Since Hezbollah decided to use pagers precisely for security reasons, they are probably one-way pagers that receive messages but do not send messages.
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There is (beneath and aside) to the larger violent horror of this, a nerdy “uh… pager?? so how was this accomplished?” The nerds on hacker news are fairly convinced (maybe) that a shipment of pagers must’ve been intercepted and explosive ones put in their place (rather than, say, shorting the normal batteries which wouldn’t really have that much force) If a tenth of the cunning used for violence were instead directed for the good of humanity… but that’s not likely, is it?
-sigh-
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This is some seriously fucked up Black Mirror type shit. Good lord.
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But to receive, you’re still going to have to sync with the towers.
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this doesnt look like a battery exploding. how is this even possible? did the mossad somehow intercept mailings of the pagers and placed a little semtex in these pagers, internally wired to the electronics? jfc, what the fuck is happening?
e/
-just white noise in my head-
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Looks like we’re on the Slaughterbots timeline, great… 
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What is a Pager
Way to make me feel old, News18
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I think this basically has to be a supply chain infiltration. Lithium batteries don’t really “explode”; they get really hot, light things on fire, and shoot sparks, but they generally don’t have any concussive force. Even the really nasty fires/“explosions” don’t look or sound anything like that video; there’s usually a plume of smoke before anything you could call an explosion.
I’m also struggling to think of a way you could get them to reliably burn with software while not plugged in, in a coordinated way. Most fires are either defective/damaged cells, overcharging, or a short. Shorting shouldn’t be possible in software alone, and ensuring everyone you want gets a defective cell is a supply chain infiltration, so we’re basically left with trying to get the battery into thermal runaway on nothing but it’s own power, at a precise time, and without the person wearing it noticing that their pager is getting really fucking hot.
The explosion in the video looks like what I’d expect from a purpose built charge, so either there’s an extremely sophisticated hack that can cause lithium batteries to fail in a novel, extremely controllable way that doesn’t require you to alter the design of the device, or they just put a charge in somewhere.
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One of the comments on Hacker News says:
I remember reading once that Apollo is pretty much the only name in the game any more for pagers.
The model believed to be involved is a “Rugged Pager”. I wonder if the Israeli government and the IDF also use the same model for secure (or less insecure) communications.
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I’m not sure that’s the case. I think some one way pagers just receive messages passively and never tell the tower where they are. As in all towers on the network broadcast all pager messages. It’s a lot but the amount of data is so small that the total transmitted isn’t much. Ie if the id packet is like 64 or 128 bytes it could transmit thousands of them per second and have very little affect on the network throughput.
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Yeah, with an SDR and some software you can read all of the non-encrypted pager messages in your area. Really not much reason to, but it’s neat.
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They probably had their agents in Lebanon set up a company importing pagers. They might have collaborators inside Hezbollah who were able to influence procurement decisions or even encourage the switch to pagers in the first place.
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They will have to check everypiece of tech they buy and turn to cold war strategies.
[Numbers station - Wikipedia]
[The spooky world of the ‘numbers stations’ - BBC News]
[Explaining the ‘Mystery’ of Numbers Stations (warontherocks.com)]
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Maybe the Mossad itself sold them the gadgets.
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… sounds very secure 
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Well,
Back in February, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had urged members to stop using mobile phones, saying, “I call for dispensing with cellphone devices at this stage, which are considered a deadly agent.”
Still no clue how this is done, and really don’t want to know. But the fact that it seems to be possible is terrifying.
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Given the large number of devices involved and the fact that there is likely a non-zero failure rate, it’s only a matter of time before some of the devices that failed to explode are dissected and we will know how this attack was accomplished.
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Basically it’s a sophisticated radio. Each pager will have a unique ID number. Messages are sent in a manner that provides information on which pager the message is for, so only that pager can read the information package. As long as the pager doesn’t need to transmit any data back to the pager network, it is essentially invisible to the network, just as a car radio is invisible to the radio station broadcasting its programming.
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https://www.axios.com/2024/09/17/hezbollah-pager-explosion-israel-didnt-tell-biden-administration
Israel didn’t inform the Biden administration ahead of its intelligence operation that included exploding thousands of Hezbollah members’ pager devices, two U.S. officials told Axios.
…
- The source said Israeli intelligence services assessed ahead of the operation that Hezbollah would likely retaliate with a major attack against Israel.
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Traditionally pagers operated on a pure broadcast model: the transmitters just shout all the messages into the void and the pagers display any that are tagged as being for them if they are in range to receive.
Limiting; but allows the handset to be more or less radio silent and copes with marginal signal areas fairly well.
You could certainly build something on top of a cell network that pretends to be a pager; but the underlying mechanisms are markedly different.
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