Comment by anigbrowl

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.