Comment by einszwei

It looks like a trigger that can only be pulled once.

Thus, choice of the optimal time could be influenced by a lot of things:

- knowledge of other Hezbollah imminent action making comms disruption right now of great importance

- recognition that the vulnerability had been discovered and was about to be remediated

- via other "eyes on" prime targets, knowledge that just one or two top leaders were briefly in especially-vulnerable positions (like sleeping alongside their pagers)

- etc

And, there will be a "long tail" of damage to Hezbollah's usual communications practices & trust in devices/suppliers. Some marginal recruits may even be deterred from joining a battle against an opponent which can carry out this sort of attack – though of course, others may be emboldened.

I think the purpose is to terrorize your opponents. Sometimes getting seriously wounded is even worse than getting killed, from the perspective of Hez. Now they need to handle thousands of wounded members, which is much more expensive than dead ones.

I actually think that an unintended consequence is that Mossad has permanently flagged the vast majority of Hizbullah's followers, an entire generation, on Lebanese soil.

The wound patterns will emerge for the vast majority of victims: arms, hands, eyes and hips ? Time will tell.

The Lebanese army, and the IDF, now suddenly can tell between civilian vs combatant.

I think the simplest explanation here is that pagers are small and light and don't have that much free space inside them, and it's hard to fit enough explosive into them to reliably kill people. The figures I saw was only a few grams of explosive could be fit in them. If you look at the photos and videos that have been coming out today you'll see what the injuries look like; they're not as catastrophic as getting shot with a bullet, or anything close to a real explosive with orders of magnitude more explosive in it like an artillery shell, rocket, aerial bomb, etc.

I would guess Israel would have preferred more lethal pagers, but the required amount of explosive simply didn't fit. So the resulting deaths are from the people who got really unlucky, whereas getting wounded was the modal result.

The death toll isn't the goal. They're after the 2nd order effects, now there are ~3,000 operatives that are marked by a scar that is relatively distinctive. They also have substantially disrupted their communication protocols and caused psychological damage.

I doubt those 2,750 all have minor injuries. That's 2,750 targets, a lot of whom probably now now have missing fingers/hands, a chunk missing from their leg, face injuries.... Aka major injuries from having a small explosion on their belt or int their pocket. It's going to be 2,750 probably major injuries that will take a long time to recover from.

It surely is because you corrode your target’s trust in technology. They moved from smartphones to pagers, now they’ll have to find even cruder types of communications.

Wounded soldiers are often a bigger burden than killed ones. You neee to retrieve them, take care of them, and they may never be fight capable again. They are also a breathing reminder of the costs of war, and at the same time less likely to make others vow revenge.

Killing is one thing, but wounded soldiers/operatives are a much larger drain on resources than killing.

The wounded people need care, medicine, rehab, therapy, and feeding during their recovery.

This occupies significant resources of your enemy.

I’m not commenting on this specific attack, but talking in general.

TBH Israel does not concern itself about killing bystanders generally and our western press will also laser focus on hezbullah.

If their comms are severely disrupted, yes. Even if it wasn't militarily effective, it's still quite a clever attack.

If this were coordinated with a ground attack on Hezbollah, it would be a great way to disrupt any defense right before it needs to offer resistance.

I'm surprised they used it out of such a concept. It is almost heartening, because it suggests no such attack is currently anticipated by Israel.

And how many of those wounded are totally unconnected bystanders, who just happened to be standing next to the individual in the grocery store or wherever?

Idk who exactly was hit but losing a hand will definitely hurt ones ability to fight.

The point was probably to reduce accidental casualties. Also, the wounds can be quite severe. Finally, a device like a pager cannot hold a lot of explosive substance in its spare space anyway.

It's the psychology. Every sat phone and laptop is being opened up right now...

Killing isn't always the goal.

The effect of this "action" is the same as a bouncing betty. (I assume) The goal is to incapacitate and use resources.

500 blinded

> 2,750 wounded

Absolutely insane. Imagine this many Israeli had been wounder by Hammas attack.

Disgusting move from Israel to keep civilian causalities minimum! This is no excuse for 'collateral damage'

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> "One shot attack"

>> This is the second time israel has done this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash

> They will never be able to do it again.

Only if Hezbollah take steps to avoid it. Presumably they will, but presumably there is a cost, and so Israel will continue to benefit from them having to divert resources to doing that.

As someone else posted, it's not entirely novel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash#Assassination

OP was most likely concerned about Israeli businesses that supply (or ship) non-explosive components/products no longer being trusted.

As if Israil ever cared about civil vs combatants.

From the amount of injured it seems more like a broad attack than a targeted one.

Most likely they knew some of them would go to hezbollah, and that was enough, collateral damage be damned.

> The main injury inflicted on individuals was psychological

Have you seen the footage(0) from hospitals? It's likely that hundreds of Hezbollah members lost hands, eyes, etc. That will degrade their military effectiveness significantly, especially the people who were blinded. And remember that Hezbollah is trying(1) to prevent more footage of the attack from getting out, so what we've seen publicly quite likely underplays the full extent of it.

Sure, maybe you could argue that the "main" effect in terms of total numbers was psychological. But we shouldn't understate how many Hezbollah members were directly given life-long injuries that will make them ineffective forever. That's a huge win for Israel.

0) https://x.com/Osint613/status/1836040863195029530 1) https://x.com/Saul_Sadka/status/1836039347210002899

>communication network that was intended to avoid Israeli surveillance

Reuters even covered conversion to pagers two months ago

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/pagers-drones-how-...

> What if large numbers of countries with developing tech markets start looking at the suppliers involved the way the USA looks at China's Huawei?

It's well known that the NSA performs supply chain attacks by planting spyware on hardware which goes through the USA. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/12/glenn-greenwal...

Whenever the USA complain about something China is allegedly doing, it's a good bet that they know someone in the USA camp is doing that very thing.

I don't know if you've been following this conflict, but Israel's enemies don't need excuses to attack Israel. They think Israel doesn't have a right to exist, and thus see the very existence of the state of Israel as a provocation that justifies violence against Jews.

They've been firing hundreds of rockets, daily, into Israeli territory. You think they need more excuses to do anything?

The other side was already doing everything it could.

Somebody in Russia is probably thinking right now "you know, that was quite a clever idea".

I’d prefer a device with a Chinese backdoor to a device with Israeli remote explosives any day.

Hezbollah started this war on October 8, and they can stop it by ceasing their attacks.

Israel have no reason to want a war. It's Hezbollah who want to conquer Israeli land. Israel wants nothing from Lebanon.

I wonder why they did it now of all times. This is a card you can only play once.

Israel leadership is probably prepping for some big October surprise timed perfectly just before the US election. Everyone is predicting it so much these days that its not really a surprise but a eventuality at this point.

Or you know, 100,000+ Israelis had to leave their homes in north Israel for nearly 1 year. You also had Druze Arab children slaughtered by Hezbollah. So what options would Israel have here?

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> Absolutely. From today on, this type of attack will have to be considered part of the arsenal.

I doubt that. It’s way more likely that from today on, every batch of devices used by VIPs will be tested for explosives, thus rendering such attacks moot. Finding such devices would also enable figuring out who your enemy’s operatives are.

This was a one-off.

BDS?

I think this is an actual "supply chain attack", while the downloading-malware-from-github-automated isn't.

Probably because of Israel's demonstrated infiltration of IRGC operations inside of Iran? Just a guess.

> It's said those devices were Iranian made.

Made, or provided by?

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You have zero information about the goal here. There could have been an imminent attack from from Hezbollah that this action by Israel stopped, an attack that could have caused much more collateral damage on both sides of the border than this targeted at Hezbollah op. You literally have nothing to base calling this a terrorist attack on at this point.

It's not a terrorist attack unless the primary goal is causing terror. The primary goal here was clearly causing damage to Hamas' command structure by putting a few thousand militants in the hospital, and also literally blowing up their communications network.

Israel isn't part of the supply chain for Hezbollah pagers.

Isn't that true of any supply chain that involves foreign states? Usually it's just surveillance, not destructive stuff, but expecting state actors to stay out of things is... naive?

Israel has the second highest GDP in the middle east[1].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Middle_Eastern_countri...

In the toilet? They practically run the world tech industry. Practically every GPU, laptop, and phone have a chip or sensor designed in Israel. FAANG companies keep growing their offices. Startup exits are at an all time high even as the war goes on (NVidia recently bought 2 more Israeli startups IIRC)

And good luck finding a Fortune 1000 company that isn’t using Monday or Akeyless or Zscaler or jfrog and I can keep going

Oh and remember Ilya sutskevers new AI company SSI? In their initial announcement they talked about opening with 2 offices, SFBA and Tel Aviv . You really can’t succeed without Israeli talent

You can like or dislike the government, but Israeli techs income and importance constantly grows YoY

This is probably the historical lowest civilian casualty count ever for taking out this large a number of adversaries in an urban environment.

Same in Gaza, it seems they are willing to kill pretty much anybody (children, journalists, humanitarians, hostages) close to a potential target, regardless of whatever their allies may be thinking. Kind of a "godfather" strategy.

They did show that religious fundamentalism, which attacked their country and abducted their people, has to pay a very high price for their terrorism.

This terrorism will hurt innocents and the winning strategy would have been to just not attack Israel.

Hezbollah has been firing rockets to civilian area a day after Oct 7 attack with intent to kill civilians to this day.

But a collateral from targeted attack people lose their mind. Much moral. Very righteous.

I applaud your empathy but I don't think this number of active military adversaries have been taken out in cities with so little civilian casualties ever in history. We should probably be applauding this action over say the standard targeted bombing of the Hezbollah militants homes which is pretty much the previous 'least casualties' method used.

> A 10-year-old girl also died.

The death of that one girl, if it isn't entirely made up for propaganda purposes, is obviously very very tragic, but since almost all pro-Hezbollah commentators are referring to that one specific case that's a pretty clear sign that no other children died. Interestingly I'm now seeing comments where they're making her younger from 10yo to 9yo, now even 8yo. You can ask yourself why people are doing that.

While in their own attacks Hezbollah specifically targets Israeli civilians hoping for children to be among the victims.

> They took no precautions to limit damage to bystanders

The fact that those explosions were small enough to not kill even a single-digit percentage of several thousand targets who carried those pagers in their pockets near vital organs and blood vessels refutes your allegations.

> assuming that every person with a pager was a BadGuy™

These days, even in Lebanon, normal people simply own a cell phone so they can be called. When was the last time you even saw one? They are incredibly rare. The purpose of a pager is to receive (movement) orders and, in the case of Hezbollah, to make tracking more difficult. While it is possible that medical personnel may have used some of these pagers, it is highly unlikely that a new shipment of pagers would not primarily go to Hezbollah's "valuable" command staff, for whom being able to move and operate undetected is the greatest concern. According to Wikipedia, Hezbollah has more than 20,000 full-time fighters, and at 3,000-5,000 devices, this would not have been enough to resupply even a major part of the entire organization, so it is unlikely that any civilian outside the command structure would have received one, even less a random 10yo girl.

Ask yourself again if this is terrorism:

- if the attack was so specifically targeted at military targets

And collateral damage was minimized by:

- using a vector unlikely to be used by innocent civilians

- a sufficiently small explosion not to seriously injure people standing in close proximity to the target as indicated by the many videos floating around

Not even close. Thousands of pocket bombs. Some dead civilians, and a lot of dead terrorists. Not reprehensible but a well-executed op.

What? You guys like war?

Seriously though. Dynamite didn't do it, nuclear bombs didn't do it, but tiny precision bombs are going to work: just kill all the people who like to fight. QED