Comment by wkat4242 3 days ago
Ahh so a simple supply chain attack. I was thinking it might have leveraged the built in batteries. But it was always unlikely, especially in a receive-only device.
Still, if you have the capability of such a supply chain attack, I would imagine the rewards of silent surveillance (tracking, audio) would be of much higher value than this kind of attack where 3 out of 1000s targets were killed.
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.
Do you have a cite? Otherwise I think every study conducted in the last few decades have found that attacks against Israel is over-reported whereas attacks against Palestinians are under-reported. See f.e: https://theconversation.com/bias-hiding-in-plain-sight-decad..., https://theintercept.com/2024/01/09/newspapers-israel-palest..., https://lab.imedd.org/en/dead-versus-killed-a-closer-look-at...
As tends to be the case with this sort of complaint, it absolutely makes the news.
Quick sampling of examples:
https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20240908-hezbollah-f...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/4/hezbollah-fires-reta...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw9y7wqn8j5o
https://apnews.com/article/lebanon-israel-hezbollah-hamas-ro...
It doesn't make a big splash in the news because it tends to be severely ineffectual, but it has been pretty widely and continuously covered.
Yes, there are blurbs about it if you know where to look and are already familiar with the situation. But a small blurb once about Israel being attacked is drowned out by the literally thousands of articles about Israeli actions, which mention time and again every small detail or infringement.
I don't agree; I think you're pushing some vague nonsense media conspiracy here. I haven't been following the war that closely, but I hear about Hezbollah attacks fairly regularly. I'm very critical of Israel right now, but it's not even remotely unknown that they're facing attacks from multiple fronts.
The "news" doesn't even seem to exist anymore. News providers have adapted to the readers only wanting hear their own views supported.
Not only are there specific providers for specific worldviews, but major providers seem to spit out articles catering to every viewpoint. You can find probably find multiple pro Israel and anti Israel articles coming from a single news source on a single day.
So, I dunno maybe we need some kind of cumulative news app to get any kind of meaningful idea of how things are actually leaning. Like an AI summarizing sentiments of the 20,000 articles on Israel in the last week to determine if the news is slanted.
I think you’re basically describing ground.news
They advertise pretty heavily, and I’ma bit skeptical of their ability to make money. but it basically uses AI to summarize stories, and it groups stories from many media outlets, categorizes their bias, and shows the slant of the topic overall.
> attacks against Israel receive far less attention in the news than do Israeli retaliations.
this is false
the rockets in northern Israel have been going on for years (as are rocket attacks into Lebanon), so just not much news anymore
> attacks against Israel receive far less attention in the news than do Israeli retaliations.
I think retaliations are pretty fruitless anyway. Both sides have been lobbing missiles at each other for decades. This eye for an eye thing keeps going even though both sides have run out of eyes a long time ago.
Maybe talking might be an idea? Just saying...
Both sides are lobbing missiles at civilians? And responding to an attack on your civilians is fruitless? Maybe evaluate what you are saying.
Their comms and command infra is now hosed and all the operatives concentrated in hospitals. They are dead in the water.
Hezbollah has more than 100,000 fighters, so this would be what, one or two percent injured.
Everyone has cell phones that they can use in addition to the pager, so I don't think it's very accurate to say the communications are hosed either
Hezbollah has been warning its members not to use cell phones because they get targeted by using them too. Seems like the pagers were supposed to be the workaround for that.
That’s what I am thinking. These were not sent to a few thousand random guys, but almost certainly the highest level targets that could be identified.
Cell phones that, if distributed from the organization like the pagers were, could be compromised as well.
The people with the pagers could be the more important people in the organization.
And the 100k number seems quite exaggerated.
They have about 100'000 members, and this attack has killed about a dozen, and injured about 2000. Only one recent shipment of pagers was affected. I don't think they are unable to respond.
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?
Face saving. It's easier to put a PR spin on something only a few people actually saw. It's going to be hard to convince their rank-and-file this isn't a bit deal and deserving of retribution.
Israel is desperate to provoke? Hezbollah is bombing Israel since the October 7th attack. 300,000 refugees inside Israel because of this bombing. Who is provoking who ?
How is what you wrote about that Israel is desperate to provoke is related to Gaza ? Israel is defending itself against Hamas, Hezbollah and other Iranian allies since October 7th 2023. Why would Israel provoke Hezbollah? What's the point of it ?
We should avoid using the name of the country as a proxy for its current government. The people has nothing to do with this - this is all planned and executed under the auspices of the current prime minister and his associates.
Even though the people largely supports their agenda, an action that targets three people but affects 2,700 people as collateral damage would not pass by their parliament.
We should avoid using the name of the country as a proxy for its current government
I understand your point but synecdoche is the oil on the gears of discourse. This required a lot of people's involvement, from those issuing the orders to technicians at the bottom of the chain of command. It's not Netanyahu's cabinet that did the work of placing explosive charges in thousands of compact devices and then repackaged and shrinkwrapped them.
Obviously once could refer to the 'Netanyahu regime' or some other more specific term, but then someone else would complain that this was a mendacious mischaracterization of the country's political system or suchlike. To the extent that civilians there don't with to be identified with their political leadership or take on the moral responsibility for its decisions, they'd better step up their efforts to topple the government by means of a general strike or some other time-honored method.
The people voted for this government.
I do think we can hold Israel as a country responsible. But what we can't do is blame Jewish or even Israeli people in general. Though I don't see anyone doing this. The current government is always quick to draw the antisemitism card when being criticised but I never see anyone actually doing that.
Why would you assume this targeted three people? I assume the most likely scenario is that the attackers targeted as many Hezbollah members as they could, and were extremely successful at it.
Since when did naming a country for their military action signify the opinion or inclination of the majority of civic population? When newspapers report on "country A did X" it almost always means their government did X. So I'm not sure what point you're trying to make
Why not both? Location data would be relatively easy to collect and forward, audio not so much (much higher storage and transmission throughput requirements for very low quality source data given the limitations of piezoelectric microphones and the fact that pagers are usually worn on belts).
If you're getting GPS data, collecting people's movements for a month or three probably provides 99% of what you will ever want to know. Once the patterns have been established you're into diminishing returns territory, while the risk of discovery goes up, which would neutralize the value of the explosive attack.
The strategic value of such a perfectly targeted surprise attack is massive, notwithstanding the relatively low fatality rate. Injuries are expensive and often devastating, and the psychological impact is brutal. Logistically, Hezbollah (and many other organizations, militant or not) are going to have to review and/or replace part of their communications tech. That's a massive technical disruption, a significant economic cost, and risks further exposing supply chain information. It's also going to create paranoia about many other electronic devices, poison in the food, and so on.
I'm not sure about the ethics of this. If one were certain that only Hezbollah officers were being targeted then it would be an acceptable kind of asymmetric attack through a novel vector.
However this also seems to have impacted quite a few civilians, and there is a claim (unverified so far) that a hospital just replaced all its pager equipment a couple of weeks ago and would otherwise have been impacted: https://x.com/SuppressedNws/status/1836080190855795092
If this happened in the US pursuant to one of the wars we've been involved in, we'd definitely be calling it terrorism and/or a war crime. It's a big strategic win for the Israelis in the short term but can hurt them two ways in the longer term. Hezbollah and other enemies of Israel will be significantly more motivated retaliate in some equally creative/unpredictable fashion, and non-aligned economic partners of Israel are likely to view Israeli products with renewed skepticism, hurting exports.
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.
Ok, so targeted strikes in the US by our enemies that have civilians as collateral damage is OK, is that what you are saying?
The point was that the US government regularly accepts civilian casualties in trageted strikes, so it would be hypocritical for the US government to complain now.
Notably, this doesn't apply to anyone who hasn't supported such strikes in the war against terror.
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.
Given Israel's successful precision targeting of various senior Hezb members in recent months, I wonder if the pagers were initially used as such, but as suspicion mounted, and chances of an overhaul increased, they decided to hit the kill switch while they still could.
Although as as per an WSJ article: "The affected pagers were from a new shipment that the group received in recent days"
The pagers were likely one way with a codebook for the purpose of minimizing tracking and information exposure.
> I would imagine the rewards of silent surveillance (tracking, audio) would be of much higher value than this kind of attack where 3 out of 1000s targets were killed.
The reason they were using pagers, as opposed to phones, was to avoid exactly this kind of potential attack.
Pagers are (typically) a broadcast technology, the pager has no transmission capability. A page is broadcast from every tower, it has no idea where the receiver is. A targeted page is done by the receiver filtering out and ignoring pages that it isn't the recipient for (eavesdropping all pages is trivial).
The pager device is simple, it doesn't contain a GPS or have any concept of it's own location. No microphone or audio capability, very little processing capability. And adding such capability with something like a bug would be reasonably apparent to anyone opening one up and inspecting it.
For a supply chain attack.
How did they make sure a large percentage ended up in the hands of the targets? Seems like this could hit a lot of random people, just anybody using pagers. Unless they had way to target certain customers.
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.
Most bugs can be easily found out by any competent counterintelligence team.
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.
Well, slightly off topic, but in the case of Volkswagen, everybody knew they (and other car companies) were doing it for at least a decade before the scandal blew up : car magazines were even publishing articles about it !
3 killed but thousands inoperative and hospitals flooded - I would expect an immediate armed escalation