Comment by lfxyz
> It's reasonable to guess that these devices were made to only explode after a very unique code is is received, and/or only when traffic came over a radio channel known to be used by Hezbollah.
Why is this a reasonable thing to guess?
Nobody that goes through all that effort of making secret customized electronics and then sneaking them into usage by your foes wants the plan to be ruined because one went off in an uncontrolled/unexpected way, blatantly alerting all the other targets to toss their pagers into a shallow hole.
Even if the engineering makes it's a choice of "all blow up" or "none blow up", they'll also want to have control when that moment happens to be, either to pre-empt discovery and defusal or to coincide with other events and factors.