Comment by sbeam

The microcontrollers inside the pagers probably have a spare GPIO pin, so they'd just have to modify the software and attach the detonating electronics to that gpio pin.

Since i'm supposedly "posting too fast", to answer the post below:

> Just curious, is it possible to program the pins so that it triggers by wireless or satellite command? With that scale I don't think wireless is possible though.

Technically it is, but requires additional electronics and antennas. It's much easier to just use the existing pager network and trigger when some specific message (or pager code) is detected. Paging networks are simple to implement.

My best guess is explosively formed penetrator in the display.

I don’t think wholesale replacement of the pagers was likely to work for a number of reasons.

They had to go one step up the supply chain.

The EFP display could be set to trigger on a certain message, or even the clearing of a certain message, which in devices without said display would do nothing.

The display is most likely to be pointed at the user’s face, or opposed to their waistline (EFPs sort of fire both ways but in one axis.

The battery, if it were a cylinder as would be likely, would fire tangentially, likely not hitting much.

A prismatic battery would make a good place for an EFP but difficult to interface with and likely requires a second compromised component.

Might be a hardcoded date and time. Does the legit pager messaging network give the time? If not, continually powered digital clocks drift slowly.

Batteries are not magic unknown technology. People who understand their chemistry can confidently say things like that.

Reuters is quoting experts, including lithium battery experts, saying that the explosions were inconsistent with an exploding battery:

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/what-we-know-so-fa...

Simple logic and science. Batteries do not cause forceful explosions like we've seen today. These pagers were intercepted and implanted with explosives (or entire load swapped with pre-made malicious ones) and then allowed to continue on to their destination. Thus I can say with 100% confidence that this was a supply chain attack.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/17/world/middleeast/israel-h...

In a surprise to no one except you

How do you judge that likely? It seems just as possible if not more that it was a single lot purchased by Hezbollah for Hezbollah.

I'd guess anybody with a pager in that part of the world dumped theirs as soon as they heard what happened.

I bet lots of people with that model of pager are now ripping them open to check for explosives. If we don't see pictures of unexploded ones, then I'd guess they were all triggered, and the only ones we might see are devices that were turned off at the time.

Good point. I'm kind of a dumb-dumb when it comes to present-day pager tech. I haven't even seen one in decades.

Let me rephrase the question then: if any measure was made to target just the pagers that were in the hands of Hezbollah, how was that accomplished?

> We all remember the pagers running on cellular/2G networks

Who does? I'm not aware of pagers running on the GSM network. Maybe they existed, but I don't think they were ever widespread.

With a statement like that one wonders if Hezbollah leadership itself has been infiltrated.

If you’ve figured out how to get explosives into pagers, the next question is how do you get your enemy to buy a bunch of new pagers from you.

They have to want new pagers in a hurry.

So you just need to convince them that their phones are all already compromised.

Note that this does not require that their phones actually be compromised.

That's an interesting idea, and it wouldn't even need a firmware hack... a real time clock circuit with a specific date/time to detonate would be simpler and easier to coordinate simultaneous detonation.

Pagers typically ran off regular AA batteries, not Li-Ion stuff.

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Yeah, agreed. Also agreeing with the sibling posters that the videos that emerge look nothing like batteries catching fire but rather like actual detonations. Nothing an untampered pager should be able to do.

This is unlikely to be a shaped charge, there is not enough space. High explosives are inherently directional depending on the geometry of the explosive and point of detonation. As a practical matter of fitting explosives into a pager, I would expect most of the explosion to be directed perpendicular to the face of the pager in both directions. In almost all cases, carrying or using the pager would put the person directly on the main axis.

You might prefer a shaped charge to reduce the likelihood of injuring bystanders and to ensure that what little explosive you can fit in there can kill whoever is using it.

Watching the grocery store security video, I think a multi-directional shaped charge is plausible with pressure evident in two directions. But very hard to draw any conclusions.

Yeah, everyone talking about shaped charges or (micro-) explosively formed penetrators seems to overlook the fact that, compared to just a regular bomb, they'd be less strictly effective for situations where you can't control the alignment of the charge to the target.

Don't overthink it - just a bit of RDX and a detonator does wonders.

For a non-infantry massed attack on a military asset, the ratio of military to civilian casualties here is probably going to end up being unprecedented in the history of modern warfare; this will probably end up being an extraordinarily surgical attack by any military standard. Civilians are routinely killed in targeted strikes, because targeted strikes are almost always conducted by air. This attack may end up being distinguished by how few civilians were harmed.

Neither Israel nor Hezbollah is mobilized for all-out war here. Hezbollah is depleted from its disastrous efforts in Syria; Israel is fully committed to combat operations in Gaza. The north of Israel has been evacuated for months because of indiscriminate rocket attacks from Hezbollah. Hezbollah is an arm of the IRGC, which is more or less at open war with Israel. If either side could have launched an all-out assault (or, I mean, a more conventional all-out assault than this one), they would have done so already.

  > Unlike stuxnet, this attack had a lot of non-hezbolah civilian casualties. It’s "targeted" in a sense, but not really much more targeted than a drive-by assassination attempt.

I read the news in Arabic, there are credible reports of an 8 year old girl being killed in this attack. I haven't seen that yet in English language news. That is a horrible price to pay. But it is part of a calculated risk that, as per those same news sources, killed between 10 to 12 Hezbollah operatives and injured 2700 more.

Stuxnet didn't have a lot of civilian casualties (if any?) but it did cause a lot of monetary damage to civilian companies.

However this was of course unintended, the malware was never meant to make it out to the wider world.

That's a good summary of the dangers of normalizing the actions that previously were the domain of only terrorists. The world works because most countries and people rejected amoral results-based reasoning and considered such actions in the light of another dimension: morality. It's difficult to define, but there was some sort of consensus. How long those agreements, formal and simply normative, will last remains to be seen. I do not look forward to their further erosion.

Hezbollah already attacks civilians indiscriminately for one. Second, "won't someone think of the children" is a tired argument. Hate to be that guy - but maybe this will be a lesson on allowing these terrorists to roam your streets. Avoiding civilian death in a warzone is an impossibility. Limiting it is all you can do. Knowing that, this was an absolutely amazing job at target selection. Of all methods of target selection this is probably the most precise you can get with the exception of snipers, AGM-114-R9X, etc. The psychological damage from this attack alone is probably worth more than any other method. Hezbollah will be crippled at least temporarily and likely afraid to use any technology they don't control the supply chain for.

> which most countries shy away from because it’s so hard to defend against

This is not why. It's shied away from because it's extremely difficult to target effectively without causing mass unwanted causalities and the associated killing mechanism is considered cruel and unusual. "Being hard to defend against" is exactly something factored in with weapons. Why would I want to use a weapon that is easy to defend against? If that's the case, the US would march with clubs and bows, you know, "to make things fair".

You are assuming they didn't try, which is incorrect. Cyber attacks on water filtration plants attacks were done for example.

I feel this is just one more step away from "wild" globalized products and towards supply chain safety.

I've seen multiple videos of the explosions, even people standing directly next to the target were not hurt.

Contrary to what you said, this is pretty much the ultimate in targeted attacks.

Completely disagree. I cannot think of a more successful, large scale, targeted attack in recent memory. The engineering behind this was incredible.

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Also because one would have to weigh the alternative.

Imagine Israel declared an old fashioned war against Lebanon as response to the missile strikes originated from its territory.

I think the number of civilian casualties of a conventional "legal" war would be much much higher than the collateral damage of this operation.

Now, does that make it "right"? To me war is horror and is to avoid at all cost. Is a smaller horror a cost one's willing to pay to avoid a bigger horror? Hard to say. But I think it's still important to at least try to see things in a broader context otherwise we may never understand why people on the ground make the choices they do.

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I would argue that Hamas has gone from being an organised terrorist group to being an idea.

Gaza has a very young population growing up with the current war, some (not all) will be radicalized by what they experienced growing up.

hamas is the governing body of gaza, so any government workers would technically be hamas.

don't confuse post office workers for military personnel just cuz they work for the government.

Many of them, yes.

yes.

After I posted my comment the title was updated to be a little bit more neutral.

The previous headline was emphasizing a little too strongly the assumption that this attack was against Hezbollah only, and as you mention there are "exceptions", meaning, civilians and non-militants (including children) were killed and injured.

EDIT: in other words, the headline is/was written with the assumption that whoever was attacked was a member of Hezbollah, but this isn't true.

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Iraq War deaths are actually kind of lower than you'd expect them to be. Low enough if that if you want to score him, GWB is net positive because of PEPFAR. It's so good it saved many more lives than even two pointless wars lost.

Do you have a reference for that? And does it explain how Israel's assassins were sure none of the pagers weren't resold, nor given away, nor that someone's kid was playing with it?

Hezbollah also has a massive social services wing, operating hospitals, schools, etc. I'd keep that in mind when hitching my wagon to this line of thinking.

Even though I personally doubt this statement, care to explain how that would possibly be enough? If an explosion happens, everyone in range is hit.

you realize they exploded, right? potentially as someone's child was nearby. or playing with it. or in the middle of a grocery story.

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So you are saying that if hezbollah exploded weapons on off-duty military walking around in malls and hospitals in the US it would not be terrorism? Because that's exactly what happened here.

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October 7th was obviously far worse. But I don't think people would agree that police should stoop to same levels of criminals.

It wouldn't be considered a success if police stopped a bank robbery by killing bystanders.

No. October 7th made me sympathize with Israel. What followed that made defending Israel impossible.

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It’s not quantum mechanics. They put bombs inside pagers and pressed a button.

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We know absolutely zero about how the pagers were distributed.

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Also if I can make a late addition: vouch for comments which you believe may have been unfairly flagged or killed. That also happens on Highly Contentious Discussions.

AFAIU mods see flags and vouches and will occasionally step in. Their bandwidth is limited however.

(I've emailed dang over this moderation issue, and in the case of this specific story. The mods do what they can.)

When I think of sane people, I don't think of people who ignore the moral and ethical implications of thousands of deaths.

Just deal with the people who completely lose their shit on topics such as these.

Injecting copious amounts of vitriol is exactly how you can make people shut up about the entire thing.