Or flag signals as used by old-time navies.
These seem more like legitimate terrorist or military targets. The average person doesn’t use walkie-talkies.
My family used two way radios on our farm in the 1970’s. People at the house called the farm trucks and barn. I haven’t used them since.
The Guardian
I wouldn’t think of Hezbollah as a mere terrorist group: it is a large organization. NYT, emphasis added:
Hezbollah was formed in the 1980s, with Iranian help, to fight the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, which ended in 2000. In the years since, it has grown into Lebanon’s most effective political party and fighting force, and expanded its operations into Syria, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East.
In Lebanon, it has deep roots in parts of society, as well an extensive apparatus to support its mission that includes offices dedicated to social services, communications and internal security.
The US State Department estimates that it has tens of thousands of members worldwide. Iran reportedly sends them hundreds of millions of dollars each year. The party has held cabinet positions in the Lebanese government since 2005.
More:
My thoughts.
I agree that the Israelis might have suspected the jig was up and it was kaboom time. The real goal was data, not harm.
Pagers come in two flavors: one-way and two-way. But even one-way ones have to periodically ping a tower so that the cell network knows its location for future pages to be sent. You just don’t blast the message via all cell towers all over a continent. That pinging, if the cell network is compromised can provide useful information.
If they can make an exploding pager they can make a pager that does two-way stuff even if the label says one-way. They can also set up a backdoor in the encryption on the device. Whatever capabilities the device “officially” has are not at all the same as what it actually has. After all, it’s doesn’t say “This goes kaboom.” on the box.
I suspect that the main goal of the explosive was to destroy the device. To make post-boom analysis hard it takes a decent amount of explosives. (OTOH, what if the pager’s battery is dead or the user is inside a well shielded room at the time? There’s still a good chance that analysis can be done on a few of them.) If any of their users get hurt in the process that’s just a plus from Mossad’s point of view.
Hezbollah IS the Lebanese government, for all effects and purposes. It is by far the most powerful military force in the country, and it operates with no government control or oversight.
And the second communication attack:
Hezbollah was hit by another wave of attacks Wednesday, as walkie-talkies used by the group exploded across Lebanon.
I’m guessing then, Faraday bags and phone covers are Woo?
A pager in a faraday bag would still go bang?
A pager in a faraday bag wouldn’t work as a pager, though.
Especially if you are using a satellite pager (e.g., Iridium)
That’s not a great article and is full of errant speculation but it did have one interesting paragraph:
The prospect of a large-scale offensive against Hezbollah isn’t universally supported by Israeli officials. This has led to reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could be poised to remove Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant from his post since he is said to oppose such an operation.
This suggests that this may be a precursor to Israel expanding the conflict with Hezbollah (which is currently limited to Hezbollah firing a few salvos of crude missiles and Israel responding with precision mortar and missile attacks) and potentially even a limited expeditionary action into Lebanon. This might be just as much speculation as everything else in that article but it aligns with a lot of the thinking on Netanyahu’s current precarious position where he is being attacked both by moderates and families angry at the lack of progress and fumbling in getting back the hostages taken by Hamas, and the hard-right extremist faction which has thus far backed the Netanyahu’s government but feels as if he hasn’t done enough to attack the Palestinians and support ‘settlers’ in the Occupied West Bank. If Netanyahu is going to pick a side to appease it is almost certainly going to be the latter, which has been railing for the government to deal with Hezbollah.
Although Hezbollah is certainly the largest organized force in Lebanon, it is a non-state actor and is not recognized by the United Nations or any credible nation as being a representative of the Lebanese government. In terms of its size and relative sophistication, it is comparable to a middling infantry force for the region but lacks almost completely for any crewed aircraft, heavy artillery, or armored vehicles except for a handful of Soviet surplus vehicles captured from Syria or the South Lebanon Army that are in a questionable state of maintenance and mobility. In a head-on confrontation with the Israeli Defense Forces, they would basically be fodder.
One thing to bear in mind is that this explosive pager attack is arguably a war crime; although it is “permissibly extralegal” to target specific enemy combatants by using targeted killing methods including covert explosive devices, it appears that these pagers were distributed without any specific knowledge by Israeli intelligence as to who they went to, and there are some unverified reports that medical personnel were injured by exploding pagers (as well as a couple of children, although that is presumably collateral injuries). This is akin to booby-trapping innocuous and unmarked devices that may do indiscriminate harm outside of a demarcated battlespace. This is likely a violation of Protocol II of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. Of course, Hezbollah has no problem attacking civilians and conducting suicide bombings, but again, they are a non-state actor that is not subject to the international “laws of war” and international conventions where Israel ostensibly is. Whether anybody really cares or not, particularly in light of what is already going on in Gaza and the West Bank, is another question, but then open warfare with Hezbollah will also distract from those issues, which is likely the point of this whole enterprise.
Stranger
A pager is not a general use consumer item like,say, a cell phone.
An encrypted pager has only one purpose:
to be carried by someone important to the organization he works for, to enable his boss to page him at any time-- and order him to report for duty.
These pagers were set to receive calls from the highest level of command in Hezbollah. Anyone who carried those pagers was a direct employee of the organization, and fully understood that he is under the command of Nasrallah.
Hezbollah is officially defined by the US government as a terrorist organization.
If you carry a pager for a terrorist, you’re a terrorist.
And if you let your young child handle your pager, that’s on you*. It’s terribly sad.
But Hezbollah is committed to war, and in war, there is collateral damage.
–
*( a bad analogy: imagine a gun owner in America letting his young child handle his Glock .)
Useless fact: While watching a French TV program last night I discovered that the French term for “walkie-talkie” is “talkie-walkie.”
It’s so funny that a term that I’m used to sounds “normal,” but saying it with the words reversed (and essentially the same meaning) it sounds odd and kind of babyish.
It is a bad analogy, because anybody with a Glock knows that it can kill somebody, but nobody expects a pager to do so. Or at least, they didn’t before yesterday.
Aside from that, however, that’s useful information about the degree of targeting; which probably was about as precise as they could get.
I see @FlikTheBlue posted this much earlier. Interesting anyway.
Pretty much all countries spy on everyone else.
Well, OK, sure, it sound weird… but if it didn’t happen how do you account for 14 dead and thousands injured? Something happened…
The evidence seems to support exploding pagers. You are welcome to come up with an alternative IF you can provide supporting evidence.
That is assuming the attackers knew which batch of pagers was being produced and shipped to Hezbollah and not also sold to doctors, IT employees, etc. and/or had also independently obtained a list of Hezbollah pager numbers to collate with.
Which maybe they did, but maybe they didn’t.
This is beginning to sound like the prelude to an all out Israeli attack. Step 1: Take out their comms.
another good book on the mossad is this one by a former agent… his experiences weren’t positive … but whats even more interesting is the second half of the book is where he writes about some of the more famous operations in response to the 1972 Munich murders
Don’t think so. Pagers don’t use cellular networks, for one thing. And they DO have specific ranges. Remember, those messages are pretty short, so they can just blast to an entire area. And transmission is a LOT more expensive than reception in terms of battery life.
Back when I had a pager, reception time varied, too. I assume sometimes there was more congestion than others.
Back in the early 80s, I had a pretty early pager that was slaved to ONE number (the data center operator’s desk). It would beep. Once. No display, not even an LED. It had a three-position switch: Off, On, and Delay. The last setting meant it wouldn’t beep until you put it back to On. This was so you could take a shower without having to be paranoid that you’d miss a page. Or, I guess, engage in other, um, consuming activities without being interrupted. Though getting paged was pretty serious, meant you’d better respond ASAP!
Yeah, I’m talking de facto, not de jure. De jure doesn’t mean shit, and they know it.
I’m starting to think that the sole purpose of international law is to protect non-state actors (and purported non-state actors) and to allow them to act with impunity, while binding the hands of actual legitimate states. When this is over I think some major revisions are in order… but who am I kidding.
As for Hezbollah’s capabilities, Hamas showed us that you don’t need conventional hardware to massacre civilians, all you need is guys with guns. You also don’t need tanks to defend yourself if you’re entrenched in a massive system of fortifications and tunnels, and guess what? Hezbollah has that, too.