Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon
(reuters.com)1064 points by logicchains 3 days ago
1064 points by logicchains 3 days ago
> You have to hand it to them -- it's a clever strategy with minimal casualties outside of your enemy
I agree it’s clever, but there are reports now of thousands wounded. Feels like a lot of collateral risk, if these people who were targeted were out and about (grocery shopping, bank, etc.)
I have no doubt that innocent civilians have been injured. But it's also worth noting that there are thousands of Hezbollah members, so the number alone doesn't necessarily tell us much about the number of civilians injured. (Similar to the casualty figures that come out of Gaza.)
I hate the idea of any innocent civilian being injured. But it might also be instructive to consider the alternative: if Israel wanted to achieve similar results via a conventional war against Hezbollah, it seems virtually guaranteed that far more innocent people would have been injured and killed—not to mention the Israeli civilians on the other side, whose lives also matter.
> if Israel wanted to achieve similar results via a conventional war against Hezbollah, it seems virtually guaranteed that far more innocent people would have been injured and killed
"It's OK that Israel causes excessive amounts of civilian casualties, because in the alternative scenario Israel would also cause excessive amounts of civilian casualties"
Israel is definitely at war with Hezbollah.
Hezbollah is of course not a country (though they're a proxy for Iran), but they occupy parts of Lebanon, so you can't attack them without attacking Lebanon.
I wonder if people are unaware that Hezbollah and Israel have been shooting rockets at each other for months. There are roughly 1000 deaths in the conflict and hundreds of thousands of civilians evacuated. If we’re talking about harms to civilians, this incident is probably small compared to the war overall.
These are Hezbollah pagers and Hezbollah only exists to terrorize Israel and it is their sole purpose. Of course there is still a danger of collateral risk, but I don't think it can get much more targeted.
"Hezbollah only exists to terrorise Israel and it is their sole purpose." This is a very curious take, what makes you think a group of hundreds of thousands of people, investing so much time, efforts and resources, exposing themselves and their loved ones to fatal risks just to terrorise Israel?
Looks like Lebanese civilians have indeed been injured/maimed; but it appears cool to some since it is an "impressive supply-chain hack", so let's leave it at that and not call it terrorism.
You could've labeled it terrorism had Lebanon and Israel weren't at war with each other over the past 12 months, and had the people carrying those devices were random uninvolved civilians.
If you were to consider the fact that Hezbollah has been shelling Israeli cities and civilians on a daily basis for the past 12 months (killing many, also children, and driving hundreds of thousands of people out of their homes), with the UN peacekeeping force failing to keep Hezbollah north of the Litani river - then perhaps you would understand that this is likely as close as you can get to a "precision strike" on an enemy you're at war with.
This may in-fact be the most precise military strike on an enemy paramilitary group in the history of modern warfare.
You either have a very unrealistic idea of what a war actually looks like (0% civilians casualties or injuries), or an agenda.
> Hack the backend server, send a coordinated page to all the pagers at the same time.
You likely don’t even need to hack anything if you coordinate based on time. A built in clock would eliminate the need for any external signal and work in a, no pun intended, dead zone.
If the pager itself is hacked, the software could also pretend to receive a page a moment before detonation to maximize the chance the device is held with the receiver in the open.
It most likely just received a code message that triggered the device.
if you physically control the pager I don't even think it's called hacking anymore. you can change the hardware and software willy nilly. put an extra SIM that you control in there, and call it. put a radio receiver. a timer. heck, a dog whistle audio detector, you blow it and they blow up. infinite possibilities.
Pagers don't have SIMs, they are simply programmed with a "Cap Code" which is basically the address of the pager.
Pagers can be programmed with multiple cap codes, and can function differently based on which cap code address receives a message. For instance, a single cap code could be programmed to just vibrate the pager, vs an audible alert.
Pagers are sent out via very high power distributed transmitters as one way transmissions simulcasted transmissions.
The format is typically:
[CAP CODE] - Message
That's literally it.
I mean they probably did hack to some degree the default software/hardware in the pager to get it to do something nonstandard. I doubt they have access to the full source code and build stack of the OG pager, so even just modifying the software running on it to do something different is indeed a hack.
That doesn't follow. You could have a timer that causes the pager to vibrate as if it had received a message or an alarm had rung. That would make the attack simpler, in that one wouldn't also have to compromise (or risk leaving traces in) the phone system to activate thousands of pagers.
It could be, but it would be very risky. These pagers would have been distributed months in advance. How could you possibly know the perfect time to set them off?
And since pagers are already receiving remote messages, it doesn't make sense to do it any other way.
> You have to hand it to them
Given the context and peculiar choice of words, this reminds me of a classic @dril tweet
>You've just injured and identified most of your enemies, incapacitated them, completely broken their communication network and effectively given you weeks of disarray to do whatever you want to further disrupt them.
And affected their recruitment. Because of how pagers are worn, a significant number of injuries are going to be genital injuries.
Given, that your primary recruits are young men, that is important.
In that demographic, the young men may actually fear non-lethal genital injuries more than they actually fear death.
> minimal casualties
We'll see about that. Some of the footage indicates the targets were all just out and about in public. I think it's likely there will be collateral damage. I assume it didn't happen since it's not being reported, but what if one of them was on a plane?
FWIW, AP is reporting over 2800 injured, 200 seriously, with only 8 dead.
Seeing some video from one of the hospitals, there's a lot of variety to the injuries. It looks like some people were looking at the pager when it exploded (injury to face and hand), some were wearing it on hip, some in pocket, some probably in an across-the-chest fanny pack.
It would seem this attack has managed to kill some, maim many, tag all, terrorize, and disrupt.
The shell company isn't a strict requirement, and I'd wager less likely. Infiltrating the delivery process would be easier and would instead require knowing about the pager purchase and being able to swap the actual package for an alternative package. Theoretically all of this is possible with some data interception to discover the pager order, a team to construct the exploding pagers, a person to deliver the exploding pagers, and a person to intercept the actual pagers (which could be the same person delivering the exploding pagers).
> Hack the backend server, send a coordinated page to all the pagers at the same time.
I worked on these before and I don't think you'd need to hack anything at all to send a page. Its just a broadcast. Especially if you had access to the receiver as they seem to have had, I can't imagine they compromised the actual Hezbollah transmission tower.
Yeah I mean it's basically just like mass-sending a spam text, no? All they need to know is the phone numbers of the pagers. Or even just the number range from which the pager numbers were assigned, and then spam the entire range. Spammers have simple enough software that can do all this; it doesn't seem like a sticking point for Mossad.
It Depends... Sure you could spam the pager system triggering them one by one, but because how pagers work you could trigger them all at the same time.
Pagers are basically just a receiver of a One-to-Many network. A pager will receive all pages being broadcast as they are "listen only" devices. As the pagers don't talk back to the service provider the SP doesn't know which transmitter to use, so the SP will broadcast the pages out across their whole network. The circuity/software of the pager will then filter out only the messages intended for that pager out of all the pages it receives. To reach pagers out of range/switched off the SP would just repeat the page for a period of time.
(note: for message privacy you can add encryption to the message but back in the day that didn't happen, and you could just pull clear text out of the air.)
This "receiver only" style of device allowed pagers to be low power and would run for a very long time on a single AAA battery (or even on a watch battery, because they built a pager into a watch! The Timex Beepwear... Oh I so wanted one as a kid!). But it has the benefit that because they are one-way/"listen only" you can't track them because they are not communicating back to the mothership! It would be like trying to track an AM/FM radio in a car.
If you are adding an "add-on board" to the device, you could tap the receiver of the pager and do your own decoding of the pages. So you could have the add-on board trigger on a "certain message for this pager only" but you could also trigger on "a certain message sent to pager serial 1234567890".
If you knew the phone number assigned to the pager with the serial 1234567890 (because you just so happened to have paid for service for that pager by what ever clandestine means you wanted) you could trigger them all with a single phone call from a public phone or a disposable cell phone to a pager not even associated to the target group of devices.
EDIT: Just a note to say 2 way pagers do exist, this type of pager allows the pager to confirm receipt of a page and even send their own pages to other pagers, but I would suspect that the type of pager being used in this case is the one-way type pager because its reported they were using them because they are harder to track.
FWIW, Hezbollah has thousands of members.
From Wikipedia [1]:
> Hezbollah does not reveal its armed strength. The Dubai-based Gulf Research Centre estimated in 2006 that Hezbollah's armed wing comprises 1,000 full-time Hezbollah members, along with a further 6,000–10,000 volunteers.[200] According to the Iranian Fars News Agency, Hezbollah has up to 65,000 fighters.[201] In October 2023, Al Jazeera cited Hezbollah expert Nicholas Blanford as estimating that Hezbollah has at least 60,000 fighters, including full-time and reservists, and that it had increased its stockpile of missiles from 14,000 in 2006 to about 150,000.
And this is just the armed portion.
Israel probably knows from the number of pagers ordered (and probably from spying on their pages' contents, since if you're going to mount this sophisticated a supply-chain attack to plant bombs in a device, you might as well also plant spyware) just how many active members Hezbollah has [or had, since many of them are now inactive members].
Call it whatever you like, I don't care - but what do you do when the other side is out to wipe your country completely and has zero regard for any conventions of war?
Hezbollah has willingly waged a war on Israel 12 months ago. The Lebanese government is complicit in not managing to hold Hezbollah back, and so do the UN peacekeeping forces which have been unable to implement resolution 1701. There have been countless of attempts at diplomacy with Hezbollah and Lebanon during this time, but nothing worked. So what would you do in this case?
If my best idea was setting off thousands of explosions in public places, I think maybe I'd keep brainstorming.
Well, I'm asking again, what is your best idea then?
Face it - you'd just sit there and get slaughtered, right? Contemplating your morals and war conventions until every last citizen of your country has been butchered? Waiting for some imaginary court and international peacekeeping forces to come and help you, only to die waiting?
Those were thousands of targeted explosions, by the way. There are videos of bystanders, standing in close proximity to the explosions themselves and not getting hurt. Why are you being so flippant?
> but what do you do when the other side is out to wipe your country completely and has zero regard for any conventions of war?
Genocide, clearly. Should not. But that is what is happening.
"You ignore rules so I will too" is the logic of the playground, not civilised people.
Another example of why outsourcing manufacturing is a national security concern, and how the absolute free market can lead "winners" to harm themselves by chasing "success" at all costs.
Arguably, it's off-topic, though I agree with the point. Lebanon has been struck by poverty, and as a result, they might have far fewer choices when it comes to providers in general. Manufacturing within Lebanon or trading with neighboring countries might not be affordable for them.
It’s important to take a step back before generalizing an economic or political statement that may not be applicable in other contexts. There are little chances that the supply chain in Lebanon is in the same state as Europe countries' ones, for instance. Thus, this is not another example.
Just because something is not affordable doesn't mean its affordable alternative is a viable option, especially when information asymmetries caused by foreign manufacture obscure plastic explosives in the devices or whatever triggered these.
It is the same attitude. "Outsourcing is the only way we can be competitive" / "Buying these cheap pagers is the only way we can afford it"
Do you think manufacturing pagers in Lebanon is a viable alternative?
The idea of the majority of manufacturing being external to a country is a little under 100 years old, yet people talk as if it is unthinkable.
Unthinkable, or at least not feasible, in the sense of supporting the current level of technological advancement and average quality of life in many countries.
lebanon has an economy that's currently in shambles, and its never been known for its productive capacity. even if they wanted to start making simple comms devices it might rely on infrastructure that they can't invest in, and take tech/capital they have not accumulated
it would be more realistic for them to receive it from the iran but there might be political hurdles to this and it would end up costing the iranians as hezbollah can't be expected to pay much for it
100 years ago there were no pagers or mobile phones I guess, or any other kind of modern advanced tech.
Undoubtedly, this attack has proven that it certainly is, at whatever cost.
The initial objection was the lack of sufficient size or institutional robustness for indigenous manufacturing capacity. I addressed that.
The question of the integrity and trustworthiness of a collective bloc structure had occurred. It's another factor, and of course poses its own challenges. Then again, the Western bloc, most capable of the set, seems to have persistent issues along those lines already. Several of Israeli origin, as it happens. (Though of course not solely.)
Doesn't matter, they could have intercepted a shipment and done the same thing
This almost reads like science fiction, what an incredible attack from a technical POV. A couple of thoughts:
1. The beepers were compromised and have been for a long time. I don't know how easy it is to exfiltrate data from them if they are receive-only devices. At any rate it shows that Israel is capable of intercepting and manipulating low-tech comms. What's left for Hezbollah to use?
2. The next step is to hack into hospital record systems and get a list of all patients admitted today.
> 1. The beepers were compromised and have been for a long time.
Where did you see this? Sources are saying that Hezbollah recently upgraded their pagers with the American University of Beirut on August 29:
https://x.com/gazanotice/status/1836082218805891360
Why would Israel have the ability to wipe out a good chunk of Hezbollah for years and just sat on it until now?
They are claiming 2750 injuries:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/9/17/dozens-of-hezbollah...
> Hezbollah recently upgraded their pagers with the American University of Beirut
Please do not conflate Hezbollah and AUB.
The claim is that AUB medical school pagers were replaced a week or so ago. This is either pure coincidence, false or fake news to imply that AUB has Israeli operatives, or indeed that the pagers used were compromised and that the USA was aware of the impending attack and did not want to harm AUB medical staff - who probably are mostly not connected with Hezbollah.
Further reading: https://x.com/AUBMC_Official/status/1836086847153320148
The reason for using pagers instead of phones is that they are receivers only, they do not transmit, therefore they cannot be localized.
So no data exfiltration was possible using the pagers. The only purpose of the modified pagers was to maim or kill their possessors, by detonating all of them simultaneously.
So they missed incapacitating a hospital, which changed to smart phones. Are you sure it was Mossad?
This makes an assumption that Israel cares about making it's list of targets as small as possible. Israel has shown over and over again that it is happy casting a very wide net when labelling people as legitimate targets, using fuzzy machine learning to label large numbers of people without any direct evidence. Israel also has a higher acceptance of the deaths of innocents than any other western aligned & supplied nation, literally happy if dozens or more civilians are killed in order to kill one member of Hamas or Hezbollah. They or their proxies then blame their opponents for the deaths of innocents, ignoring that the accepted rules of war are that civilian deaths should be minimized.
For sources, search for "Israel Lavender system" and pick your media source of choice.
Unfortunately innocent people were also harmed, don’t think a straight list will serve anyone
Honestly I doubt Israel/Mossad doesn’t know who is in Hezbollah, i think this is more of a direct attack (obviously) mixed with scare/terror benefit
I think the value is in knowing the network and cross-reference against it. Innocent bystanders or people who happened to just go to the hospital today will probably fall off during this process. Not to mention that you can filter out by the type of injury to get a more accurate list.
Its quite simple to filter out Hesbolah from those injured. If it is fighting age male, then he is Hesbloah.
Yikes the "list of patients" thing is scariest part of all of this: if they feed that into some monster AI that creates new targets... I can only imagine the diminishing accuracy of who is really deserving of being targets
But that is exactly what modern AI-era big data warfare would look like. By its nature, and by choice, less accuracy / more innocent targets, but oh well
I heard a story according to which a similar scheme was used in the Algerian war of independence, so these is more retro than scifi. Radio sets were left by the French military for the Algerians to grab. The explosive was hidden in the frame and components, and the trigger was a specific audio frequency. The device looked exactly like a stock military radio set if you disassembled it. So it's not that scifi.
I am for some reason reminded of this classic scene from The Wire [1] where a detective sells a trove of preemptively wiretapped burner cell phones to a drug organization
Dark Wire by Joseph Cox came out this earlier in the summer that covers the 2010s version of this with an Android phone company being stood up as a replacement for Blackberries
The Australian Federal Police and the US FBI launched a similar attack a few years ago where they sold a few thousand phones to underworld figures. The phones had an apparently encrypted and hidden chat app pre-installed on them which was feeding all the messages and data to the police.[0]
[0]: https://www.afp.gov.au/about-us/history/unique-stories/opera...
Also related, but rather a malware attack: Europol/French Police compromising all Encrochat phones in 2020.
For those who don't know, "EncroChat was a Europe-based communications network and service provider that offered modified smartphones allowing encrypted communication among subscribers. It was used primarily by organized crime members to plan criminal activities."
That's an impressive supply-chain hack. Spend years showing how insecure modern telecom devices are and scare your enemy into going old-school, receive-only. Set up a shell company to sell pagers to your enemy's shell company. Give them devices implanted with a small explosive charge pointed inward, knowing they will be worn around the waist most of the time.
Hack the backend server, send a coordinated page to all the pagers at the same time. You've just injured and identified most of your enemies, incapacitated them, completely broken their communication network and effectively given you weeks of disarray to do whatever you want to further disrupt them.
You have to hand it to them -- it's a clever strategy with minimal casualties outside of your enemy. This is a Stuxnet-level hack that we'll probably never fully understand.