“In February, the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, urged its fighters to get rid of their smartphones, saying Israel could use them for surveillance”
The Israeli press is reporting that the pagers were new models, recently delivered to Hezbollah. (No, I don’t know what a “new model” of a 1980’s technological device is.)
A new model is a pager with a little Mossad surprise inside, of course!
The Mossad would have had to detonate the pagers fairly soon after they arrived in Hezbollah hands, because every day that went by would be a day risking discovery and then the jig would be up (all it would take would be for one out of thousands of users to open up the device for maintenance or repair some day and then the mini-bomb might be noticed by someone who knows electronics.)
This still looks like an April 1st hoax to me?
I suppose an alternative conspiracy theory is that Hezbollah equipped their members with pagers packed with explosives to make them into involuntary suicide bombers?
It seems very dubious to me.
Hoaxing that would be neatly as clever and complicated as actually doing it.
I’m impressed, but this is the country that managed to damage Iran’s nuclear program with a computer virus
Detonation footage in that video starts at 2:20, for those interested.
That seems to be the current theory; though I don’t believe it’s been confirmed.
They were apparently using pagers because they can’t be effectively used to record or photograph conversations/meetings/etc.
Should be a gift link to the Washington Post (my cite for both of the above):
That, and the date.
One of the advantages, I hear, of the AK-47/74 is that they do not require a lot of cleaning. You think terrorists are going to maintain pagers?
With what phones to they respond to the pages?
They don’t. They get a page that says (123) 456-7890 (for example; I don’t know what Lebanese phone numbers look like), and they reference the single-use cipher they’ve got in their pocket to figure out that that means “The guns will be arriving at Dock 15 in crates labelled “fresh bananas”” or something of that nature.
Again, good point.
Oh holy shit 
Yahoo News link, apologies if it is repeating other links but it does indicate that the pagers were sabotaged during production:
“The Mossad injected a board inside of the device that has explosive material that receives a code. It’s very hard to detect it through any means. Even with any device or scanner,” the source said.
I have to say, I like this approach a lot more than the ham-fisted “bounce the rubble” strategy in Gaza. This is some old school Mossad right here.
How long before TSA prohibits pagers on airline flights?
I’d imagine that (at least for a while) any time they spot one in an x-ray of your stuff, they’ll be swabbing it for explosives.
My first thought was, “People are still using pagers?”
They stopped using cell phones because they feared that the network had been compromised.
And they were right. Cell phones are easily compromised and easily tracked. Pagers are were much more secure.
Second round, this time two-way radios exploded.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-planted-explosives-hezbollahs-taiwan-made-pagers-say-sources-2024-09-18