Comment by harimau777 3 days ago
This seems like it would have the potential for a lot of collateral damage due to the possibility that modified pagers might enter general distribution. That is to say, how do they insure that a given shipment of pagers are only going to Hezbollah as opposed to some of them going to people like aid workers?
Well, now that everyone knows it's feasible to hide a small bomb inside a pager, what's to stop people from checking their pagers for tiny explosives before using them?
Well nothing which is why people are spreading stuff about it being a hack causing the batteries to explode. Which disrupts everything with a network connection and battery. Adds confusion to the situation.
As I said elsewhere this is a one shot attack. They would never be able to pull this off again at this scale.
It's effects might have been intended as much for psychological as lethal results. This specific vector may be a one-and-done tactic but Hezbollah members would be foolhardy not to regard every electronic device that is, at minimum, younger than $pager_age with suspicion. At this point even if it's a wired copper POTS line I'd be asking the intern to take my calls and shout things out from a few rooms away.
Agree on the one shot thing. Makes you wonder if they got what they wanted, and if someone's pulling out their hair over wasting this attack...
You only need to vet what the inside of a pager should look like once, and spread the knowledge around... using them will become more of a hassle, but not entirely impossible.
Probably not but the average person can buy a pager with a replaceable battery and buy a new one over the counter.
Assuming the stock of replaceable batteries is large enough to handle them all being replaced simultaneously, that the replacement batteries are not likewise compromised, and that the battery is indeed the compromised component.
Realistically just replacing the pagers is not only safer but also probably cheaper.
I'm not sure how many bomb techs they have around, but I'd be pretty afraid to personally open something I suspected to have a bomb in it.
Who uses pagers? Aid workers carry phones. The pagers are deliberate opsec move for Hezbollah.
I've used them for DevOps on-call in the last ten years in the US, as a backup to phone-based alerts. It's far too easy to mess up phone DND settings, forget to charge a phone, be outside cell service, or leave a phone in the wrong room. The pager had a long battery life and I clipped it to my pants waistband. I definitely caught pages via the pager that I would have missed over the phone.
If you're worried about the cell network going down, they serve as a backup comms device as well since they use different infrastructure.
Presumably Lebanese DevOps on-call isn't sharing pagers from a shipment to Hezbollah from Iran.
Hezbollah is essentially a government entity in much of Lebanon, they totally would. Hezbollah runs schools, hospitals - it's easily the largest social services provider in large swathes of Lebanon. That's why it enjoys so much support, in many ways it was a much more competent alternative to the failed Lebanese government.
Nurses and medical staff, at least in the US.
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/15/1219737658/why-do-doctors-sti...
For collateral, I was thinking more along the lines of non-Hezbollah civilians right next to the target, or perhaps a building set on fire
Here's a video of someone standing right next to the target: https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1836037485492629605
They are unharmed.
At the same time, I don't think there's any reason to disbelieve accounts (and video footage) of children among the injured. Unless you're sending operatives with pistols and killing targets individually, I don't think there's a way to do a strike of this scale without killing innocents.
So 1-2 feet away is safe from serious injury resulting from the explosive force itself. Though the probability seems high at least some out of thousands had people standing close enough for worse, or further away and hit with shrapnel.
I’m just commenting on injury though, not making a moral or ethical judgement. That’s not an easy call when an opponent is embedded in a population of non-combatants.
not sure of band allocations around israel, but in the US pagers were long wavelength devices and, as such, could receive signals much further inside buildings than pre-wifi cellular bands could reach. again, band / frequency (wavelength) allocation dependent. but if similar there, pagers might get signals in tunnels whereas cellular bands may not, for one plausible conjecture.
I'll consider that a possibility when it comes from an independent party detailing exactly which processes failed, why, and what remediation is being done beyond sacrificial dismissals. The particular WCK strike you're referring to wasn't even the first one killing WCK workers, just the most high-profile among many others.
[1]
> Yeah, it's really important to situate that attack on the World Central Kitchen in the context of these many other attacks that have occurred since October in Gaza. We've documented incidents of attacks on guest houses, on convoys of aid organizations, including Doctors Without Borders, MSF, the UN institution there UNRWA, the International Rescue Committee, and Medical Aid for Palestinians and another American aid group. And in every single one of these instances, these groups notified the authorities, the Israeli authorities multiple times about the GPS coordinate of the guest house, of the convoy that was moving. When it was convoys, they were taking agreed-upon routes that the Israelis had told them to take. And in every instance, these attacks occurred with zero prior warning to the aid organizations, and we're talking about, you know, 15 aid workers having been killed in these attacks and another including two children, family members, and another 16 injured.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2024/05/14/1251200131/israeli-strikes-on...
That's right. Any evaluation or discussion of this needs to take account of the fact that it makes the perpetrator culpable of an illegal act of war in which the lives of innocent children are disregarded. There are all sorts of "clever" but reprehensible things warring parties could do, but are considered to be beyond the pale. So, this is a stupid action by a reckless, immoral party which will continue to have consequences for all of us -- especially if we don't deal with anything that we control.
These pagers were used by Hizbullah because, unlike mobile phones, they cannot be tracked. The people who had them were certainly not random aid workers, but people in the Hizbullah chain of command. This is also indicated by the statements of Hizbullah itself (which are themself to be questioned and not taken at face value), according to which so far one non-combatant was reported killed and no other non-combatant were reported injured out of a total of 4,000 exploded explosive devices. The CCTV footage also shows that even in a crowded supermarket, no one was injured apart from the Hizbullah member with the pager.
First: Innocent people can use their phones just fine and have their comms intercepted by the IDF. Only Hezbollah wanted an alternative to hackable phones.
Second: If you distribute to Hezbollah and detonate already months later, it's unlikely many unaffiliated people already have Hezbollah pagers.
The hit rate indicates the targeting was right.
You can't insure it. It is actual terrorism, pure and simple.
"American University of Beirut withdrew the pagers from the medical staff this morning under the pretext of updating the system".
They didn't. Al Jazeera's headline was updated to read "Lebanon’s health minister says 8 killed, 2,750 wounded by exploding pagers."
These are pagers connected to Hizbollah's internal communication network. Why would they be used by the general population?
As I understand it, people are saying that the most likely way that this was carried out was that a shipment of pagers where intercepted and modified. My concern is that part or all of the shipment might not go to Hezbollah. Perhaps the shipment gets rerouted to somewhere else due to supply chain issues. Perhaps only half of the shipment was intended for Hezbollah. Perhaps a postal worker steals a few and sells them on the black market. Perhaps Hezbollah decides they have more than they needs and does something with the rest. Perhaps part or all of the shipment gets delayed and is sitting in a post office when it goes off.
Basically: warfare via mail bomb seems like it might be irresponsible.
These aren't normal retail pagers, like the world uses (or used to use) for pager-duty? And Hezbollah maintains its own network infrastructure?
You can also think of them as an Iranian army occupying southern Lebanon.
I know what Hezbollah is, I’m surprised they maintain stand-alone pager infrastructure apart from the system in use by the rest of thecpeolle
Hezbollah is essentially a governmental organization, they provide healthcare, education, agricultural infrastructure, social services, etc...
No essentially about it. Hezbollah is part of the government, one of many political parties in Lebanon. Just like most of the other major political parties in Lebanon, they maintain their own militia separate from the Lebanese military.
I think this is something that many people may not grasp about Lebanon.
The "There's Your Problem" podcast did an episode on the fertilizer explosion that leveled Beirut's port in 2020. The amount of breakdown that had to occur for that outcome was both astonishing... And utterly predictable given Lebanon's governmental structure, which is barely functional. It's less a government and more a power detente that hard-codes sectarian differences in the culture into the power structure, like trying to build a government out of a band of feuding warlords with no particular underlying agreement amongst the warlords to leave each other alone. Among other things, this makes their foreign policy heterogeneous; a given faction can just wage war without the government's consent, and the government lacks top-level power to do anything about it.
(Ironically, one of the things that minimized the potential damage in the fertilizer blast is that much of the material had been stolen and shipped away before the explosion. Likely by actors with the tacit support of high-level government functionaries looking the other way and refusing to do enforcement).
It would be easy to include a little microcontroller that can check what frequency the pager is set to. This allows you to target specific pager networks (government, military) while leaving pagers that are unlikely to be in use by targets intact for follow-up attacks.
Since when has Israel cared about civilians or aid workers
Pagers could have certain security options that would interest only a military organization. We don't know at which stage these were intercepted. They could just as easily be targeted to Hezbollah from the beginning of the sale. Advertise something that could be catered to them and once they take the bait go ahead and booby trap them all
I'm not sure why it's being assumed that they detonated all of the pagers. They presumably have unique device IDs / phone numbers that can be tied to individual people. For all we know, they may have just detonated the ones known to be in use by Hezbollah operatives.
Per The Lancet, if you account for excess deaths due to things like willfully imposed mass starvation, denial of medical services due to the destruction of hospitals, and living in tents without cooling due to the destruction of housing, 100,000 people have been killed as a consequence of the IDFs actions.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
If you aren't targeting occupied residences with the JDAM (like Israel does through the Where's Daddy? program) then feasibly you could end up with less civilian attrition using the JDAMs. Distributed fragmentation explosives with no fire control system are arguably more dangerous than a direct-attack munition targeting a military installation.
If that were the case, Israel wouldn't be intricately planting bombs in Hezbollah pagers.
Gaza has fairly low civilian:combatant death ratios, lower than in most comparable urban wars. It's not hard to calculate them, the information is partly public (published by Hamas and IDF). However, many people chose to believe whatever they want to believe instead of going for the facts, I've seen some people come up with numbers ad hoc that are ten times than what Hamas reports, or they claim IDF has basically not killed any Hamas combatants at all.
Not really? Part of what happened with Gaza and Hamas was that Netanyahu (and governments before his) spent a decade taking Hezbollah more seriously than Hamas (for good reason!). They are geared up for a precise and carefully-executed conflict with Hezbollah in ways they were not with Hamas.
At the same time: 100% reasonable to look at today and say "if you can pull off an attack like this, why the fuck are you still leveling apartment buildings in Gaza, after having permanently crippled Hamas months ago". Like, there's a moral dimension to this! But I don't think that dimension is "feel real bad for Hassan Nasrallah". Play stupid games, &c &c.
The pagers do give Israel a certain veneer of plausible deniability that they wouldn’t otherwise have if they had used more traditional bombing methods.
Literally everybody in the entire world believes Israel is responsible for this. An Mk-82 bomb dropped from a bomber would have more deniability. This was a joke about Israel's tactical signature back when James Mickens included it in a Usenix Security throwaway paragraph back in 2014. There is absolutely no deniability here, unless someone very powerful is deliberately trying to frame Israel (which is not what is happening).
And yet they set thousands of them off no matter who was nearby.
I suspect that is an intentional side effect against the whole pager network. It is now totally compromised which means they can no longer use passive channels as a communication medium. This effectively shut down their comms structure.
As for aid workers, they mostly use whatever low ball android phones they can get their hands on I know someone who volunteered out there and everyone uses them and Telegram). I don't think that will impact them at all.