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.
That said, .... Really glad I quit smoking anything after seeing the damage a vape did to those poor guys
Given the chain of events detailed already sounds like it was ripped from a spy novel, I'm pretty skeptical of this claim.
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.
>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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/31/world/europe/russian-defe...
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.
Also, yeah, this came up when I searched (on duckduckgo), but it seemed like the wrong match, since I don't see how it could be related ??
and yes, it's unrelated for sure
He was offered $500,000 to do it.
[1] https://denikn.cz/1510394/cesti-zpravodajci-resili-zda-byl-z...
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.
I realize that this is not widely known, attacks against Israel receive far less attention in the news than do Israeli retaliations.
Quick sampling of examples:
https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20240908-hezbollah-f...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/4/hezbollah-fires-reta...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw9y7wqn8j5o
https://apnews.com/article/lebanon-israel-hezbollah-hamas-ro...
It doesn't make a big splash in the news because it tends to be severely ineffectual, but it has been pretty widely and continuously covered.
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.
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.
Maybe talking might be an idea? Just saying...
Well, one's hitting civilians with missiles, the other's hitting them with rockets.
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.
Israel widely acknowledges that they kill civilians - including Israeli hostages emerging from captivity (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/israeli-military-says-it-...).
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.
this is false
the rockets in northern Israel have been going on for years (as are rocket attacks into Lebanon), so just not much news anymore
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. If you are so confident, I would be happy to make a wager on a platform of your choice. What do you think constitutes a major escalation? I would happily bet against a ground invasion.
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.
> I would happily bet against a ground invasion.
By Hezbollah? Well, yeah.
As a concrete example, the last big Israel-Lebanon war resulted from the capture of two Israeli soldiers in a border raid; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Lebanon_War
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.
It's certainly part of the playbook, if they can manage some captures. Soft targets seem a lot more likely, though.
> That said, I don't know what a path to peace with Hezbollah looks like.
This conflict is creating the next generation of orphaned rage-filled extremists. Peace is a very, very distant goal at this point.
> 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.
I very much disagree. Netanyahu is on a treadmill he can't ever let stop; ending the emergency means having to properly face his long-delayed criminal proceedings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Benjamin_Netanyahu).
They sure don't seem motivated to stop, if Israel's pre-planned response is still fratricide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal_Directive
Everyone has cell phones that they can use in addition to the pager, so I don't think it's very accurate to say the communications are hosed either
The idea that Hezbollah members have and had no means of communication other than pagers in a country full of cellphones and landlines is a farce.
Two birds with one pager.
Sure, theoretically one can detect a receive-only radio, but its massively more difficult than detecting something which actively transmits.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
(from https://www.iridium.com/services/iridium-burst/)
> 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.
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.
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).
Paper mail and landlines are incredibly easy to intercept and tap, but that doesn't make it legal.
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.
And the 100k number seems quite exaggerated.
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.
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.
It's unknown how many were family members of targeted individuals, and whatever the number actually is, it'll be misreported.
I also want to raise an issue which I’m not sure you personally have, but I have seen elsewhere on this thread and echoed by state department spokesperson Matt Miller that the targets were somehow legitimate because they were members of Hezbollah, which they claim is a terrorist organization.
Hezbollah is a much larger organization with many different functions, including governmental function, but also education and health care. We know that the targets did not only include their military wing, indicating that the targeting was indeed indiscriminate.
If people want to legitimate this terrorist attack by claiming that any member of a group which does terrorism is a legitimate target, that opens the door for all sorts of targets which unambiguously should not be considered military targets, including politicians and workers for governments and their political organizations.
If your country says that the IDF is a terrorist organization (a claim rather easy to make) your country than has the right to target any members of the Knesset that belong to any of the ruling parties is a legitimate target in a terrorist attack, if their family members are hurt in the attack, they become a legitimate collateral damage. Any worker for any ministry in Israel who contributes to the IDF somehow would also become legitimate.
This is of course not true, and the only conclusion we can draw here is this attack is an unambiguously immoral act of terrorism.
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.
The claim that this is a well targeted attack with legitimate targets ignores this reality. The attack may be well targeted, but the targets are still indiscriminate and illegitimate. That is unless you count any Hezbollah members as a legitimate target. But like I said before that is simply ridiculous.
Note Reuters reporting on the concentration of reports of strikes here: it's not uniformly spread across the population of Lebanon.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/17/world/middleeast/israel-h...
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.
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.
In most wars, war crimes are committed. When war crimes are committed they need to be condemned, and prosecuted, not excused and repeated.
> Why are senior administrators at hospitals and media workers carrying military command and control equipment?
These are pagers, and cheap once at that, I don’t know if you have ever been a part of any activist organization, but it is pretty standard to assume you are a target of state level intelligence, and that state actors (most likely the police) is spying on you. Any activist would know to try to protect them selves and their organization by minimizing opportunities of breaches. This extends to lower level participants, who are unlikely to actually confront the police or cause any civil disruptions, but participate in other ways.
I assume Hezbollah would take similar measure. That higher level members at non-military institutions still see the need to protect them selves—and their organization—from infiltration. At the very least, it is criminally negligent of Israel to assume that they don’t, and still detonate when there is some probability the innocent will be harmed.
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.
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.
"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?
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.
But this question is irrelevant because this is very unlikely to be the case. The victims seem to be many civilians.
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.
Shebaa Farms are currently occupied by Israel. Which is Lebanese, acknowledged by both Syrians and Lebanese.
Although as as per an WSJ article: "The affected pagers were from a new shipment that the group received in recent days"
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.
Notably, this doesn't apply to anyone who hasn't supported such strikes in the war against terror.
or to any US ally; the hypocrisy has been around for a long time already
if 20 Mossad agents had been assassinated in Israel _in the same way_, we'd be hearing the story told in a whole different way
Edit: my comment is 100% factual and unopinionated. I'm just quoting an NPR report. To downvote this is to be a propaganda agent.
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/17/g-s1-23452/hezbollah-pagers-e...
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/17/g-s1-23406/scores-of-hezbolla...
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/17/g-s1-23452/hezbollah-pagers-e...
That's the first link in your own comment. The URL and title mention thousands. Are you a bot?
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.
> Are you a bot?
No.
<https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/17/world/middleeast/israel-h...>
Ordered by, and delivered to, Hezbollah.
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:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lebanon_pager_explosions#...>
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.
The downvotes seem reasonable to me.
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/17/g-s1-23452/hezbollah-pagers-e...
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.
Dumb and cruel, could have used it to nearly the same effect by just telling hezbollah.
I mean that in the sense of spectacle, of gruesome theatricality, not to glorify maiming people.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
https://www.gazettelive.co.uk/news/teesside-news/vape-explod...
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/e-cig-vape-pen-explosion/
Kind of makes sense to modify the battery because since they still need a functioning battery anyway and the space is limited.
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.
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.
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.
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
But this, arguably, would be detectable, through low battery life?
More like a year or two off of a single AAA battery.
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.
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.
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.
That won't work. You can use C4 and other modern plastic explosives as cooking fuel; they burn nicely. Getting them to explode requires a detonator.
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.
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.
Israel makes them quietly shit their pants instead.
They'll cause a big backlash. And the best they have are again suicide bombers in Israeli cities
no, there won't be suicide bombers in Israel again. they've gotten much better at finding the rats - see original article.
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.
I disagree with the other post you mention, FWIW.
...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.
And, is the device anyway going to pass through airport security? I guess the owners are not really travelling on commercial airliners.
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 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.)
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.
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
From https://www.mdpi.com/2313-0105/8/11/201
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.
Presumably some software that triggers this?
My guess would be that not only the battery but also the main board was modified to initiate the action.
edit: why do you think I'm not sure if they are serious? Calculator jokes are not a niche humor :)
Clearly someone's not being serious.
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
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.
Is the information wrong?
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
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
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/dozens-hezbollah-m...
This isn't how lithium batteries fail.
Blowing a hole in the side of the bag and sending debris for several meters is obviously not plausible with that quantity of lithium.
Tom Scott explains it better than I do https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OOWcTV2nEkU
Objectively this is therefore targeted, not indiscriminate...
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.
4000 wounded of which 400 in critical conditions
Al Jazeera from a Lebanese security source:
The pagers were brought to Lebanon 5 months ago. They were boobytrapped in advance. Each device contained an explosive weighing no more than 20 grams.
hezbollah got totally owned and look like fools...relying on tech they just took at face value out of the box
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.
Really shows that the HN community and the victims have very little overlap.
https://www.google.com/search?q=About+https://www.gapollo.co...
Apps (some more or less than others) represent a target for a nation state to pursue for information, graph analysis, bugging, etc.
If you can’t control your supply chain then that isn’t guaranteed.
After all, most pagers don’t contain explosive charges either.
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'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).
Active mode, 260mA to 790 mA (!)
Modem sleep, 20mA
Light sleep: 0.8 mA
Deep sleep: 10 uA
Hibernate: 2.5 uA
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)
That results in a power consumption ratio on the order of 100,000,000. ESP32s are not efficient.
[1]: https://lastminuteengineers.com/esp32-sleep-modes-power-cons...
[2]: https://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers-microprocessors/stm32...
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.
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.
The internals could be replaced with modern smaller and lower-power equivalents, requiring a smaller battery, and saving enough space.
(Or maybe somebody just donated a batch of innocent-looking devices to 'the cause', or offered a bargain on some 'extra secure' pagers?)
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.
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…”
Buyer: “Say no more. We’ll take them.”
Disclosure: my first job was in the Australian Defence Science Technology Organisation, Materials Research Lab, Explosives Instrumentation Group.
So, an "excited" AA (which, I believe is what pagers usually use) could do a surprising amount of damage.
Photo: https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/40...
Any idea what prompted the explosion?
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?.
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?
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.
Loads of pagers are passive, receive-only devices. There's a reason why there's a common distinction between "pager" and "two-way pager".
I'm not sure if thats true, they just need to start cracking open their shipments of pagers and looking for explosives.
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]
[1] https://www.turkiyetoday.com/region/this-is-how-israel-targe...
[2] https://i.turkiyetoday.com/image/resize/876x1024/wp-content/...
[3] https://i.turkiyetoday.com/image/resize/1280x1280/wp-content...
[4] https://x.com/JakeGodin/status/1836042111726072229
[5] https://x.com/PaDaGal/status/1836057094211969467
[6] https://x.com/Kahlissee/status/1836102796090953812
[7] https://web.archive.org/web/https://www.gapollo.com.tw/rugge...
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]
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/09/18/hungary-en...
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.
"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."
https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/lebanon-pagers-attack-he...
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.
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
But yes, the supply chain sabotaging is certainly impressive.
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.
GSM on the other hand is cellular and bidirectional so triangulation problem applies.
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.
I don't think whoever approved this was worried about innocent people getting hurt.
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.
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.
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!
I can promise you that you wouldn't make the same "analysis" if someone were to poison a group of Israeli reservists on vacation. You recognize that Israelis who have served in the military can return to non-combatant status, yet you don't recognize that the same must hold true for people who have been or are affiliated with Hizbollah.
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.
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.
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.
I believe you can rules of engagement under IHL straight off the ICRC's documents; that this isn't even a tricky case.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/09/18/lebanon-exploding-pagers...
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.
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).
In any case, where you use the word "fear" I would probably use "deterrence".
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.
Moreover, I use the word "indiscriminate" because it has a specific meaning in IHL which you, apparently, is unaware of. Let me cite ICRC (https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule12):
> Indiscriminate attacks are those:
> (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.
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"
To Kasey's point, the reciprocal is true, too! The laws of armed combat permit Hezbollah strikes on Israeli command and administrative staff.
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?
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.
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.
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?