Comment by tptacek 2 days ago
These pagers work only on Hezbollah's own military network. Lebanon literally had a civil war about this specific issue! People are doing a lot of axiomatic reasoning here about stuff they can look up.
We'll see, but I think --- without claiming that anything we know right now is dispositive --- that this is going to net out as an attack that overwhelmingly impacted military personnel, for the simple reason that they were the ones who needed the pagers; so much so that the highest death toll from the attack thus far appears to be QF fighters in eastern Syria.
How would you even know which network a pager was on just by looking at it? They were thousands of bombs disguised as consumer devices in circulation in public. There are new reports that other consumer devices may also have been rigged with explosives.
What if that industrial sector is managed by Hezbollah and you are responsible for making it run smoothly? They more or less run everything in south Lebanon so I imagine that includes key infrastructure like electricity, water, and telecoms. Staffers in those sectors might or might not be in Hezbollah themselves, but one has to assume a lot of the management is. I don't know about private industry.
It seems odd to me that random laborers would be issued military encrypted pagers, and it seems certain that you couldn't simply go buy one on your own (or at least, buy one and then use it on the Hezbollah military network), but we have reached a point of specificity on the thread where I'm comfortable that we're all talking about the same thing --- previously, I've gotten the sense that we were suggesting random workers who happened to need pagers might have these ones. My personal prediction is that everyone who had these things was a member of Hezbollah, based on the reading I'm doing, but that's all it is: a personal prediction.
That's not what they said. Pagers are used by civilians, no one would be on guard around them, they are not considered to be weapons. If you saw someone in a grocery store with a pager, you wouldn't distance yourself from them.
I don't agree but also don't care to litigate this point; the only point I'm on this thread to make is that no professional who routinely carries a pager could have mistakenly been carrying a Hezbollah pager. Also: it is interesting that Hezbollah literally fought a war over phone systems in Lebanon! The rest: these are some of the most complicated conflicts in the world and we're not going to settle anything on HN. I don't begrudge you your take, I just had those two claims to make.
I know Hezbollah operates their own telecoms, but I don't think it necessarily follows that this is exclusively military. This article (from an Israeli analyst) examines their communications infrastructure in more depth and points out that thanks to their political maneuvering they have de facto control of all telecommunications in Lebanon. I find it easy to imagine that at least some of the erstwhile pager users worked in an administrative or logistical capacity.
https://israel-alma.org/2021/03/09/hezbollahs-communications...