Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon
(reuters.com)1064 points by logicchains 3 days ago
1064 points by logicchains 3 days ago
> More than 1,000 people, including Hezbollah fighters and medics
The CNN title implies that only Hezbollah members were targeted were reality seems different. It's crazy a country is capable of doing a "special security operation" on civilians of another country without any international sanctions.
If it was targeting pagers used for Hezbollah's internal communication then it would be justified, no?
If it was targeting pagers used for Hezbollah's military wing then yeah, kind of justified. But Hezbollah is bigger than that, and seems this attack targeted the whole organization, not just the one that is commonly designed a terrorist organization.
I guess for an American comparison it's a bit like attacking all republicans for the actions of the Proud Boys or any other militia.
> it would be justified, no?
It's never justified to trigger explosives when you have no idea where said explosives are.
What if the dude if hugging is kid/wife/mom ?
What if he's picking up his kids from school, visiting the local food market, &c.
What if he's driving and end up crashing in a bunch of people walking on the sidewalk
Let’s assume you accurately determine which thousand pagers are going to which people, and that you accurately determine which thousand are Evil Hezbollah Members and definitely not someone’s cousin or whatever.
Regardless of these (tenuous) assumptions, if you detonate a thousand small bombs, it seems fair to also assume that some of them might not be on the bodies of their intended targets, but rather outside on the counter by the shower or over by the car keys or something.
So no, I’d say this is a pretty tough sort of operation to justify.
Would it be moral to make people who work in israeli army explode even when not in uniform?
Hezbollah is a political organization with a paramilitary wing. The wing is designated as a terrorist group in many countries, the organization as a whole is designated as a terrorist group by not as many countries. France or EU as a whole, for example, consider Hezbollah a political organization and only the paramilitary arm as the terrorist group.
Seems like a harbrining of war, if the pager network was compromised, thus burns the compromised network and also harms a lot of people.
Most major newspapers in Israel are saying that Netanyahu wants an invasion of Southern Lebanon:
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/bje3pjv60
https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/article-820399
https://www.timesofisrael.com/top-general-said-pushing-for-g...
Lebanon has been shooting rockets at Israel for a while now. They already are at war. It's just Israel is very strategic about its steps.
> Lebanon has been shooting rockets at Israel for a while now.
Correction: Israel and Lebanon have been firing across the border for a while. More Israeli attacks on Lebanon than the other way around and more Lebanese dead too.
Details:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/6/27/mapping-7400-cross-...
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/800/cpsprodpb/bfa9/live/320f24...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cv2gj544x65o
And lots more details here:
"Between 21 October 2023 and 20 February 2024 the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) recorded an estimated 7,948 incidents of artillery fire from the south of the Blue Line (from Israel to Lebanon) and 978 incidents of artillery fire from the north side (from Lebanon to Israel)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel–Hezbollah_conflict_(202...
The question is who started shooting rockets at the territory of the other. I would be surprised if it was Israel.
Per that wikipedia entry this current conflict began with an attack on Israel. Hezbollah attacked a much more powerful enemy so a statement that stops at "they've both been doing it" does not accurately capture the casus belli:
"Israel and <strikethrough>Lebanon</strikethrough> Hezbollah have been firing across the border since an October 8th strike against Israel in 2023..." etc.
That is a more complete & accurate description.
Artillery != rockets. And importantly artillery from Israel is much more targeted and predictable than unguided rockets. Hezbollah has launched about 14k rockets as of late June: https://www.newsweek.com/chart-shows-increae-hezbollah-rocke...
Just on its face, with Hezbollah launching sometimes hundreds of rockets per day, didn’t you suspect what you posted was misleading?
> if the pager network was compromised, thus burns the compromised network
I wouldn't necessarily call this type of attack a network compromise. All it takes is knowing the target phone numbers and sending a specific message, which is a paging network working exactly as designed. Phone detonated bombs have been a thing for a long time too.
Calling it a hardware supply chain attack seems more accurate.
And you thought "Key Escrow" or "Chat Control" was bad!
Future maximum-security states may just require every mobile phone to have an explosive charge pre-installed, with the detonation-codes only available to the authorities, of course.
Then when they detect a device in active use by a [terrorist|child-pornographer|subversive|tax-evader], ka-blewie! Problem solved at the press of a button.
See also: 'Black Mirror' s3e6, 'Hated in the Nation'
Stanislav Lem wrote a short story about a tyrant that made his subjects wear highly enriched uranium earmuffs so that if more than two of them got together they would assemble a critical mass.
Italo Calvino wrote a short story about politicians having to sacrifice parts of their bodies in order to hold positions of power, like you'd have to have a hand chopped off to serve one term, a leg to serve another, and so on.
Cookie cutters:
Maybe a dumb question, but I wonder if this was a software attack or IL was able to modify the physical pagers that are issued during Hezbollah onboarding. If this was a pure software attack, are only pagers susceptible? Or are we unknowingly carrying around bombs in our pocket, waiting for the counterattack?
There are CCTV videos purported to show some of the explosions: https://x.com/warfareanalysis/status/1836041245996584983
It is indeed not the kind of explosion I would expect to see from lithium ion. (Those usually are a lot more flame-y at least the ones I have seen so far.). But I'm not an expert.
There's no way the little battery in a pager has enough energy to do this. This is a 'supply chain attack' by the Israelis. An ingenious one at that.
NB: that's probably backwards. Batteries contain a lot of energy, they just don't release it particularly quickly.
Most explosives have relatively low energy density, however the energy they have is released far faster than with conventional fuels. By unit mass, TNT (or other comparable explosives such as C4, RDX, etc.) have about 1/10th the energy as liquid petroleum fuels (petrol, diesel, kerosene).
Though again most battery technologies also have fairly low energy densities. But those are probably roughly comparable with most mainstream explosives.
TNT has an energy density of 4.184 MJ/kg.
A LiON battery: 0.36–0.875 MJ/kg.
Motorola pagers (a widely used type) seem to typically take a 3.5V 500mAh battery, which if I'm doing my conversions correctly (mAh * V * 3.6) works out to about 23 kilojoule. That would be the energy equivalent of ~5g TNT. A light charge, but one you wouldn't want going off on your hip.
(Note: I've corrected an off-by-an-order-of-1,000 error above, earlier read 23 MJ / 180g TNT. As I said, I'm not entirely certain of my calculations, which are using the Wikipedia energy densities noted and GNU Units.)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density>
Again, batteries won't explode as footage of the presumed Israeli attack on Hezbolla members shows. But they do contain appreciable energy. It would more likely burn rapidly at worst case.
> Motorola pagers (a widely used type) seem to typically take a 3.5V 500mAh battery, which if I'm doing my conversions correctly (mAh * V * 3.6) works out to about 23 MJ.
Batteries should really quote energy, not charge, for this reason. The voltage is not a constant.
But something’s wrong with your math. Even assuming a constant 3.5V, that’s 1.75Wh, and 1Wh is 3600J, so that’s 6300J.
23MJ would drive a car a respectable distance :)
Gasoline has 45 MJ/kg for comparison
so it is a ten times that of TNT. Source: https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/ArthurGolnik.shtml
Why waste it on a clever show instead of stalking their owners silently?
They’re likely already stalking their owners via software exploits on their phones
Assuming a lithium battery and control over the firmware+power draw, couldn't you theoretically make the battery output more charge than safe, leading to at least overheating and maybe more?
I also find it unlikely this was just a remote attack rather than supply chain, but with little to no details we can only assume for now.
Yes, but compare a phone's much larger lithium battery exploding: https://youtu.be/8nz5ijXcckI?si=jpZOWIs3BIQTvVt2&t=31
With a Hezbollah pager exploding: https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1836037485492629605
Not really. This is about the worst your can do with a lithium battery in practice https://youtu.be/oieH2wwDGzo and that's a proper short in something way bigger than a pager. They don't explode like these were reported to.
If you put yourself in the position of Hezbollah's IT chief, you get a different picture than this question assumes.
Let's assume you're somewhat competent and aware of supply chain vulnerabilities.
Let's also assume that pagers are not that popular anymore, and you insist on a pager that's completely passive. It can't emit any signals at all, or the Mossad would track it.
So you probably find some supplier of gear to the Iranians and other non-Western countries, and give them your specifications. That supplier is reliable, you think. It probably listens to a signal that Hez and only Hez transmits. It's Security By Obscurity, the choice of naive buyers everywhere.
You certainly don't buy anything off the shelf. Well, we know what's wrong with Security By Obscurity: Mossad only has to decipher one secret.
> The affected pagers were from a new shipment that Hezbollah had received in recent days, according to sources familiar with the matter cited by the Wall Street Journal.
Presumably someone, likely Israel, intercepted them before they got to Hezbollah and added an explosive payload that could be remotely triggered.
Hard to see how a remote exploit could detonate the battery, which was my initial thought.
Honestly just slept on the thing and the story seems even more surreal to me now.
How come they needed to replace their pagers AT ONCE recently? Has there been some great breakthrough in pager technology? I have a 5 year old phone and no desire to replace it for at least a couple years more.
How come everyone had the EXACT same model? Even if the Israelis didn't compromise it, even the most incompetent intelligence agency would notice somebody ordering thousands of an item with an usual order count of zero.
Anyone with a very basic knowledge of supply chain attacks knows you don't buy just one kind of item. If they bought fifty different kinds of pagers, this attack would've been impossible.
I'm sure even in benign cases, placing an order of thousands of items on some niche product causes a lead time of months/weeks. Never mind that the Israelis had to painstakingly modify every single one under the cloak of secrecy. Didn't that raise any flags?
And after they did order thousands of the same item, they didn't bother opening up even a single one?
Honestly I don't think incompetence could explain this, I'm 99% sure Hezbollah is compromised at a high level.
> How come they needed to replace their pagers AT ONCE recently?
Hezbollah recently switched to using only pagers for communication, because they were worried about Israel hacking their phones. It's likely they all bought pagers at the same time because of that, because I doubt any of them would have owned pagers already
I agree with all of your questions. But covert organizations fall victims for this type of vulnerability all the time. Operation Trojan Shield and the ANOM network is one example. Operation Firewall and the ShadowCrew takedown was another. I believe LulzSec was taken down by bad opsec in the internal IRC channel as well. Bin Laden wasn't able to mix up his use of couriers and locations enough to stay hidden forever. It's easy for us to see the mistakes and point out that the criminals should have been more diligent or mixed up their operations more, but that would take more effort than anyone can consistently give over time.
Operational security is really hard and requires constant dedication which most organizations can't keep up over time. Eventually the most professional organizations will slip up and make some of the mistakes you point out above. It's very likely that someone has spies or informants inside organizations such as Hizbollah and Hamas. But this can also have been a lapse in standard operations that was finally detected and exploited by Mossad after actively watching for a long time.
From a legal perspective, are there any regulations on these kinds of attacks? Meaning, are they allowed? Are they considered a war crime or maybe this is still a gray area?
It's not that there is a list of approved ways to attack your enemy. Inventing new ways to take enemy by surprise is absolutely a part of warfare. What's important from legal perspective is the ratio between military effect and collateral damage. In this case so far it seems it was better than if conventional warfare was used.
If the pagers had been equipped with lasers that caused blindness, there is a Geneva Convention protocol going back to 1995[0].
I would like to think that the spirit behind that protocol is that the intent to cause permanent blindness in your opponent should be considered a crime. And not that it's not a crime so long as you don't use a laser to do it.
So you can put me in the camp of "this should be considered a war crime", even if it's not in any books yet.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Certain_Conventi...
It surely must be in violation of international law due to its potentially reckless/indiscriminate nature
Not at all, that's why we have moderators. Hacker news is interesting because they stay focused on the right topics. If you let people just talk about whatever they want, you're just gonna get an inferior Reddit. Topic != "Whatever we want to talk about", the topic is very often the technical and technological aspects of a story or article. Talking about politics on HN is definitely "off topic".
Email mods at hn@ycombinator.com if you see a pervasive violation of HN's comment guidelines.
Flagging and voting also help, but for wildly out-of-control threads, direct contact is more reliable.
Love to consider only the technical aspect of terrorist attacks that's what makes this News for Hackers yes.
One aspect here that is not commented on but has long-term security implications:
Assuming these were indeed Hezbollah devices, its likely every single Hezbollah operative now has an identifying wound, possibly a missing limb or wound at the hip level. The wound may be in fact, unmistakable.
What happens later with the lebanese armed forces and with IDF, when they see the ops in the open, its anyone's guess
I might be misinterpreting, but news coverage seems to say that Hezbollah fighters as well as medical personnel were injured. That might mean that the attack was aimed at pagers rather than Hezbollah pagers.
Such lack of precision would be what you'd expect in any kind of operation targeting so many devices.
Those medical personnel may also be members of Hezbollah. Doctors, nurses, and emergency responders can have ideological beliefs. For example, in my country, there are medical personnel with far-right and extremist views, some even holding leadership positions in such ideological organizations.
It's surely possible and or even plausible ideology has infiltrated civic institutions. Still it's quite a stretch to assume any victim of what looks like a supply chain attack is guilty, simply because of the scale of the attack.
Sounds like Israel added plastic explosives to pagers and managed to supply them to Hezbollah. Then, I assume, they triggered only those pagers belonging to known operatives. I'm guessing some did not explode and we'll get to see the device inside and possibly understand the mechanism.
Hmm. I have a couple of politic fiction questions. Lets would imagine that somebody takes a flight with a pager or a second-hand bought phone.
1) How could be sure that there is not a small amount of explosive hidden in their devices or batteries?.
Most devices are sealed. Would the phone smell like something in particular? Would be detected by dogs or x-rays? (I assume that a tiny amount of explosive can be put inside a battery or anything, enough to start a chain reaction with the whole battery while remains hidden to x-rays).
2) What would be the legal path on the defense of this person? just "I didn't knew" does not seem very convincing in a trial. If somebody manipulates a phone are the data stored somewhere?
Rumor that this is the company that manufactures the pagers:
someone in the US government is probably freaking out about all these iphones and macbooks made in china right now.
Actually, I trust Apple's hardware security enough that I think it is probably impossible for anyone in China (even though they have physical access to the devices) to alter an iPhone or Macbook so that its own electronics can be used to trigger any explosive the attacker might install in the device, so in addition to an explosive, the attacker would need to install his own radio receiver. And the attacker probably won't be able to use the device's electronics to eavesdrop on the device's user, so no ability to tell whether the user is in the group the attacker wants to target unless again the attacker installs his own electronics (including radio transmitter) to do the eavesdropping.
An Iphone should weigh X grams. I think you should be able to detect tampering by weighing it.
I don't whats the margin of error/variance that passes quality control.
> it is probably impossible for anyone in China (even though they have physical access to the devices) to alter an iPhone or Macbook so that its own electronics can be used to trigger any explosive the attacker might install in the device
It would be trivial for a Mossad-level adversary to get around this. The pager explosives were disguised inside the battery, not around it. If you replaced the iPhone's 4500mAh battery with a 3500mAh one containing RDX and a 3G radio, you'd have to be mega-paranoid before you noticed the difference.
This is exactly the sort of hubris modern intelligence agencies rely on in order to exploit your misplaced trust. Apple's hardware security, much like their software security, is mostly predicated on marketing and not the transparent or accountable defense of your device.
> If you replaced the iPhone's 4500mAh battery with a 3500mAh one containing RDX and a 3G radio, you'd have to be mega-paranoid before you noticed the difference.
There’s a 0% chance Apple wouldn’t detect that. A huge difference in battery life like that would fail QC and even the weight would have to be very close before it wouldn’t be flagged for inspection. The liability for battery fires means so dude at the factory isn’t just saying “probably fine” and using them anyway.
> Apple's hardware security, much like their software security, is mostly predicated on marketing and not the transparent or accountable defense of your device.
Have you personally audited it, or are we just being asked to accept this because it would support your tribal affinities?
Evocative of the "power user" scene from Iron Sky[0]
This is a little over-the-top, but I do agree that the clinical way some are handling this understates the horror of what's happening. These people were at home or running errands or at work, not pointing a gun at anyone at that particular moment.
With fairness though, this is exactly the risk we run as an importer-state of electronics that cannot secure our own supply chains. We've been dealing with the digital risk of backdoored electronics for the better half of a decade; physical risks were only a matter of time.
There exists meaningful mitigation (eg. inspect imported electronics at random) but ultimately this risk is our just-deserts as Americans. If our smartphone and car manufacturers didn't take their jobs to other countries, then we'd be able to sleep a whole lot easier. Turns out, there is a bipartisan interest in making America hostile to manufacturing jobs.
"Israel managed to hack the portable pagers and cause them to explode" sounds like they uploaded firmware to make the device explode. In fact, it was a supply chain infiltration and they modified the devices with explosives inside. It's weird to call it hack.
Was going to ask how common pagers were, but suppose still used by emergency services etc and especially in warzones of questionable cell network reliability
Hezbollah reportedly bans its members from carrying cell phones and has them carry pagers instead:
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/pagers-drones-how-...
With a cell phone, the bomb is conveniently express-shipped to you by F-16. Or thoughtfully hand-delivered by the Mossad Postal Service.
Pagers are immune to a number of threats that two-way communications devices enable.
Although, if I was an intelligence agency or police force, I’d definitely give pagers a second look, right? Like they have uses but somebody picking a pager over a cellphone is doing something unusual—maybe something unusual and good, like running an emergency services organization, but still unusual enough to take a second look.
So no one has a credible source on how and why the exploded? Because the mostly likely answer is they were intercepted and rigged with explosives
As I'm trying to better understand the situation from a technology perspective, I'm curious: has anyone experienced a lithium battery catastrophically failing during use (not charging) and without plenty of warning (ie. gets warm, hot, scalding)?
My experience has been that at worst, they overheat over minutes to hours, and then hiss, smoke, pop, and catch fire.
I guess what I'm wondering is: is it at all plausible that this happened without the use of some amount of added explosives? (edit: I saw a few videos. I cannot imagine a mobile lithium battery is capable of such a sudden and violent explosion)
https://x.com/WachtelDan/status/1836038754756145515
Footage from the hospital
This is why Chinese made electric cars are a bad idea in America.
But Kudos to Israel for pulling off a surgical strike the likes of which we've never seen before.
Let's assume that the battery in the pager is replaced with half C4 half battery. AA battery weighs about 20-25g, so 12.5g C4 total. 12.5g of C4 has roughly 84,000J of energy. For comparison, a 62 grain 5.56 NATO round has about 1,700 J of kinetic energy. The C4 is undirected, so the target is getting a fraction of the impact, but that much C4 detonating near your body is going to do some serious damage.
So, if the method was to substitute the batteries for ones containing explosives, then how were they triggered simultaneously?
Wouldn't this also require some additional HW/SW in the pagers to trigger the devices? Otherwise, if it was just battery terminals connecting to the battery, how would a remote signal trigger them?
Or maybe it's as simple as the adulterated batteries containing timers and thus not needing external triggering?
It's just a matter of knowing your battery's power management firmware. You can overload the power control circuits that pagers or smartphones by creating a massive surge (sending signals to the IGBT drivers) that will cause the battery to explode. If the battery is moderately charged, the explosion is devastating. Hacker teams from the notorious Israeli ShinBet know of many bugs of this type.
The WSJ report claims that:
> The official said some people felt the pagers heat up and disposed of them before they burst.
Sounds more like a battery explosion, but it's way too early to tell.
It is possible that there was an explosive planted, plus some sort of thermal detonator that was triggered electronically, or even that the battery was used as a thermal detonator to detonate an explosive.
While the Note 7 exploded with quite a bit of force, they never caused injuries like these, and the Note 7 likely had much bigger battery than these pagers had.
We won't know for sure until the devices have been examined.
I highly doubt that it’s a result of hacking the battery power management. Lithium batteries don’t explode the way I have seen these pagers do so far. They usually smoke or start catching fire before they explode due to overheating, which should’ve given enough time to dispose of them. But what happened is sudden and strong. Definitely, something extra was added and was activated remotely later.
Aside from the death and injury, what concerns me about this is why now?
There is little doubt in my mind that the Prime Minister of Israel is highly motivated to engage in a wider war and drag the US along.
This mass bombing could well be in preparation for imminent further action - such as an invasion of Lebanon. Regardless, the escalation this represents is extremely concerning.
On the other hand, one could view this a show of force to try and scare Hezbollah away from further escalation
UN Security Council Resolution 1566 outlines what is considered as terrorism:
"criminal acts, including against civilians, committed with the intent to cause death or serious bodily injury, or taking of hostages, with the purpose to provoke a state of terror in the general public or in a group of persons or particular persons, intimidate a population or compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act."
If their purpose was really about scaring Hezbollah away, this attack can be labelled as terrorism. I'm pretty sure politicians have different ideas there.
Ah words hardly mean anything these days. It very clearly is terrorism but you won't ever hear any politician in the west calling it that.
Yeah, true. It's either terrorism or borderline-terrorism at least. But people still gotta talk if they're not willing to wage another war against each other. We clearly have too many wars going around, so politicians will have to forge up some bullshit excuses.
These were detonations, not batteries gone wild. A few grams of common explosives like PETN could have been dabbed to look like a small component in a pager. An exploding bridge wire (EBW) detonator can be blown by a charge pumped array of small low voltage capacitors charged in parallel, then switched to discharge in series. No booster needed.
A question for more knowledgeable users: What CPU does Apollo AP-900 Pager use? I tried to search the Internet but found nothing.
Looks like a hardware supply chain attack: https://goachronicle.com/hezbollah-members-pagers-exploded-i...
>>GoaChronicle through its intelligence network has learned that Israeli intelligence successfully intercepted a shipment of pager batteries that had been ordered from B&H Photo. The order was placed from Lebanon. Acting on a confirmed tip, the intelligence agency seized the shipment and covertly modified the batteries. Small, undetectable explosives known as Kiska 3 were inserted into the battery casings and connected to the battery wires via a discreet chip. The pager model was Rugged Pager AR924 IP67. The operation code word was ‘Below the Belt’.
> B&H Photo
Okay, that pretty much guarantees that somebody at the Goa Chronicle fell hook, line, and sinker for a bit of internet satire.
EDIT:
It would also appear that the good folks at the Goa Chronicle failed to check a Yiddish-English dictionary.
B&H?!?! The giant store in Manhattan famously run by Orthodox Jews? If that's confirmed it's going to be protested into dust pretty soon.
EDIT: I see an addenda to the article that B&H are denying any involvement. We'll see how it plays out. True or not, the rumor will be flying.
If it is confirmed I'd expect it to actually boost B&H's business, as long as B&H didn't actually know of or participate in the tampering with the shipment.
As you note B&H is well known for being run by Orthodox Jews. So why the heck would Hezbollah, an organization that wants to destroy Israel, buy their batteries from B&H?
It suggests that B&H is a really great place to buy things, so much better than the alternatives that even if dealing with Jews goes against your fundamental beliefs it is worth it.
They must really be in desperate need for more conflict to keep their population at bay. For Netanyahu certainly conflicts come at a convenient time. First he tried to swing himself up to dictator like figure, taking away power from judiciary, tens of thousands of people go to protest. Then October 7 happens. Suddenly a war keeps him in power. Now that that has been going on, and hundreds of thousands are on the streets, they are doing many things to provoke another conflict/war. I think if they fail to keep Israel in a war-like state, his days will be over quickly. He knows that, so he tries to escalate. Not that Iran and their allies aren't provoking and escalating either, but for Netanyahu this is all very convenient.
You're forgetting that tens of thousands of Israelis from the north of Israel have been homeless and internally displaced since shortly after October 7th when Hezbollah started indiscriminately targeting Israeli residential neighborhoods in North Israel with rockets, artillery, and ATGMs, killing several civilians. This is not a tenable state of affairs, not militarily, nor politically. Israel is going to address it one way or another, one day or another, and perhaps they're starting now.
So in one sense you're right that it's to keep their population at bay -- because their population is absolutely fed up with the situation in North Israel and how people have been homeless for nearly a year now and a huge swath of the northern part of the country, will billions of dollars in real estate in total, is uninhabitable. And if this government can't provide security for its citizens, which is the most important thing a government can do by the way, then it will be replaced with one that can.
The opposite is probably more true. By the admission of some of Netanyahu's own command staff, the only reason the IDF is still committed in Gaza is to keep Netanyahu in power; as soon as Gaza is resolved, he's likely to be ousted (and then to face criminal charges). Israel cannot stay fully engaged in Gaza and open up a conventional military front in southern Lebanon. If we're using this kind of logic --- message board logic, let's be clear --- today's action harms Netanyahu's immediate interests, by hastening the point at which the IDF will substantially withdraw from Gaza.
I'm pretty sure that if the IDF is committed in Lebanon it's no different from Gaza, as far as the ousting process is concerned.
Do you have a source for that command staff admission?
There are still hostages in Gaza. Until they're either released or proven dead I would guess Gaza would still be counted as "unresolved".
Yup, Netanyahu is certainly taking advantage of the situation to secure his position, at the cost of innocent lives and the expense of the United States. As long as Israel remains committed to its purely-Jewish-state ideal, the conflict will continue, draining more money from US taxpayers.
I think this is the case of both sides knew about each other's plan all along and yet Oct 7 happened. What could be the reason for both sides to execute it. Just to find out what happens?
Like George Carlin said, “you don’t need a formal conspiracy when interests converge”
There are other governments who also benefit from war in the region that most likely have a hand in encouraging, directly or indirectly, for continued conflict.
"War is a continuation of politics by other means."
I don't think "Islamic fundamentalism" is the source of this conflict. Like President Truman so eloquently put it, "You can't move 5 or 6 million people out of a country and fill it up with 5 or 6 million more and expect both sets of them to be pleased"
President Truman clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0DvO72fuG4
Populations tend to unite when confronted with an immediate hostile threat. George Bush's popularity shot from 50% to 90% overnight after 9/11. There's always a sense that "we need to solve this before we get back to our infighting". I mean, that's an argument for why Hamas attacked in the first place (and tends to attack periodically): to keep the Palestinian population united behind them, if only out of fear of Israel.
I doubt the commenter meant it as an antisemitic attack.
Unfortunately Netanyahu has gained and lost the prime minister position multiple times without wars. He's just somewhat popular. Between his first government in 1995 and today, people forget there were prime ministers Sharon, Olmert, Barak, Lapid, Bennet, just 18 months before 10/07 his opposition was in power. Did they not have any part of ignoring the preperations?
Even if he would have lost his position if 10/07 never happened, history has shown he always ends up back in leadership due to a million+ voters for his own party, and millions of votes for other religious and right wing parties.
People can rightfully hate them all they want, but he has the votes, and Israel doesn't have a limit on the number of times you can be prime minister
This is only half joking but the only "solution" to the Netanyahu problem is to replace the voters
The videos I've seen definitely look like it was more than a battery explosion - very high energy...
Wondering if the pagers were intercepted and implanted with heat-sensitive explosive?
The NSA has planted custom chips/firmware inside cisco routers after intercepting them - it's not a large jump to go to explosives inside pagers.
I'd love a technical write up on how this is possible. Is it RF based or the battery being exploited?
The reason you are asked to prove your laptop can boot at airport security is that batteries and bombs have similar densities.
It would be pretty straight forward to rig a pager to run off of one battery while the other is an explosive charge made to look like the actual battery.
Especially now that it is abundantly clear that a pager's batteries are large enough to be replaced by quite an effective bomb. And cell phones are a fair amount larger than pagers.
It seems the pager bombs only killed the users. But they also harmed a lot of people around them.
I wonder if this is possible in devices that actually use a small asic to handle all aspects of battery control. They're even more complex than a BMS, for instance macbook batteries have had these for around 20 years [0]. They're even common in vapes and vape batteries. I have to wonder if these asics can be bypassed with malware?
Seems like the cells in these pagers were massively over-discharged and then allowed to be over charged? Potentially a capacitor used to drive the vibration motor was then used to cause the battery to catastrophically explode?
0 - https://squidgeefish.com/projects/a1175-battery-hacking/
Threat model: The Mossad doing Mossad things with your [change "email address" with "anything"]
Solution:
- Magical amulets?
- Fake your own death, move into a submarine?
- YOU'RE STILL GONNA BE MOSSAD'ED UPON
I think that's it.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/08/mickens_on_se...
Full read here https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf
This is going to be an interesting one... definitely someone (not a lot of guessing who) modified the pagers somewhere in the supply chain...
As with exploding drones, this will become a thing in other countries too, either as a part of organized crime or general terrorism.
Another working theory is that it could just be an opportunistic cyber attack - compromising lithium batteries. Though some of the videos coming out look like a bigger explosion that just a battery going off: https://www.reddit.com/r/lebanon/comments/1fizgag/ha_member_...
Nah, batteries don't explode like that... heat, burst of fire somewhere, sure... full on explosion, no way. This was done somewhere in the supply chain, devices were replaced, explosives were added.
And israel will wonder why suddenly even more lebanonis want to fight them after.
It reminds me of the movie Law Abiding Citizen.
Check it out if you haven't already: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1197624/
Gold Apollo, the company whose brand was on the devices says they did not manufacture them, they only licensed their brand to BAC, a Hungarian company. Well, I'm sure income from licensing fees in their accounting books say differently. You profit from it, you should pay for it. Any other way to see this will allow this type of vulnerability to spread and the buck will stop nowhere.
Footage of explosions: https://x.com/cherylwroteit/status/1836041510233444404
From the hospital (NSFW): https://x.com/nexta_tv/status/1836052147646955935
I am very surprised Hezbollah didn't think of supply chain security and didn't do the most cursor inspection of these devices. The post mortem would be very interesting on this one.
"""
In the real world, threat models are much simpler (see Figure 1). Basically, you’re either dealing with Mossad or not-Mossad. If your adversary is not-Mossad, then you’ll probably be fine if you pick a good pass-word and don’t respond to emails from ChEaPestPAiNPi11s@virus-basket.biz.ru. If your adversary is the Mossad, YOU’RE GONNA DIE AND THERE’S NOTHING THAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. The Mossad is not intimidated by the fact that you employ https://. If the Mossad wants your data, they’re going to use a drone to replace your cellphone with a piece of uranium that’s shaped like a cellphone, and when you die of tumors filled with tumors, they’re going to hold a press conference and say “It wasn’t us” as they wear t-shirts that say “IT WAS DEFINITELY US,” and then they’re going to buy all of your stuff at your estate sale so that they can directly look at the photos of your vacation instead of reading your insipid emails about them.
"""
Pretty wild that this mentions a mobile device supply chain attack explicitly.
Ah yes, the Mossad / Non Mossad threat model :). Classic.
Tangentially related - Hezbollah used pagers because they could not trust mobiles. One reason is that mobile basebands are locked down: if they weren't, it's quite possible that by now someone would have implemented a baseband firmware which preserves opsec, that could be used on (rooted) phones . That is probably one of the reasons why governments are hostile to modifiable radio firmware.
newer reports saying 1000s not 100s
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/sep/17/middle-ea...