Dozens of Hezbollah members said to be seriously injured as devices explode

Re:Dozens of Hezbollah members said to be seriously injured ... by wongarsu on Tuesday September 17, 2024 @03:04PM (#41571425)

Most (pouch-shaped) Li-Ion batteries just look like square shapes packaged in heavy aluminum foil, with some Kapton tape to keep a small PCB with protection circuitry in place. Any determined hobbyist could buy smaller batteries and the packaging materials off AliExpress to make something that looks visually similar but has lots of space left over for explosives.

With cylindrical batteries it's a bit harder, but ultimately they are just a cylinder with pressed-on end caps. You can disassemble them (lots of videos on youtube), change the contents and reassemble them.

It is pretty high effort compared to just sticking the explosives next to the pager's electronics, but I don't think the barrier to entry is actually that high

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Re:Dozens of Hezbollah members said to be seriously injured ... by Bluestein on Tuesday September 17, 2024 @04:36PM (#41572441)

> packaging materials off AliExpress to make something that looks visually similar but has lots of space left over for explosives.

But this, arguably, would be detectable, through low battery life?

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Re:Dozens of Hezbollah members said to be seriously injured ... by viraptor on Tuesday September 17, 2024 @04:53PM (#41572622)

Pagers last for a very long time. Some one-ways can last for over a month. At that point, you probably wouldn't notice it's just over 3 weeks, or maybe think the product is lying in the advertisements and lasts less but not enough to replace the "company provided" one.

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Re:Dozens of Hezbollah members said to be seriously injured ... by Scoundreller on Wednesday September 18, 2024 @03:47AM (#41576938)

> Some one-ways can last for over a month.

More like a year or two off of a single AAA battery.

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Re:Dozens of Hezbollah members said to be seriously injured ... by andrewflnr on Tuesday September 17, 2024 @04:57PM (#41572652)

There are tons of more likely explanations for that, though, with the top of the list being "dang bosses bought low quality pagers".

And if they can make the combined package big enough that the battery life is still acceptable, it's even less likely that someone will pull the pager, notice that they should be getting "great" battery life instead of "just ok", and investigate deeply.

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Re:Dozens of Hezbollah members said to be seriously injured ... by baud147258 on Tuesday September 17, 2024 @05:06PM (#41572738)

I read elsewhere that Hezbollah recently changed to this pagers to communicate, maybe it those who put the bombs bet on the fact their victims wouldn't have time to realize that the battery have shorter life than advertised

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Re:Dozens of Hezbollah members said to be seriously injured ... by _xerces_ on Tuesday September 17, 2024 @06:08PM (#41573399)

Not impossible they modified the firmware to improve battery life - look how sophisticated Stuxnet was.

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Re:Dozens of Hezbollah members said to be seriously injured ... by ValentinA23 on Tuesday September 17, 2024 @05:50PM (#41573229)

I recently discover explosive welding is a thing. It uses PETN packaged as a thin sheet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detasheet

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