody as a combatant, I will absolutely agree with you. But it's very unlikely, to me, that those people are carrying Hezbollah military command and control telecoms devices. We could learn otherwise, and if we do, I'll acknowledge that. But from what we're learning now, it's not looking likely.
No, you emphatically are not. The criteria is membership in the armed forces: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule4 Had it been otherwise, practically everyone working for the Israeli state would also be a "valid combatant target". Including reservists since they are also "under the effective command" of the IDF. I have no idea who carries these pagers and neither does you, so I'll refrain from speculating.
In regular armies, activated reservists are valid combatant targets. Reservists become civilian, under the principle of distinction, when they are deactivated and fully integrate into civilian life. More applicably to the situation with Hezbollah, which is an irregular army, functional criteria apply; meaning, very roughly and in my paraphrase, "is some aspect of the armed wing of Hezbollah your day job?"
I don't know that we disagree much here. We both agree that simply because Hezbollah operates a school does not distinguish the employees of that school as combatants. There are civilian combatants; for instance, whether or not your yourself were ever going to take up arms in Syria, if you work in a Hezbollah arms depot or weapons factory, even if you're just counting the bullets, you're most definitely a combatant. It depends.
You're refraining from speculating on something I am clearly not refraining on. I get that. I am (much) further out on the limb than you are. When the evidence shows I'm way off on this stuff, I'll absolutely say so. The big place where our premises differ is: I believe Hezbollah pagers to be military equipment, and you believe random Lebanese people with weak associations to Hezbollah might carry them as well. I'll say right now that is not a crazy point of view; it's just one I don't currently share.
You are juxtaposing two different concepts. 1) military objectives (weapons factories) and 2) combatant status (fighters). Factory workers are not combatants. While I don't think Elbit Systems should be allowed to operate globally, killing their workers is not legitimate.
At this point it is not even certain that all exploded pagers were "Hezbollah pagers" and that it wasn't just a random shipment of pagers the Israelis booby-trapped. Pagers are still used by emergency and medical services in many parts of the world.
There is a big misunderstanding here; you seem to believe that because Hezbollah is so invariably coupled with civilian life and has by own decision foregone uniforms and other basic traditional military structures, this somehow raises the requirements for Israel to strike them. The opposite is true.
I want to push back on this because I am making a stronger claim. This kind of argument came up a lot in the Gaza conflict, and pulled in proportionality arguments and discussions about Hamas embedding military assets deliberately in vulnerable civilian targets. I'm saying none of that happened here. I don't believe (but I could be wrong, as I often am) that Israel just killed a bunch of Hezbollah medics and schoolteachers. They attacked, with great specificity, actual soldiers of a military peer with whom they are in open conflict.
I believe you can rules of engagement under IHL straight off the ICRC's documents; that this isn't even a tricky case.
“Customary international humanitarian law prohibits the use of booby traps – objects that civilians are likely to be attracted to or are associated with normal civilian daily use – precisely to avoid putting civilians at grave risk and produce the devastating scenes that continue to unfold across Lebanon today. The use of an explosive device whose exact location could not be reliably known would be unlawfully indiscriminate, using a means of attack that could not be directed at a specific military target and as a result would strike military targets and civilians without distinction. A prompt and impartial investigation into the attacks should be urgently conducted.”
These pagers almost certainly went off on n the hands of doctors and clerics.
But again, this isn’t about some sort of ethical counting and categorizing of the injured. What can the intent of this attack be other than to spread terror? To say to the broad populace we will harm you when you least suspect it, independent of the military status between our countries and we will do it in surprising and asymmetric ways.
It eliminated their entire command and control network, hospitalized hundreds of their officers and command staff, put the IRGC on notice that it has been comprehensively infiltrated, and will force months of internal investigations and purges.
Further, it comes during a time where Iran has been publicly messaging about retaliation for the killing of Ismael Haniyeh, so there's a geopolitical angle to it as well: "we can do this, think about what we'll do next if you try launching another 300 drones at us".
I don't think it's very hard to make a military validity argument here (of course, it's easy for me to do that, since I'm shoplifting an argument from Noga Tarnopolsky and Oz Katerji here).
Spreading fear is generally considered terrorism - not a proper military objective. You have to realize that the argument you're making goes both ways here.
In every military conflict in the history of warfare, combatants have taken steps to inspire fear in their adversaries. You may be providing a definition of terrorism, but I don't think it's a useful one; I think you need to refine it more if you want to make it operable here.
In any case, where you use the word "fear" I would probably use "deterrence".
I have no idea why you think that is a comparable event.
What I think may be happening here is that my reply to Kasey is being read as a justification for attacks on civilian populations. That is not a thing I believe; as you know, from the rest of this thread, my contention is that this attack targeted combatants.
Deterrence happened to be the stated purpose of the Lidice massacre. And it probably "deterred" the Czech resistance. That in and of itself did not legalize the attack. Here we have an Israeli attack involving indiscriminate maiming. You are claiming that "inspiring fear" and "deterrence" legitimizes this attack. The attack targeted pagers and anyone in vicinity of those pagers. That's exactly equivalent of dropping a bomb in a trashcan and saying you targeted soldiers that may or may not pass by as the bomb detonates.
I don't think it's productive to reply like this without acknowledging that we're operating from different premises. You're calling this "indiscriminate maiming", and I'm claiming these "maimings" are extraordinarily discriminating: they exclusively target Hezbollah military personnel, the only people carrying these devices. You clearly disagree with that premise, but that's the dispute, not whether one of us believes that massacring an entire city is a legitimate use of military force.
It's not a matter of "operating from different principles", it's a
matter of facts. Among the killed were a 10-year-old girl and among
the wounded were Iran's ambassador to Lebanon. Mouthbreathers will say
"Iran bad so wounding ambassador good", but an ambassador is a
noncombatant, hence wounding them is prima facie evidence of an
indiscriminate attack.
> (a) which are not directed at a specific military objective;
> (b) which employ a method or means of combat which cannot be directed at a specific military objective; or
> (c) which employ a method or means of combat the effects of which cannot be limited as required by international humanitarian law;
> and consequently, in each such case, are of a nature to strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction.
It is clear that whoever detonated these remote-controlled bombs had
no control over who they injured. Thus, the effects of combat couldn't
"be limited as required by international humanitarian law". Hence, the
attack was indiscriminate. If you don't trust my interpretation of the
IHL, read the ICRC's interpretation:
> But this reasoning begs the question as to what those limitations
> are. Practice in this respect points to weapons whose effects are
> uncontrollable in time and space and are likely to strike military
> objectives and civilians or civilian objects without
> distinction. The US Air Force Pamphlet gives the example of
> biological weapons.[17] Even though biological weapons might be
> directed against military objectives, their very nature means that
> after being launched their effects escape from the control of the
> launcher and may strike both combatants and civilians and
> necessarily create a risk of excessive civilian casualties.
Moreover, there is the principle of proportionality. You claim
"deterrence" motivates the attack and the loss of civilian life. But
spreading fear is not a military objective in the first place, hence
it does not full-fill the principle of proportionality.
>That is, they were not uniformed soldiers engaged in combat. Hence, they were not legitimate targets. They may not even have touched a gun if they served in Hizbollah's civil administration.
Had precision strikes existed in 1944, nobody would complain if a Nazi office party got hit with a missile just because "they were civil administrators, not soldiers"
It wouldn't matter. They would have been considered combatants then, and are explicitly designated so under the Geneva Conventions now. Unless you're a medic or a chaplain, you cannot safely work for (or, really, even be "under the effective command of") Lebanese Hezbollah under the laws of armed combat.
To Kasey's point, the reciprocal is true, too! The laws of armed combat permit Hezbollah strikes on Israeli command and administrative staff.
And yet it took 5 hours for IDF to respond to Hamas breaching their border - where it only takes a maximum of 45 minutes via helicopter to get to any point along the Israel-Palestine border?
Is there any technology possible to help people more seriously see incongruences for what they are, technology to help prevent people from propaganda - or is that primarily simply a systems control issue - education system, information system, etc - that would be party to a censorship-suppression narrative control and distraction apparatus?
Hamas coordinated strikes against Israeli c4i to hinder the IDF response to the invasion. This is trivially verifiable. Not all of Hamas are barely-educated fighters capable of little more than being pointed at innocents and told to kill.
Most sophisticated-best funded military in the world doesn't have automatic alert systems in place, redundancies, etc, eh?
You probably also don't believe that the Hannibal Directive was deployed on Oct. 7th as well, even though Israel is known to have done the same as early as 1986.
P.S. There are IDF intelligence agents who are whistleblowers that say that this had to have been allowed.
I think the planners of the operation weren't your average terrorist: They outmatched the border barriers' design basis threat, they knew the default Israeli response and targeted critical c4i nodes to hinder it, and they had a bit of luck and a lot of audacity. Those added up to a black day for Israel.
How much confirmation bias do you think you're leaning into, in order to not have to swallow the equally, if not more likely case, that the IDF was ordered or purposefully delayed in their response by higher ups?
And about the Hannibal Directive you didn't respond? We can assume too then, since you like assumptions, that they were deployed to kill their own citizens as well - right?
Im assuming you’re saying they were looking for a casus belli. They well might have, but surely the assailants knew this was a likely consequence. Why did they proceed to breach the border if they didn’t want to trigger a war?
You do know this so-called war didn't start on Oct. 7th, right?
This world needs to be mandated to watch all of the actual evidence, and just propaganda by those who mostly control the mainstream-social media channels.
