Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon
(reuters.com)1061 points by logicchains 3 days ago
1061 points by logicchains 3 days ago
Do you think Hezbollah was buying stuff from Israel, or otherwise using Israeli supply chains?
I think it's far more likely that Mossad has infiltrated whatever foreign (non-Israeli) supply chain they were using.
So this can happen regardless of whether you're using Israeli supply chains or not.
I think the point is that if you're not Hezbollah or any kind of political actor, but just a customer for Israeli technology (public or private), would you really want to keep buying it? Leave aside boycotts over Israeli policy, you might be opening yourself to becoming an Israeli attack vector and either find your own interests compromised or become a target of Israel's enemies if they thought you were complicit.
What are you gonna buy? Chinese tech? Iranian tech? Russian tech?
Who do you want to be able to spy on you and compromise your hardware?
Unless you can spin up your own fab (hint: you can't) you're dependent on a hegemon. US/EU/Israel isn't perfect, but pretty much as good as it gets.
I mean, CIA had similar blowback in the past for vaccines: https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vacci...
Why not? When was anything Israeli-made involved in any funny business? I mean officially Israeli-made, not... this.
Do you think Hezbollah was buying stuff from Israel, or otherwise using Israeli supply chains?
The modern supply chain is vastly deep. Iran can buy something from (IDK) India which might use software or hardware from Israel. As a further example, unless there's viable phone OS I don't know about, even Hezbollah will be using Android or iOS (and so buying from the US). etc.
I think it's far more likely that Mossad has infiltrated whatever foreign (non-Israeli)
Maybe that is more likely. But I don't think my or your guesses matter so much as public perception. IE, it would change the situation that a given customer may look skeptically at an Israeli software or hardware product. Or they may not given that price and features trumps security and quality for nearly everything these days.
> So this can happen regardless of whether you're using Israeli supply chains or not.
The point is, would allies trust if it were China that pulled this off? Huawei/TikTok were thrown under the bus for way less.
It was pointed out to me that you shouldn't overthink it: the most likely thing which happened is Israel had someone inside Hezbollah procurement and used them to take delivery (I'd put much lower odds on this guy being in on the plan, it's doubtful he even knew he was working for Israel directly).
You've got to remember that as internet people, we want everything to have a clever storyline to it. Intelligence services exploit that exact expectation though: the first thing you attack is trust within the organization itself, since it gives you more access, more easily and once people have talked themselves into "supply chain threat" there's a real danger they've ignored "actually the guy signing off on the paperwork is taking a payoff to ignore some delivery irregularities".
> I think it's far more likely that Mossad has infiltrated whatever foreign (non-Israeli) supply chain they were using.
Yeah. Wasn't there something in the Snowden leaks about the CIA intercepting servers in-transit to install implants on them? I'm sure Israel is doing something similar.
Photos of an NSA “upgrade” factory show Cisco router getting implant https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa...
During the cold war, Russia intercepted typewriters and teleprinters going to the US and other embassies and inserted implants in them. https://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/selectric/
And the US CIA ran the "Swiss" firm Crypto AG, which sold cable-encryption (as in telegraphic / telex coms) equipment with pre-installed back-doors:
<https://www.npr.org/2020/03/05/812499752/uncovering-the-cias...>
It was Cisco routers that made the headlines. Not sure of other gear: https://www.engadget.com/2014-05-16-nsa-bugged-cisco-routers...
Yes there was. @48:48 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NFrjHmI35w&t=48m48s
meh, the most probable explanation is that israel infiltrated hezbollah and whoever was in charge of ordering and distributing those devices knowingly distributed the tampered devices.
That guy got a deal and was evacuated with his family before events unfolded. Seems way easier than alternative plans.
I don't see this as a smart move (let alone strategy) in any time frame. As a third-party observer greatly removed from the conflict I used to view Israel as an island under attack from terrorists. Now I'm struggling to see the differences between their activities and blowing up airplanes or launching rockets from schools and hospitals. You can say I'm naive, and why would Israel care about how I feel, but as a country and a people they only exist as long as we're their benefactor, and I don't think I'm alone in how I feel.
> Now I'm struggling to see the differences between their activities and blowing up airplanes or launching rockets from schools and hospitals.
Well, the obvious difference is that blowing up airplanes or launching rockets at residential areas intentionally targets civilians in order to spread a maximum amount of terror among the civilian population while blowing up pagers that were used for coordinating attacks against Israel very specifically targets operatives involved in such activities.
Some of the initial footage shows such a device going off while innocent bystanders remain unharmed. You can't get any more targeted than that.
Yes, such a pager might have ended up in the hands of a non-involved person, but given the facts known so far that's very unlikely, because there's a reason those people were carrying these devices on them: They were afraid of being tracked down by Mossad in the first place.
Many people fail to see this. You can't compare a terrorist attack that intentionally targets civilians with no apparent military target to a legitimate attack on a defined military target that unfortunately results in some collateral damage.
The act of modifying and/or deploying the devices was targeted. That’s it.
Carrying out an explosives attack across a large geographic area that includes public spaces, with no specific intelligence on the location of the devices, or who is within the blast range, is the exact opposite of targeted.
> Some of the initial footage shows such a device going off while innocent bystanders remain unharmed.
This is anecdotal and misleading. There are reports of civilians maimed including the murder of a child. This is entirely plausible due to the indiscriminate nature of these bombs with respect to immediate bystanders.
If an enemy had set off thousands of small bombs in American supermarkets and homes, maiming thousands of whoever was nearby and killing children, we would undoubtedly call it a mass terrorist attack.
> Eight killed and 2,750 wounded
Such a pager did end up hurting non-involved people, in great quantity.
> blowing up airplanes or launching rockets at residential areas intentionally targets civilians in order to spread a maximum amount of terror among the civilian population
Which is exactly what Israel has been doing for decades by
installing an apaitheid regime https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_apartheid
colonizing palestinian land https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli-occupied_territories
kicking hundreds of thousands of people off of their homes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba
putting guns on their head day in day out https://www.msf.org/palestinians-face-harassment-and-violenc...
running on them with tanks while their families must watch https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6385?s=35
destroy the graves in an attempt to dehumanize even more https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_razing_of_cemeteries...
and on and on and on since a time when none of us was even born. Let's not pretend Israel is the good guy here. There are no good guys, and while I don't accept the acts of Hezbollah, what is a colonized people being genocided to do when the world doesn't care about them being denied human rights ?
Israel also do bad things. Maybe it flies under the radar of being called terrorism by the west - but look at west banks settlements, jailing kids forever for throwing stones, turning Gaza into something that makes Mad Max look like a dream in the name of self-defence, appartheid conditions in Israel and the occupied territories. Offensives on Gaza before Oct 7 - 2023 was particularly bad, and the general embargo aroudn Gaza that made life pretty rotten before the current war - etc.
Israel do enough operations that ticks the "look we killed soldiers guys!" box and they really like to get media attention on that. Otherwise it is "Hamas was hiding there". Hard to verify - they may be right sometimes, but I bet not all the time based on the the number of deaths and the amount of destruction in Gaza.
> You can't get any more targeted than that.
We can nuke a dictator. It's going to blow up everything within miles, evaporating millions of people, but it can't get any more targeted than that. Deal with it.
Seriously, tho, it's infuriating that a government literally triggered explosion among general public, right in front of innocent eyes. This is an act of terrorism, harming the lives of innocent people who've been largely unrelated to the conflict.
There are 100,000+ northern Israeli's who are refugees inside Israel because Hezbollah is firing hundred of rockets indiscriminately daily at civilian targets, but Israel doing something specifically targeted at higher level Hezbollah operatives makes you feel like Israel is doing exactly the same thing? All while you don't even yet know the reason for the Israeli op (was it to stop an imminent Hezbollah action? Seems odd that this also impacted so many operative in Syria, doesn't it? Why aren't people mentioning that this was larger than Lebanon?)
Why? Why is Hezbollah firing rockets into Israel?
You don't mention Gaza or Palestinians, yet it's right there (and been there for 75+ years).
Well, yesterday’s actions aren’t really gonna fix that situation for those 100,000 Israelis now though are they? It wasn’t designed to make that border region safer overnight because those rockets are going to keep coming even more often now. Hezbolah might even get so pissed off they go all out and rush the border.
There are old stories of the Russians planting mines inside children's toys during some of the later cold war conflicts. This is starting to feel a bit like that. Nobody had any way of knowing who was holding those pagers when they sent that packet but they still distributed thousands of munitions throughout the populace and pressed the red button. Now there are probably at least a hundred or so still out there that haven't exploded and are just live UXO sitting in people's desk drawers.
I'd say it's pretty fucked.
It is morally fucked to compare trapping children's toys with trapping the communications devices of soldiers in a war.
"Israeli fighter planes have also attempted to kill children by dropping thousands of booby-trapped toys on Lebanese villages and towns. The Israeli occupying forces have used this method through the years and continue to do so, the most recent example being when booby-trapped toys were dropped on the town of Nabatiyah, killing and injuring children and permanently disfiguring others." https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-180386/
>as a country and a people they only exist as long as we're their benefactor
Why do so many people think this? If the US stopped "giving" them "military aid" which is actually just disney dollars to spend in the US military industrial complex they would be out a small percentage of their defense budget.
"Israel orchestrating an attack against the terrorists they're at war with makes me think less of them" is certainly an opinion. A batshit fucking stupid opinion, but you're entitled to it nonetheless.
Please don't vote.
Just like everything else 90s the transparent iMac G3 look is going to be coming back only in the non-ironic prison use for having everything in a clear case (to check for contraband).
Right now one of the fastest growing companies is the Israel cybersecurity company Wiz, founded by founders and investors from Israel's Unit 8200, their secretive cyber hacking group. Seems to me a massive security risk for any US company to be relying on critical security to a non American founded companies.
I created a throwaway account just for this.
I actually hired, and we later fired, a couple of 'engineers' from Unit 8200. They were technically quite weak, and when Oct. 7 happened, I wasn't surprised at all. If this was the cream of the crop, the defense community should seriously re-evaluate the efficacy of the IDF.
Wiz is the WeWork of cybersecurity. The Israeli tech sector is not that powerful but has lots of investments from the West (US mainly). My experience relates to yours. I think most people have high and unrealistic expectations of people coming from Israel but this usually comes out short.
This might be my ignorance showing, but how do you, as a hiring entity, even verify a candidate has experience in Unit 8200?
Or that these Unit 8200 alumni aren't dismissed "C-players", not good enough for them?
Israel has a mandatory military service, and they have been cultivating technical talent development in their armed forces for a long time. So I would think that the arrow of causality runs the opposite way.
In other words: virtually every Israeli has been in the military, and for the technically competent ones, were likely to be recruited into their offensive intelligence unit. Coupled with a government whose industrial strategy has been to promote business development in this sector, we are in a situation where practically every single founder of an Israeli tech company has a military service background.
Those with (offensive) infosec mindset end up founding infosec focused businesses, knowing that there is readily available investment available for them. As a result, the Venn diagram between the unit members and infosec business founders is likely to show a pretty big overlap.
And if you look at it more broadly, most Israelis served in the army which maintains an occupation which is illegal under international law, that is most countries on the planet deem it illegal. So, when I meet an Israeli, the instant thought that runs through my head would be: did this person participate in the human rights abuses? They might very well not have, but the possibility is there. This is a scary situation for me as well, because I do not want to be discriminating and prejudiced against anyone, but the facts are straight.
I guess it's good that Google's attempt to acquire Wiz fell through.
> From Israel's perspective, this supply chain attack was undoubtedly a clever move
From The Guardian [1]:
> Eight killed and 2,750 wounded
Was that a clever move if you're killing "only" 8 potential adversaries?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/sep/17/middle-ea...
It looks like a trigger that can only be pulled once.
Thus, choice of the optimal time could be influenced by a lot of things:
- knowledge of other Hezbollah imminent action making comms disruption right now of great importance
- recognition that the vulnerability had been discovered and was about to be remediated
- via other "eyes on" prime targets, knowledge that just one or two top leaders were briefly in especially-vulnerable positions (like sleeping alongside their pagers)
- etc
And, there will be a "long tail" of damage to Hezbollah's usual communications practices & trust in devices/suppliers. Some marginal recruits may even be deterred from joining a battle against an opponent which can carry out this sort of attack – though of course, others may be emboldened.
> And, there will be a "long tail" of damage to Hezbollah's usual communications practices & trust in devices/suppliers.
It appears pager use was a solid choice. Even on full supply chain compromise the amount of explosives fitted couldn't kill even 1% of targets. A cellphone would be packed with much larger payloads able to kill much more people. Their failure was the lack of proper inspection before distribution.
I think the purpose is to terrorize your opponents. Sometimes getting seriously wounded is even worse than getting killed, from the perspective of Hez. Now they need to handle thousands of wounded members, which is much more expensive than dead ones.
Who said the injured are all Hezbollah members? From the above Guardian coverage:
"Among those killed is an eight-year-old girl from Bekka Valley, Abiad said, according to Al Jazeera."
This CCTV footage shows one of the devices exploding in a busy supermarket:
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/dozens-hezbollah-m...
Terrorizing your opponents is one thing, but indiscriminately detonating bombs in public spaces is just plain terrorism.
Also, being a martyr on a poster with everyone celebrating you can be an attractive recruitment tool to young men. But seeing the broken beggar without eyes that people pity isn't going to be quite the same enticement to recruit for your terrorism org.
I actually think that an unintended consequence is that Mossad has permanently flagged the vast majority of Hizbullah's followers, an entire generation, on Lebanese soil.
The wound patterns will emerge for the vast majority of victims: arms, hands, eyes and hips ? Time will tell.
The Lebanese army, and the IDF, now suddenly can tell between civilian vs combatant.
I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding but it sounds like you are implying membership of Hezbollah is deep dark shameful secret in Lebanon. The designation of Hezbollah as a "terrorist organization" is great for outside political propaganda, but the actual reality is they are a major and open faction in political life in Lebanon as both paramilitary group and political party - as is my understanding. Basically Sinn Fein/IRA.
If I was wounded (or even witnessed this in real life), I would go from civilian to combatant instantly. Israel just attacked a bunch of civilian population centers. This will be seen as a huge strategic mistake, both in terms of new combatants created on the ground and continued loss of good will for Israel abroad.
I think the simplest explanation here is that pagers are small and light and don't have that much free space inside them, and it's hard to fit enough explosive into them to reliably kill people. The figures I saw was only a few grams of explosive could be fit in them. If you look at the photos and videos that have been coming out today you'll see what the injuries look like; they're not as catastrophic as getting shot with a bullet, or anything close to a real explosive with orders of magnitude more explosive in it like an artillery shell, rocket, aerial bomb, etc.
I would guess Israel would have preferred more lethal pagers, but the required amount of explosive simply didn't fit. So the resulting deaths are from the people who got really unlucky, whereas getting wounded was the modal result.
you're looking at the wrong videos. I saw videos with people's hands blown off, massive holes in their bodies, etc. reportedly something like 15-20gr of Pentaerythritol tetranitrate. Massive wounds.
The death toll isn't the goal. They're after the 2nd order effects, now there are ~3,000 operatives that are marked by a scar that is relatively distinctive. They also have substantially disrupted their communication protocols and caused psychological damage.
Hezbollah members in Lebanon are not necessarily perceived as bad people - why would the scar be a problem ? Hezbollah claims it’s a resistance movement to Israel, they’re now wearing a scar caused by Israel in a mass coordinated attack, which will further legitimize Hezbollah.
I agree with the disruption of communication protocols and psychological damage though.
I doubt those 2,750 all have minor injuries. That's 2,750 targets, a lot of whom probably now now have missing fingers/hands, a chunk missing from their leg, face injuries.... Aka major injuries from having a small explosion on their belt or int their pocket. It's going to be 2,750 probably major injuries that will take a long time to recover from.
And then they will be 10x more dedicated to revenge. Where they may have sworn to destory Israel before, they weren't yet personally injured. It'a the same cycle of violence.
Wounded soldiers are often a bigger burden than killed ones. You neee to retrieve them, take care of them, and they may never be fight capable again. They are also a breathing reminder of the costs of war, and at the same time less likely to make others vow revenge.
Killing is one thing, but wounded soldiers/operatives are a much larger drain on resources than killing.
The wounded people need care, medicine, rehab, therapy, and feeding during their recovery.
This occupies significant resources of your enemy.
I’m not commenting on this specific attack, but talking in general.
It's not clear whether you're asserting Israel does or doesn't care whether it kills civilians, though I think you're saying it doesn't in general try to accomplish this.
Israel's history is decidedly chequered in this regard, and there have been killings, including quite recently of demonstrators / protestors, and within recent years of journalists, by Israeli forces.
But there are also practices such as "roof knocking" in which an initial nonlethal warning is exploded above a building several minutes prior to a much more destructive strike:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roof_knocking>
Video of a roof-knock strike: <https://xcancel.com/AJEnglish/status/1710690655091990644#m>
The explosion seen doesn't significantly damage the building, that occurs in a later strike, shown as the first set of explosions here:
<https://yewtu.be/watch?v=ZFTK9V_mEjI>
(That clip follows with the initial roof-knock.)
And to be clear, much of Israel's subsequent air and artillery assault on the Gaza strip has been far less surgical, with vast numbers of structures destroyed.
By contrast, both Hamas and Hezbollah make extensive use of highly inaccurate missiles (totally unguided in the case of Hamas, guided though low-ish precision generally for Hezbollah) which are effectively aerial mines, striking randomly largely within civilian areas. This reflects both tactics and available means, so again the picture is complex. As I've written in an earlier comment on this thread, most hats are at best grey in these conflicts, rather than clearly white.
If their comms are severely disrupted, yes. Even if it wasn't militarily effective, it's still quite a clever attack.
If this were coordinated with a ground attack on Hezbollah, it would be a great way to disrupt any defense right before it needs to offer resistance.
I'm surprised they used it out of such a concept. It is almost heartening, because it suggests no such attack is currently anticipated by Israel.
How do we know this didn't do this but in reverse, being used to disrupt an attack Hezbollah had planned? Edit: People seem to be ignoring the large amount of Syrian operatives this hit as well.
exactly. The most charitable way to look at this is Israel targeted a handful fewer bystanders than a terrorist attack. I can't imagine anyone thinking longer-term strategy thought thought this was a good idea.
Really isn't though. We don't know if there was an imminent action that Israel prevented by doing this? Did Israel do this instead of blowing up apartment blocks to target individuals, in which case this might be a much more limited collateral damage action than other methods might have caused. Without knowing Israel's motives one can't make any sort of judgement not sure why you are leaping to conclusions minus any actual information.
Idk who exactly was hit but losing a hand will definitely hurt ones ability to fight.
It's the psychology. Every sat phone and laptop is being opened up right now...
I'm guessing it was to stop some tentative action on Hezbollahs and the huge number of Syrians that this attack got as wells parts that was about to occur.
> 2,750 wounded
Absolutely insane. Imagine this many Israeli had been wounder by Hammas attack.
Disgusting move from Israel to keep civilian causalities minimum! This is no excuse for 'collateral damage'
Nearly every single one injured was a Hezbollah militant. Regarding militant:civilian rates, this has one of the lowest civilian impacts of any option.
Most modern wars see MORE than 1 civilian death per militant death. This pager bomb was nearly entirely militants.
> "One shot attack"
>> This is the second time israel has done this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash
As someone else posted, it's not entirely novel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash#Assassination
> In the short term, it's a smart strategy for Israel, but they've likely opened Pandora's box in the process.
Is the short term here a few days or maybe just hours? For the reasons you pointed out and more this is likely a strategic failure for a very short term military gain. The economics you pointed out. Politically this will not help them with any but their most extreme allies while enraging their enemies and giving them the moral high-ground with their peoples and the international community. Militarily this likely did little to actual readiness since the people wearing the pagers were probably mid to upper level people so they will heal and go back to desk jobs they were doing before. So an economic, political and military strategic fail. It would have been far better for Israel had this fizzled out or been found out before it triggered. Plausible deniability would have been easier and international outrage would have been minimal all while the C&C of their enemies would have gotten the intended message that they had deep capabilities that could cause disruption. Instead they actually pulled it off and now they get all the bad consequences with very few good ones. This was a bad idea executed, unfortunately, well.
I'm not at all convinced that's the case, unless it comes out that the targeting was extremely broad (like if Israel was just putting bombs in every pager going into Lebanon rather than targeting a specific shipment going to Hezbollah) I don't think there's really any new risk for other countries.
I'd disagree - this seems highly targeted. There aren't that many people with pagers but pagers were a specific way for Hezbollah to speak to operatives.
They probably run their numbers and reasoned that more than 75% or something of pagers from a specific batch were used by hezbollah or subjects close to them and decided that it was an acceptable casualty ratio.
"You can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs" approach applied to armed conflicts.
Everyone should be keeping an eye on all their supply chains all the time, Israel-connected or not. Especially for military (or paramilitary) applications.
It reminds me a bit of when after 9/11, some of the reaction in Israel (as well as shock and sympathy) was "Of course we have locked cockpit doors, marshals on planes and other security features on ElAl. We're not barbarians!"
Also, (Hagelin) Crypto AG. Just because it's in Switzerland doesn't mean you shouldn't be paranoid.
The fact that they attacked them via their communication network that was intended to avoid Israeli surveillance, is irregular warfare at its finest.
The main injury inflicted on individuals was psychological - we got into your supply chain this far. Also, your attempts to avoid us failed.
But at an org level? They just disabled the entire comms system, whether through explosions, or by making people scared of explosions.
What's the contingency plan for this in Hezbollah? And will it have credence, given their last grand idea of "let's use pagers to avoid the Israelis" ended with a large number of simultaneous explosions?
It's a very clever attack from a psychological POV.
> The main injury inflicted on individuals was psychological
Have you seen the footage(0) from hospitals? It's likely that hundreds of Hezbollah members lost hands, eyes, etc. That will degrade their military effectiveness significantly, especially the people who were blinded. And remember that Hezbollah is trying(1) to prevent more footage of the attack from getting out, so what we've seen publicly quite likely underplays the full extent of it.
Sure, maybe you could argue that the "main" effect in terms of total numbers was psychological. But we shouldn't understate how many Hezbollah members were directly given life-long injuries that will make them ineffective forever. That's a huge win for Israel.
0) https://x.com/Osint613/status/1836040863195029530 1) https://x.com/Saul_Sadka/status/1836039347210002899
>communication network that was intended to avoid Israeli surveillance
Reuters even covered conversion to pagers two months ago
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/pagers-drones-how-...
> In the short term, it's a smart strategy for Israel, but they've likely opened Pandora's box in the process.
Did they? Supply chain attacks, intercepted parcels, none of this is new - the US, going by the Snowden leaks, has a long history of tampering with parcels in transit, which is why a few of the "libre phone" vendors offer to seal the parcel, the device and all screws in random glitter glue and take photos prior to shipping so that any attempt at tampering in transit is not hideable (there is no known way to recreate a glitter pattern).
For me this whole things, including the previous use of AI backed social graph modelling build from digital surveillance of Palestinians, being use for as targeting intelligence, for drone strikes on people homes and families.. this whole thing chills me to the bone about ever wanting to use a social network, or a always connected mobile device ever again. Israel has taken the Dark Mirror SF speculations about the shifts in power and capability as the instruction manual and we're mostly ignoring the warnings. There nothing stopping this happening to any of us.
There's also the hit to the reputation of the manufacturers of these devices to consider (even though they were almost certainly intercepted some time after manufacture and modified in transit, or replaced with a different batch that had been ordered by the perpetrator and modified ahead of time for a quick swap). The perpetrator may have been spying on the pager network for some time, and if so then their cover is blown and their information source is gone.
The larger issue is that if shipments of pagers can be intercepted and modified in this manner, then any electronic device can be subjected to other hardware-based attacks - eavesdropping devices, keystroke loggers, etc. What if large numbers of countries with developing tech markets start looking at the suppliers involved the way the USA looks at China's Huawei?
In general this boosts the open-soure model for both software and hardware, so the expected hardware configuration that can be checked visually and with other user-available tools. If any phone, pager, tablet or laptop can be physically hijacked and modified, the user should be allowed access to all the information and tools needed to detect it. This assumes the factory itself is not the bad actor.
Hardware security consultant firms probably have a bright future. Also robots for assistance with inspection.
> What if large numbers of countries with developing tech markets start looking at the suppliers involved the way the USA looks at China's Huawei?
It's well known that the NSA performs supply chain attacks by planting spyware on hardware which goes through the USA. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/12/glenn-greenwal...
Whenever the USA complain about something China is allegedly doing, it's a good bet that they know someone in the USA camp is doing that very thing.
IMO, this gives IL's enemies more excuses to execute more horrible attacks. Considering pagers are civilian products and some of them might actually be delivered to non-Hez civilians, the consequence is pretty dire.
it basically says: we can do whatever we want because we can. Now imagine what the other side is going to reply.
I don't know if you've been following this conflict, but Israel's enemies don't need excuses to attack Israel. They think Israel doesn't have a right to exist, and thus see the very existence of the state of Israel as a provocation that justifies violence against Jews.
They've been firing hundreds of rockets, daily, into Israeli territory. You think they need more excuses to do anything?
Definitely not. Hez has showed footages of UAVs inside of IL so potentially they could do some damage. They can also up their missile attacks. And there are other players such as the Houthis. Maybe they just don't want to do it because they figured it's of no good to them at the moment, but maybe the climate changes in the future and they decide to do it anyway.
My concern now is another nation-state actor who manages certain large international supply chains doing this on a broader scale against widespread western targets. Your comment on it being a pandoras box is quite profound.
Somebody in Russia is probably thinking right now "you know, that was quite a clever idea".
That's a real issue. Especially if this escalates to smartphones.
Technical questions:
- Was the explosive in the pager detectable by the normal tests used at airports?
- Who gets to skip those tests? Are all devices carried by airline pilots examined with explosive tests?
- This is selective. Only the addressed devices blow up. That has implications for devices which know too much about their owners.
That's a ridiculous take. No one involved Israel in this supply chain.
Also, there is no country in the world that would refrain from doing the same thing to their enemies, if they could pull it off. (big if)
Meanwhile, you can be sure the U.S. and China are putting back-doors in every device they can manage, and have been doing so for decades.
I’d prefer a device with a Chinese backdoor to a device with Israeli remote explosives any day.
it makes me think the Israeli decision-makers are trying to leave Hezbollah no choice but to escalate into a larger war. I think Hezbollah has been trying to avoid escalation into all out war, responding in limited proportionate ways despite Israel continuing to escalate. (Can you imagine if Hezbollah had detonated thousands of such devices in Israel? I'd be scared of a nuclear response).
But Israeli leaders maybe decided Hezbollah's hesitation to escalate into all out war must mean that such a war must be good for us and bad for them? Let's try to really make em do it, so we can invade Lebanon again? Why Israeli government thinks it wants an invasion of Lebanon right now, I don't know, but it looks like that's where this goes to me and they must know it?
Hezbollah started this war on October 8, and they can stop it by ceasing their attacks.
Israel have no reason to want a war. It's Hezbollah who want to conquer Israeli land. Israel wants nothing from Lebanon.
Israel leadership is probably prepping for some big October surprise timed perfectly just before the US election. Everyone is predicting it so much these days that its not really a surprise but a eventuality at this point.
> other major producers could replicate this tactic
it's an inefficient tactic that actual terrorists won't employ tbh. Infiltrating manufacturers just to place small explosives isn't terror inducing - and you want the recipient of the explosion to know who it came from for a terrorist attack to be effective.
Israel did it to limit the amount of collateral (instead of shooting a missile or bomb, which would require a much larger radius of damage).
Everytime you say Israel you must insert US, just as you must insert Iran every time you mention Palestine. These are who the war is between. Hamas or Hezbollah by itself is nothing and so is a <10 million population fighting several adversaries. And the US will always win in escalation which is exactly what they have aimed to achieve and why Iran never gave a 'proper' response to the assassination of Haniyeh.
It could also act as an ad - Israel is capable of James Bond level stuff, their tech must be great.
Isn’t political isolation a strategy in extremism movements? It encourages some people in the middle to move into your camp, while others who move away can become convenient enemies. So from my understanding, the consequences are possibly considered another benefit for the country’s current government.
> In the short term, it's a smart strategy for Israel, but they've likely opened Pandora's box in the process.
Absolutely. From today on, this type of attack will have to be considered part of the arsenal.
While building thousands of explosive communication devices and swapping a large shipment requires substantial resources and intelligence, the actual "sophistication" of today's attack seems to lie in the fact that the perpetrator managed to specifically target a clandestine adversarial organization.
If you don't care about that last part, I don't think it's completely out of reach for a hypothetical "state sponsored terrorist organization" to have a thousand smart phone explosives shipped into a target market, say the European Union or the United States. Such an attack, if successful, would be devastating.
> Absolutely. From today on, this type of attack will have to be considered part of the arsenal.
I doubt that. It’s way more likely that from today on, every batch of devices used by VIPs will be tested for explosives, thus rendering such attacks moot. Finding such devices would also enable figuring out who your enemy’s operatives are.
This was a one-off.
Israel used letter bombs for a long time to assassinate and terrorize. People didn't stop using the mail because of that, but upgraded their opsec.
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycott,_Divestment_and_Sanc...
israel wasn't identified as israel, and hizbolla weren't identified of hizbolla
much of the work of a CIA or Mossad agent isn't breaking in to this house or murdering that person. It's working as an executive in a shell company
No one is going to sell a terrorist organization thousands of new beepers. The hizbolla probably also created shell companies. Israel knew their cover and approached them as a foreign seller. Everyone is lying to everyone
In reality the supply chain space is probably full of shell companies from all different terrorist organizations and western countries
Israelis are not the 1st ones at this.
The CIA did something similar for the better part of 4 decades
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-...
It was just another Opsec failure (or success, depending on your perspective). I dont see israeli hardware devices being any more suspect. Same as china. They were suspect before and they continue to be. 1 is our ally and 1 ins not
It's said those devices were Iranian made. What makes you think Israel has any overt involvement in the supply chain to begin with?
That’s very very unlikely since the nuclear agreement fell through. As in they tried cooperation and got nothing in return last time. I assume everyone’s aware of what happened there right and why Iran probably won’t be cooperating any time soon?
Let's be clear here: it was a terrorist attack. Replace "IsraeL" and "Lebanon" with "iran" and "Israel" and Iran would already have bombed by the US.
Netanyahu is trying to ignite a regional war. It's the only way he stays out of prison. If the genocide in Gaza ends, his government falls and he goes to jail. He wants to drag the US into this regional war.
Do you think that's smart from Israel's perspective? Will that improve that safety of Israeli citizens? Or will it subject them to counterattacks?
Is that smart?
You have zero information about the goal here. There could have been an imminent attack from from Hezbollah that this action by Israel stopped, an attack that could have caused much more collateral damage on both sides of the border than this targeted at Hezbollah op. You literally have nothing to base calling this a terrorist attack on at this point.
It's not a terrorist attack unless the primary goal is causing terror. The primary goal here was clearly causing damage to Hamas' command structure by putting a few thousand militants in the hospital, and also literally blowing up their communications network.
I think that they are inspiring terror, but terror against operatives. That's a good goal. Terror against civilians is the problem (according to our modern moral code)
What would you killing 8+ peole and wounding 2800+? Were it any other actor, there would be absolutely no hesitation in calling it a terrorist attack.
You know who uses pagers? Doctors and nurses. Are they legitimate military targets? Let's just say that a Hezbollah or Hamas commander was killed. What's an acceptable civilian dead or wounded count that takes it out of the realm of a terrorist attack? How many is too many?
Yeah every company that has a part of their supply chain via Israel must be wondering now if this could be done to their devices.
...but this does sound like it would make a hilarious Family Guy episode.
Isn't that true of any supply chain that involves foreign states? Usually it's just surveillance, not destructive stuff, but expecting state actors to stay out of things is... naive?
The difference is between theoretical capability & Israel's demonstrated willingness & successful execution of it.
It's pretty reasonable now to think a little harder about "huh, I wonder if our Israeli supplier..." but yesterday it would have been a bit paranoid, not naive, to spend more than a passing moment on the thought if you weren't in a member of the March 8th club, or Iran.
Israel has the second highest GDP in the middle east[1].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Middle_Eastern_countri...
In the toilet? They practically run the world tech industry. Practically every GPU, laptop, and phone have a chip or sensor designed in Israel. FAANG companies keep growing their offices. Startup exits are at an all time high even as the war goes on (NVidia recently bought 2 more Israeli startups IIRC)
And good luck finding a Fortune 1000 company that isn’t using Monday or Akeyless or Zscaler or jfrog and I can keep going
Oh and remember Ilya sutskevers new AI company SSI? In their initial announcement they talked about opening with 2 offices, SFBA and Tel Aviv . You really can’t succeed without Israeli talent
You can like or dislike the government, but Israeli techs income and importance constantly grows YoY
I'm still amazed that many US companies willingly force every employee to install zscaler "to improve security and compliance", application which basically passes all inbound and outbound traffic through zscaler edge servers, unencrypted. Who knows who could be listening. And who can control that they aren't.
And yet Intel just cancelled a multi-billon dollar fab upgrade ...
https://www.timesofisrael.com/intel-suspends-planned-15-bill...
Israeli ports are going bankrupt ....
https://www.seatrade-maritime.com/ports-logistics/attacks-on...
Their strategy seems to consciously be showing everyone that they are craziest mf'ers who don't care about any consequences or collateral damage ever.
I agree with you that there some pretty serious global consequences that will come back to bite them too, but, then, they pretty intentionally don't care, that seems to be the whole deal.
I have heard Trump supporters actually suggest that a similar thing is a winning strategy for Trump too. Of course he seems to be an irrational unpredictable guy who doesn't care about the consequences in foreign policy, that's great for the USA, everyone will be scared to cross him because he's so unpredictable!
This is probably the historical lowest civilian casualty count ever for taking out this large a number of adversaries in an urban environment.
Same in Gaza, it seems they are willing to kill pretty much anybody (children, journalists, humanitarians, hostages) close to a potential target, regardless of whatever their allies may be thinking. Kind of a "godfather" strategy.
They did show that religious fundamentalism, which attacked their country and abducted their people, has to pay a very high price for their terrorism.
This terrorism will hurt innocents and the winning strategy would have been to just not attack Israel.
As much as Israel likes to spread that narrative, religious fundamentalism had nothing to do with October 7th. And the number of innocents murdered, the amount of destruction wrought, the land stolen by Israel in Gaza since then has completely eclipsed the relative few killed by Hamas. Or are Israeli lives worth more?
A 10 year old girl died too. They took no precautions to limit damage bystanders even assuming every person with one was a BadGuy™ which makes it terrorism and reprehensible.
I applaud your empathy but I don't think this number of active military adversaries have been taken out in cities with so little civilian casualties ever in history. We should probably be applauding this action over say the standard targeted bombing of the Hezbollah militants homes which is pretty much the previous 'least casualties' method used.
> A 10-year-old girl also died.
The death of that one girl, if it isn't entirely made up for propaganda purposes, is obviously very very tragic, but since almost all pro-Hezbollah commentators are referring to that one specific case that's a pretty clear sign that no other children died. Interestingly I'm now seeing comments where they're making her younger from 10yo to 9yo, now even 8yo. You can ask yourself why people are doing that.
While in their own attacks Hezbollah specifically targets Israeli civilians hoping for children to be among the victims.
> They took no precautions to limit damage to bystanders
The fact that those explosions were small enough to not kill even a single-digit percentage of several thousand targets who carried those pagers in their pockets near vital organs and blood vessels refutes your allegations.
> assuming that every person with a pager was a BadGuy™
These days, even in Lebanon, normal people simply own a cell phone so they can be called. When was the last time you even saw one? They are incredibly rare. The purpose of a pager is to receive (movement) orders and, in the case of Hezbollah, to make tracking more difficult. While it is possible that medical personnel may have used some of these pagers, it is highly unlikely that a new shipment of pagers would not primarily go to Hezbollah's "valuable" command staff, for whom being able to move and operate undetected is the greatest concern. According to Wikipedia, Hezbollah has more than 20,000 full-time fighters, and at 3,000-5,000 devices, this would not have been enough to resupply even a major part of the entire organization, so it is unlikely that any civilian outside the command structure would have received one, even less a random 10yo girl.
Ask yourself again if this is terrorism:
- if the attack was so specifically targeted at military targets
And collateral damage was minimized by:
- using a vector unlikely to be used by innocent civilians
- a sufficiently small explosion not to seriously injure people standing in close proximity to the target as indicated by the many videos floating around
> The death of that one girl is obviously very very tragic, but since almost all pro-Hezbollah commentators are referring to that one specific case, and if that case is even true, that's a pretty clear sign that no other children died. Interestingly I'm now seeing comments where they're making her younger from 10yo, to 9yo, now 8yo in order to exploit the death for propaganda purposes.
She has been consistently identified as either 8 years old or simply a "young girl" from the very first news accounts; I've never seen her given any other age in a news media account. There's probably some confusion in second-hand non-professional-news accounts (like this HN comment thread), confusing her age with other numbers in the same articles (at various times, the total number killed has been reported as 8, 9, 10, or 11 in the same articles identifying her as a particular victim. It is fairly easy to swap her age with the total victim count if you aren't being careful.)
Not even close. Thousands of pocket bombs. Some dead civilians, and a lot of dead terrorists. Not reprehensible but a well-executed op.
It's not uncommon for perfectly legitimate military operations in urban areas to kill more civilians than enemy soldiers. Managing to only injure a few civilians while seriously wounding hundreds of enemy soldiers in an urban area is a remarkable achievement.
Hezbollah of course is an entirely legitimate military target. They've been indiscriminately raining down missiles on northern Israel for months, forcing tens of thousands of Israeli's to abandon their homes. Israel has every right to put a stop to that, and it would have been perfectly reasonable for them to kill tens of thousands of Lebanese civilians in the process of killing the tens of thousands of Hezbollah members responsible for this.
From Israel's perspective, this supply chain attack was undoubtedly a clever move, but I can't help but wonder about its long-term consequences.
Although it was aimed at harming Israel's adversaries, third-party countries may now hesitate to involve Israel in their supply chains. There's also the risk that other major producers could replicate this tactic, potentially leading to further escalation in the region or beyond.
In the short term, it's a smart strategy for Israel, but they've likely opened Pandora's box in the process.