Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon, sources say
(reuters.com)291 points by shmatt 2 days ago
291 points by shmatt 2 days ago
If they have the capacity to intercept the supply chain, they almost certainly have been implanting listening devices in electronics of all sorts. If you're not in Hezbollah or Hamas you probably don't need to worry about getting blown up by your phone, but if you've got a large platform and been very critical of Israel, it wouldn't be a huge stretch to imagine that you might get personally targeted by communication interception.
Israel maintains public lists of people criticizing Israel (if you publicly apologize to them and renounce your views you can be removed) so I wouldn't be surprised that they are also maintaining a large network of interception. Maybe even using multiple avenues to collect data like buying from data brokers.
Not so sure you need anything to do with Hezbollah to be afraid. One example of many.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/02/israel-opt-ne...
OK, also don't stand near Hamas fighters when they flagrantly violate international law and fight from designated humanitarian zones.
(Obviously, voting in Hamas was a huge mistake, but Palestinians probably didn't expect Hamas to make that the last election. Unfortunately, you only need to elect a totalitarian government once.)
> make the big brands like Apple/Samsung the only trusted device manufacturers and completely wipe out the small ones?
It's not a question of manufacturing but one of intercepting devices in the transit / shipping network. The brands most likely have nothing to do with it except allowing repair manuals to fall into the wrong hands - which they can't prevent even if they wanted to.
I'm pretty sure you could run an entire household on nothing but Samsung at this point.
Phone? Check. Watch? Check. TV? check. Washer? Dryer? Fridge? Dishwasher? All there. Laptop? Well, they at least used to make those, not sure if they still do.
"Someday you will drive your Sony to the sony to pick up some more Sony"
https://everything2.com/title/Someday+you+will+drive+your+So...
Why limit yourself to only electronics? You can study at Samsung university, go to the amusement park of Samsung, take the Samsung metro, work at Samsung factories while living in a Samsung apartment, if you get sick you could go to the Samsung medical centre.
Yeah, I can't say I'm a big fan of this massive scale booby trapping devices all over civilian society and I suspect most nation stats are not very happy about this either. The EU is probably not going to be happy at all about Israel using an EU flagged company to do it either.
This is going to create a lot of distrust in the international supply chain.
Exactly it’s one thing to target operatives it’s another thing to target large number of people when they’re among the civilians.
Phone exploding in a market, doesn’t make it OK if the owner of the phone is a militant.
With that logic the Hamas terrorist attack last year isn’t a terrorist attack because many of the victims served in the IDF, which illegally occupies their territory.
This is getting ridiculous. Israel will loose the last drops of good will, which is a shame considering how much they achieved to do on that barely habitable piece of land. It breaks my heart.
> This is going to create a lot of distrust in the international supply chain.
Is it? If your threat model includes Mossad (or really any nation state) then you shouldn't have trusted those devices in the first place. Even if you didn't have "tiny explosives" on your bingo card, certainly bugs (hardware or software) should've been on there.
Given that those pagers are commonly used by doctors and none of them have been reported to explode, I think we can guess that it was targeted to the batches delivered directly to Hezbollah.
For instance, when Apollo Gold lisenced their pagers to a little known hungarian company, having their brand used as a bomb delivery device in the middle-east was not something they would have had on their list of potential brand risks.
So now companies engaged in international business not only have to consider exposure to the usual fraud, but also if their counterpart is actively malicious.
It's also likely going to make nation states start thinking about supply chains they maybe didn't before. How do you know someone didn't put explosives in your mice, keyboards, monitors, headsets and various other things that were probably manufactured in china?
I can imagine the EU is far more interested in an EU flagged company doing business with Hezbollah who are a designated terrorist organization and subject to sanctions.
If there's one thing you learn quick in fintech - it's you absolutely do not fuck with sanctions.
If it was a real company that would be the case. However from what I've read the journalists looking into BAC Consulting has found it to be a company in name only with no actual offices or hungarian employees.
It makes me slightly curious which company Israel convinced to actually produce these pagers and radios.
The claim isn't that they're "civilian devices", it's that they're "devices all over civilian society". That's relevant because bobby trapping them is liable to cause casualties.
> The EU is probably not going to be happy
Happiness is irrelevant, especially when it comes to geopolitics.
In the US, criticism of Israel is antagonistic to our Judeo-Christian values.
In the EU, criticism of Israel is tantamount to the rise of a Fourth Reich.
Germany, in particular, is scared shitless of this accusation, and will accept any and all actions by Israel. This is a country who can do no wrong, and will get away with whatever they feel like.
> This is going to create a lot of distrust in the international supply chain.
This reminds me of people who were legitimately shocked to learn about the Snowden disclosures. If you don't already know the supply chain is thoroughly poisoned, and has been for decades, there is no helping you.
Germany has pretty much halted weapon supplies to Israel, so perhaps you should temper your cynical posture with occasional factual updates.
https://www.reuters.com/world/germany-has-stopped-approving-...
Nothing new even happened. Agencies like CIA and NSA are able to intercept equipment and replace with bugged equipment with no change to ship time to you already. Most military or intelligence services are aware of this possibility and take steps to ensure their hardware is not compromised. I guess hezzbolah was obviously not, likewise with the internet community also surprised by this.
> Don't they see that booby trapping large number of devices rhymes with poisoning the well? It wouldn't help with antisemitism but that's another discussion.
could you expand on what you mean here? I don't understand either the argument or the conclusion. thanks!
Please note that this is distinct from yesterday's incident - these are for a different set of communication devices - from what I can see, they went off at 16:58 local time - notably 2 minutes prior to Nasrallah's planned speech on the first incident.
Icom is a Japanese company. They make radios, including police walkie talkies (land mobile radios). The pictures I've seen look like bog-standard land mobile radios. Not particularly small, and larger than most flip phones.
The radio in question: https://rigpix.com/icom/icv82.htm
There’s a “live by the sword, die by the sword” reaction that I have to this.
I think we expect better of democracies, which is why these kinds of attacks shock us. But it is interesting that we are unsurprised when Lebanon/Hezbollah uses terror tactics but it quickly becomes a news event when Israel responds in kind.
Ironic because drone bombings like we did in Afghanistan would probably have a much more terrible collateral damage effect but be less newsworthy. But somehow boobytrapping radios and pagers pricks our conscience. Maybe because it feels more personal, intimate, and therefore retributive?
When the US wants to guide a remote bomb into a hut in a village, estimations of the potential collateral damage are at least made and considered. This is the issue that the military community has with this attack. It was sloppy basically and none of this sort of assessment was made.
>I think we expect better of democracies, which is why these kinds of attacks shock us
Israel conducts probably the most precise military action in the history of warfare and people still demand more.
This is easily disprovable.
See pages 10-30 of this report and the associated inline sources - https://www.academia.edu/112967602/Bearing_Witness_to_the_Is...
I wasn’t aware those terrorists organizations had exploded devices in public spaces. Please share your source.
Just a few months ago, Hezbollah exploded a rocket in soccer field with children playing, killing 12 children. Doesn't get much more "exploding devices in public spaces" than that.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/11-killed-mostly-children-doze...
Very debatable. The local population seem to be under the impression that it was an iron dome missile that fell on the sports ground. Partly because they claim it is a regular occurance (malfunctioning dome missiles and detritus falling in the area).
Ask yourself, why would the Druze population be a target? It's almost unthinkable that Hezbollah deliberately targeted those civilians.
> I wasn’t aware those terrorists organizations had exploded devices in public spaces
They've done much worse.
The UN found Hezbollah (on behalf of the Assad regime) guilty of massacring 700 civilians in Daraya in 2012 [0].
The Daraya Massacre is what ended the prospect of a negotiated end to the Syrian Civil War, and radicalized a significant wave of Sunni FSA fighters to join Jabhat al-Nusra and the then fledgling Daesh.
The same leaders in Hezbollah that Israel has targeted over the past several weeks are the same ones that lead the Daraya Massacre [1] as well as other human right abuses in Syria and Lebanon.
More recently, Hezbollah has been indiscriminately shelling Northern Israel, which itself has lead to incidents like the Madjal Shams attack, which left 12 children dead [2].
Israel absolutely has been indiscriminate in Gaza and Lebanon, but so is every other actor (Hamas, Hezbollah, etc) in this tragedy.
This is war.
[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/aug/25/t...
[1] - https://www.cnn.com/2013/05/25/world/meast/syria-violence/in...
Does truck count as a device? Here is a history refresher https://aoav.org.uk/2020/a-short-history-of-suicide-bombings...
The only way we'd find out how they did it is if some pagers didn't explode and at least one would get into the hands of someone willing to do a public tear-down.
In this video, we'll be cutting the explosive battery. Hit the like and subscribe buttons, and let us know what kind of explosive you think this is in the comments. Also, don't try this at home kids, we're what you'd call "professionals".
Listening to BBC News headlines earlier today, this seems to be exactly what's occurring. Multiple devices did not explode, and are being investigated by multiple parties. I cannot find a specific story detailing this presently.
There's some discussion of the mechanics of the modifications in this TEMPCO story, though how the information was ascertained isn't clear:
[S]enior Lebanese source said the devices had been modified by Israel's spy service "at the production level."
"The Mossad injected a board inside of the device that has explosive material that receives a code. It's very hard to detect it through any means. Even with any device or scanner," the source said.
<https://en.tempo.co/read/1917697/israel-planted-explosives-i...>
Presumably not by like-and-subscribe seeking YouTubers, however.
Edit: World Service broadcast, analysis note at ~52s: <https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w172zgf8tw4nqq5>
If it was a US intelligence agency, we could just wait 20-50 years and ask politely and they'd probably tell us how. Say what you will about US intelligence agencies (and there's a LOT to say), but I always did kind of like that feature.
I vote for Bigclive doing the teardown. Or maybe AVE…
If the mossad was able to plant explosives without being caught, I wouldn't be surprised if they also planted bugs (indiscriminately) in many electronic devices delivered to Lebanon such as TVs, computers, phones etc...
Similar to the spy chips implants within the Supermicro server motherboards.
Supermicro never happened. Zero evidence. The reporters and the paper (Bloomberg?) have never retracted it, which is a reflection of their crappy reporting.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/02/12/bloomberg-big-c...
Until a few hours ago there was "zero evidence" that thousands of pagers and walkie talkies had been tampered to explode via a remote command.
That's not how any of this works. If you investigate extensively and fail to find evidence, then there's probably no evidence. If you weren't looking for any evidence and didn't find any, that does not mean there's no evidence.
I wouldn't be surprised if this went well beyond Lebanon. It's time to start really scrutinizing our tech supply chain. I won't use any Israeli tech going forward.
Glib defeatism and the automatic surrender to any entity more powerful than you is sad, pitiable even.
The main way states exercise power is by making large enough shows of force that people behave exactly as you do, and roll over in submission. State powers may be able to silence, extort, or kill anyone, but they damn sure can't get everyone.
What history? I don't even normally comment but this was crazy and horrible. I'm aware that companies have offices in Israel. I think that's quickly going to become a bygone era though. In fact, Intel just canceled a new Israeli office.
Yes, the supply chain is very clearly compromised.
How much of it is an excellent question. It's remarkable that apparently (?) none of the devices went off prematurely and tipped off the targets. That implies a higher degree of QA than you'd expect from a more ramshackle organization.
The Supermicro story was never proven to be anything but bullshit, though. The more you looked into it, the less it added up.
The original pager attack was triggered in the anniversary of World War II hero Folke Bernadotte assassination by Zionists, on September 17. See https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-...
I wonder if this was meaningful choice, or just a coincidence.
Most likely coincidence. From what I’ve read, Israel had to pull the trigger on the pagers early because some people (whom they were monitoring) had gotten suspicious that something was up.
I strongly suspect the birthday paradox is making an emergence.
You'd be hard-pressed to find a day of the year without some plausible significance.
He was assassinated one day after publishing his peace plan: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernadotte_plan
I guess it could still be considered the same one, just the continuation of it. I was kind of expecting a ground invasion after such havoc in communications has been wrecked. I guess if the "electronic" attack is still going on, maybe something else will still proceed...
But the point of the argument was that Hezbollah would immediately never trust their electronic devices going forward until they could secure their supply chain. The argument didn’t depend on the semantics between same and distinct attacks.
One can argue that there is some temporary remaining vulnerability for Hezbollah members who either didn’t hear about the first attack or had some insanely urgent need to communicate (and this vulnerability wouldn’t exist once they secure the supply chain). But I think the much simpler story is that these attacks aren’t possible only once; supply chain security is a continuum, and people will continue to balance risk of repeat attacks against the costs of security.
Tomorrow: "Hezbollah laptops explode across Lebanon, sources say"
That's got to be a reason why the attacks are staggered.
Separating them definitely increased the chances that somebody would check their radios - but taking out the pagers drove people to the radios. Now taking out the radios is making people worry what else might be compromised. Your enemy refusing to use their communication equipment is a definite win.
The pagers and radios were supposedly due to the worry that the phone system was compromised - but I'm guessing more people will be using it tomorrow.
I mean, it has been only one day after the last attack. It's still part of the same attack plan IMO.
I really doubt Israel can pull this off again next month or year. Hezbollah (and Lebanon) will switch all their electronics to Chinese supply chain or something, and double check it.
At this point someone needs to run an SDR and start capturing as much RF spectrum as possible, especially on any communications device that has a 'selective calling' feature.
The pagers could have been set off with a page sent to a 'group' capcode in a hidden slot with a unique beep pattern that a little tiny MCU picked up and set off the detonator.
Radios -- same thing. Possibly a group calling feature of a signalling system was used with a "secret" group hidden away in the radio programming?
> especially on any communications device that has a 'selective calling' feature.
I wonder if it’s even dumber than that. Entirely separate from the paging network and tuned to listen for a pulse at a specific RF frequency and then blow up.
Also gives the ability to target certain geographic areas.
But even if listening to pager spectrum, the paging network is incredibly insecure. Anyone could send out fake pages with the right RF setup (e.g. from a drone).
For the first time ever since the beginning of conflict (pre-Hezbollah in fact) , native lebanese had been talking opening about partitioning the country into 2, and letting the Hezbollah group have their own fiefdom. This is because Hezbollah is a defacto government in the south.
This was before these surprise IDF attacks - i wonder how the conversation evolves.
If i understood correctly they were rigged with explosive. There is no way that a regular battery would explode like this right ?
Correct. The injuries are comparable or worse to what you get if you try to use a .50 BMG cartridge as a hammer.
Videos show outright detonations (so far with notably little fire), nothing like the fiery deflagrations you see in “battery explodes” videos while someone is doing a repair.
Yes. There's sourcing for the first attack that Israel implanted daughterboards of some sort with small (30g?) amounts of explosive. The battery may have been involved with the triggering, but it wasn't a battery explosion.
But if you wanted to put 30g of explosive into a device, you wouldn't just want it sat there looking out of place to any curious person with a screw-driver. My guess is that you'd want to put it inside a component like say a LiPo pouch that looks like it belongs there. Half-battery, half-explosive - and maybe hijack the BMS components to also allow it to be triggered.
Anyone care to appreciate how effectively the new CT X-ray machines used by the TSA could have picked up the explosive materials in these electronic devices?
That might be one way to restore faith in one’s supply chain.
Some reports are saying the Icom-V82 devices were bought by Hezbollah 5 months ago, close to the time yesterday's beeper were purchased. However, the exploding part was the battery, imported to Lebanon only 2 weeks ago.
I wonder if this operation had two sides - implanting something in the devices that will allow remotely triggering the explosion, and then also tampering with the batteries to include explosive material.
If it walks like terrorism, and quacks like terrorism...
I struggle to understand how they're imagining they're obviating the optics of this, unless they don't care what the dissenting population in Israel thinks (or the world for that matter) until "it is done".
Can you explain how ultra targeted, small explosive charges quack terrorism? I have been reading comments like this yesterday, and I'm completely bewildered as to how any sane person could come to this conclusion.
Did you consider the US operation to take down Bin Laden an act of terrorism too?
Can you imagine being in a supermarket and detonations go off dropping people? At least 8 children have died in the pager attack.
The US did not detonate personal devices using a supply-chain infiltration, I am specifically talking about this tactic. If you feel the need to bring another conflict into this, you don't think you have an argument to stand on. Imagine this was Hezbollah detonating hundreds or thousands of devices in Israel?
> Imagine this was Hezbollah detonating hundreds or thousands of devices in Israel?
If these were devices used predominantly by IDF, I wouldn't consider it an act of terror either. However, Hezbolla prefers to indiscriminately target civilians.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/druze-shock-war-be...
To be ultra targeted you actually have to know where your target is when your bomb goes off. When you detonate thousands at once, you're simply accepting the civilian casualty risk.
This risk is so low it is ultra targeted. Once again, the usual ratio of civilian casualties to combatant casualties in a modern war, per UN, is 9:1. In Gaza war, this ratio is 1-2:1, so even there, Israel is already producing 5-10 times less civilian casualties.
In this case, it's thousands of enemy combatants and (at the most, according to journalists in Lebanon and therefore under Hezbolla power) a couple of dozens of civilians. Can you calculate the ratio here? Where else have you seen a military operation of this scope and with this kind of civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio?
>Once again, the usual ratio of civilian casualties to combatant casualties in a modern war, per UN, is 9:1.
>it has often been claimed that 90 percent of the victims of modern wars are civilians,[1][2][3][4] repeated in academic publications as recently as 2014.[5] These claims, though widely believed and correct regarding some wars, do not hold up as a generalization across the overwhelming majority of wars
>In Gaza war, this ratio is 1-2:1
>The Palestinian Health Ministry has estimated for most of the conflict that around 70% of the dead are women and children; these numbers have been corroborated by the United Nations and the World Health Organization. [74][75][76]. On the other hand, according to the Israel Defense Forces, an estimated less than 1:1 ratio has been reported [3][4].
I guess it depends on who you are listening to.
This is war. Any hostile action in armed conflict can, and will, have collateral damage to the innocent. Acts of terror and war crimes are determined by who is targeted, what precautions are taken to minimise collateral damage, and how significant is the military target compared to expected collateral damage.
If you don't want to kill any innocent civilians, your only course of action is not to offer any resistance to people who attack you and surrender.
Whether terror is an intended effect or not, Israel is engaging in it.
Perhaps in the scheme of things as far as military operations are concerned this is "low" collateral damage. But if 3000+ people were wounded that means potentially tens of thousands experienced the traumatic event of explosives going off in a public space. And hundreds more are mourning family.
> This was a deliberate targeting of terrorists,
Negative. Anyone can use a pager or a walkie talkie. If this were to have happened in say the US, it would 100% be considered not only terrorism, but an act of war.
> Anyone can use a pager or a walkie talkie.
Israel is not targeting "pagers and walkie talkies".
They are targeting pagers and walkie talkies specifically ordered, paid for, and supplied to individuals by Hezbollah.
Who is using a pager or walkie talking in 2024? I will admit there was maybe a few bystanders standing too close to a Hezbollah member, but how many non-Hezbollah members do you think really had one of these pagers? Keep in mind Israel also does surveillance and probably tracked where they went. If it turns out a material % of these were owned by civilians, I might agree with you, but I suspect that’s not the case.
These were pagers sold to Hezbollah though, not random pagers.
Symmetrical warfare is still the preferred method of response. I think this qualifies as such.
I'd be eyeballing for anything that could still function with a couple cm^3 carved out & filled with HE. Next come the potatoes.
These sorts of attacks are going to hurt a lot of innocent people. How do they control the munitions and ensure they limit civilian casualties? (I suspect they do not.)
It also seems to be lionized in the media as something "impressive" and not "contemptible". I'm not saying it cannot be both! It could be contemptible and impressive, but the media seems comfortable just being impressed.
If North Korea or Iran or Russia pulled this off against another military, would we all still be here discussing only the technical parts of the attack? I suspect not. Maybe I'm wrong, but I suspect there'd be a lot more condemnation.
Yes. If North Korea or Russia pulled this off we would all be suitably impressed. This is an impressive feat, as targeted as it gets (you could have been standing right next to one of these and walked away, as shown in many of the videos online), and while we would certainly retaliate, the very next step would be studying how it happened.
The explosives were in devices whose only functionality and purpose is communication between terrorists and their leadership. With No civilian functionality. With tiny amount of explosives.
> The explosives were in devices whose only functionality and purpose is communication between terrorists and their leadership. With No civilian functionality
Those devices are used still extensively by Hospitals, ambulances and first aid teams. The red cross use walkies. The firefighters and police also. They pose several advantages over the phone net, specially when managing sensible information from victims private life that you still have to custody and protect from internet. Nobody wants to talk on whasap about "somebody is being raped somewhere and we are on route to help, tell the other units that join us there".
They still work after earthquakes or on wildfires, and common people use it extensively on places without phone coverage like mountainous areas or fisheries. None of those people are terrorists.
But this does not matter, because the brands will stop making and selling this products to everybody. The risk as a company to became collateral damage in this new operations is too high.
If you are using a radio given to you by Hezbollah it is fair to say you are working with them, that's it imo. Even if you arent currently you likely will in the future, which is why they gave you the device.
Does anyone know, assuming this was a radio-triggered signal to detonate the booby trap, what range the originating signal or radio station could have?
I'm curious if this type of remote activation could be achieved with just a single radio tower, or if it would require a network of geographically distributed radio towers to transmit the signal to the affected area. How would isolation conditions, like being inside a building or in a garage, affect it? Also, what kind of radio towers would be needed? Could it be disguised as a regular HAM radio antenna on a building?
I would love to know that too. I don't know the frequency the walkie-talkie used: it could anywhere between 136 MHz to 900 MHz. To give you an idea, 135 MHz isn't too far from the FM spectrum. The antenna of your local radio can blast at several miles. If several cities were targeted, then multiple emitting stations were involved.
Interesting that they chose to carry out this attack in two waves - presumably the thinking was that Hezbollah would assume only the pagers were compromised (single source/shipment) and thus increase their use of other communication devices. I suspect some did the opposite as well though (stopped carrying/using any devices).
Several thousands of "modified" portable communication devices were distributed in Lebanon about half a year ago. I am curios how many of those explosive gadgets the unsuspecting owners were bringing to the airplanes through airport security without explosives being detected? Another proof that the airport security is a theater (at least in the Middle East).
I wonder how many of their telecom devices like routers, switches, etc. have bombs implanted in their power supplies
Ha, maybe this will be the turning point for international corporations becoming national-only? Or maybe make the big brands like Apple/Samsung the only trusted device manufacturers and completely wipe out the small ones?
No iPhones exploded so far but I wouldn't be surprised if the paranoia takes over everywhere and local supply chains and local producers become a thing. "Foreign social media platforms" was already a concern but this is "foreign hardware is booby trapped as you can see". Another nail for the globalized world, united humanity, citizens of the world etc. If a big brand has a supply chain is infiltrated too, then its all over.
Also, are those people blind? Don't they see that booby trapping large number of devices rhymes with poisoning the well? It wouldn't help with antisemitism but that's another discussion.