Modified3019 2 days ago

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.

tptacek 2 days ago

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.

  • goldcd 2 days ago

    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.

    • arwhatever a day ago

      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.

    • tptacek 2 days ago

      My understanding is that they were extremely well concealed, and would have been difficult to detect with simple internal visual inspection.

      • gruez 2 days ago

        >My understanding is that they were extremely well concealed

        Source? I'm not sure how you can concealed any meaningful amount of PCB/explosive in a pager/radio, unless you're hoping that your target never opens the plastic casing, or doesn't know what the internals are supposed to look like.

      • Scoundreller 2 days ago

        > My understanding is that they were extremely well concealed, and would have been difficult to detect with simple internal visual inspection.

        Obviously the mistake was forgetting to sacrifice a handful of units into a bomb calorimeter.

        The joules would have been way off.

yoavm 2 days ago

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.