Yes. There's sourcing for the first attack that Israel implanted daughterboards of some sort with small (30g?) amounts of explosive. The battery may have been involved with the triggering, but it wasn't a battery explosion.
But if you wanted to put 30g of explosive into a device, you wouldn't just want it sat there looking out of place to any curious person with a screw-driver. My guess is that you'd want to put it inside a component like say a LiPo pouch that looks like it belongs there. Half-battery, half-explosive - and maybe hijack the BMS components to also allow it to be triggered.
>My understanding is that they were extremely well concealed
Source? I'm not sure how you can concealed any meaningful amount of PCB/explosive in a pager/radio, unless you're hoping that your target never opens the plastic casing, or doesn't know what the internals are supposed to look like.
The most plausible theory seems, that the batteries were manipulated/replaced with smaller ones, from the outside still looking like normal batteries, but with explosive inside.
So a shorter battery life, but usually no one cuts open batteries.
the amount of explosives would be about the size of a pencil eraser, easily concealable imo. Reports are that they could have modified the existing batteries and put them inside there.
You know what a LiPo pouch looks like right? silvery bag, some yellow tape at the end with some wires sticking out.
Less likely you know what they look like inside, as it's been drilled into us not to pierce the things. Also if your laptop battery only lasts a couple of hours you might suspect something is wrong. If your pager needs recharging every month instead of every 2 months... well nobody has a clue how often a pager should need recharging.
I've no idea if it was the battery, but just feels like the right approach.
I'd guess the explosives were inside the "VCO can": the metal shielding around the VCO circuit. The picture of the radio shows the radio's metal casing bent away from the PCB, suggesting the blast came from that direction rather than the battery. The VCO can would have air-space inside it and is unlikely to be opened, even by a service tech. There will be an SPI serial bus running from the CPU into the VCO can, to allow programming of the VCO, which could be used as a conduit for a trigger command.
From the picture it looked to me like it was more aligned with the DAC, although I double checked and I don't think that any DACs of that size would be in the order of 20-30 grams. Could a discharge be angled like that within the confines of the can?
Anyone care to appreciate how effectively the new CT X-ray machines used by the TSA could have picked up the explosive materials in these electronic devices?
That might be one way to restore faith in one’s supply chain.
Correct. The injuries are comparable or worse to what you get if you try to use a .50 BMG cartridge as a hammer.
Videos show outright detonations (so far with notably little fire), nothing like the fiery deflagrations you see in “battery explodes” videos while someone is doing a repair.
Some reports are saying the Icom-V82 devices were bought by Hezbollah 5 months ago, close to the time yesterday's beeper were purchased. However, the exploding part was the battery, imported to Lebanon only 2 weeks ago.
I wonder if this operation had two sides - implanting something in the devices that will allow remotely triggering the explosion, and then also tampering with the batteries to include explosive material.
Saying this "further heightened tensions" between Israel and Hezbollah is like saying Jason "further heightened tensions" with the campers at Camp Crystal Lake.
Can you imagine what must be like to be a rank-and-file Hezbollah soldier at this point? What the fuck is going to happen tomorrow? I'd throw away my socks.
There really isn’t any de-escalation. Hezbollah continues to bomb Northern Israel and the IDF continues to strike back. There are still hundreds of thousands of displaced Israelis who can’t go back to their homes.
Well, first, there's no de-escalation happening with Hezbollah. Israel, Hezbollah, and Iran are more or less openly at war. We don't talk about it much because the attack failed, but Iran launched a mass drone assault against Israel a few months back. Israel recently exploded Ismael Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, in Tehran. Hezbollah rocket attacks on Northern Israel, which killed half a youth soccer team, have more or less evacuated that whole region. Hezbollah is not Hamas: they are a military peer (a weaker one, but still) to Israel.
Second, the reporting I've seen (incl. "confirmation" from US intelligence sources) is that this was a use-it-or-lose-it situation: that Hezbollah operatives were on the verge of discovering it.
The Iran "retaliatory" attack was clearly not a serious effort, they mostly used old cheap rockets and drones. It was more to save face and they got a lot of information on Israel's defence systems out of it. And not to mention it cost the Israelis over a 1 billion dollars to thwart while Iran spend a few million.
Israel is in their 9/11 moment and is not backing down due to international hand wringing. Ultimately it’s a test of the international institutions and US government support.
What you're saying is true. Israeli citizens have had enough and demand a military solution. The fighting doctrine of Israel's adversaries is attacking and then running for the cover of the international community, but post October 7th that doesn't really work anymore with Israel.
At this point, I wonder if Israel isn't intentionally trying to provoke more 9/11 moments. If they lose the direct support of the US or the tolerance of the wider international community, they can't fulfill their goals.
Or the flip side. Hamas promised to continue slaughtering Israeli Arabs, Jews, and Christians until they are all dead. Hezbollah has launched rockets into northern Israel for a year…with 100k+ Israelis forced to relocate south.
What exactly other option does Israel had. Peace talks didn’t go anywhere for last few decades
Even if Hamas hadn't eliminated the anti-semitic language from their charter in 2007, that argument would require one to accept that preventatively mass murdering whole families and generations of children is a moral means of dealing with a political opponent.
Options? Israel (the people anyway) has always had the option of finally dropping the ethno-nationalism and apartheid of their foundational principles, and accepting that the Palestinians have a way more material right to Palestinian territory than an American or a European who Israel brought over on a birthright trip.
You say "moralizing about being mean," other people say "opposing genocide." Deliberately trivializing the objections of others is not a good faith argument. Surely you don't think that a 100:1 civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio is par for the course in "every war ever waged," so why say it? You waste everyone's time
Further, you must know that the beliefs you say that Palestinians profess are only actually held by a minority of them. On the same page, Israeli officials have said things like "all Gazans must be destroyed,"[1] but everyone here knows that quotes like these represent the far end of aggression among the group.
> Israeli officials have said things like "all Gazans must be destroyed,"[1] but everyone here knows that quotes like these represent the far end of aggression among the group.
I unfortunately believe that most Israelis believe this or something like it.
You are right, let me rephrase. They have all the power, opposing the genocide of the palestinians will accomplish nothing as long as the palestinians make the isrealis feel unsafe.
You're overlooking facts in a way that serves the Israeli narrative and calling opposition to crimes against humanity as "moralizing about being mean". I don't wish to engage with that nonsense (I wonder if you were similarly unimpressed when John Kirby moralized about the Russians "being mean" to Ukrainian children), but lest someone be inclined to believe it:
- After invading their territory and forcibly displacing them from their homes in 1948, the Israeli government would eventually imprison 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza, severely undermining or outright depriving them of their right to food, movement and labor. Rather, the question is why would the Palestinians welcome an militarized immigrant movement whose stated objectives included the total demographic overwhelm of Palestine, changing the "facts on the ground", supported by an interloping British Mandate. This is as true now as it was then.
- So, while the IDF may be engaged in urban warfare with the armed wing of Hamas, their practical goal is the cleansing of the Gaza Strip, including the genocide of Gazans, evidenced by this past year's perfidy-ridden bombing campaign against civilians. (And the March of Return, and Operation Cast Lead, and Operation Protective Edge, and the bombing of the AP office, then the largest number of journalist assassinations ever witnessed... etc etc)
- Aware of the legal liability of this, the American and Israeli governments have been lying about these aims and attempting to generate plausible deniability by claiming the IDF is measured and surgical in their use of long range heavy bombs, and pretending the infinitesimal ratio of enemy combatants killed is Hamas-engineered. They redefine "human shield" and "Hamas combatant" to suit the moment.
- Of course we know that the Purpose Of a System Is What It Does, so nobody who is informed and in their right mind believes these soul sucking, sugar-coated "upper establishment" statements about due diligence or accountability or whatever and pearl clutching about hostages never mind the overwhelmingly higher number of Palestinian hostages taken and tortured by Israel. Despite their toothlessness, the UN, the ICC and the ICJ have allowed the world to show, one inconvenient determination after another, that the truth is plainly visible.
Ultimately, it's just whether they see war crimes when they see children and families being killed systematically, and whether they're cool with it.
I actually agree with most of this. Israel is almost certainly planning on genociding the Palestinians, although they have not yet started. Where we disagree I guess is in our estimation of what can be done to stop Israel. I do not believe there is anything western countries can do to stop Israel from doing whatever they want to make themselves feel safe. The Palestinians do legitimately make them feel unsafe and as long as that is true it’s not possible to stop Israel from genociding them.
I really don’t think the original comment overlooked any of the stuff you pointed out, it just called it all irrelevant.
They have the support of a state 30x their size. In a unique way few others do, almost in a parent child undying and asymmetrical way.
This is 9/11 but the US backed by an entire alien planet, unafraid to go in the direction of scorched earth even when totally surrounded because the aliens will bail them out.
De-escalation wouldn't solve the problem of an Islamic militia with the declared goal of destroying Israel and the military capabilities somewhere in the world top-20 armies sitting right on Israel's northern border. As far as Israel is concerned, Hezbollah needs to be removed and pushed back away. If this doesn't register with common sense alone, then this view is also backed by UN security council resolution 1701.
Hezbollah has been firing rockets into Israel more or less continuously since October 7, and Israel has been firing back. I believe both countries have had to evacuate border areas, something like 100,000 Israelis living hear Lebanon are internally displaced.
In short, there's a war on. Neither side wants a full blown war but Israel doesn't want to let Hezbollah muster a larger assault, so they're doing what they can to cripple Hezbollah and disrupt their operations.
De-escalation is a goal that takes cooperation from both parties (or in this case, from Israel and the various Iranian proxies attacking them). Telling one party to "de-escalate" while the other party continues attacking is just farting in the wind.
Israel has been pressing the escalation as hard as they can. They've had people in positions of power saying it's literally ok to rape Palestinians in prison.
This is the most relevant point, yet downvoted. Hezbollah decided to pile-on and attack Israel (at Iran's urging, to support their other proxy Hamas). Prior to that, there hadn't been serious conflict between the two states in years.
Because the current Israeli leadership are using external conflict to avoid facing criminal charges from internal political issues. Netanyahu was on the verge of being ousted before the 7 October attacks.
If the conflict stops, the current cabinet will be forced to face their own party, the opposition and the rest of their country.
The escalation is the point. Continuing war keeps Netanyahu and his right-wing cabinet in power. It may also draw the US into the conflict, which would, among other side effects, hurt the Dems chances of winning the presidency in November. (Netanyahu and friends prefer Trump over Harris.)
The “End of history” was just a euphemism for western comfort and insulation from the rest of the world. A number of comments here can demonstrate that. There’s simply not enough proximity to death and destruction for these people to feel like it’s anything more than entertainment or an interesting topic of discussion.
The end of history will be over when we all recognize that this could just as easily be an operation against the Cartel or the Boogaloo Boys or whoever the fuck, with Feds blowing up pagers in a Whole Foods in LA instead of a market in Lebanon. Oh, but that could never happen here.
Please note that this is distinct from yesterday's incident - these are for a different set of communication devices - from what I can see, they went off at 16:58 local time - notably 2 minutes prior to Nasrallah's planned speech on the first incident.
Apparently, these are ICOM devices --- you have in your head maybe like a police walkie talkie from the 80s, but these things are smaller than flip-phones, a little smaller than the palm of your hand.
Icom is a Japanese company. They make radios, including police walkie talkies (land mobile radios). The pictures I've seen look like bog-standard land mobile radios. Not particularly small, and larger than most flip phones.
> The death toll rose to 12, including two children, Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad said on Wednesday. Tuesday's attack wounded nearly 3,000 people, including many of the militant group's fighters and Iran's envoy to Beirut.
The cost and years in the making of this through a shell company in Hungary, and also putting a random (and probably innocent) Taiwanese company in the target, for just killing 12 people including two children... Doesn't look like galaxy brain to me either.
Now we don't yet know which radios exactly these are. But more likely then not, wouldn't these be from the exact same supply chain attack and maybe even come in the same shipment?
According to Routers, they were bought at the same time as the pagers 5 months ago. So I would bet on it being the same supply chain operation that targeted both devices and maybe other devices that were bought at the same time.
Civilians are shown to be in proximity of these devices when they are exploding. It appears that these devices were all triggered simultaneously, rather than waiting for individual targets to be isolated.
One reason is that Hezbollah is not a purely military organization, and has political, medical and educational arms. Another is that some of the reported casualties are the family of Hezbollah members.
Hezbollah like most other similar organisations is not a primarily military organisation even though they are a paramilitary one. The vast majority of the members of Hezbollah have non-military roles of various kinds.
You can't take Lebanon's report on who the injured were at face value. I've not doubt that innocent people were injured by this, but it's not _thousands_ of innocent people.
Israel's bombing of Gaza made them look like a terrorist organization. I believe the majority of deaths and a significant fraction of injured in this attack are in fact Hezbollah members.
There has been no statement or indication that the thousands of people injured were comprised in any significant proportion of civilians. Given that these pagers were purchased by Hezbollah directly and videos of their explosions show a minimal blast radius it is premature and, depending on motives, propagandistic to claim that the thousands of people injured were civilians.
There has been no statement or indication that the thousands of people injured were comprised in any significant proportion of civilians. Given that these pagers-- reportedly 5000 of them-- were purchased by Hezbollah directly and videos of their explosions show a minimal blast radius it is premature and, depending on motives, propagandistic to claim that the thousands of people injured were civilians.
If it walks like terrorism, and quacks like terrorism...
I struggle to understand how they're imagining they're obviating the optics of this, unless they don't care what the dissenting population in Israel thinks (or the world for that matter) until "it is done".
Can you explain how ultra targeted, small explosive charges quack terrorism? I have been reading comments like this yesterday, and I'm completely bewildered as to how any sane person could come to this conclusion.
Did you consider the US operation to take down Bin Laden an act of terrorism too?
This is war. Any hostile action in armed conflict can, and will, have collateral damage to the innocent. Acts of terror and war crimes are determined by who is targeted, what precautions are taken to minimise collateral damage, and how significant is the military target compared to expected collateral damage.
If you don't want to kill any innocent civilians, your only course of action is not to offer any resistance to people who attack you and surrender.
That last paragraph is disingenuous at best because there is a miles-wide valley of options between setting off explosives in peoples' pockets and surrender.
No, this paragraph explains that "this attack killed innocent" is not a good argument if you want to prove that this was a war crime or an act of terror. If you want to prove something like this, your argument should be "this attack targeted innocents", "reasonable precautions to minimise damage to innocents were not taken", or "the military significance of target is insignificant compared to damage to innocents".
Its almost like the target group is known for using civilians as shields. Dont bring kids to your work seems like a no brainer, especially when you are a terrorist.
But that is the tactic, and it has been for the whole time. Just like Hamas puts its centers in and under hospitals, so civilians act like a shield. And very convenient for propaganda if hospitals gets under attack.
Can you imagine being in a supermarket and detonations go off dropping people? At least 8 children have died in the pager attack.
The US did not detonate personal devices using a supply-chain infiltration, I am specifically talking about this tactic. If you feel the need to bring another conflict into this, you don't think you have an argument to stand on. Imagine this was Hezbollah detonating hundreds or thousands of devices in Israel?
> Imagine this was Hezbollah detonating hundreds or thousands of devices in Israel?
If these were devices used predominantly by IDF, I wouldn't consider it an act of terror either. However, Hezbolla prefers to indiscriminately target civilians.
Since we're bringing other conflicts into this... How come Ukraine is able to put in every effort to avoid civilian death when their opponent deliberately uses cruise and ballistic missiles on residential areas?
A targeted attack focusing on users of a combatants equipment? What terrorist has ever operated with such a fine tooth comb? Its quite a far cry from the usual mid east terrorist playbook of a child with a bomb vest walking into the market.
Because Ukraine was fighting on it's own territory, not the territory of the enemy. Just today, Ukrainians have blown up the Russian arms silo the size of a small town, and I don't doubt that a lot of Russian civilians have died. There's also been a lot of casualties around Kursk. There's been a lot of civilian casualties in different attacks on Crimea too. Quite a few people died when Ukrainians attacked the Crimea bridge.
And, of course, Ukranians are within their rights and do not break any laws of war. Just as Israelis.
Except for the 503,000 living in the West Bank, the 220,000 or so (post-1967) residents of the East Jerusalem, and the 25,000 living in the Golan Heights.
(Counting the Fourth Geneva Convention under the rubric of "laws of war").
In addition all the members of the IDF and settler groups committing war crimes currently in the West Bank and Gaza.
What a Ukrainian settlement looks like when taken by Russia is predominantly on the scale of heavily damaged to totally leveled. Whereas Ukraine has taken localities without huge artillery and bombing preparation and have supplied locals hiding in the largely intact settlements with food and water, about whom Russia had forgotten - furthermore they shell and bomb towns with both Ukrainian soldiers and Russian civilians in them.
Ukraine targets exclusively war-fueling infrastructure including refineries, ammo/petroleum depots, military airfields and yes, key logistics routes like said bridge that was built by an invading country spanning over to occupied territory.
Israel has set off explosives with the knowledge that statistically many hundreds of bystanders will be in the blast casualty radius in public and private spaces. That is magnitudes more negligent and accepting of civilian casualties in comparison.
> What a Ukrainian settlement looks like when taken by Russia is predominantly on the scale of heavily damaged to totally leveled. Whereas Ukraine has taken localities without huge artillery and bombing preparation and have supplied locals hiding in the largely intact settlements with food and water, about whom Russia had forgotten - furthermore they shell and bomb towns with both Ukrainian soldiers and Russian civilians in them.
There is a lot of cities captured by Russia that have near zero damage, because UAF not used them as fortresses. There is even a mem inside UA about cities-fortresses.
> Ukraine targets exclusively war-fueling infrastructure including refineries, ammo/petroleum depots, military airfields and yes, key logistics routes like said bridge that was built by an invading country spanning over to occupied territory.
Belgorod has near zero military infrastructure. Yet missiles shell residential areas on regular basis. Death toll of civilians in this area is quite high already.
I won't defend Ukraine's actions in this case -- but the sum total of reports I've seen suggest a far lower total. You will also definitely need to provide support for the assertion of "missiles deliberately fired on a residential area" (as opposed to being intercepted and then landing in those places).
To be ultra targeted you actually have to know where your target is when your bomb goes off. When you detonate thousands at once, you're simply accepting the civilian casualty risk.
This risk is so low it is ultra targeted. Once again, the usual ratio of civilian casualties to combatant casualties in a modern war, per UN, is 9:1. In Gaza war, this ratio is 1-2:1, so even there, Israel is already producing 5-10 times less civilian casualties.
In this case, it's thousands of enemy combatants and (at the most, according to journalists in Lebanon and therefore under Hezbolla power) a couple of dozens of civilians. Can you calculate the ratio here? Where else have you seen a military operation of this scope and with this kind of civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio?
>Once again, the usual ratio of civilian casualties to combatant casualties in a modern war, per UN, is 9:1.
>it has often been claimed that 90 percent of the victims of modern wars are civilians,[1][2][3][4] repeated in academic publications as recently as 2014.[5] These claims, though widely believed and correct regarding some wars, do not hold up as a generalization across the overwhelming majority of wars
>In Gaza war, this ratio is 1-2:1
>The Palestinian Health Ministry has estimated for most of the conflict that around 70% of the dead are women and children; these numbers have been corroborated by the United Nations and the World Health Organization. [74][75][76]. On the other hand, according to the Israel Defense Forces, an estimated less than 1:1 ratio has been reported [3][4].
Negative. Anyone can use a pager or a walkie talkie. If this were to have happened in say the US, it would 100% be considered not only terrorism, but an act of war.
Who is using a pager or walkie talking in 2024? I will admit there was maybe a few bystanders standing too close to a Hezbollah member, but how many non-Hezbollah members do you think really had one of these pagers? Keep in mind Israel also does surveillance and probably tracked where they went. If it turns out a material % of these were owned by civilians, I might agree with you, but I suspect that’s not the case.
Just because you don't know of legitimate uses of a walkie doesn't mean they don't exist. A walkie can work independent of a cell phone network, which makes it uniquely useful for numerous applications. Not everyone can afford a cell phone bill.
I own walkie talkies. So does any large retail store in the US, they're given to staff to communicate. Every film set with more than 10 crew members uses them. I could go on. I'm amazed people come to a web community about technology to broadcast such ignorance.
Whether terror is an intended effect or not, Israel is engaging in it.
Perhaps in the scheme of things as far as military operations are concerned this is "low" collateral damage. But if 3000+ people were wounded that means potentially tens of thousands experienced the traumatic event of explosives going off in a public space. And hundreds more are mourning family.
No, we are not talking about civilians. We are talking about Hezbollah members. Pagers and walkie talkies purchased by terrorist organisation do not end up in civilian hands.
I have to admit that, as a hack, the amount of planning, technical integration, and apparently flawless execution must have required an awesome amount of effort by very intelligent people.
As a human being though, this is revolting. A new avenue of mass destruction. I sure hope I am never around someone a Mossad-like organization wants to kill.
Most likely coincidence. From what I’ve read, Israel had to pull the trigger on the pagers early because some people (whom they were monitoring) had gotten suspicious that something was up.
It looks more likely to just be a demoralizing psyop, expose a couple thousand Hezbollah members based on hospital records and to the Lebanese public, disrupt communications and attack south Lebanon
Countries often scrub their history books of things they're not proud of. I grew up in the US and not once was the 1921 Tulsa massacre covered in school.
You are in the minority. Huge chunks of society were surprised by the Watchmen episode.
My AP US History introduced the civil war section by saying despite his personal beliefs, he was teaching us to pass the exam and any discussion about the war being over slavery and not state's rights was a waste of class time as that would not get us a four or five on the test.
My AP history teacher in high school was black, so that may have affected it too, or perhaps it was the NYC curriculum as compared to curriculums in the South. I’m not sure, but I definitely recall hearing about and reading about Tulsa far before HS. I wish I knew when.
But I totally believe you that is probably not true across wide swaths of the country.
> My AP US History introduced the civil war section by saying despite his personal beliefs, he was teaching us to pass the exam and any discussion about the war being over slavery and not state's rights was a waste of class time as that would not get us a four or five on the test.
This is odd. When did you take
the test? I was taught the civil war was about slavery in AP US History decades ago - including via primary sources - and got a 5 on the test.
These sorts of attacks are going to hurt a lot of innocent people. How do they control the munitions and ensure they limit civilian casualties? (I suspect they do not.)
It also seems to be lionized in the media as something "impressive" and not "contemptible". I'm not saying it cannot be both! It could be contemptible and impressive, but the media seems comfortable just being impressed.
If North Korea or Iran or Russia pulled this off against another military, would we all still be here discussing only the technical parts of the attack? I suspect not. Maybe I'm wrong, but I suspect there'd be a lot more condemnation.
Yes. If North Korea or Russia pulled this off we would all be suitably impressed. This is an impressive feat, as targeted as it gets (you could have been standing right next to one of these and walked away, as shown in many of the videos online), and while we would certainly retaliate, the very next step would be studying how it happened.
The explosives were in devices whose only functionality and purpose is communication between terrorists and their leadership. With No civilian functionality. With tiny amount of explosives.
> The explosives were in devices whose only functionality and purpose is communication between terrorists and their leadership. With No civilian functionality
Those devices are used still extensively by Hospitals, ambulances and first aid teams. The red cross use walkies. The firefighters and police also. They pose several advantages over the phone net, specially when managing sensible information from victims private life that you still have to custody and protect from internet. Nobody wants to talk on whasap about "somebody is being raped somewhere and we are on route to help, tell the other units that join us there".
They still work after earthquakes or on wildfires, and common people use it extensively on places without phone coverage like mountainous areas or fisheries. None of those people are terrorists.
But this does not matter, because the brands will stop making and selling this products to everybody. The risk as a company to became collateral damage in this new operations is too high.
If you are using a radio given to you by Hezbollah it is fair to say you are working with them, that's it imo. Even if you arent currently you likely will in the future, which is why they gave you the device.
> I see a lot of comments here that seem to imply there is knowledge that victims were exclusively members of Hezbollah.
Well a great many here also believe that raping and killing 1200 young civilians who were enjoying a music at a festival is an act of "resistance". I don't know about you but to me these civilians weren't Mossad agents.
War is messy: if you don't want to find out, don't fuck around. For example begin by not firing missile on another country.
And I see a lot of people who are fucking around at the moment, including in the EU and the US, thinking there shall never be any reaction.
They can keep fucking around: at some point they'll find out.
You realize these went off in supermarkets, right? In hospitals? In homes where children were near by? There has already been reporting on at least two dead children.
What alternative do you suggest? It's not as though a 250, 500lb bomb is less prone to collateral damage.
Hezbollah willingly joined with Hamas into a war. As far as war goes, this is just about the most precise form of targeting possible, especially in an urban area.
These were devices purchased by Hezbollah for their internal communications. There are cell phones in Lebanon and they are cheap, people use these devices to avoid Israeli tracking. Otherwise you would use a cell phone. Explosions were very localized so in terms of civilian casualties this was probably very low.
That's true but doesn't really respond there are three levels to consider regarding this and whether Israel truly did minimize civilian casualties.
1. Were the pagers/radios distributed to only Hezbollah members or was Hezbollah the main purchaser of the lots? Plenty of professions (doctors) still use pagers.
2. Did Hezbollah distribute these only to militants or did members of its civil service receive these as well? Keep in mind that Hezbollah is a legitimate political party in Lebanon and provides social services and operates hospitals. They have plenty of members and leaders who have never personally lifted a finger to harm Israel.
3. Did Israel verify that these devices were in the hands of Hezbollah members at the time of detonation and that those members were isolated to minimize collateral damage? The answer to this is clearly no, the logistics are simply impossible to track who is holding 3000+ passive devices. And we've seen reports of civilian causalities including a dead child.
Hezbollah is not a mobile device distribution organization. From my understanding they bought these to avoid Israeli tracking for their own people. No civilian doctor would use these pagers but there are medics working for Hezbollah like any militia/army.
Due to the nature of the devices I doubt it's physically possible to verify every explosion. Just like you can't verify it with a bomb or even a bullet. It's tragic that civilians are hurt but that would happen in any case when there's a war.
Hezbollah themselves bootstrapped a phone in the past. They also recently fired on a football field and killed 12 children. Then they hide in tunnels while leaving the general populace of Lebanon to deal with the wrath of the war that they started while they keep shelling the northern part of Israel. These parts of Israel and Lebanon are abandoned now because of their war. For once, they actually got some consequences for their own actions.
Was it 100% perfect and surgical?
Hell no. Nothing ever is, that's fantasy land. But it's about the closest thing that you can get to an ideal attack in these specific circumstances. The fact that the attack produced less than 1% in casualties shows the concern for collateral damage in this situation.
> Hezbollah is not a mobile device distribution organization. From my understanding they bought these to avoid Israeli tracking for their own people.
That's exactly my point, if for example, Hezbollah just bought 2500 pagers out of a lot of 3000 armed pagers that means 500 were distributed to civilians.
> No civilian doctor would use these pagers but there are medics working for Hezbollah like any militia/army.
And why wouldn't they use these pagers? Doctors use pagers all of the time. As mentioned we know very little about who actually received a pager. Even if the doctors were all Hezbollah that doesn't make them all part of the militia wing of the party: they operate civilian medical services including 4 hospitals and 12 clinics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezbollah_social_services
I would think that a 2000 of the devices are sitting in a warehouse as spares or waiting for distribution. These are relatively new devices.
> And why wouldn't they use these pagers? Doctors use pagers all of the time.
These devices were specifically ordered by Hezbollah. An army buys its own equipment not in order to hand it out to the civilian populace. They don't hand out guns to doctors who carry. Why would they hand out their internal communication device?
> Even if the doctors were all Hezbollah that doesn't make them all part of the militia wing of the party
It doesn't make them a great target but it does put them in the valid line of fire. The fact that someone works as a civilian doctor isn't relevant. If they have a Hezbollah beeper they are probably an army medic.
Hezbollah put the entire populace of Lebanon at risk without a second thought, people acting as their "beard" trying to legitimize a terrorist organization (that killed many Americans/French too) are part of it. This is a military communication device, the only case where a civilian has access to it is if they took it from a combatant.
The fact is that if there were significant civilian victims they would have been paraded in front of cameras repeatedly. There were some probably, but not many.
Hezbollah is constantly firing missiles into northern Israel. Accounting for causalities is a luxury in war and Hezbollah is a militia that forces Israel into war.
It was an effective war strategy and I doubt you can name weapons of war that are more targeted. So I don't see how your criticism can hold up even if the questions were answered.
I would not want to answer them, because I believe you would not accept any answer anyway.
I mean obviously not, even if the radios were exclusively in possession of Hezbollah fighters or apparatchiks, they don't live in isolation. They go to coffee shops and restaurants and have dinner with their families.
I have not seen that implication anywhere and most reporting cites 1 or 2 killed children. On the other hand, 5000 (per reports) of these pagers were purchased by Hezbollah because they were afraid cell phones could be implanted with bombs (there's precedent) and so the users would be predominantly Hezbollah members.
Despite this, there are a few persistent comments here that thousands of civilians were injured. That statement seems near to willfully wrong or intended to be misleading given the circumstances and lack of any more specific information about the people injured.
At this point someone needs to run an SDR and start capturing as much RF spectrum as possible, especially on any communications device that has a 'selective calling' feature.
The pagers could have been set off with a page sent to a 'group' capcode in a hidden slot with a unique beep pattern that a little tiny MCU picked up and set off the detonator.
Radios -- same thing. Possibly a group calling feature of a signalling system was used with a "secret" group hidden away in the radio programming?
> especially on any communications device that has a 'selective calling' feature.
I wonder if it’s even dumber than that. Entirely separate from the paging network and tuned to listen for a pulse at a specific RF frequency and then blow up.
Also gives the ability to target certain geographic areas.
But even if listening to pager spectrum, the paging network is incredibly insecure. Anyone could send out fake pages with the right RF setup (e.g. from a drone).
The supply chain for an iPhone is much stronger than for a Gold Alpha pager, and it's likely that the same thing will end up being true of these ICOM radios: they'll turn out to be designed and branded by ICOM, but actually manufactured and distributed by some random Eastern European outfit that paid to use ICOM as a skinsuit. That would never happen with an Apple device.
It is likely that they were authentic Icom devices. My understanding is that it is common for commercial radios to be programmed by distributor. Or Gold Alpha gave a good deal on pagers and radios and then were intercepted from warehouse.
I don't think Icom would ever put name on generic radio, they make all their radios in Japan. It is like Toyota putting name on another car.
There's lots of Toyotas in this list[1] in both directions. Toyota is happy to build cars with other people's names on them, as well as put their name on a car someone else built.
And on a more serious note. Hizbolla is a blacklisted terrorist org, they can’t just order stuff from regular factories. Buying from an anonymous white label factory in Hungary with no address and little information is probably pretty normal from them - because anyone doing business with them in the EU will go to jail
As long as you’re not buying electronics from shady factories with no known owners you’ll be fine
Israel has shown us (again) that we cannot trust any device whose full supply chain hasn't been properly audited. Which you can't really do at this scale.
So yeah, literally anything you buy can apparently just be stuffed full of explosives waiting to kill you and anyone near you.
The mechanism of action is unclear at this time. I’ve seen it written that the explosives were part of PCBs with electronics that mimicked the original.
But you can see photos of the same model of pager and it's an LCD screen in a plastic shell, the kind that seems like there would be room on the inside for a little addon board to be attached to the existing board.
It might have looked like a normal pager under xray, but I bet it looked _different_ than an unmodified pager. Not suspicious on its own but suspicious because it was changed.
Interesting that it wasn't discovered by any bomb sniffing dog in Lebanon. They had thousands of devices. There must be at least a few bomb dogs in Lebanon right?
Bomb sniffing dogs can't detect every explosive compound under the sun. They're trained on some of the most common ones but there are almost infinite variations of explosive chemistries.
"According to Sky News Arabia; Mossad was able to Inject a Compound of Pentaerythritol Tetranitrate (PETN) into the Batteries of the New Encrypted Pagers that Hezbollah began using around February, before they even arrived in the Hands of Hezbollah Members, allowing them to Remotely Overheat and Detonate the Lithium Battery within the Device."
This wasn't something magical that turned the battery into an explosive, they allegedly injected an explosive compound into the battery which would be triggered by intentionally overheating the battery.
Like if you packed C4 into an electric car battery, it would be a bomb, much the same way if you packed it into an ordinary empty box. Sure the battery adds some extra energy, but the explosive is the explosive, ya know.
High explosives rarely require only heat to detonate, and most can be quite literally set on fire by an open flame and burn without detonating. PETN is not terribly sensitive, and should require a detonator of some sort. What's more, that doesn't jive with the other claim that they added a daughterboard to the device.
Simply because "bomb" dogs, like "drug" dogs are a scam to give the police a legal excuse to violate your rights. The dogs don't detect bombs/drugs, they detect cues from the controlling officer.
The law was reviewed in 2006 by the New South Wales Ombudsman, who handed down a critical report regarding the use of dogs for drug detection. The report stated that prohibited drugs were found in only 26% of searches following an indication by a drug sniffer dog. Of these, 84% were for small amounts of cannabis deemed for personal use.[27]: 29 Subsequent figures obtained from NSW Police in 2023 revealed that between 1 January 2013 and 30 June 2023, officers had conducted 94,535 personal searches (refers to both strip searches and less invasive frisk or "general" searches) resulting from drug detection dog indications, with only 25% resulting in illicit drugs being found.[28]
Well, are you a member of a terrorist group? If no, then odds are that nobody is going to go through the trouble of adding explosives to your phone's battery.
In this case the people responsible must have discovered where these terrorists were buying their devices. Since basically no one except for them was buying large quantities of these, they were easy to target.
You cannot answer any security questions without a threat model. Are you worried about your neighbor putting a bomb in your phone? Mossad isn't putting bombs in random phones.
No, not really. In contact with, certainly. Hezbollah holds ~12% of seats in the Lebanese parliament and its military wing is arguably as powerful as the Lebanese army. It would be surprising, arguably irresponsible, if cabinet ministers did not have a channel to communicate with them. Every government has back channels, even to straight up enemies. For example:
>The NYT wrote today that Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon was injured (although this may have been in yesterday’s incident?), which makes it obvious that he works with Hezbollah.
A joke I saw:
"Why did the Iranian ambassador have a Hezbollah pager?"
Anyone know how these devices may have been triggered that would be different from pagers? I imagine these radios would have to be modified to listen to multiple channels in case a radio was on a different channel than planned.
For both attacks, I've been seeing stories of a plane, the "EC-130H Compass Call" flying in the area. It's supposedly an electronic intelligence aircraft that hasn't been seen in the sky for about a year. I don't know much more than that though
An entire integrated explosive device + detonator + radio circuit that leeches off the host device's power supply, that you activate by blasting an area with some out-of-band signal on a frequency that propagates far and wide?
Takes some upfront work but you don't have to mess with the device, any firmware that might leave traces, and the comms network itself. You just fly a big antenna nearby and everything goes boom.
If the Israelis are as careful as they were with Stuxnet there might be a permanent kill switch baked into the implementation to prevent being triggered in the future. Without an initiating event, the type of explosive believed to be used here is very stable with respect to normal kinetic shocks or heat.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 407 ms ] threadSource? I'm not sure how you can concealed any meaningful amount of PCB/explosive in a pager/radio, unless you're hoping that your target never opens the plastic casing, or doesn't know what the internals are supposed to look like.
So a shorter battery life, but usually no one cuts open batteries.
(But now some will start doing it)
Weights might not be right either but they maybe they corrected for that.
Centre of gravity may have changed.
Less likely you know what they look like inside, as it's been drilled into us not to pierce the things. Also if your laptop battery only lasts a couple of hours you might suspect something is wrong. If your pager needs recharging every month instead of every 2 months... well nobody has a clue how often a pager should need recharging.
I've no idea if it was the battery, but just feels like the right approach.
https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/09/18/17/walkie-talkie...
and a picture of the main board on page 5 of the Icom service manual:
https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/icom-v82-service-manual...
I'd guess the explosives were inside the "VCO can": the metal shielding around the VCO circuit. The picture of the radio shows the radio's metal casing bent away from the PCB, suggesting the blast came from that direction rather than the battery. The VCO can would have air-space inside it and is unlikely to be opened, even by a service tech. There will be an SPI serial bus running from the CPU into the VCO can, to allow programming of the VCO, which could be used as a conduit for a trigger command.
Obviously the mistake was forgetting to sacrifice a handful of units into a bomb calorimeter.
The joules would have been way off.
That might be one way to restore faith in one’s supply chain.
Videos show outright detonations (so far with notably little fire), nothing like the fiery deflagrations you see in “battery explodes” videos while someone is doing a repair.
I wonder if this operation had two sides - implanting something in the devices that will allow remotely triggering the explosion, and then also tampering with the batteries to include explosive material.
Can you imagine what must be like to be a rank-and-file Hezbollah soldier at this point? What the fuck is going to happen tomorrow? I'd throw away my socks.
Second, the reporting I've seen (incl. "confirmation" from US intelligence sources) is that this was a use-it-or-lose-it situation: that Hezbollah operatives were on the verge of discovering it.
Note that this was a retaliatory strike, announced in advance, to Israel's illegal bombing of Iran's consulate in Damascus, Syria.
Enthusiasts of Rhetoric or Logic may notice how interesting this sentence is, in that it is both true and false simultaneously.
They may also notice that is also true of a rather large percentage of discussion/cognition regarding these matters.
Gosh, how do people manage to understand what's going on if language is used this way???
What exactly other option does Israel had. Peace talks didn’t go anywhere for last few decades
Options? Israel (the people anyway) has always had the option of finally dropping the ethno-nationalism and apartheid of their foundational principles, and accepting that the Palestinians have a way more material right to Palestinian territory than an American or a European who Israel brought over on a birthright trip.
Further, you must know that the beliefs you say that Palestinians profess are only actually held by a minority of them. On the same page, Israeli officials have said things like "all Gazans must be destroyed,"[1] but everyone here knows that quotes like these represent the far end of aggression among the group.
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/01/05/wv-israel-ha...
I unfortunately believe that most Israelis believe this or something like it.
You are right, let me rephrase. They have all the power, opposing the genocide of the palestinians will accomplish nothing as long as the palestinians make the isrealis feel unsafe.
- After invading their territory and forcibly displacing them from their homes in 1948, the Israeli government would eventually imprison 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza, severely undermining or outright depriving them of their right to food, movement and labor. Rather, the question is why would the Palestinians welcome an militarized immigrant movement whose stated objectives included the total demographic overwhelm of Palestine, changing the "facts on the ground", supported by an interloping British Mandate. This is as true now as it was then.
- So, while the IDF may be engaged in urban warfare with the armed wing of Hamas, their practical goal is the cleansing of the Gaza Strip, including the genocide of Gazans, evidenced by this past year's perfidy-ridden bombing campaign against civilians. (And the March of Return, and Operation Cast Lead, and Operation Protective Edge, and the bombing of the AP office, then the largest number of journalist assassinations ever witnessed... etc etc)
- Aware of the legal liability of this, the American and Israeli governments have been lying about these aims and attempting to generate plausible deniability by claiming the IDF is measured and surgical in their use of long range heavy bombs, and pretending the infinitesimal ratio of enemy combatants killed is Hamas-engineered. They redefine "human shield" and "Hamas combatant" to suit the moment.
- Of course we know that the Purpose Of a System Is What It Does, so nobody who is informed and in their right mind believes these soul sucking, sugar-coated "upper establishment" statements about due diligence or accountability or whatever and pearl clutching about hostages never mind the overwhelmingly higher number of Palestinian hostages taken and tortured by Israel. Despite their toothlessness, the UN, the ICC and the ICJ have allowed the world to show, one inconvenient determination after another, that the truth is plainly visible.
Ultimately, it's just whether they see war crimes when they see children and families being killed systematically, and whether they're cool with it.
I really don’t think the original comment overlooked any of the stuff you pointed out, it just called it all irrelevant.
This is 9/11 but the US backed by an entire alien planet, unafraid to go in the direction of scorched earth even when totally surrounded because the aliens will bail them out.
Zero accountability, forever. This is as grim as it gets.
In short, there's a war on. Neither side wants a full blown war but Israel doesn't want to let Hezbollah muster a larger assault, so they're doing what they can to cripple Hezbollah and disrupt their operations.
De-escalation is a goal that takes cooperation from both parties (or in this case, from Israel and the various Iranian proxies attacking them). Telling one party to "de-escalate" while the other party continues attacking is just farting in the wind.
There's zero interest in de escalation there.
If the conflict stops, the current cabinet will be forced to face their own party, the opposition and the rest of their country.
The end of history will be over when we all recognize that this could just as easily be an operation against the Cartel or the Boogaloo Boys or whoever the fuck, with Feds blowing up pagers in a Whole Foods in LA instead of a market in Lebanon. Oh, but that could never happen here.
The radio in question: https://rigpix.com/icom/icv82.htm
The cost and years in the making of this through a shell company in Hungary, and also putting a random (and probably innocent) Taiwanese company in the target, for just killing 12 people including two children... Doesn't look like galaxy brain to me either.
I can't believe the full up and down owning of the communications supply chain.
Makes Hezbollah look like a clown show.
Makes Israel look like a terrorist organization, IMHO.
You have absolutely nothing on which to base the claim that these were civilians and not Hezbollah members.
I struggle to understand how they're imagining they're obviating the optics of this, unless they don't care what the dissenting population in Israel thinks (or the world for that matter) until "it is done".
Did you consider the US operation to take down Bin Laden an act of terrorism too?
If you don't want to kill any innocent civilians, your only course of action is not to offer any resistance to people who attack you and surrender.
I don't see any of these arguments.
I'd say this particular line has been crossed the moment you make something explode without knowing who exactly is holding it and where they are.
How positive are we that by standards didn't get the same batch of devices?
The US did not detonate personal devices using a supply-chain infiltration, I am specifically talking about this tactic. If you feel the need to bring another conflict into this, you don't think you have an argument to stand on. Imagine this was Hezbollah detonating hundreds or thousands of devices in Israel?
If these were devices used predominantly by IDF, I wouldn't consider it an act of terror either. However, Hezbolla prefers to indiscriminately target civilians.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/druze-shock-war-be...
And, of course, Ukranians are within their rights and do not break any laws of war. Just as Israelis.
Except for the 503,000 living in the West Bank, the 220,000 or so (post-1967) residents of the East Jerusalem, and the 25,000 living in the Golan Heights.
(Counting the Fourth Geneva Convention under the rubric of "laws of war").
In addition all the members of the IDF and settler groups committing war crimes currently in the West Bank and Gaza.
Ukraine targets exclusively war-fueling infrastructure including refineries, ammo/petroleum depots, military airfields and yes, key logistics routes like said bridge that was built by an invading country spanning over to occupied territory.
Israel has set off explosives with the knowledge that statistically many hundreds of bystanders will be in the blast casualty radius in public and private spaces. That is magnitudes more negligent and accepting of civilian casualties in comparison.
There is a lot of cities captured by Russia that have near zero damage, because UAF not used them as fortresses. There is even a mem inside UA about cities-fortresses.
> Ukraine targets exclusively war-fueling infrastructure including refineries, ammo/petroleum depots, military airfields and yes, key logistics routes like said bridge that was built by an invading country spanning over to occupied territory.
Belgorod has near zero military infrastructure. Yet missiles shell residential areas on regular basis. Death toll of civilians in this area is quite high already.
Ukraine, which regularly shells civilian areas of Belgorod? That Ukraine?
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/belgorod-city-where-war...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62042455
I won't defend Ukraine's actions in this case -- but the sum total of reports I've seen suggest a far lower total. You will also definitely need to provide support for the assertion of "missiles deliberately fired on a residential area" (as opposed to being intercepted and then landing in those places).
why do children have Hezbollah pagers ?
In this case, it's thousands of enemy combatants and (at the most, according to journalists in Lebanon and therefore under Hezbolla power) a couple of dozens of civilians. Can you calculate the ratio here? Where else have you seen a military operation of this scope and with this kind of civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio?
>it has often been claimed that 90 percent of the victims of modern wars are civilians,[1][2][3][4] repeated in academic publications as recently as 2014.[5] These claims, though widely believed and correct regarding some wars, do not hold up as a generalization across the overwhelming majority of wars
>In Gaza war, this ratio is 1-2:1
>The Palestinian Health Ministry has estimated for most of the conflict that around 70% of the dead are women and children; these numbers have been corroborated by the United Nations and the World Health Organization. [74][75][76]. On the other hand, according to the Israel Defense Forces, an estimated less than 1:1 ratio has been reported [3][4].
I guess it depends on who you are listening to.
Negative. Anyone can use a pager or a walkie talkie. If this were to have happened in say the US, it would 100% be considered not only terrorism, but an act of war.
Israel is not targeting "pagers and walkie talkies".
They are targeting pagers and walkie talkies specifically ordered, paid for, and supplied to individuals by Hezbollah.
Perhaps in the scheme of things as far as military operations are concerned this is "low" collateral damage. But if 3000+ people were wounded that means potentially tens of thousands experienced the traumatic event of explosives going off in a public space. And hundreds more are mourning family.
Talking about civilians here. Unless you're saying all Lebanese are terrorists?
> I understand that israeli lives don't count for much in this conversation
Based on...?
As a human being though, this is revolting. A new avenue of mass destruction. I sure hope I am never around someone a Mossad-like organization wants to kill.
I wonder if this was meaningful choice, or just a coincidence.
It looks more likely to just be a demoralizing psyop, expose a couple thousand Hezbollah members based on hospital records and to the Lebanese public, disrupt communications and attack south Lebanon
My AP US History introduced the civil war section by saying despite his personal beliefs, he was teaching us to pass the exam and any discussion about the war being over slavery and not state's rights was a waste of class time as that would not get us a four or five on the test.
My AP history teacher in high school was black, so that may have affected it too, or perhaps it was the NYC curriculum as compared to curriculums in the South. I’m not sure, but I definitely recall hearing about and reading about Tulsa far before HS. I wish I knew when.
But I totally believe you that is probably not true across wide swaths of the country.
This is odd. When did you take the test? I was taught the civil war was about slavery in AP US History decades ago - including via primary sources - and got a 5 on the test.
You'd be hard-pressed to find a day of the year without some plausible significance.
It also seems to be lionized in the media as something "impressive" and not "contemptible". I'm not saying it cannot be both! It could be contemptible and impressive, but the media seems comfortable just being impressed.
If North Korea or Iran or Russia pulled this off against another military, would we all still be here discussing only the technical parts of the attack? I suspect not. Maybe I'm wrong, but I suspect there'd be a lot more condemnation.
Those devices are used still extensively by Hospitals, ambulances and first aid teams. The red cross use walkies. The firefighters and police also. They pose several advantages over the phone net, specially when managing sensible information from victims private life that you still have to custody and protect from internet. Nobody wants to talk on whasap about "somebody is being raped somewhere and we are on route to help, tell the other units that join us there".
They still work after earthquakes or on wildfires, and common people use it extensively on places without phone coverage like mountainous areas or fisheries. None of those people are terrorists.
But this does not matter, because the brands will stop making and selling this products to everybody. The risk as a company to became collateral damage in this new operations is too high.
Well a great many here also believe that raping and killing 1200 young civilians who were enjoying a music at a festival is an act of "resistance". I don't know about you but to me these civilians weren't Mossad agents.
War is messy: if you don't want to find out, don't fuck around. For example begin by not firing missile on another country.
And I see a lot of people who are fucking around at the moment, including in the EU and the US, thinking there shall never be any reaction.
They can keep fucking around: at some point they'll find out.
Hezbollah willingly joined with Hamas into a war. As far as war goes, this is just about the most precise form of targeting possible, especially in an urban area.
1. Were the pagers/radios distributed to only Hezbollah members or was Hezbollah the main purchaser of the lots? Plenty of professions (doctors) still use pagers.
2. Did Hezbollah distribute these only to militants or did members of its civil service receive these as well? Keep in mind that Hezbollah is a legitimate political party in Lebanon and provides social services and operates hospitals. They have plenty of members and leaders who have never personally lifted a finger to harm Israel.
3. Did Israel verify that these devices were in the hands of Hezbollah members at the time of detonation and that those members were isolated to minimize collateral damage? The answer to this is clearly no, the logistics are simply impossible to track who is holding 3000+ passive devices. And we've seen reports of civilian causalities including a dead child.
Due to the nature of the devices I doubt it's physically possible to verify every explosion. Just like you can't verify it with a bomb or even a bullet. It's tragic that civilians are hurt but that would happen in any case when there's a war.
Hezbollah themselves bootstrapped a phone in the past. They also recently fired on a football field and killed 12 children. Then they hide in tunnels while leaving the general populace of Lebanon to deal with the wrath of the war that they started while they keep shelling the northern part of Israel. These parts of Israel and Lebanon are abandoned now because of their war. For once, they actually got some consequences for their own actions.
Was it 100% perfect and surgical?
Hell no. Nothing ever is, that's fantasy land. But it's about the closest thing that you can get to an ideal attack in these specific circumstances. The fact that the attack produced less than 1% in casualties shows the concern for collateral damage in this situation.
That's exactly my point, if for example, Hezbollah just bought 2500 pagers out of a lot of 3000 armed pagers that means 500 were distributed to civilians.
> No civilian doctor would use these pagers but there are medics working for Hezbollah like any militia/army.
And why wouldn't they use these pagers? Doctors use pagers all of the time. As mentioned we know very little about who actually received a pager. Even if the doctors were all Hezbollah that doesn't make them all part of the militia wing of the party: they operate civilian medical services including 4 hospitals and 12 clinics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezbollah_social_services
> And why wouldn't they use these pagers? Doctors use pagers all of the time.
These devices were specifically ordered by Hezbollah. An army buys its own equipment not in order to hand it out to the civilian populace. They don't hand out guns to doctors who carry. Why would they hand out their internal communication device?
> Even if the doctors were all Hezbollah that doesn't make them all part of the militia wing of the party
It doesn't make them a great target but it does put them in the valid line of fire. The fact that someone works as a civilian doctor isn't relevant. If they have a Hezbollah beeper they are probably an army medic.
Hezbollah put the entire populace of Lebanon at risk without a second thought, people acting as their "beard" trying to legitimize a terrorist organization (that killed many Americans/French too) are part of it. This is a military communication device, the only case where a civilian has access to it is if they took it from a combatant.
The fact is that if there were significant civilian victims they would have been paraded in front of cameras repeatedly. There were some probably, but not many.
It was an effective war strategy and I doubt you can name weapons of war that are more targeted. So I don't see how your criticism can hold up even if the questions were answered.
I would not want to answer them, because I believe you would not accept any answer anyway.
Despite this, there are a few persistent comments here that thousands of civilians were injured. That statement seems near to willfully wrong or intended to be misleading given the circumstances and lack of any more specific information about the people injured.
The pagers could have been set off with a page sent to a 'group' capcode in a hidden slot with a unique beep pattern that a little tiny MCU picked up and set off the detonator.
Radios -- same thing. Possibly a group calling feature of a signalling system was used with a "secret" group hidden away in the radio programming?
I wonder if it’s even dumber than that. Entirely separate from the paging network and tuned to listen for a pulse at a specific RF frequency and then blow up.
Also gives the ability to target certain geographic areas.
But even if listening to pager spectrum, the paging network is incredibly insecure. Anyone could send out fake pages with the right RF setup (e.g. from a drone).
Probably not strong enough to make it unreachable by a sophisticated agency like the Mossad.
But that would be many orders of magnitude more difficult that what they pulled off here, which was already very impressively difficult to pull off.
I don't think Icom would ever put name on generic radio, they make all their radios in Japan. It is like Toyota putting name on another car.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_badge-engineered_veh...
And on a more serious note. Hizbolla is a blacklisted terrorist org, they can’t just order stuff from regular factories. Buying from an anonymous white label factory in Hungary with no address and little information is probably pretty normal from them - because anyone doing business with them in the EU will go to jail
As long as you’re not buying electronics from shady factories with no known owners you’ll be fine
For now and to our knowledge so far.
So yeah, literally anything you buy can apparently just be stuffed full of explosives waiting to kill you and anyone near you.
But you can see photos of the same model of pager and it's an LCD screen in a plastic shell, the kind that seems like there would be room on the inside for a little addon board to be attached to the existing board.
Bomb sniffing dog or chemical test of surfaces
Like if you packed C4 into an electric car battery, it would be a bomb, much the same way if you packed it into an ordinary empty box. Sure the battery adds some extra energy, but the explosive is the explosive, ya know.
High explosives rarely require only heat to detonate, and most can be quite literally set on fire by an open flame and burn without detonating. PETN is not terribly sensitive, and should require a detonator of some sort. What's more, that doesn't jive with the other claim that they added a daughterboard to the device.
I'm very skeptical of a report about a specific compound and method 4 hours after an attack - Its not enough time for analysis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detection_dog#Criticism
In this case the people responsible must have discovered where these terrorists were buying their devices. Since basically no one except for them was buying large quantities of these, they were easy to target.
James Mickens explained this clearly a decade ago.
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf
You cannot answer any security questions without a threat model. Are you worried about your neighbor putting a bomb in your phone? Mossad isn't putting bombs in random phones.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2008/mar/18/northernire...
A joke I saw:
"Why did the Iranian ambassador have a Hezbollah pager?"
"Because he left the Hamas pager at home."
Takes some upfront work but you don't have to mess with the device, any firmware that might leave traces, and the comms network itself. You just fly a big antenna nearby and everything goes boom.