Yes, well, can you name a conflict in the Middle East in the past 100 years that has shown any consideration about collateral damage?
Continuing the discussion from Discussion for the Israel-Hamas War: A thread in the Pit:
I don’t know which thread is the right one for this either, so I’ll simply start a new one with a narrow focus, but which can be widened if deemed appropiate (I guess the situation will evolve shortly). And I put it Great Debates because it seems too uncertain for Factual Questions, but if there is a better place, I don’t mind moving it to another forum.
Now to my question: Everybody is writing that it was Israel who made some thousands of pagers explode in Lebanon simultaneously. Many of those pagers beonged to Hizbullah cadres and operatives. Never mind for a second whether it was Israel’s work or somebody elses: How on Earth do you pull this off? How it is even possible?
Just for historical context, this is the story of Yahya Ayyash’s assassination with an exploding mobile telephone. In 1996.
But that was one explosion, now we had thousands simultaneously!
How did they do it?
Unknown at this point, but an article on the explosions, in the Washington Post, quotes a security expert who hypothesizes that Israel was able to infiltrate the supply chain which Hezbollah uses for their pagers, and rig them to explode.
It seems unlikely that a pager would explode without such intentional tampering.
I didn’t know that people actually used pagers anymore. Can they make cell phones explode as well? Or are pagers a the preferred method of communication by terrorist organizations? Perhaps so they can’t be tracked.
The same article notes that Hezbollah uses pagers because they can’t capture sound, and don’t have cameras, making them less riskier than cell phones, from the standpoint of being susceptible to surveillance.
Intercept a shipment of pagers being sold to a vendor known to distribute to Hezbollah members, pack a small charge and a microcontroller that receives a specific message or data sequence, probably behind the display screen so it blows outward directly into the face of someone trying to read it, and then send it on its merry way. It appears that all of the pagers are from the same manufacturer and some type, and were purchased at around the same time.
Hezbollah are probably using pagers to prevent being tracked by a Stingray-type IMSI cell tracker, or text and voice messages intercepted by access through the cell provider. Instead of sending text, you send coded messages or a phone number scrambled by some algorithm which the receiver calls using a burner or some random person’s phone to prevent being tracked. See The Wire for examples.
Stranger
Hezbollah used pagers because the telephone network had been allegedly infiltrated by Isreal: they thought it was more secure. If the way to make the pagers explode was by tampering with then before they were handed over to the end users as kenobi_65 writes then the same can be done to phones, if you can intercept them on the way to the final user.
Seems incredible that they could do this, but if you intercept pagers in Lebanon you are targeting Hezbollah more narrowly than if you intercept and manipulate phones. Still there has been a lot of collateral damage. Whoever gave the order to detonate the pagers must have thought he had very compelling reasons. If you have such a weapon in your hands and you can only use it once then you must think very carefully of timing.
Israel has a history of being relatively unconcerned about the indiscriminate ‘collateral damage’ by the Mossad and other assassination efforts. See Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations by Ronen Bergman.
Stranger
Has there been?
Some I am sure, but relative to the operational disruption achieved, compared to other means that are available to achieve such objectives, “a lot”?
What information do you have access to that allows you to know that?
BTW, this technique has been used before, quite effectively:
Except that the videos I saw pretty much only the person holding the pager was injured. In the grocery store one it doesn’t look like even the fruit got bruised. These were very personal explosives, and apparently much more often maimed the holding device (even right in front of their face) than killed them.
No question Israel is willing to accept high degrees of collateral damage. This time though? It doesn’t appear to have been much compared to the operations damage achieved.
Pretty incredible. The number of things that had to go right to pull this off is astonishing.
I’m frequently a bit suspicious of some supply chain attack stories. There’s a classic story that the CIA introduced a Trojan horse in some software controlling a gas pipeline in the USSR and caused a huge explosion. The trouble is that the story doesn’t really hold up and comes from a single source that wasn’t a first party to the alleged operation.
But this? Impossible to deny that Israel pulled off an impressive supply chain attack with all that entails. Stuxnet was impressive too, but this even more so.
Seems like it might have been more useful to plant microphones in the pagers rather than explosives. But I suppose the transmission of the audio wouldn’t be hard to detect.
That would be vastly more complicated to do.
It’s really not that complicated in this case. Lebanon has a relatively limited volume of imports, especially for new technological items like computers and pagers, and Hezbollah probably placed a bulk order with some grey market vendor to ensure that they could get the necessary quantity of pagers to support their network. Israeli intelligence is quite well known to be very good, not only at human intelligence and signals intelligence but also acquiring information about commercial transactions and doubtless has contacts with anyone shipping any kind of communication hardware to anyone in the region. Getting physical access to the pagers to insert ordnance devices is the most risky element of the process but of course they have done this sort of thing before, just not in such volume.
Pagers are perfect for this mechanics, BTW, because unlike smartphones and modern ‘dumb’ cellphones they have room inside for a significant charge, and people will hold them up to their face after getting a page to read the number or message, so I wonder if they didn’t intentionally spread rumors of a compromised cell network to encourage the adoption of pagers.
And kind of pointless. The operational intelligence that could be gleaned from ‘bugging’ the pagers would be of limited tactical use, and sooner or later someone would have figured out that the pagers were bugged. But again, the purpose of this was almost certainly to spur Hezbollah into retaliatory action which will serve as pretext for an Israeli response.
Stranger
It sounds like it was quite a targeted attack then. After all, who the hell else uses pagers in 2024?
I had one once, back in 1996, so my wife could alert me if she was going into labor with our son. I switched to a cell phone by 2001.
I wonder if they had the exploding pagers ready to go ahead of time? If they knew that Hezbollah typically ordered one or two models, Israel may have ordered some well in advance to reverse engineer and pack with explosives. I imagine that would take a significant amount of time. That way when they intercept the order, all they have to do is swap the exploding ones for the real ones and the order would just have a minimal delay.
Hezzbola ordered an encrypted pager. It’s unlikely that many got into the hands of ordinary citizers. Of course, the Iranian ambassador had one, surely a mistake 
.
It’s surmised that Israeli intelligence got wind of the order, intercepted it, PETN (high explosive) was added along with a controller. And the shipment continued on. The exact method of triggering the pagers at this specific time is unknown.
Pagers, one way for notifications, do not transmit so do not reveal positions or movement. We’ve ( US) have had Special Forces and troops tracked by fitness apps giving away position and numbers. Ukrainian intelligence had lots of success early by monitoring indiscriminate cell phone use by Russian soldiers.
We all seem to be assuming that the Israelis are behind this - is Hezbollah so well-loved in the region that they have ho enemies who would pull this on them? A rival could set this up in the sure knowledge that Hez would believe it was Israel, and chaos (well, even MORE chaos) ensues.
Dan
I’m not convinced anyone else in the region could pull something like this off apart from Israel.
Maybe Iran could? Maybe Saudi Arabia? Russia or the US. But I can’t see any of them trying this sort of thing there.