This isn't entirely true. Cellphones are actively transmitting and checking in with the towers, so they're pretty easy to track.

Walkies transmit sporadically, so they can be tracked when activated. It's not instantaneous, but with a decent logging system you can keep track of users to a large degree. Even when you have multiple units all of the same model on the same frequency, there are various tricks to sorting them out to individual units.

One-way pagers don't transmit typical signals, buy like all RF devices, they're still emitting some signals and are trackable to a large degree with an antenna network deployed for that purpose. You might not be able to track them deep within enemy territory, but there is still a lot that can be done to track general movements or to find where clusters of the oscillators associated with the pagers turn up in large numbers.

Thuraya handsets don't work without reporting their GNSS position to the network in cleartext, they only work outdoors (ie they don't work inside tunnels and "hospitals"), and because of their cost they tend to be carried by senior leaders.

If I were the IDF, this is the communications system that I would prefer the enemy to use.

The cell network knows a lot about handset position without handset gps participation. UTDOA is good to several meters, CGI-TA to a lesser extent, etc.

If you transmit, you can be tracked. If you could modify a device to include an explosive, you could also modify it to include an undisclosed transmitter.

Which would then require Israel to use missiles. Which would be more complicated. Both logistically and politically. Also, it would be like playing whack-a-mole and risk of lot more collateral damage. Not to mention expensive.

At least with the pager attack, Israel hasn’t directly admitted it was behind it. Even though pretty much everyone knows it was them. But kinda hard to deny missile attacks.

Of course they can, just not as easily or conveniently.

EDIT: I meant walkie talkies. Old school pagers probably can't. Also I guess if you just use walkie talkies to listen to instructions. The station broadcasting can be tracked, however.

A walkie-talkie receiving a message should be a passive device no?

One can triangulate a radio broadcasting, I don't know how one would track receiving the broadcast.

A traditional FM walkie-talkie, yes, passive, but a P25/DMR handheld radio, especially operating in trunked mode, not necessarily. One notorious example of this is P25's use of packet retransmission requests: https://www.mattblaze.org/papers/p25sec.pdf

A lot of worksite-oriented handheld radios these days are not just oldschool FM and use digital protocols to efficiently manage bandwidth, which can involve transmitting when not actually sending voice data. I haven't seen any confirmation of whether the affected devices were digital or not, but if they were buying COTS radio equipment there's a decent chance that they were.

They were Icom IC-V82s. A long discontinued VHF FM radio.

Interesting, thanks!

Its hard but its not impossible. Functionally you need some very accurate equipment and some knowledge of the receiver. This is one of those areas where the military and government likely have approaches that are secret.

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

If the walkie talkie remains a passiv listener, then no, but then it is also only half as useful. And a unmodified pager is a passive listener by default and cannot be tracked, which is why they were bought in the first place from Hezbollah.

Tracking radios like that is very hard when the signal is far away and in urban environments.

How would you track a pager? It's a receive only device

Maybe they once were. Are there features now like receipt confirmation?

There was for a while (Motorola ReFLEX), but it was never popular.[1]

The pagers in this case were very boring POCSAG receivers, no transmit capability.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReFLEX