Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon
(reuters.com)1065 points by logicchains 3 days ago
1065 points by logicchains 3 days ago
I don't think it would be quite the same as in explosive ordinance put into a device but it is very similar in that a mass hack could use the navigation system to target pedestrians and calculate the speed required to plow through them without losing control to maximize victim count. All that would be required in another remote hack as has been demonstrated on live highways in the past [1] combined with some form of AI or gaming engine. A mitigating control could be more bollards near sidewalks and more hydraulic bollards on intersections that have a lot of foot traffic to confine the hacks to smaller blast zones. This won't protect the occupants but maybe drive by wire car manufacturers could start adding a "oh crap" manual handle to physically disengage power and apply some type of physical friction brake.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZVYTJarPFs [video][2 mins]
A parking garage full of electric vehicles properly compromised (at least some of them) would be very ... energetic. Burning lithium batteries aren't precisely explosive, but they are still very angry. It is plausible that you could destroy a building with a chain reaction of battery fires. That is one of the safety concerns I think might not yet be fully accounted for (what happens when a bunch of electric cars are in a full closed lot and one of them starts on fire).
Any of the smart plugs or other devices plugged directly into the grid could be intentionally compromised to start a house fire. Millions of homes simultaneously catching fire would be catastrophic. Apartment buildings where a fire starts in 10%+ of the units.
> maybe drive by wire car manufacturers could start adding a "oh crap" manual handle to physically disengage power and apply some type of physical friction brake
It depends on the manufacturer, but I think this is already the case with Tesla cars? The brake specifically isn't drive-by-wire, it's an electrically assisted hydraulic brake - so even if a malicious actor could get the car to not do the assist part anymore, you can still stop by pressing the pedal hard.
I feel like bollards and other form of separating roads from pedestrians are unviable on the large scale. I hope manufacturers start focusing more on sandboxing any internet-connected parts of their software and leaving the whole car-driving part inaccessible from any of that.
Yes, some kind of Semtex or C-4 would fit the application
It's worth noting that RDX requires a detonator. This requires more space in the device.
Not to mention phones, laptops, tables, smart watches, medical devices, children's toys, etc.
That's exactly why the "software hack" doesn't make any sense
No battery powered gadget as ever exploded like that ever
That's a battery explosion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KR7_xwQbYp0
That's a bomb: https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1836037485492629605
It's surprising that Mossad arranged a massive destruction of communication technology without it being the precursor to a major military operation. Very curious why they chose this moment to execute an operation they clearly had ready to go for months.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-09-18/ty-article-li...
"use it or lose it" moment, allegedly.
How do you intercept so many beepers ?
- you have to know they have been ordered
- you have to know when they are sent (from Europe)
- you have to intercept them (in which country ?)
- to modify them
- to put them back in the delivery (so you have ties with the shipping company)
- without nobody noticing
So Israel was likely not alone, or they have agents in many places...
I don't think they intercepted. Think they just bought the pagers, prepared them and sold them directly to Hezbollah in one big batch.
I haven't seen images of the damage, but the difference in damage between an exploding lithium ion battery and 10-15 grams of RDX explosives is going to be "night and day", as they say.
Edit: OK, I've seen some videos. Looks like much less than 10-15g of RDX levels of explosions.
Are pagers allowed on airplanes? Most modern digital devices also carry a sealed Lithium ion pack....
Question: what's the possibility of doing this with non-tampered with modern mobile phones?
Many phones today have a 5000mah battery, which I'm assuming could be triggered to overheat via a malicious app or webpage. Imagine this being used on a grand scale.
It's not easy. Lithium-ion batteries are designed to withstand heat without presenting an immediate or non-obvious threat to the user. The easiest way to cause a pyrotechnic discharge is to penetrate the battery itself, and even that isn't terribly explosive (here's a laptop battery "exploding": https://youtu.be/oieH2wwDGzo )
If someone did try heating up your phone to implement such an attack, you would feel it burning through your denim pockets long before it hits 210f. Futhermore, both phone SOCs and battery firmwares tend to implement emergency shutoff contingencies for when the phone overheats. Without prior tampering, nothing will really behave like it does in this attack. It is 100% a supply-chain threat.
I seriously doubt there is any way at all for software to trigger a dead short, and even if you did, the path would burn out quickly and the hardware only BMS part would cut power due to the massive voltage drop.
Part of the context is that they use a different communication network which is probably why they were targeted in that specific way...
Overcharging batteries would be the hack....not suggesting someone do this but said strategy works with both acid based and lithium batteries...
How did they know who was using the modified pagers?
How did they know they were only Hezbollah people?
Are there inocent people walking around with modifed explosive devices strapped to their waists? To their kids waists?
This seems potentially extremely reckless.
Weren't these people mostly emergency responders? Like doctors and EMTs? And yes, killed several, but also injured thousands? I'm a little concerned by the vocabulary used in the op title.
Hezbollah started encouraging its operatives to switch to pagers months ago, out of fear that Israel would compromise or had compromised their cell phones.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/pagers-drones-how-...
It seems likely that a significant number of the thousands injured were Hezbollah militants. How significant? We’ll have to wait for the numbers.
I haven’t seen any indication that the exploding pagers were held by emergency responders in a significant quantity. Do you have a source for that?
A lot of what I have been following is from here[1] and mentions: - "Today's attacks exposed many members at various levels. While the group says many of those injured are medical staff or administrative personnel and not fighters..." as well as - "Then we started seeing CCTV from inside shops and supermarkets of these small explosions targeting people doing their groceries or paying at the checkout.
Then for hours on end [we heard] the wail of sirens. The internal security forces were asking people to get off the streets because traffic was overwhelming the city."
And from my understanding of that region's geopolitics, isn't Hezbollah a political party? So this is like reading about a nation state blanket bombing targets that are of members of the Republican party right?
Does republican party has a military wing that shoots rockets into Mexico every day?
I just noticed my use of 'mostly' which unintentionally is doing more heavy lifting than it should. I was incorrect to use that word, but the point remains.
This article [1] has an image of the pager and a video supposedly showing one exploding in the bag of some guy while shopping groceries. From that I would suspect a supply chain attack integrating some explosive, that seems way too violent for just an exploding battery or anything else you would usually find in that kind of device.
[1] https://realrepublic.com/encrypted-hezbollah-pagers-simultan...
The batteries are the only major energy storage device there to breach.
Clearly Israel has found a software vulnerability that lets them overload some otherwise minimally used processor and overheat the batteries. Above ~140f lithium ion cells go into thermal runaway.
I was discounting the possibility that Mossad was in control of global supplychains with sufficient intensity and recklessness to hide semtex and a detonator in an entire brand of consumer electronics, in its urgency to provide retroactive justification for every antisemitic conspiracy theory out there and ignite war with the entire Middle East.
The only thing in a pager that SHOULD BE THERE with enough energy to 'explode' on demand, is a lithium ion battery. Which is evidently, given further reports, not what happened here.
It could be they had a way to warm up the batteries until these explode
Apparently a message was sent to the pagers right before exploding. I saw in a couple videos where the victim looked down at their hip and angled it to see the screen. It makes sense as a trick to ensure the target is close by when it goes off, but a kid could just as easily pick it up off a table after hearing it buzz.
Would the explosives in these pagers have been caught by something like TSA? I could imagine that at please *some* of the owners had to have flown with them.
Were they caught? If not, why not?
It was most likely a supply chain attack integrating explosives into the pagers, this article [1] says the affected devices were from a recent shipment. The explosions are way too violent for malfunctioning batteries.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/hundreds-of-hezbollah-...
>Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon
why is the title so bland? It fails spectacularly at communicating the scale of the event. They went with a dog bites man headline instead.
Email suggested improvements to mods at hn@ycombinator.com
HN permits (and encourages) title edits in certain cases, within certain parameters:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40734840>
Again: email suggestions to mods.
(Probably too late to matter in this case, but keep in mind in future.)
What's the probability that the pagers were also bugged to allow Mossad to listen in? Pretty high, I would guess.
I was thinking more of the underlying encryption being compromised.
This is a pretty amazing exploit by the attackers. Either they had access to the pagers during shipment and installed malware or had access to RCE on the devices.
The market for 3d X-Ray scanners and population surveillance is about to explode.
This is terrorism. Israel is not an island defending from terrorist, they are the ones spreading terror. What they did to their neighbouring countries could be happen to others. Can we stop praising this as clever and impressive attack and start holding Israel accountable!?
It's the very opposite.
It's the most precise targeting of enemy combatants ever. Hezbollah (and effectively Lebanon) started a war on Israel on Oct 8th in solidarity with Hamas' attacks on Israel (before Israel has even responded really) and has continued indiscriminate attacks against Israeli civilians since resulting in more than 100,000 internally displaced people in Israel. Many dead and injured. Most recently children in a soccer match.
Israel has repeatedly demanded Hezbollah stop attacking it and warned it of grave consequences. This is consequences.
The only "neighbouring countries" of other countries that have something to worry about are those that start wars against their neighbours.
I hope people discuss using more precise terms. UN Security Council Resolution 1566 outlines what is generally 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."
Physically the attack was likely well targeted. It was shipped very recently, so it's likely only few of those beepers made into the public market.
However, the attack happened right in the middle of general population far away from the theater of war. This obviously intimidates and mentally damages innocent people living their normal lives. So it can be considered as a form of terrorism.
No government, especially those of developed countries, should be allowed to inflict harms on individuals, living in peace, in any form, whether physical or mental.
>No government, especially those of developed countries, should be allowed to inflict harms on individuals, living in peace, in any form, whether physical or mental.
That's why they targeted members of Hezbollah (a terrorist organization) and not children playing football like Hezbollah does.
> Former Israeli officials have openly acknowledged Israel's role in providing funding and assistance to Hamas as a means of undermining secular Palestinian factions such as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, who served as the Israeli military governor in Gaza during the early 1980s, admitted to providing financial assistance to Mujama Al-Islamiya, the precursor of Hamas, on the instruction of the Israeli authorities.
> in 1998, it was revealed that Netanyahu suggested Turkey to support Hamas. Netanyahu said "Hamas also has bank accounts for aid in banks, we help them too, you [Turkey] can help too."
> In an interview with Politico in 2023, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that "In the last 15 years, Israel did everything to downgrade the Palestinian Authority and to boost Hamas." He continued saying "Gaza was on the brink of collapse because they had no resources, they had no money, and the PA refused to give Hamas any money. Bibi saved them. Bibi made a deal with Qatar and they started to move millions and millions of dollars to Gaza."
Israel is surprised that the terrorists they funded do terrorist things?
The obvious conclusion is that they WANTED Hamas to do those terrorist things.
New fear unlocked!!! I will no longer look at my phone the same way!
Why were they even using pagers? Aren't all messages in cleartext?
A possible explanation of how it happened: https://www.lbcgroup.tv/news/lebanon-news/796406/understandi...
not unprecedented https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash#Assassination
I wonder why they did this, thus revealing that they compromised a lot of devices and losing that capability, instead of quietly continuing to monitor them and using their location to perform attacks via other means if needed.
Maybe they hope the psychological effect is a big deterrent?
>Israel loses if it kills it's enemies. That's your logic?
huh? No not at all
Saying that those 2k+ injured Hammas are going to spend time recovering and when they're back they're going to be even more motivated to harm Israel.
Would have been better to do nothing. Or to kill them. But nothing in between.
Seems more likely their explosive implant used a separate RF trigger -- makes the whole thing much simpler for them, less detectable. They could run a plane or drone overhead to send the radio initiate message.
Looked like 5-10g (maybe up to 20g?) of explosive, NOT battery. I think you could fit the whole package inside an AA battery, along with an AAAA battery, so you could do something crazy there, or just replace a rechargeable battery pack with something of smaller battery capacity containing the explosive, some electronics, etc. Or just use spare volume inside the case and hope no one does gross physical inspection.
It's trivial to sniff a data line to the LCD and look for a specific message(I regrettably had to do this in the late 90's to fix a bug using an additional Z8 microcontroller). That said, it would be more work than inserting a separate module with its own message reception logic.
Many questions remain, but, also, one: If Mossad had the capability to pull off such a complex supply chain fiesta here, could they not as certainly hack the firmware to intercept all traffic? (Now that Hezbollah is alledged to be using them to communicate?)
Maybe they did, and - at this point - decided that detonating them was preferable to having the asset - and whatever information it was yielding ...
... which is worrying.-
PS. There's talk of this being a "use it or lose it" kind of scenario, with the pagers being close to compromised.-
I doubt it's just a cyberattack, the videos of the explosions indicate small explosives rather than batteries.
Don't think we'll know exactly what happened until Israel tells the world or an independent investigation concludes but so far my impression is there was a supply chain infiltration and thousands of pagers with explosives have been distributed to Hezbollah.
Mossad said - "Explain to me why it is more noble to kill 10,000 men in battle than a dozen at dinner."
Sucks to be them, why they even use pagers is laughable, unencrypted or encrypted. Cell infrastructure is easily traceable.
I just feel sorry for the innocent lives involved in all of this, no one deserves to be caught up in either side of the conflict.
> Sucks to be them, why they even use pagers is laughable, unencrypted or encrypted. Cell infrastructure is easily traceable.
That's the point why they're using pagers: pagers are passive only. A cellphone can guide a rocket to its target, a pager just listens and cannot be used to guide a rocket, to act as a listening bug or confirm someone's presence (or absence).
Interesting, never knew this. Do modern pagers transmit any RF at all?
There's two-way pagers which transmit, but receive only pagers can be broadcast reception only; there's no check-in / message acknowledgement, although messages may be rebroadcast to help ensure reception in case of bad signal conditions.
You'd probably get some small amount of RF emissions though, most receivers radiate something as a result of using superheterodyne signal processing.
Thousands now were injured. This is a massive scale (terrorist) attack
Honestly, at this point, I see absolutely zero difference, from a moral perspective, between the Israeli government and their enemies.
Both are as bad as each other and have been implicated in many war crimes and human rights abuses, however Israel has more firepower and can inflict much more damage (E.g. demolish an entire apartment block, killing hundreds of innocent people from the air).
The last thing any country should consider doing is arming or funding either side, that will be like throwing fuel on a fire. Taking sides in what is essentially a regional ethnic conflict between extremists on both sides is not a good idea.
Again, not condoning or justifying the actions of either side or taking any sides here - they are both as bad as each other.
I do and the latest war completely reaffirmed my perspective. The little spot that allegedly tries to genocide everyone around them while their enemies have that as the stated goals in their respective charters. It is the reason for the existence of Hezbollah even. Why not believe them?
The positions aren't equal, in fact they are worlds apart and Israel treats enemy civilians better than the terror regimes they do live under despite facing constant wars of aggression by said nations.
We can argue who killed more or was more justified to do it, but that isn't progress. The latest issue is the attack on Israel. There is no equivalence and no justification for that.
The latest issue is an attack on Israel? Are you referring to Oct 7?
Oct 7 had a 71-72% civilian casualty. Project Lavender considered a 90-100% civilian casualty rate to be acceptable and the number of civilians killed vs number of Hama killed far exceeds the ratio on Oct 7.
Israel has systematically destroyed Gaza building by building ruining the lives of millions of people. That is the latest and continuing issue. Ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity.
Long term solution here is a two state solution and implementing the protocols Isreal agreed to ~10 years ago. Unfortunately successive Israeli governments have completely ignored it and the current one has declared they wont be abiding by what has been agreed to.
If these things didn't happen, there could have been lasting peace by now. But I expect to see more carnage from both sides for the next 5-10 years at least, until moderate voices on both sides take over and some new agreement can be not only reached, but actually implemented.
This is objectively false.
Israel is objectively an apartheid state [1][2], no different to apartheid South Africa. South Africa was also a "democracy" (for white people). You cannot be both a democracy and an apartheid state, by definition.
There are ~2M Palestinians in Gaza and ~3M in the West Bank, both areas that Israel lays claim to and are within its borders. These 5M people do not have the rights of the Jewish citizens of Israel. Even for the few who are Israeli Arabs, they don't have the same rights as Jewish Israeli citizens (eg [3]). Most settlements prohibit Israeli Arabs from living their under 2018 segregation laws [4].
Anyone with a passing knowledge of American history will immediately recognize Israel for what it is. Jim Crowe laws, sundown towns and so on.
And this segregation permeates every aspect of daily life. Checkpoints, residency permit segregation, Palestinians falling under military rather than civil jurisdiction, many Palestinians being held indefinitely without charge, water restrictions, building roads to divide up the West Bank and separate Palestinian communities, destroying Palestinian food sources, randomly bulldozing Palestinian homes, never premitting construction, settler terrorism, honestly the list goes on and on.
And in 11 months, ~75,000 tons of munitions have been dropped on an open air prison, also one of the most densely packed and most populous refugee camps in the world.
Democracy? I think not.
[1]: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-...
[2]: https://www.vox.com/23924319/israel-palestine-apartheid-mean...
[3]: https://www.hrw.org/news/2011/03/30/israel-new-laws-marginal...
[4]: https://www.vox.com/world/2018/7/31/17623978/israel-jewish-n...
Their current government is basically run by extremists, with government ministers openly calling for a second Nakba https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231009-israel-mk-calls-f....
Calling for a second Nakba, in my opinion, is no different to the chants of "death to isreal" coming from the other side.
I would say they are about as democratic as the former south african apartheid government. Democratic yes, but only one group of people gets to vote.
I was equating terrorism and and virulent anti-semitism and violent suppression of women's rights, gay rights, free speech, and democracy with barbarism. Israeli Arabs are happy to live in Israel. If you have a better word, I'd be happy to use it. Barbarity?
I see a clear difference. One side still holds hostages, the other does not. One side perpetrated murder, rape and kidnapping, the other did not. Etc.
Rape has been committed by both sides: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/02/israelopt-un...
Are you seriously suggesting, in any way, that blowing up an entire apartment building and all of the innocent civilians inside is not murder?
Israel holds many innocent Palestinian civilians in its prison as its own hostages. These people are held without trial and subjected to rape and other abuses. The difference? Its a state doing it, so to alot of people this somehow makes it ok.
Again, not taking sides here, but both sides are as bad as each other.
Israel had 4000 hostages before Oct 7, and more than doubled it since to 10 000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_prisoners_in_Israe...
Revolting to see the replies cheering for the "wailing terrorist" who was just restocking produce.
Neither of those videos show somebody restocking produce getting hurt.
here is how they did it (supposedly):
I don't know the density of PETN and I'd prefer not to fire up a VPN to run that search at the moment, but let's assume it's something like 1.5 g/cm³
So 20 grams of the stuff would occupy 13.3 cm³
Which is equivalent to the volume of about three and a half AAA batteries.
How big are these pagers, and how can there be that much empty space in one?
Specs:
- Dimensions (mm): 73(L) x 50(W) x 27(H) (98.55 cm^3)
- Weight: 95g including battery
Presumably the majority of that weight is battery. And 13.3 cm^3 would occupy less than 1/6 the total available volume.
Battery is described as "Lithium battery, up to 85 days with 2.5 hours for full battery charge, USB-C charging."
From: <https://www.gapollo.com.tw/product/ar-924/>
Archive: <https://archive.is/Kw0Pg>
(For some reason the origin is unreachable presently.)
From comments and news stories elsewhere, it seems highly probable that the explosive was engineered into a battery form-factor, and replaced the original battery of the device.
I read somewhere that these were likely Motorola devices. Does that mean they are complicit in adding explosives to their pagers (wtf?) or is Mossad conducting supply chain attacks on such a massive scale? How do they ensure only the right pagers explode? Or did they randomly blow up a bunch of innocent pager users?
Could be true but that requires a lot more steps. Need the materiel to be implanted, delivered to targets, then have a software payload execute, instead of just the last step. However, most battery packs for pagers im seeing are 650 mAh which isn't much energy at all. Two 18650s have almost ten times as much capacity, and they don't explode.
That's enough to vaporise about 100 g of water according my back of the envelope calculations. Overkill? Or is modified for an entirely different purpose?
I saw a speculation on r/lebanon:
https://www.gapollo.com.tw/rugged-pager-ar924/
I can't find the link now, but it was based on an image of the back of burned pager.
Edit: wayback machine link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240529091558/https://www.gapol...
Apartheid Israel really are terrorists. This was representative of that, killing 2 children in the process. There could be 186,000 deaths since October in their current Genocide of the Palestinians. No wonder Hamas and Hezbollah exist, the same way uMkhonto we Sizwe existed in Apartheid South Africa. They need to be sanctioned and their leaders put in a court of the ICC.
Imagine what they could do with the battery in an electric car..
thankfully the security on vehicles is so good that a hack like this would be impossible eh?
It's very easy to imagine what they'd do with the battery in an electric car. They would do the same thing they did to the pager: put a bomb in it. You cannot "detonate" a lithium ion battery with remote code execution unless you have tampered with the components surrounding it.
It's not so much about the security on vehicles and more about the practical limits. Thermal runaway is only going to happen if you manage to disable the battery's shutoff safeguard (which is usually replicated in hardware and firmware). Unlike phones, you can't really heat up the CPU and force the battery to take the heat. You would have to manipulate the drivetrain in a way that unnaturally damaged the hardware, something a driver would notice almost immediately.
Getting the conditions right for a software-based exploit is a circus act compared to installing a plastic explosive and remote detonator outside the battery stowage.
This is a great article going over why the settler colonial apartheid genocidal state of Israel engages in such operations:
https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09...
Cant help but be reminded of that james mickens article about the mossad vs not mossad threat model https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf where he joking says that mossad will replace your cellphone with a blick of uranium (as a joke to imply you shouldnt worry about nation state actor type threats when building a stupid web app that nobody cares about, because its impossible)
I think a state actor would be able to make an explosive look like a battery on x-ray.
We live in a world where iPhones get shipped directly from China. I know this is pretty much conspiratorial but if China wanted to hack a bunch of iPhones in the hands of government officials, there’s nothing to stop them. This episode made me realize how loose security is around supply chains.
Is it some device like this one?
https://cat-uxo.com/explosive-hazards/ied/pager-bomb-rcied
It's disgusting that humans can invent such devices.
I find it hard to believe that people are seriously considering the cybersecurity angle in this situation. Yes, there may be some extremely rare and unlikely scenarios where you could hack into a device and cause the attached lithium-ion battery to overheat and combust. However, it’s important to understand that lithium-ion batteries don’t actually explode—they combust gradually over the span of a few seconds to minutes. Even if they did explode, which they don’t, we’re talking about something with the energy equivalent of a single AAA battery, not a large and powerful EV cell. Given these facts, it’s far more plausible that those pagers were intercepted and deliberately implanted with explosives, rather than being manipulated through hacking.
Not sure why this was flagged, it's certainly a novel way of striking the enemy, regardless of the political undertones.
Reuters seems to have a bit more details, and is probably a bit less biased than current URL (timesofisrael.com): https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/dozens-hezbollah-m...
What's definitely novel is the scale, perhaps not the tactic, which has been used many times before (speculative assumption being that the devices were tempered with)
Intelligence agencies put their bugs within the hardware of electronic devices you order online.
If you believe being the target of an intelligence agency never order anything online. They will put the bug inside, especially if it is an electronic device such as a phone/laptop/TV/coffee machine.
Best solution is to go buy it from a random store and have a good home security system.
Also weigh your electronic devices laptop/phone to check if the weight differs from its original weight, it should not deviate.
> Also weigh your electronic devices laptop/phone to check if the weight differs from its original weight, it should not deviate.
What kind of errors are acceptable here? Or maybe better, how accurate are the measurements given from the manufacturer?
I have a iPhone 12 Mini for example, Apple says (https://support.apple.com/en-us/111877) it should weigh 135 grams. Measuring with a scale of 0.01g precision (which is also calibrated right before) I get 133.5g, so it's ~1.5g off.
Measuring a 50g weight gives me exactly 50g, so the scale is correct, so either the weight of my phone is off, or Apple doesn't give exact weight.
At least Eight killed and 2,750 wounded (200 of those in a critical condition) [1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/sep/17/middle-ea...
"These devices don't appear to be designed to be lethal.[..] They are, for the most part, low charge so not packing enough to actually kill somebody.[..] Let's not forget that this comes on the same day that Israel has extended its war aims to including expelling Hezbollah basically from the border." -- BBC's Security Correspondent Frank Gardner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNEb-dY3tRY
I'm not sure if I'm allowed to link to a gory video, but there is commonly circulating video of a pager detonating in a grocery store. There are a few people around the man but only the man appears to be impacted, all bystanders seem OK.
Media is reporting that most casualties are caused by the pager detonating while driving. Obviously because it would impact other drivers that happen to be around the now incapacitated driver.
> Let's not forget that this comes on the same day that Israel has extended its war aims to including expelling Hezbollah basically from the border.
Also in the anniversary of WWII hero Folke Bernadotte assassination by Zionists. See https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-...
Just to put some numbers on that, ToI are presently reporting 9 deaths and 2,800 injuries (those numbers are of course preliminary and very much in flux), which taking the 2nd value as a denominator would be a <1% lethality rate. The BBC's characterisation does seem to be accurate.
While a clever attack it's also highly likely there was collateral damage to nonviolent or noninvolved bystanders.
Tbh I only use the word stereotypes because speaking in absolutes here leads to really grimy political discussions with under the guise of semantic or technical discussions. Anyone with eyes can see that Israel acts with protection of the US military and has no reason to be specific with their targets, even while being scolded by that military
Definitely sad when there is collateral damage. But I don't see how it is possible to fight a war with absolutely zero collateral damage - do you? Hezbollah started firing rockets at Israel on Oct 7 before they even responded.
It is better not to fight a war at all, but this is not always an option.
Watch some of the videos, they are remarkably targetted. One man is standing at a checkout line in a grocery store, 2 women near him. He looks at his pager before it explodes. The women around him are unharmed.
If the man is unarmed, I don't think they can be considered a legitimate target. If that is the case, then you could argue all Israelis who have a military background are legitimate targets and that includes most of the population.
The concept of legitimate targets is from the Geneva convention.
> A fundamental premise of the Geneva Conventions has been that to earn the right to protection as military fighters, soldiers must distinguish themselves from civilians by wearing uniforms and carrying their weapons openly
Hezbollah fighters clearly aren’t doing this and this is whether the fundamental argument around how Israel behaves comes from - what is a legitimate target and rules of engagement when the fighting force blends itself into the general populace? For all the criticism, Israel by some accounts does seem to do better than the US in similar circumstances when they were in Iraq and Afghanistan in terms of protecting civilian populations. And for all their criticism (some well deserved some not) they could certainly be even more indiscriminate in their targeting.
To paraphrase a guy on the 'tube, intelligence officers are seldom armed with more than a ham sandwich but are still legitimate targets.
Link to the video (which AFAICT contains no gore, but is obviously not pleasant):
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/17/world/video/hezbollah-pagers-...
That's just the videos that have been published and the ones that happened to be captured by CCTV. If 1000 devices were indiscriminately detonated, even a 5% collateral damage rate would mean up to 50 innocent people harmed, maimed, or killed. At 15%, 150, and so forth.
That would still make it the least indiscriminate long-range attack in the history of warfare.
Give me another example of a military that injured/incapacitated over 1000 enemy combatants from hundreds of miles away with so few civilian casualties.
Hopefully mods wake up soon, I want the technical gory details without the gory convo. If this is legit, it is going to be a fascinating post mortem.
I don't think the Times Of Israel is an unbiased source. This isn't trustworthy reporting.
Civility is not a concept, nor a word, that we employ in HN moderation—we dropped it years ago.
All people are counted as people by HN moderators. If it seems otherwise to you, I imagine that this is a combination of you having (1) not many explicit data points from us and (2) strong priors on the topic.
Sucks for some of us with family in Lebanon but I doubt I'll be seen as human either. I won't name-and-shame, but I've worked at YC-sponsored startups that have asked me verbatim "How does it feel being a goyim, in [your] experience?"
That is not a joke, unfortunately. Thankfully I didn't think highly of YC in the first place so it wasn't horribly shocking.
some minimal due diligence to check the electronics maybe.
in simple devices charging and protection circuits are usually logically isolated from the rest of the device, and you cannot draw enough power from them to damage the battery.
maybe they used a weird load pattern the screws with the BMS, but there should be fuses too.
I hope we get more info
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container the same stuff you can put in a pager can be put more easily in a paper tube.
You do know that those Hezbollah members have been firing hundreds of rockets daily for a year into Israel, right? The fact that those rockets killed limited number of people is a matter of skill, not will.
Supply chain attack putting some RDX into a shipment of pagers
> The article says nothing about thousands.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/sep/17/middle-ea...
> Eight killed and 2,750 wounded in pager blasts across Lebanon – health minister
All I said is this article doesn’t say it. Other articles do make this claim.
We've banned this account for egregiously breaking the site guidelines and for using HN primarily for political battle. Those things are not allowed here, even though I am sure that you have very legitimate reasons for feeling the way you do.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
p.s. I suppose I'd better add that yes, we treat accounts breaking the rules from the opposite site of the war in just the same way, and have moderated and banned many of those accounts as well.
I am talking about people like current Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, not some random dude on Hacker News or Twitter:
"he gave a speech in Paris at a podium featuring a map that included Jordan and the occupied West Bank as part of Israel and said the Palestinian people were 'an invention.'"
https://www.axios.com/2023/03/20/bezalel-smotrich-jordan-gre...
I'm not predicting the future, I am reporting what some believe and advocate for. My reporting is sourced.
What is HN's reason for not allowing submissions to be downvoted? Downvote seems like the most appropriate solution.
For anyone with this response to any given story: you can use HN's "Hide" feature.
If you have the spoons for it, flags / vouches (and mod emails) help, though on highly contentious topics, such as this one, there's a limit to what can be done.
It isn't normally like this unless the topic is controversial.
My problem is with the obvious compromised assets who continually pop up on threads like this always pushing certain narratives. Look for yourself who has the most posts.
The ugly question is how much collateral is fine. Hezbollah confirmed the deaths of 3 people, two of its fighters and this girl. Of course, this will surely escalate the war between Israel and Hezbollah so its surely negative even if the collateral ends up being very low because Hezbollah received most of the pagers.
>> They set these off in public spaces and private residences. There are already reports that Israel murdered a 10 year old girl with this attack. Absolutely horrible.
People tend to do whatever they want when they’re raised since birth to believe everybody that is not one of their in-group is a quite literal subhuman not chosen by god
HN tries to really avoid this kind of discussion since it never goes anywhere productive. Folks who have really strong views on Israel/Gaza are not going to change their perspective because of a comment thread on Hacker News.
In this case, they were posting information what was apparently perfectly accurate (except as to the exact age of the girl who was killed in the attack) - per CNN:
At least nine people, including an 8-year-old girl, have been killed by Tuesday’s pager explosions, Lebanon’s health minister Firass Abiad said in an interview with Al Jazeera.
From my understanding of the HN guidelines, a technical discussion around the technology in this story is not an issue. Where things break down is when people starting talking about Israel vs Palestine, who is at fault, who should be punished, who is the true aggressor, etc.
I am curious how would you conceal an explosive in an electronic device (like a pager) to make sure that it minimizes collateral damage when it goes off. That is a political question since you ultimately are making a human life vs military objective trade-off.
The international law standard seems to be proportionality to the military objective desired, so maybe no one (generally) cares how many civilians die if you know the targets will be high ranking.
The original post is from the Times Of Israel. It's literally propaganda, we can at least discuss the content no?
I'm still not really sure why Isreal causes such polarised emotions.
However, one thing is certain, this level of polarisation is not going to help.
The "fixing" of Israel and its neighbours requires a change of attitude from many people, including us.
Currently, there are no "good guys" only future victims.
Its all to easy to see someone bomb civilians and say "well yeah its justified because they did it first." Ok, I understand, but how do you get to a state where that doesn't happen again?
There are other wars we can draw some parallels from that might help. Most notably is the irish civil war in the 6 counties (1919-200x). Britian went round shooting anyone that looked like the IRA, and the IRA went round shooting andbombing, the UDF et all also bombed and shot whomever they thought were wrong.
THe war intensified, but it was only when all the players started talking did something good happen (Ireland, UK, USA)
The problem here is that the number of parties that need to talk are quite high, and two of the main actors are currently run be recalcitrant pricks.
The reasons behind these polarized emotions will differ based on who you ask and are too many to list. Both sides feel entitled to the land, I personally don't care what the place is called, I just want everyone living in it to have equal rights and for justice to exist in the land. But that requires persecution and killing to end – which I don't see happening in the foreseeable future as tragic as that is.
> I'm still not really sure why Isreal causes such polarised emotions.
Not to state the obvious but the largeest distinction between israel and every other country its that its a mostly jewish country.
> THe war intensified, but it was only when all the players started talking did something good happen
The bigger issue here is that while talks have been attempted many times, there is a sense on both sides of bad faith negotiations. In Ireland, bad as it was, there was a feeling the other side "would get too much" but not that they were outright lying about their aims.
> The problem here is that the number of parties that need to talk are quite high
There is also the problem of little value to human life. Religious fanatism, afterlife promises and even goverment sponsored programs such as martyr funds have devalued human life to a point where here is little basis on what to use as foundational goal for peace.
> other country its that its a mostly jewish country.
I mean yeah that was a thing, but I would suggest that its less of a unique part as it once was.
> Religious fanatism, afterlife promises
I mean that's a strong motivator, but sectarianism isn't new or unique to this conflict. Moreover its only part of the story. People are fighting because someone they knew has been injured, killed or suffered from this war. Yes there are people who are also into making a new eden or some shit, but they are often only a small but tediously vocal minority.
It's amazing how little empathy you can have for a country that had 1000+ of its civilians murdered just because it's a primarily Jewish country.
As long as nobody's forgetting the Qibya massacre I don't really think much empathy is lost. It's a dirty war fought by ideologically-motivated pundits on both sides. The current US administration can barely even show their support for Israel without being (rightfully) questioned on the morality of supporting things like the Hannibal directive and Dahiya doctrine.
If this was just about Israel being a primarily Jewish country, there would be no discussion. It is more broadly about the IDF pushing the boundary of war in ways that makes other first-world countries uncomfortable by association.
There's an on-going war between Hezbollah and Israel since Hezbollah attacked Israel on October 8th [0]. The pagers were to be used by Hezbollah members. Hezbollah is considered a terrorist organization by many countries, including Arab countries. Being a member of a terrorist organization isn't the best way to stay safe, especially not during a conflict that your organization initiated. I think that the fact that these explosions happened in public places isn't so relevant considering the size of the explosions.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Hezbollah_confl...
This was a bombing of military personnel by parties at war. That is, by definition, not terrorism. This action has been acceptable for as long as bombs have existed.
This hack is the best argument against network-connected electric vehicles that there is. Imagine the same, but with tens of thousands of Teslas.