Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon
(reuters.com)1063 points by logicchains 3 days ago
1063 points by logicchains 3 days ago
“Gold Apollo said on Wednesday the pagers that were used in the detonations in Lebanon on Tuesday were not made by it but by a company called BAC which has a licence to use its brand.”
They spun up a whole company
Not surprising. Recall how two Taiwanese companies were implicated when they reportedly had their device driver signing key "stolen", in the creation of Stuxnet.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet#Windows_infection [2] https://youtu.be/Fqk_VUMzY_M?si=H64JCMMCzY-k7Y1K&t=823
Apparently they were branded Gold Apollo but not made by Gold Apollo:
Gold Apollo said on Wednesday the pagers that were used in the detonations in Lebanon on Tuesday were not made by it but by a company called BAC which has a licence to use its brand.
…
The company said in a statement that the AR-924 model was produced and sold by BAC.
"We only provide brand trademark authorization and have no involvement in the design or manufacturing of this product," the statement said.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/gold-apollo-says-i...
>citing American and other officials briefed on the operation.
How far should I be reading into the fact that people outside of Israel leaked this info so quickly? Does it mean the US was very unhappy with the attack? I doubt they were happy with not being given a heads up.
The capacity to keep secrets, even at the state level, takes a level of mental maturity that few are capable of. So many are thrilled by the idea of knowing something few other people know to a degree that they paradoxically want to make it something everybody knows. Journalists take advantage of this and collect and share leaky sources amongst each other. The reason for the leaking is most likely just human nature.
That said, the existence of the state of Israel is such a contentious topic that the leakers may have been motivated by politics as well as the above, sure. But I doubt state-level agencies are condoning the leaking here.
> So many are thrilled by the idea of knowing something few other people know to a degree that they paradoxically want to make it something everybody knows
Some people (often due to trauma) have a very different relationship with secrets than you describe. Some people get immense satisfaction from holding secrets, and have no issue keeping it that way. Sometimes those people have other flaws or vices, as often plays out. In my understanding, managing such people is its own meta-game within these professions
It probably just means that they weren't given any advanced warning and don't want any blame for it.
Could be damage control. There were rumors that it was the lithium ion batteries being made to explode. If those rumors were widely believed true, that would damage iPhone and Android and other brands.
That is pretty similar to what has been guessed so far. The posters here speculated that the charge was concealed inside the battery. Also some reports said that the batteries themselves heated up triggering the explosives. does the report mention if this was a physical switch or just some sort of control circuit?
The majority of plastic based high explosives are designed to be very stable, and require both heat and pressure to detonate, so my educated guess is they implanted something along the lines of a blasting cap into the pagers. I’ve seen PETN mentioned, but again, that is designed to be stable.
Electrical charge? There are electrically initiated caps, but you can’t place a negative and positive charge into a stick of C4 and expect it to do anything.
So trigger some kind of process to cause the batteries to overheat + detonate the blasting cap after a short delay? I'd be interested to know how it was packaged if it was done in a way that wouldn't look suspicious if someone looked inside the pager. The bomb-in-the- battery theory is a good one.
If we try to do what we are best at here at HN, let’s focus the discussion on the technical aspects of it.
It immediately reminded me of Stuxnet, which also from a technical perspective was quite interesting.
I already wonder if this was anything that was planted in the devices perviously, or if the ones responsible had similar devices, and managed reverse engineer them and craft a payload to them, that could be sent over existing cellular protocols/networks and then, similar to Stuxnet, make the device exagerte some existing functionality to a point where it caused a malfunction? Thoughts on this?
We can't really do much more than speculate right now, but it seems like the most likely answer is that a shipment of pagers was intercepted and implanted with explosives. Israel has done this before to assassinate a prominent bomb maker. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash#Assassination
> most likely answer is that a shipment of pagers was intercepted and implanted with explosives
I agree, there are photos and videos of extensive damage to furniture and injuries that go way beyond what a small lithium battery would NORMALLY do.
Also, all the CCTV footage I've seen indicates explosions and not fire.
It can be explosives planted, However it can be batteries modified to explode instead of burn&outgas. I recall a video of someone losing their lives when their vape battery exploded. IIRC the vape's metal structure acted as a container that enabled pressure build up and eventual sudden release.
There are many stories about vapes exploding, some causing serious damage similar to these:
https://www.gazettelive.co.uk/news/teesside-news/vape-explod...
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/e-cig-vape-pen-explosion/
Kind of makes sense to modify the battery because since they still need a functioning battery anyway and the space is limited.
> It can be explosives planted, but maybe it can be batteries modified to explode instead of burn.
That is not really a thing, from a technical point of view. Changing the chemistry of the battery (assuming that a suitably explosive one exists; these tend not to be developed very far) would just be swapping an explosive and not a modification. Doing something like adding some vessel to build up pressure within the battery sounds impractical (you’d need something very resistant to heat as a battery fire goes above 2000 K), at which point it’s not worth the trouble.
The most likely is either some explosive besides the battery, or something that looks like a battery from the outside, but is actually half explosive on the inside to at least pass superficial inspection.
This kind of damage really does not look like a battery gone wrong. It would have left all sorts of chemical residues and burned very differently.
CCTV footage of one of the explosions:
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/dozens-hezbollah-m...
This isn't how lithium batteries fail.
Amir Tsarfati: The updated numbers:
4000 wounded of which 400 in critical conditions
Al Jazeera from a Lebanese security source:
The pagers were brought to Lebanon 5 months ago. They were boobytrapped in advance. Each device contained an explosive weighing no more than 20 grams.
I had a rechargeable battery explode in my kitchen recently and it was like a small grenade went off. I'll see if I can find the photos but it shattered trim and bits went through a screen on the other side of the room.
So, an "excited" AA (which, I believe is what pagers usually use) could do a surprising amount of damage.
Photo: https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/40...
It looks like 1-way pagers sold in the US are powered by AA or AAA batteries: https://pagersdirect.net/collections/1-way-pagers.
That's not to say that they couldn't have put a lithium AA or AAA battery into the pagers or inserted a modified AA/AAA battery that was a combination of lithium (with greater power density) and explosive.
It's also possible that they have fancier 1-way pagers than I'm aware of.
How do you fit an explosive into a pager and still have the pager work? Like, aren't they already optimized to have everything for inside super tight?
Exactly that. There is a video of a hole blown through a table surface with one. That is not happening with any off the shelf battery technology as is currently being heavily misreported. They were modified with explosives clearly.
Of course there is paranoia being sewn now about hacking and the batteries which is likely part of the ongoing operation as it will disrupt anyone they didn't explicitly target.
I’m not sure which image you are referring to but there are images of lithium battery explosions blowing holes into counters and faces. There are some linked here.
Ahh so a simple supply chain attack. I was thinking it might have leveraged the built in batteries. But it was always unlikely, especially in a receive-only device.
Still, if you have the capability of such a supply chain attack, I would imagine the rewards of silent surveillance (tracking, audio) would be of much higher value than this kind of attack where 3 out of 1000s targets were killed.
3 killed but thousands inoperative and hospitals flooded - I would expect an immediate armed escalation
Why not both? Location data would be relatively easy to collect and forward, audio not so much (much higher storage and transmission throughput requirements for very low quality source data given the limitations of piezoelectric microphones and the fact that pagers are usually worn on belts).
If you're getting GPS data, collecting people's movements for a month or three probably provides 99% of what you will ever want to know. Once the patterns have been established you're into diminishing returns territory, while the risk of discovery goes up, which would neutralize the value of the explosive attack.
The strategic value of such a perfectly targeted surprise attack is massive, notwithstanding the relatively low fatality rate. Injuries are expensive and often devastating, and the psychological impact is brutal. Logistically, Hezbollah (and many other organizations, militant or not) are going to have to review and/or replace part of their communications tech. That's a massive technical disruption, a significant economic cost, and risks further exposing supply chain information. It's also going to create paranoia about many other electronic devices, poison in the food, and so on.
I'm not sure about the ethics of this. If one were certain that only Hezbollah officers were being targeted then it would be an acceptable kind of asymmetric attack through a novel vector.
However this also seems to have impacted quite a few civilians, and there is a claim (unverified so far) that a hospital just replaced all its pager equipment a couple of weeks ago and would otherwise have been impacted: https://x.com/SuppressedNws/status/1836080190855795092
If this happened in the US pursuant to one of the wars we've been involved in, we'd definitely be calling it terrorism and/or a war crime. It's a big strategic win for the Israelis in the short term but can hurt them two ways in the longer term. Hezbollah and other enemies of Israel will be significantly more motivated retaliate in some equally creative/unpredictable fashion, and non-aligned economic partners of Israel are likely to view Israeli products with renewed skepticism, hurting exports.
Given Israel's successful precision targeting of various senior Hezb members in recent months, I wonder if the pagers were initially used as such, but as suspicion mounted, and chances of an overhaul increased, they decided to hit the kill switch while they still could.
Although as as per an WSJ article: "The affected pagers were from a new shipment that the group received in recent days"
The pagers were likely one way with a codebook for the purpose of minimizing tracking and information exposure.
> I would imagine the rewards of silent surveillance (tracking, audio) would be of much higher value than this kind of attack where 3 out of 1000s targets were killed.
The reason they were using pagers, as opposed to phones, was to avoid exactly this kind of potential attack.
Pagers are (typically) a broadcast technology, the pager has no transmission capability. A page is broadcast from every tower, it has no idea where the receiver is. A targeted page is done by the receiver filtering out and ignoring pages that it isn't the recipient for (eavesdropping all pages is trivial).
The pager device is simple, it doesn't contain a GPS or have any concept of it's own location. No microphone or audio capability, very little processing capability. And adding such capability with something like a bug would be reasonably apparent to anyone opening one up and inspecting it.
For a supply chain attack.
How did they make sure a large percentage ended up in the hands of the targets? Seems like this could hit a lot of random people, just anybody using pagers. Unless they had way to target certain customers.
I think you're assuming that all pagers of this model were being sent out like this. That's unlikely.
Much more likely is they compromised someone in Hezbollah that was doing the ordering, or the distributor/vendor they ordered from, modified a couple thousand devices and sent them pretty much directly to their enemy, and only their enemy, to distribute among themselves. Then waited a bit, and set them off.
Most bugs can be easily found out by any competent counterintelligence team.
There are several sources online claiming the model used is the Gold Apollo Rugged Pager AR924. This pager is made in Taiwan, a country that has close ties with Israel and it's most important ally USA. Just a week ago Taiwan's Foreign Minister Lin Chia-Lung openly emphasized the critical importance of intelligence sharing and technology cooperation with Israel.
It was reported in Turkish news (allegedly via IRGC on X) that pagers are all Motorola branded, and supposedly at least include the Motorola LX-2 model.[1][2] However, the provided image of a Motorola LX-2 is also the first image on the Wikipedia English page for pagers.
There is also a photo circulating of a destroyed pager[3] which has visible writing "Distri: GOLD" and "Model: AP" (or "AR"). This has been matched to the Gold Apollo AR-924 model pager that is manufactured in Taiwan and is not a Motorola pager.[4][5][6][etc][7][8][9]
[1] https://www.turkiyetoday.com/region/this-is-how-israel-targe...
[2] https://i.turkiyetoday.com/image/resize/876x1024/wp-content/...
[3] https://i.turkiyetoday.com/image/resize/1280x1280/wp-content...
[4] https://x.com/JakeGodin/status/1836042111726072229
[5] https://x.com/PaDaGal/status/1836057094211969467
[6] https://x.com/Kahlissee/status/1836102796090953812
[7] https://web.archive.org/web/https://www.gapollo.com.tw/rugge...
Correction after more information has become available:
The Gold Apollo AR-924 model pager is reported to have been manufactured under license by Budapest-based company "BAC Consulting KFT", but the head of this company denies manufacturing the devices and instead described themselves as an intermediary, without providing further information. The Taiwanese company which allowed these devices to be manufactured under license also reported receiving strange remittances from BAC via banking systems in the Middle East (not Hungary).[1]
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/09/18/hungary-en...
"Taiwan has no record of Gold Apollo pages being shipped to Lebanon or the Middle East"
"Gold Apollo founder and chairperson Hsu Ching-kuang told reporters on Wednesday that his firm had signed a contract with a European distributor to use the Gold Apollo brand. Hsu said the distributor, which he did not name, established a relationship with Gold Apollo about three years ago."
https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/lebanon-pagers-attack-he...
TIL: pagers still exist.
I wonder, if these devices could be suspect, why don't they order these cheap Chinese GSM modules. You can't hide explosives in those.
Also, afaik all GSM modules broadcast their IMEI numbers over the network. Explosives or not, I'm sure they can all be tracked and triangulated, since they talk to the towers. I don't think these things are secure anyways.
That would make sense, since there's no such thing as a one-way GSM device. GSM towers (cells) need to keep track of which devices are in their vicinity and do smooth handovers to neighboring towers.
I'm not sure how the protocol you mentioned works, but I'd imagine it still needs some info about the whereabouts of the receiver to route the messages to him.
> Kamil Hamad disappeared and it is rumored that he received US$1 million, a fake passport and a visa to the US.
Given the chain of events detailed already sounds like it was ripped from a spy novel, I'm pretty skeptical of this claim.
A Russian helicopter pilot had his family escape Russia, stole a helicopter, fled to Ukraine with it and cashed out on the bounty money offered. Then he was found and assassinated in Spain by the FSB. We are living in interesting times.
I guess if your only exposure to spying is through spy novels you probably would feel that way? Nothing about this seems out of line to me.
You should check out any of the books written by Ben Macintyre, especially "The Spy and the Traitor". It turns out a lot of spy novels aren't that far off from reality.
Exactly. Snowball's chance anyone could get a series of capacitors and transistor to do too much more than "let the smoke out," even with the largest influx of EM energy. Most batteries give pretty big warnings before they do anything close to explode, making this a pretty obvious 'attack' vector they utilized. I'm also happy to offer political opinions for anyone that wants to hear ;)
Given history, given adversary, given all facts known thats practically sure. Usually Mosad doesn't say anything so we won't get much more anytime soon.
There will be few movies and documentaries about this for sure once things calm down a bit. I presume they used pagers instead of phones to not be so easily trackable via google/apple software and hardware?
A pager is passive receiver only. It never transmits. So you can't track it. That allows an operative to get to a secure line or obtain a burner device.
Whoever did this just killed that as an information channel as both the devices and the network are now compromised.
If an entire shipment was intercepted and modified, how many other pagers are out there? How many non-targeted persons are walking around with a bomb in their pocket?
There's also plenty of bystanders who are being impacted by an explosion happening in the pocket of the person next to them.
I don't think whoever approved this was worried about innocent people getting hurt.
And yet it took 5 hours for IDF to respond to Hamas breaching their border - where it only takes a maximum of 45 minutes via helicopter to get to any point along the Israel-Palestine border?
Is there any technology possible to help people more seriously see incongruences for what they are, technology to help prevent people from propaganda - or is that primarily simply a systems control issue - education system, information system, etc - that would be party to a censorship-suppression narrative control and distraction apparatus?
Hamas coordinated strikes against Israeli c4i to hinder the IDF response to the invasion. This is trivially verifiable. Not all of Hamas are barely-educated fighters capable of little more than being pointed at innocents and told to kill.
Im assuming you’re saying they were looking for a casus belli. They well might have, but surely the assailants knew this was a likely consequence. Why did they proceed to breach the border if they didn’t want to trigger a war?
These pagers were 100% a supply chain attack. Intercepted and modified with small explosives embedded in them or swapped the entire shipment out with ones with a small explosives in them.
There is no possibility these explosions are from battery overloads via an exploit or firmware hack.
>or firmware hack.
There's still the question of how the explosive capsule would have been triggered. It couldn't just explode at the first incoming call. There must be more to that.
The microcontrollers inside the pagers probably have a spare GPIO pin, so they'd just have to modify the software and attach the detonating electronics to that gpio pin.
Since i'm supposedly "posting too fast", to answer the post below:
> Just curious, is it possible to program the pins so that it triggers by wireless or satellite command? With that scale I don't think wireless is possible though.
Technically it is, but requires additional electronics and antennas. It's much easier to just use the existing pager network and trigger when some specific message (or pager code) is detected. Paging networks are simple to implement.
My best guess is explosively formed penetrator in the display.
I don’t think wholesale replacement of the pagers was likely to work for a number of reasons.
They had to go one step up the supply chain.
The EFP display could be set to trigger on a certain message, or even the clearing of a certain message, which in devices without said display would do nothing.
The display is most likely to be pointed at the user’s face, or opposed to their waistline (EFPs sort of fire both ways but in one axis.
The battery, if it were a cylinder as would be likely, would fire tangentially, likely not hitting much.
A prismatic battery would make a good place for an EFP but difficult to interface with and likely requires a second compromised component.
Might be a hardcoded date and time. Does the legit pager messaging network give the time? If not, continually powered digital clocks drift slowly.
Reuters is quoting experts, including lithium battery experts, saying that the explosions were inconsistent with an exploding battery:
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/what-we-know-so-fa...
Simple logic and science. Batteries do not cause forceful explosions like we've seen today. These pagers were intercepted and implanted with explosives (or entire load swapped with pre-made malicious ones) and then allowed to continue on to their destination. Thus I can say with 100% confidence that this was a supply chain attack.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/17/world/middleeast/israel-h...
In a surprise to no one except you
How do you judge that likely? It seems just as possible if not more that it was a single lot purchased by Hezbollah for Hezbollah.
I bet lots of people with that model of pager are now ripping them open to check for explosives. If we don't see pictures of unexploded ones, then I'd guess they were all triggered, and the only ones we might see are devices that were turned off at the time.
> make the device exagerte some existing functionality to a point where it caused a malfunction? Thoughts on this?
I'm actually astounded by the things that must have been in place to make this attack even plausible, let alone viable. At the same time, the ramifications are sobering. Here's where my head is:
- Hezbollah failed to inspect electronics that, if tampered with, could have lead to some kind of intel breach. That or the explosive modifications were indistinguishable from the real thing.
- Operatives knew what pager numbers were in use by Hezbollah, perhaps exclusively to the rest of the population.
From there I have three possible explanations for how this may have been executed:
1. Many shipments of such pagers bound for Hezbollah in Lebanon and other places in the region, were identified, intercepted, modified, and sent on their way with minimal delay. You probably don't get many opportunities like this (how often do you replace a pager?), so this is really quite a hat-trick.
2. Or: there are many more pagers out there with a very dangerous vulnerability on board, with only a special pager sequence that stands between the user and sudden death. This suggests simply infiltrating the manufacturer instead. This also has much more favorable lead times and can leverage the manufacturer's resources to that end.
3. Or: There's a pager manufacturer out there with gob-smackingly bad engineering and software on completely stock units, which operatives simply exploited to (sub)lethal effect.
You don't have to intercept a shipment and tamper at large scale with incredible speed if you're posing as the supplier.
That's what I believe happened. Specially likely if you consider that terrorist orgs are not exactly putting RFPs or doing large orders at legit vendors. That gives you the chance to pose as a helpful supplier that operates on the down low and accepts cash on delivery, etc.
Good point. I'm kind of a dumb-dumb when it comes to present-day pager tech. I haven't even seen one in decades.
Let me rephrase the question then: if any measure was made to target just the pagers that were in the hands of Hezbollah, how was that accomplished?
> We all remember the pagers running on cellular/2G networks
Who does? I'm not aware of pagers running on the GSM network. Maybe they existed, but I don't think they were ever widespread.
You're right. It existed and had a short span of life/fame in some countries but that is all. Most pagers were on their own protocol/frequency. the protocol seems to be mostly the same theses days: POCSAG
Many commenters here also assumed like I did it was some cellular/SIM devices but it wasn't that much widespread.
>I already wonder if this was anything that was planted in the devices perviously
That seems to be the case with almost complete certainty. They said it was a new batch of pagers that the targets/victims/whatever you choose to call them received in the last few months.
>The pagers that detonated were the latest model brought in by Hezbollah in recent months, three security sources said.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/dozens-hezbollah-m...
> If we try to do what we are best at here at HN, let’s focus the discussion on the technical aspects of it.
Technical? Yes it's interesting but you are missing the biggest part here: how do you convince such a huge organization to switch so many devices? This human engineering is the really interesting part here.
Hezbollah has said some time ago they were switching to pagers because Israel can get inside their cell phones.
If you’ve figured out how to get explosives into pagers, the next question is how do you get your enemy to buy a bunch of new pagers from you.
They have to want new pagers in a hurry.
So you just need to convince them that their phones are all already compromised.
Note that this does not require that their phones actually be compromised.
My hunch is that IL intelligence bought some 3,000 - 4,000 pagers of the same models, fixed them with explosives and trigger systems, and swapped them with the package sent to Hez in the middle of transport or (probably) in the Lebanon distribution center.
So they needed to know: which company manufactured those pagers; which models are sent to Hez; when they were in transport and arrived at the distribution center; which packages went to Hez operatives, and much more information.
BTW rumors says the pagers were manufactured by a Taiwanese company, not confirmed though but some of my friends were able to read from the pictures that show what was left of the pagers.
If the footage on Twitter is legit, then there was a small detonation, with a bang, not a burning battery with a 'whoosh' and flames. Which indicates that the internals of the pager had been replaced with something rather more explosive than a lithium battery.
Lithium ion batteries in devices are sandwiched layers enclosed in a kind of 'pouch', right? So what if you manufactured one of these that looked identical to the normal battery, but only had half a battery inside, and the rest of it was plastic explosive. Maybe put a tiny chip in there that, when a particular pattern of current draw happens, fires a detonator. Then, some firmware hack in the device proper that responds to some event and actuates that current draw pattern. It wouldn't even look suspicious if you opened it up.
That's an interesting idea, and it wouldn't even need a firmware hack... a real time clock circuit with a specific date/time to detonate would be simpler and easier to coordinate simultaneous detonation.
Pagers typically ran off regular AA batteries, not Li-Ion stuff.
Haaretz reports that the devices were purchased only recently - and heated up before detonating. [1]
So, that sounds like indicators for both, either a supply-chain attack or malware targeting the battery.
[1] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-09-17/ty-article-li...
How much stuff is there to fuck with in a standard, untampered-with pager? Seems unlikely this was pure cyber (and some novel battery hack). And if you need supply chain interception to carry out the attack in the first place, why wouldn't you insert explosives? There's a history of these kinds of attacks.
This is unlikely to be a shaped charge, there is not enough space. High explosives are inherently directional depending on the geometry of the explosive and point of detonation. As a practical matter of fitting explosives into a pager, I would expect most of the explosion to be directed perpendicular to the face of the pager in both directions. In almost all cases, carrying or using the pager would put the person directly on the main axis.
Yeah, everyone talking about shaped charges or (micro-) explosively formed penetrators seems to overlook the fact that, compared to just a regular bomb, they'd be less strictly effective for situations where you can't control the alignment of the charge to the target.
Don't overthink it - just a bit of RDX and a detonator does wonders.
Most high explosives need a high impact detonation source. You can literally set C4 on fire and it wont explode. It needs high temperature and pressure. And I do not think the 120F that a "hot" battery could get to reliably could trigger a high explosive in a way that wouldn't accidentally trigger beforehand. The middle east is a warm place.
Compared to Stuxnet it's also a first where this kind of attack was done at scale. Regardless of the particular target it's of course the question whether this is a desirable practice in cyber warfare. For such a new field there are very few ethical guidelines yet, like we do have for more conventional warfare.
Unlike stuxnet, this attack had a lot of non-hezbolah civilian casualties. It’s "targeted" in a sense, but not really much more targeted than a drive-by assassination attempt. Anybody close to these people could have sustained serious injury, and there are reports of children injured and dead. We’ll have to wait for details to emerge.
Politically, this is the sort of action that invites comparison to conventional terrorism. It also begs the question of why Hezbollah or other actors shouldn’t try a similar attack against civilian targets. It’s almost like a chemical or biological attack, which most countries shy away from because it’s so hard to defend against (a big part of why it’s illegal). No country can perfectly safeguard its supply chain from intentional sabotage.
I’m afraid that the entire world is a little bit less safe after this move. Maybe Israel is goading Hezbollah into all-out war, who knows, but this affects all of us.
For a non-infantry massed attack on a military asset, the ratio of military to civilian casualties here is probably going to end up being unprecedented in the history of modern warfare; this will probably end up being an extraordinarily surgical attack by any military standard. Civilians are routinely killed in targeted strikes, because targeted strikes are almost always conducted by air. This attack may end up being distinguished by how few civilians were harmed.
Neither Israel nor Hezbollah is mobilized for all-out war here. Hezbollah is depleted from its disastrous efforts in Syria; Israel is fully committed to combat operations in Gaza. The north of Israel has been evacuated for months because of indiscriminate rocket attacks from Hezbollah. Hezbollah is an arm of the IRGC, which is more or less at open war with Israel. If either side could have launched an all-out assault (or, I mean, a more conventional all-out assault than this one), they would have done so already.
> Unlike stuxnet, this attack had a lot of non-hezbolah civilian casualties. It’s "targeted" in a sense, but not really much more targeted than a drive-by assassination attempt.
I read the news in Arabic, there are credible reports of an 8 year old girl being killed in this attack. I haven't seen that yet in English language news. That is a horrible price to pay. But it is part of a calculated risk that, as per those same news sources, killed between 10 to 12 Hezbollah operatives and injured 2700 more.
That's a good summary of the dangers of normalizing the actions that previously were the domain of only terrorists. The world works because most countries and people rejected amoral results-based reasoning and considered such actions in the light of another dimension: morality. It's difficult to define, but there was some sort of consensus. How long those agreements, formal and simply normative, will last remains to be seen. I do not look forward to their further erosion.
Hezbollah already attacks civilians indiscriminately for one. Second, "won't someone think of the children" is a tired argument. Hate to be that guy - but maybe this will be a lesson on allowing these terrorists to roam your streets. Avoiding civilian death in a warzone is an impossibility. Limiting it is all you can do. Knowing that, this was an absolutely amazing job at target selection. Of all methods of target selection this is probably the most precise you can get with the exception of snipers, AGM-114-R9X, etc. The psychological damage from this attack alone is probably worth more than any other method. Hezbollah will be crippled at least temporarily and likely afraid to use any technology they don't control the supply chain for.
> which most countries shy away from because it’s so hard to defend against
This is not why. It's shied away from because it's extremely difficult to target effectively without causing mass unwanted causalities and the associated killing mechanism is considered cruel and unusual. "Being hard to defend against" is exactly something factored in with weapons. Why would I want to use a weapon that is easy to defend against? If that's the case, the US would march with clubs and bows, you know, "to make things fair".
You are assuming they didn't try, which is incorrect. Cyber attacks on water filtration plants attacks were done for example.
Completely disagree. I cannot think of a more successful, large scale, targeted attack in recent memory. The engineering behind this was incredible.
It was successful clearly, not disagreeing with that. So were Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My point was more that this is a truly significant line that has been crossed for the first time by a major military at this scale. People comparing this to isolated assassinations with booby trapped phones, or to wiretapping and other surveillance, are massively downplaying this.
My other thought is that these probably came from the Iranian military, and it’s quite possible the Iranian military puts explosives in them so they can remotely detonate one that falls into enemy hands. And that Isreal simply found out about this and managed to figure out how to activate that.
This is reaching. How would this mechanism even work? If the enemy has control of a communications device then (1) they've had it and you didn't know for some time and (2) they already know how it works. There's no benefit to putting a self-destruct mechanism into such a thing, since if you know it's compromised then you just stop messaging it.
The self-destruct is pointless, because you can't even verify that it was successful and you have no actual technology to protect (unlike say, US military drones which self-destruct to protect technological details of their construction - and the US would still prefer to commit a mission to bombing a crash site to be sure if they can).
Basically you answer your own problem: the most likely outcome of a self-destruct mechanism is that it goes off accidentally against your own forces, or gets exploited - while it would deliver no actual benefit to you.
Which is to say: when analyzing an adversaries likely actions you don't start by assuming they're stupid or irrational (which is different from whether or not their overall goals might be stupid or irrational).
Militaries around the world have robust networks to infiltrate supply chains for sabotage. It’s kind of a basic part of the whole intelligence covert and clandestine operations capabilities expected of a “first world” nation.
Israel is one of the better countries at doing this undetected so, no surprises here.
If it's basically a remotely controlled IED via a public communication network, then there's nothing technically interesting about that, really.
But the aspect of some supposedly civilized state staging a mass terror attack via a remotely controlled IEDs, putting suddenly thousands of people, many of them civilians (yes, Hezballah are also civilians, because they're a major political party in Lebanon) into hospital, killing ~10, critically infuring ~200, is way more interesting.
You can generate many questions about that aspect. Like the whole why on both strategic and tactical levels? How does this fit with the international law? Why are people kinda chill about this?
Re the response below: No proof of specific targeting of combatants, yet. No proof of any attempt to not affect bystanders, etc. Yet, there are videos of bombs exploding while people are shopping with children around, etc. Pretty much indiscriminate.
Definitely not battery burnings: https://t.me/hamza20300/293409 these are the scale/type of injuries that this caused. (Two children there just in this single scene in one hospital, so beware.)
No, a mass terror attack would indiscriminately target victims. This is almost entirely opposite -- an organization widely recognized as a terrorist group (1) is narrowly targeted.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_designated_terrorist_g...
Also because one would have to weigh the alternative.
Imagine Israel declared an old fashioned war against Lebanon as response to the missile strikes originated from its territory.
I think the number of civilian casualties of a conventional "legal" war would be much much higher than the collateral damage of this operation.
Now, does that make it "right"? To me war is horror and is to avoid at all cost. Is a smaller horror a cost one's willing to pay to avoid a bigger horror? Hard to say. But I think it's still important to at least try to see things in a broader context otherwise we may never understand why people on the ground make the choices they do.
>Hezballah are also civilians, because they're a major political party in Lebanon
That's an interesting take. Are you saying hamas are also civilians because they're the major political party in gaza?
I would argue that Hamas has gone from being an organised terrorist group to being an idea.
Gaza has a very young population growing up with the current war, some (not all) will be radicalized by what they experienced growing up.
The more interesting question is whether any sort of remote-detonate capability was involved, or this was just timed explosives.
If you look at something like this [1], then the obvious way to do this is to replace one of the NiMH batteries with a lithium cell providing the full output voltage, and replace the other cell with the explosive payload.
A basic timer set them off, and installation would be straightforward. You could probably even arrange this to not be distinguishable on X-Ray by playing with the structure of the explosive device so it would look like a battery.
Getting a little fancier, setting your timer up so the pager "waits for a page" by current draw (from say, the buzzer motor) would be a way to try and ensure the user was holding it near their face before it went off.
What's missing in the current reporting is whether this was simultaneous, keyed to a page, or what have you.
[1] https://store.jtech.com/jtech-guestcall-pager-nimh-battery-5...
The implications of weaponising a lithium battery, which seems like what was done, are potentially really significant.
Lithium batteries are everywhere, most of them significantly larger than the one in a small pager. This includes secure environments like military/intelligence facilities and aircraft.
Proof that a lithium battery pack can be weaponised as a bomb, in a way that avoids easy detection, should be a significant concern to anyone who tries to maintain the security of those spaces.
For manufactured cells, integrated safety devices would likely preclude such a fault.
People say they have seen cells explode, but don't realize those are probably highly engineered failure modes (the cells are/need to be specifically designed not to explode).
It's why people are burned by consumer product battery fires, and die from fire, but I think death from explosion of consumer products is rarer.
Having seen some of the aftermath I find it extremely hard to believe this was the result of overloading batteries. It looks like small grenades exploded in their hands. If lithium batteries can indeed explode like this I would suspect no one would ever carry one again after this. They should certainly be illegal to have on planes for example.
There is no way an unaltered pager has enough potential to explode in any way that could be harmful using a software-based exploit. Unless somehow the BMS (even if there was one) allowed you to short the battery with software, which seems really stupid to design into such a system.
I suspect supply-chain attack (probably started some time ago), combined with a pager signal software hack.
I really hope that they didn't figure out a way to make unmodified kit explode, because it would only be a matter of time, before our devices were blowing up everywhere, as folks do it for the lulz.
I agree on both points and it's worth noting the cell phone in everyone's pocket has a lot more battery in it than a pager does.
IF this was truly done to unmodified pagers, then we ALL probably need to reconsider how we use and carry our phones and what the mAh rating on our batteries implies in the context of a similar attack.
> let’s focus the discussion on the technical aspects of it.
The headline chosen here is already biased: "Dozens of _Hezbollah members_ [..]"
Anyone following this closely can see that plenty other title choices could be used. There are headlines that would be credibly neutral, headlines that favor the IDF, and headlines that favor Hezbollah. HN is currently choosing to go with a non-neutral, non-technical headline for this story. Maybe we should make the headline neutral as well before telling the commenters to focus solely on the technicals?
If you don't understand what I'm referring to, look at some of the downvoted and hidden comments here.
Honestly struggling to comprehend how this one isn't neutral.
As far as we know this was a supply-chain attack specifically on military pagers actively used by Hezbollah, and (right now) it looks like most injured are in fact Hezbollah members (which makes sense, since no one else has any reason to carry such a pager). (With some sad and unfortunate exceptions.)
After I posted my comment the title was updated to be a little bit more neutral.
The previous headline was emphasizing a little too strongly the assumption that this attack was against Hezbollah only, and as you mention there are "exceptions", meaning, civilians and non-militants (including children) were killed and injured.
EDIT: in other words, the headline is/was written with the assumption that whoever was attacked was a member of Hezbollah, but this isn't true.
When half the official death toll are children and medical staff, calling this an attack on "Hezbollah" is a clear form of IDF-leaning bias: https://x.com/AssalRad/status/1836428722381164935
we could also talk about the technical aspects of the nazi gas chambers, but maybe its only human if first we condemn this for what it is, a war crime. i for one am sick of the normalization of it
I wonder what Israel did to ensure that only legitimate targets were harmed by the sabotaged pagers.
Would we be surprised if the answer is “nothing”.
Of course we can read anything we want from the silence, as it’s unlike we’re getting any details about it. Anything in the range of “of course they did, we’re talking about a civilized country” to “of course they didn’t, how could they”.
These pagers were distributed only to Hezbollah members, these were not just standard pagers anyone could buy.
Do you have a reference for that? And does it explain how Israel's assassins were sure none of the pagers weren't resold, nor given away, nor that someone's kid was playing with it?
Hezbollah also has a massive social services wing, operating hospitals, schools, etc. I'd keep that in mind when hitching my wagon to this line of thinking.
Even though I personally doubt this statement, care to explain how that would possibly be enough? If an explosion happens, everyone in range is hit.
you realize they exploded, right? potentially as someone's child was nearby. or playing with it. or in the middle of a grocery story.
So you are saying that if hezbollah exploded weapons on off-duty military walking around in malls and hospitals in the US it would not be terrorism? Because that's exactly what happened here.
A bunch of explosives strapped to pagers wouldn't have succeeded in the way this attack did; it'd have been way too obvious. It'll be interesting to find out (if we ever do) how they modified the pagers to hide the payload.
October 7th was obviously far worse. But I don't think people would agree that police should stoop to same levels of criminals.
It wouldn't be considered a success if police stopped a bank robbery by killing bystanders.
What is following October 7th (so far, today included) is far worse. And worst of all, it won't be over anytime soon.
No. October 7th made me sympathize with Israel. What followed that made defending Israel impossible.
It’s not quantum mechanics. They put bombs inside pagers and pressed a button.
It seems somewhat plausible that Israel somehow managed to sabotage a pallet of pagers they knew were going to be distributed to people involved terrorism. If so the number of bystanders injured might be relatively low and the number of legitimate targets injured or killed could be quite high.
Having said that it also seems quite plausible that Israel just knew that some particular brand of pagers in some region of Lebanon was used by their targets, and so they just sabotaged thousands of them in the vague hope that they would get a hit.
I suspect we will never get enough info about how this attack was carried out to know.
> Sure, let's look at processes, outcomes and efficiencies. So far we have 1 dead 10-year old girl and some other civilians.
Unreliable number of terrorists aside, by more than a few reports the Lebanese ambassador to Iran [1]... not good looks for a government constantly claiming to have no relationship with Hezbollah.
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/irans-ambassador-lebanon-injured-...
Maybe future iterations of this attack will include facial recognition to determine user age > ~18?
I'm among those who often despairs that HN cannot address trenchant political issues, or aspects of stories. I really wish it could do better.
That said, if you do want to discuss those issues, the best way is to do so with an extreme awareness of HN's comment guidelines and provide a highly constructive example for others to follow. Complaining about others generally doesn't have that effect. Responding to complaints of others, even constructively, is at best marginally effective as well, of course.
I'll be the first to admit that the politics of the Middle East is exceedingly complex, most hats are at best grey, and I find myself often critical, occasionally impressed and supportive of, various parties.
One factor which might help is distinguishing direct beligerants and forces (regular or irregular) and political factions on the one hand from the civilian populations at large on the other (both sides face a high degree of risk, whether as collateral damage or as direct targets).
I'd also strongly urge all to downvote and flag clear agitation and of course nationalistic flamewars, as dang so very often admonishes: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>.
Also if I can make a late addition: vouch for comments which you believe may have been unfairly flagged or killed. That also happens on Highly Contentious Discussions.
AFAIU mods see flags and vouches and will occasionally step in. Their bandwidth is limited however.
(I've emailed dang over this moderation issue, and in the case of this specific story. The mods do what they can.)
Nobody is ignoring anything - this is just the wrong place for discussion. The HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) clearly state that politics and flamewars are off-topic, and that HN is for intellectual curiosity. Moral outrage and ideological warfare are categorically inappropriate for HN.
As the poster correctly points out, "Keeping politics out is the only way to keep this platform sane." - these guidelines are why HN hasn't degenerated into Reddit.
If you can't respect the guidelines, you shouldn't comment.
"The New York Times reported that Israel hid explosive material in the Taiwan-made Gold Apollo pagers before they were imported to Lebanon, citing American and other officials briefed on the operation. The material was implanted next to the battery with a switch that could be triggered remotely to detonate."
Wild