Comment by sbeam

> The most likely is either some explosive besides the battery, or something that looks like a battery from the outside, but is actually half explosive

That is the most plausible explanation. It can’t be an obvious thing or someone would notice it. If it looks like a plain battery pack, nobody would think of cutting it open.

One easy way to conceal the explosive would be to overmold it in a cavity inside the plastic enclosure. This would escape all but the most thorough inspections. And since battery terminals are typically also embedded in the plastic this can provide a clandestine supply of power and signal with something like Dallas protocol to the fuse.

I work in the battery space.

All you have to do is build replacement batteries without the pressure relief vents. You can easily get a Chinese manufacture to do this for a fee and properly some complaining about how stupid it is to do.

Then wrap it in some nichrome wire and have a micro run some power through it. The nichrome wire will overheat the cell really quickly causing the cell to rapidly over pressurize and boom.

Small pouch or prismatic cells that would be used at the size of a pager generally won't burn. And I speak from experience of doing stupid shit to them in the name of testing, nothing like using the nail puller side of a hammer to puncture them, or rigging up a fixture with 3 concrete nail guns to shoot it or well, fun stuff

You are probably right but explosives risk detection, either by the militants or by the airport security if taken to a flight to a country with serious security.

I don’t think they’re saying you’d need to change the chemistry though, they’re saying they could have altered way it was packaged so that when it started burning there was nowhere for the gas to go.

Similar to how firecrackers work. If you take a firecracker apart and light the powder, you’ll get a flash and a lot of smoke, but no bang. The explosion comes from the pressure building up in an enclosure.

Disclaimer: not a chemist. Just a former unwisely curious kid

Yeah, this should remove any doubt that there were explosives involved. At the 500 to 1000 mA hour capacity typically used in pagers, even tampering with the battery's venting in an attempt to build up gas pressure would at worst result in a pop and some smoke from the top of the bag.

Blowing a hole in the side of the bag and sending debris for several meters is obviously not plausible with that quantity of lithium.

The explosion in the video does show visible smoke, but there is not a visible flame or fire.

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whoever is good/evil aside...

hezbollah got totally owned and look like fools...relying on tech they just took at face value out of the box

Urg, I used exactly this brand in the past.

Is an interesting problem. Maybe the experts in the area could help here. I assume that a worn battery near the end of its life is more prone to explode, but I wonder...

Would the dead cells in the battery take part in that; or are just dead and not reactive.

In other words: if a battery has only a 30% remaining alive; or a laptop has a very worn battery, would an hypothetical explosion by overheating be much less severe? or is still so dangerous as new?.

Those are NiMHs, aren't they? WTF? That shouldn't be possible.

Any idea what prompted the explosion?

According to this post, the pagers that exploded had rechargeable batteries. They even used USB-C, so Hezbollah must be using somewhat fancy pagers: https://x.com/BabakTaghvaee1/status/1836082246538629490

So that Israel couldn't track their locations via cell networks. Sure you could use Signal or w/e but it's the cell IDs and knowing where people are that was the issue. The pagers do far less, if any, two way communication so it's not likely to give away location data.

Pagers don't have GPS devices embedded in them.

Apps (some more or less than others) represent a target for a nation state to pursue for information, graph analysis, bugging, etc.

Because cellphones transmit, pagers don't.

No, a pager is optimized to be a case size that's comfortable for carrying and reading. The electronics could be the size of the smallest wristwatch, which is already dominated by its own form factor requirements, not the PCB + battery + display subcomponents that are scarcely the size of a nickel.

A typical pager is about 60 x 40 x 20mm. Much of this volume requirement is driven by the 16mm diameter 34mm long CR123 battery, a lot of it could be empty.

That battery is a relatively safe lithium primary chemistry, not a rechargeable Lithium polymer pounch or lithium ion cylinder that would risk fire and explode if the overpressure vents were omitted and the BMS corrupted, but the primary lasts for years.

I bet you could use a CR1216 battery (1.6mm thin, 30mAh, instead if 34mm long and 1500mAh) instead and have quite a good deal of spare volume in the battery for an explosive. If you filled the entire pager, that would be even more room, but much more easily detected.

Because it takes a surprisingly small amount of high explosive to cause the kind of damage shown in the footage we’ve seen so far. All it would take is for the battery to be replaced with a combo package - part battery, part explosive. No need for additional internal space.

Disclosure: my first job was in the Australian Defence Science Technology Organisation, Materials Research Lab, Explosives Instrumentation Group.

I think it makes more sense to think of these as explosive devices manufactured by/for Israel that are just designed to pass as pagers.

If cost per unit isn’t a consideration, I suspect you can shrink the size of the electronic components used in the pager to make room for a 20 gram explosive charge.

Pagers—especially commodity models—aren’t profitable enough to warrant cutting edge tech with the latest advances in microelectronics. Lots of room to improve things if you are making a set of them at a loss.

One possibility is to replace part of the battery. The smaller battery can be designed to lie about its charge, or you can replace with a higher energy-density battery and use the space saved for a detonation system (perhaps even incorporating the battery itself into this) and a small quantity of high explosive, which is pretty stable and safe until detonated. Contrary to popular belief, high explosives are actually relatively safe, and usually even burn safely or are hard to ignite at all in some cases. Package it up into something that looks identical to an unmodified battery. Modify device firmware and battery control circuitry to detonate it on receipt of a specific signal and... boom.

Thinner (less durable, but who cares?) plastic shell to free up space for explosives, but would likely be obvious if someone opened it - which might be a common thing if these were being used as remote triggering devices.

If they were using a AA battery, replace the battery with something that provides you space to work (e.g. put in a AAAA or button cell that would provide appropriate power but lower capacity) because you don't really care if the battery life drops from months to weeks.

Pagers, by definition, are likely to be older technology.

The internals could be replaced with modern smaller and lower-power equivalents, requiring a smaller battery, and saving enough space.

(Or maybe somebody just donated a batch of innocent-looking devices to 'the cause', or offered a bargain on some 'extra secure' pagers?)

The image is from this video: https://x.com/babaktaghvaee1/status/1836074863032701208?s=12

Not sure a wooden desk is equivalent to porcelain though. Porcelain cracks, just need a lot of pressure in a small spot to make a big break.

That said, .... Really glad I quit smoking anything after seeing the damage a vape did to those poor guys

Hezbollah has been escalating their armed attacks against Israel for almost an entire year, parallel with the war in Gaza. Every day tens of rockets hit Israel, almost the entire north of Israel is evacuated of civilians.

I realize that this is not widely known, attacks against Israel receive far less attention in the news than do Israeli retaliations.

Their comms and command infra is now hosed and all the operatives concentrated in hospitals. They are dead in the water.

How would this be an escalation trigger after a year of missiles and airstrikes with 1000 Hezbollah dead and 100k civilians displaced on each side?

I don't think it takes much to 'flood' a hospital in Lebanon though. They country has been a mess since the big explosion. They barely have power.

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It would be a bit rich for us to call this a war crime, since our standard M.O. for targeted strikes --- like everybody else's --- routinely kills innocent civilians in much larger numbers than this.

A couple of things on this:

1. It appears that the AUMBC referenced replaced their equipment but that had nothing to do with this and their doctors weren't impacted.

2. Your note of "...other enemies of Israel will be significantly more motivated retaliate in some equally creative/unpredictable fashion..." is strange considering that this is already the norm. Almost all (perhaps all) of the attacks against Israel have been from terrorists targeting civilians.

I think they burned an asset right before the last time they had a window to use it. Maybe even on accident.

Dumb and cruel, could have used it to nearly the same effect by just telling hezbollah.

The pagers were likely one way with a codebook for the purpose of minimizing tracking and information exposure.

That is indeed a possibility.

I think you're assuming that all pagers of this model were being sent out like this. That's unlikely.

Much more likely is they compromised someone in Hezbollah that was doing the ordering, or the distributor/vendor they ordered from, modified a couple thousand devices and sent them pretty much directly to their enemy, and only their enemy, to distribute among themselves. Then waited a bit, and set them off.

Fear is a powerful form of communication.

True but so can explosives. Clearly they were not competent.

Radio signals can be detected of course but it's possible to mitigate that a lot by only doing that at specific times and locations, or on request. And send the data out in batch. Ideally while you have the subject under observation so you know they're not monitoring for signals.

The same way Volkswagen hid their engine manipulation from tests by recognising the test and adjusting parameters.

The level of competence usually correlates with how much in conflict you are not.

Correction after more information has become available:

The Gold Apollo AR-924 model pager is reported to have been manufactured under license by Budapest-based company "BAC Consulting KFT", but the head of this company denies manufacturing the devices and instead described themselves as an intermediary, without providing further information. The Taiwanese company which allowed these devices to be manufactured under license also reported receiving strange remittances from BAC via banking systems in the Middle East (not Hungary).[1]

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/09/18/hungary-en...

All the terrorist market suddenly boycotting them, I'm sure they're losing sleep over it.

Business for pagers is not going great anyway...

Site is down: https://www.gapollo.com.tw/rugged-pager-ar924/

Time right for a meshtastic pager with a BOM with no bombs.

That would make sense, since there's no such thing as a one-way GSM device. GSM towers (cells) need to keep track of which devices are in their vicinity and do smooth handovers to neighboring towers.

I'm not sure how the protocol you mentioned works, but I'd imagine it still needs some info about the whereabouts of the receiver to route the messages to him.

> Then he was found and assassinated in Spain by the FSB.

And that only because he seems to have lost his sense of self-preservation and basically lived his life in the open, in a Spanish town full of Russian ex-pats. And scoffed at the idea that he'd be safer in Ukraine.

This story maybe continues - the killed pilot was allegedly seen alive in Czechia. Though this information is unconfirmed [1].

[1] https://denikn.cz/1510394/cesti-zpravodajci-resili-zda-byl-z...

Didn't he kill his crew mates in the helicopter before or after landing in Ukraine.

Source?

>Whoever did this just killed that as an information channel as both the devices and the network are now compromised.

This is also true for Hezbollah. They must now distrust their own network, equipment and procurement channels. The reshuffling resulting from the casualties will make the organization less effective, at least temporarily, thus delaying any attack plans and allowing moles to rise through the ranks.

That's not been true for well over twenty years.

http://suntelecom.com/images/st900_large.jpg

Until we know the attack vector, I wouldn't say the network is compromised. Perhaps a specific message was used to detonate, that wouldn't require compromising the network. Perhaps there was a separate radio that wasn't using the pager network at all.

>Whoever did this just killed that as an information channel as both the devices and the network are now compromised.

I'm not sure if thats true, they just need to start cracking open their shipments of pagers and looking for explosives.

Its one thing to figure out how to wire the vibrator in a phone into an external explosive activation circuit.

Its a whole other thing to do a supply chain intercept on an entire factory run of pagers, build a difficult to detect explosive into them, get them into the hands of your enemies, and remotely trigger them over infrastructure you don't directly control.

This is an incredible level of execution. And, presumably, the IDF or some attached intelligence agency demonstrating how deeply they own their adversary's networks.

I watched a video of one of these exploding in the pocket of someone at a grocery store with someone standing directly next to him, so close they were rubbing shoulders, and the bystander was fine. No doubt there were many dozens of civilian casualties, but if the numbers net out the way you'd expect they would (ie: people carrying these pagers, which link to Hezbollah's own communications network --- they run their own phone company --- are overwhelmingly Hezbollah operatives) this is going to pencil out as one of the most surgical attacks of all time.

Every military strike in modern warfare will involve someone in some sense not worrying about innocent people getting hurt. This isn't Agincourt. Wars happen in cities now.

One of the most specifically targeted, discriminatory large-scale attacks of all time, and still people complain.

If they didn’t care they would directly level the building.

Most sophisticated-best funded military in the world doesn't have automatic alert systems in place, redundancies, etc, eh?

You probably also don't believe that the Hannibal Directive was deployed on Oct. 7th as well, even though Israel is known to have done the same as early as 1986.

P.S. There are IDF intelligence agents who are whistleblowers that say that this had to have been allowed.

You do know this so-called war didn't start on Oct. 7th, right?

This world needs to be mandated to watch all of the actual evidence, and just propaganda by those who mostly control the mainstream-social media channels.