The logisitcs of something like that would take a lot. And I highly doubt only Hezbollah members were hurt. Unless they get all their pagers from one guy who was compromised, it probably hurt a bunch of innocent people. Not that they care.
IIRC Mossad did something similar with a targeted cell phone attack. Jammed a guys cell and made it not work well. He takes it into a repair shop where they took it and put a bomb in it. 
It serves the purpose Hezbollah is using it for, which is to send messages to individuals without revealing where they are. Hezbollah probably assume that Israel can intercept all their messages anyway.
I rather assumed that that was the point.
Apparently Bibi really wants a wider war.
Presumably some larger-scale variant on the sort of scheme that worked on Yahya Ayyash back in the day.
[Exploding pagers join long history of killer communications devices (ft.com)]
https://www.ft.com/content/dbaac693-2fd2-41bc-b5e7-6c2c7dd92277
I wonder if that feature was added as a warning for any knowledgeable agents who happened to be near one of these things to get to a safe distance, or as a way to encourage the owners/targets of each pager to pick them up if they’re on the bedside or whatever so that they’re more likely to be injured?
Evil stuff. And even setting ethics aside, this seems like another strategically bad move because it’s bound to create even more anger directed at the folks responsible.
They did.
It did.
Or perhaps triggering the bomb involved sending multiple messages in quick succession.
Mindysan did say something to that effect, up thread.
So, because Hezbollah was using pagers, Israel weaponized all pagers (somehow), not caring that medical workers (etc) also use them? Injuring thousands to kill a handful? Yeah, sounds about right. It’s just war crime after war crime with the current government…
It’s extra shitty when you’re also (mostly) killing a bunch of random, uninvolved people, in addition. (Unless they were trying to kill doctors, like in Gaza, which is double extra shitty.)
Oh, it’s worse than that, because it’s pretty indiscriminate.
That’s immediately where my imagination went; like the part in The Wire when the Baltimore PD found a weakpoint in the drug dealers’ operation and exploited it to have one of their guys sell the targets the pre-tapped burner phones.
Seems possible and probable.
No, it’d be ‘indiscriminate’ if thousands of White Americans were also being killed as collateral damage. Because it’s non-White, non-American people, that’s just “the cost of doing business” with Bibi’s Israel.
You don’t need to look to fiction for examples. The FBI did the same thing. (Although maybe they were inspired by fiction to do that?)
That time the FBI ran a cell phone company for criminals : Planet Money : NPR.
I tend to agree with everyone else commenting on this that it is likely the pagers in question just received messages, but even if they could transmit it wouldn’t matter significantly. You are dealing with a technology that existed in the 80’s / 90’s. GPS enabled devices weren’t a thing. A pager would need an ID and just like in TV shows and movies from the late 90’s and early 2000’s the best you could get is a triangulation if you had access to at least two towers communicating with the pager. Given the data rate a pager is going to use, someone who is looking to track it may need 24/7 access to the network to monitor which towers the pager is connecting to. From a quick Google query it appears that a pager tower has a range of about 7.5 miles. Depending on where you travel you may never leave that single tower.
So, since they can’t be SURE who had the pagers… that sounds like terrorism and or a war crime.
I’m curious though about the HOW.
Meh. When they bomb somewhere, like a hospital say, they kill even more people who aren’t “legitimate targets”. Not forgetting that who they consider “legitimate targets” is pretty dodgy in itself.
The recent headline based on a Reuters story I read said of the killed “including Hizbollah members”.
Remember of course that Hizbollah members are in parliament.
That story said that the pagers in question were the latest bought in the last three months.
Don’t buy any Israeli tech.
If you’re saying that the pagers are “Israeli tech”, they aren’t. The model believed to be compromised is made by a Taiwanese company. IIRC Lebanon has an absolute ban on trade and contact with Israel, so no Israeli products are sold there.
Or take notes.
Indiscriminate stuff like this is bad. The problem is Israel thinks the US would repel any conventional strikes, and they are right. So the can do this shit with impunity.
I guess Israel is the second major thing I gave way too much benefit of the doubt 10 years ago.
I wasn’t, though of course these were Israeli compromised tech.
I would trust Israeli tech exactly the same way I would from some Russian government affiliated company.
