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.

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

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

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

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

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

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