I guess you've never been in most of middle east. Pagers, shortwave radios and "80s technology" are still widely deployed among the general population.

Hospitals at least use it extensively still in Europe.

The NSA fights terrorism. Terrorists use encryption to evade the NSA. That does not mean that everyone who uses encryption is a terrorist.

This isn't about pagers generally, this is about a particular batch of 5,000 pagers ordered by Hezbollah. They weren't distributed to random Lebanese citizens.

Where is your evidence for your claim? Doctors and children are among the dead.

We'll need to await more info about the second wave of explosions from other devices, but the first wave was widely reported to be from a specific order of 5,000 pagers for Hezbollah, see e.g. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-planted-exp...

Again, these guys don't go to distributors saying "Hello, we're evil Inc, we want your devices for our nefarious plans!" - they were coming from a batch imported trough local resellers like...basically every other consumer retail channel.

Without taking in consideration that "Hezbollah" as a loosely defined group ranges from conservative politicians and institutions to bona fine terrorists.

These devices were being shipped in equal measure from the guys sending rockets to Israel to the local equivalent of those preppers who like to spend their weekend eavesdropping the police radio waiting for WWIII.

Unfortunately real life is a bit messier than a Tony Scott movie, and we didn't harm 5000 evil terrorists ready to destroy America and Israel from their Cobra underground lair, just a bunch of random people - a few of them genuinely bad guys (how many? thousands? hundreds? less than ten?), and everyone else who may or may have not sympathized with a group that may or may be not considered a terrorist organization, depending on who you ask.

Mainstream sources are saying it was a specific shipment of 5,000 pagers, which Hezbollah ordered from Gold Apollo (a manufacturer, not a local reseller), that was tampered with.

Are you claiming that these sources are wrong, and Hezbollah actually bought them from some retailer who happened to have 5,000 units of tampered inventory?

...God, I hate when smart people pretend to be dumb to make sure facts fit their agenda.

So, you're suggesting instead that a paramilitary group picked up their phone, called a company in Taiwan (I guess there's a taiwanese-arab translating terrorist branch), told them "Hello, I'm Hezbollah, Yes, I need 5000 pagers because...reasons, take my money", nobody batted an eyelid starting from payment processors (I can only imagine they used Bison Dollars from Street Fighter The Movie), to shipping and logistics from several countries.

Then, finally, they made a big long queue of all Hezbollah members and gave each of them one of 5000 pagers, all while saying "remember, never give this extremely common consumer device to no one else for at least five months!"

Instead of, you know, buying them locally from friendly wholesale resellers when new units were needed. (remember, it's radio and pagers we're talking about. Not guns. Not Missiles. It's basically stationery.)

I'm tempted to end this with some snarky conclusion, but I'd say no further comment is really needed.

Per Reuters, "The senior Lebanese security source said the group had ordered 5,000 beepers made by Taiwan-based Gold Apollo, which several sources say were brought into the country in the spring."

I suppose the source could be lying, but what is your alternate theory exactly? Militaries don't tend to procure their communications equipment from the shelves of Radio Shack. Lebanon doesn't have a booming pager market, so it's unlikely that some local distributor just happened to have 5,000+ pagers sitting around.

This was clearly a special order (which doesn't mean no distributor was involved), and Occam's razor suggests that Mossad tampered with that particular order, rather than tampering with random pagers and just hoping that some of them might end up being purchased by Hezbollah later.

"Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah says the group’s leadership was mostly spared during Tuesday’s attack targeting pagers that killed several members in Lebanon as they were using older devices while “new ones were sent elsewhere.”

Interesting, can you share a link for this quote? I can't find it anywhere.

Thanks!

Hezbollah employs doctors (heck, it runs hospitals) and Hezbollah personnel (in any of the political, armed, or social services parts of the organization) presumably fairly often live in households with children.

"Doctors and children are among the dead" isn't inconsistent with "this came from an order of devices specifically for Hezbollah" (it does cast doubt on "this was a precisely-targeted attack on Hezbollah combatants", but that's a very different claim.)