Israel's Mossad spy agency planted a small amount (3 gm) of explosives inside 5,000 pagers made by Gold Apollo (a Taiwanese company). "The Mossad injected a board inside of the device that has explosive material that receives a code." 3,000 of the pagers exploded when a coded message was sent to them.
Gold Apollo founder Hsu Ching-Kuang said the pagers used in the explosion were made by a company in Europe that had the right to use the Taipei-based firm's brand, "The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it"
Hezbollah fighters have been using pagers as a low-tech means of communication in an attempt to evade Israeli location-tracking,
> Gold Apollo founder Hsu Ching-Kuang said the pagers used in the explosion were made by a company in Europe that had the right to use the Taipei-based firm's brand, "The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it"
He also said it was strange he got paid from "Middle East". That statement of his also indicates this was not a long standing "licensing" agreement. Someone likely called up from "Europe" and asked for the license for that specific device.
Conclusion: the company in Europe is a paper fiction. The devices were made in "Israel" and the only time they may have been in Europe was to get them from Middle East to so a "European" company can ship them back.
This also means Hezbollah has an asset in its upper ranks. We can assume this since they announced before "We're gonna use pagers from now on folks" and thus prior to this Shin Bet had no reason to run a cutout in "Europe" making pagers. The entire production chain was then a fiction setup likely recently, certainly post "headsup everyone, pagers" announcement by the targeted organization.
So the chain of events is clear:
- "Did all you hear we are going to use pagers?"
- Shin Bet sets up the phony production Taiwan -> EU.
I think from now on future OEMs will be very careful indicating whether a product was in fact made by them, under their supervision, or was license made by some third party.
You'd think that. Here in America, the NSA has been intercepting and bugging servers for decades, and manufacturers have been suspiciously quiet about the whole affair.
Suffice to say, when enough pressure can be exerted by a government agency, OEMs are happy to keep their mouth shut.
How they looked and what they did was presented in some of the Snowden files.
I have doubts those servers and other devices with implants made it into the wild since they were specifically targeted for high value target customers of those companies.
Thanks. I am usually not super pedantic but I've noticed some people using "mt" for meters recently. I immediately fall into confusion when the wrong symbols are used. Then go down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out if it is a cultural or regional thing.
People have used all sorts of abbreviations for the SI prefixes and SI units for as long as I can remember. I want to ask—are people not taught this in school? I had multiple introductions and revisions of the SI units and SI prefixes in secondary school, pre-university, and university, and every time, a wrong prefix or a wrong symbol was penalised by half a mark per question. I had classmates who mixed them up regularly and lost something like seven marks each time. They learnt very quickly not to, as those seven marks could make one or two grades' difference.
As someone who champions sole use of the SI units, this annoys me to no end.
I've seen things like 'kgs', 'gm', 'gms', 'mtr', 'mt', 'K' instead of 'k' (note capitals) for 'kilo-', mixing 'm' and 'M' (which are supposed to mean 'milli-' and 'mega-' respectively), usage of 'u' instead of 'μ' for 'micro-' (the one exception I will concede is 'mc' in the medical field, because people apparently confused 'μ' and 'm' which results in a 1000× over/underdose), and don't bother with the degree symbol (Alt+numpad 0176 on Windows, Option-Shift-8 on macOS) for °C, or use °K for kelvins (there is no degree, as it is an absolute scale and not relative to anything else, unlike the Celsius/centigrade and Fahrenheit scales), and so many other typographical errors.
I love this, thanks so much for writing it! I'm writing a blog post on metrication and this will be a super-useful resource for the sort of pedantry I intend to engage in.
Then see my point about the UK/metric/Imperial. ;-)
Incidentally, in that link there's a very common example of bad usage namely the volt/voltage. 120V is shown as bad usage and 120 V good. One sees the former usage on machines, appliances, in printed material etc. so often that it's almost a de facto standard.
I'm inconsistent in my use too, one time I'll include the space at other times not.
I agree about standardization, but I think this framing comes off as lacking empathy. Plenty of folks either
- Avoided the topic in school or put all their effort into other subjects
- Didn’t learn this in school—there are a wide variety of education systems across all the decades and distances that folks on this site may have grown up in
- Learned this in school, but a lifetime ago, and haven’t had a reason to revisit it. At a certain distance, your life experience and work experience massively overshadow what you learned in school.
Forgive the inference, but based on your recall of specific grading policies I would guess that your time in school is still near to you, or at least very important. It’s not that way for everyone.
(I am of course doggedly accurate with my unit abbreviations.)
"People have used all sorts of abbreviations for the SI prefixes and SI units for as long as I can remember."
In the US that is, not in metric counties that use SI by default.
For those in the US (and to a lesser extent the UK) there are multiple metric systems. The other notable system that's still in use is the cgs (centimetre–gram–second) system.
'cgs units' are still used in some areas notably physics as they can make calculations easier, there they're called Gaussian-cgs units.
Incidentally, often, as here, 'cgs' is in lowercase to reflect the case of the units' abbreviations. That said, the uppercase abbreviation is also often used. For instance, as I typed this my browser kept correcting the lowercase to 'CGS'.
> In the US that is, not in metric counties that use the SI system by default.
India which metricated in the late 1950s is still a big (ab)user of poor SI symbolism. A lot of the 'cms', 'gms', 'cc', 'kgs', etc come from Indian writers and Indian publications (case in point: the article in this thread).
> The other notable system that's still in use is the cgs (centimetre–gram–second) system.
> 'cgs units' are still used in some areas notably physics as they can make calculations easier, there they're called Gaussian-cgs units.
I'm not sure they're used all that much—I was under the impression most CGS units fell out of favour as MKS and eventually SI took over. I was an RA at my physics department for a while and we used SI as much as we could. Some specialisations use a certain form of natural units (like geometrised units in general relativity), but by and large SI dominated.
Right, there are offenders everywhere but the chief offender is the US by far (many don't have a clue about SI let alone metric, ask an American what 20°C is in Fahrenheit and they've no idea).
The UK is also troublesome in that whilst supposedly a metric country Imperial is still commonplace. For example, there's widespread use of antiquated units like the 'stone' (14 pounds)†, even BBC medical programs still regularly use the term.
Re Gaussian/cgs, in physics it's still widely used especially in field theory/Maxwell, SR (Special Relatively), etc. because in charge calculations and such involving permeability, permittivity, speed of light certain terms can be restated as 1 instead of their actual SI values.
Personally, I understand why this is done but from my perspective it's confusing if not misleading for reasons well outside this discussion (but who am I to argue with those more learned than me?). This Wiki provides justification of sorts (see Unit of charge): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_units.
† In Australia where I am, only people of my generation who've been around for decades would even know what a 'stone' was. Anyone born after say the mid 1970s would likely think you're talking about a rock. Trouble is, we see BBC/UK programs here. Fact is the UK is oblivious to the problem or it'd first correct its exports.
Why would your average American need to know what 20°C is in Fahrenheit? Very few people use Celsius here. All our appliances use Fahrenheit, weather reports use Fahrenheit, our recipes use Fahrenheit, and for science and physics we use Kelvin.
Honorable mention for "cc", which stands for "cubic centimeter" which is exactly equal to 1 ml. I can't find any logic to explain why cc is used in some contexts and ml in others.
The problem is old habits die hard and to be (or appear) to be consistent then an official designation can be unwieldy, as here.
I simply cannot remember when I last saw cm³ but cc and ml are everywhere including on commercial chemical reagent bottles etc.
The same nomenclature problem is all over chemistry too, the preferred IUPAC name for say isopropyl alcohol is propan-2-ol, and the preferred name for acetone is propan-2-one (systematic 2-Propanone). I can't say I've ever heard anyone ask me to pass them the bottle of propan-2-one, it's just not done (not in my world anyway).
If there's a choice between an awkward or simpler term then the simpler one wins out every time.
I wouldn't wish to be in the PR damage control team of Gold Apollo right now.
This was a direct attack to their survival as company. Will they sue Israeli government for turning their product into a bomb used to mutilate and kill people? Seems not probable.
Will they sue the Hungarian company making the bombs? That would be a more realistic target. Now Hezbollah has an excuse to attack Hungary interests in the EU and the conflict could escalate. That company should be crushed and closed for good by the Hungarian law system IMO. Either you are a military grade company or you aren't.
If Gold Apollo wants to keep selling pagers, better they start making all the carcasses on their products transparent from now on. With a big photo in the boxes showing how the correct product must look.
I assume that you, as a company, need a special permit to manufacture lethal weapons or military products on EU. Either you have it, or you don't. And if you don't have and still do it, I understand that you are breaking a dozen of EU laws.
The EU now needs to do something about it, and do it fast. Or to pretend that nothing happened, surrender to Israel, create a dangerous legal precedent "for the cause" and send a clear message that EU manufacture laws are a joke: "All those security filters painfully raised around EU products worth zero and can be easily jumped over". This is a really bad message for all the EU makers.
A franchise of your brand also signed a contract to make your product. I assume that changing the functionality or specifications of your registered product is strictly forbidden in that contract. I bet that this move violated some laws on Taiwan also.
If I was the CEO of Gold Apollo I would be fuming and furious at this moment.
Israel not only pushed them into the middle of a war that is not their war, without their consent or knowledge; also destroyed the brand image and painted a target in the backs of each employee and reseller of Gold Apollo.
At this moment, nothing suggests that the Taiwan based company were part of this. They should apologize, clear things, and detach themselves from this PR mess as soon as possible.
I understand that from the Mossad point of view this can be a big success, but from the point of view of the companies that try to sell their legit products, this is an direct attack.
> Israel not only pushed them into the middle of a war that is not their war, without their consent or knowledge;
Weren’t they already selling pagers to Hezbollah? It seems like they were already in the war as a supplier of goods to a terrorist organization.
I wonder if this is why Israel made this move because the manufacturer was already breaking international sanction by supplying Hezbollah so they have little recourse.
If I was the CEO of Gold Apollo, I’d be investigating why my franchisee was selling stuff to Hezbollah in the first place.
But it’s beepers and only 5,000. How expensive is this at the end of the day? It’s probably the last time a company lends then brand name for a small amount.
> Weren’t [Gold Apollo] already selling pagers to Hezbollah?
Selling pagers to Lebanon citizens is legal if I'm not wrong.
Not necessarily. At this moment, all suggests that somebody (Ehem, Mossad) was impersonating a reseller of the brand [1]. How do they knew that the buyers were from Hezbollah?. Did the buyers wear a t-shirt?. What if somebody was buying it to resell it later and bank some profit?. This stuff could ended being sold to innocent people, or distributed by all the schools of Lebanon.
[1] New facts can change this picture and I may be wrong about this.
> If I was the CEO of Gold Apollo, I’d be investigating why my franchisee was selling stuff to Hezbollah in the first place.
Agree. Definitely, the maker should make a move about that, just to be sure. And to be very transparent about that investigation.
> Selling pagers to Lebanon citizens is legal if I'm not wrong.
This is true. But only the thousands of Hezbollah pagers blew up, right? There are a lot of details needed to see if they knowingly supplied Hezbollah or just sold a big batch to a random customer. I assumed, perhaps falsely, that a 5000 pager order for Lebanon is pretty specific and does anyone really use pagers any more? My thinking was that this is a specific tech used by Hezbollah. Although it is a consumer tech, maybe pagers are super popular in Lebanon. But 3000 people were injured so I thought that the vast majority of these pagers were used exclusively by Hezbollah.
My point is their stuff was already in a war. Israel making them explode doesn’t seem to change that.
> only the thousands of Hezbollah pagers blew up, right?
Hopefully! Just out of curiosity I had a look for that brand of pager on eBay, but didn't see any. I'd hate to think that there were a few rogue units out there that had potential to cause harm!
> Weren’t they already selling pagers to Hezbollah?
I don't have info about those specific models, but this is pagers and not rockets. If someone makes an order for 5000 units I can't image you'd have an expectation to do a background check with references.
It's basically like ordering 5000 units of Raspberry Pi, would you consider that a military export?
For the US, at least, I am forced to confirm that those 5000 raspberry pis aren’t going to a terrorist organization. Isn’t the EU the same way? So it’s not that it’s a military export, but that it’s a sanctioned organization (Iran and Hezbollah).
How are you realistically able to do this though? It's not like they can't order batches to some neutral-country intermediary and then ship them from there.
This stunt is great for Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions folks though. Here in the US, many states require fealty to Israel in the form of promising you won’t boycott them if you want to do business with that state’s government. Now there’s an easy out: no one is boycotting Israel, they’re just avoiding the liability of Mossad intercepting and tampering with a shipment.
Would that even hold up in court? Would be amazing at counteracting these unconstitutional laws. The biggest problem is that these laws are much easier to get passed then to get repealed. Because each repeal requires a long winded lawsuit that can sometime only get the law slightly altered.
Well, pagers are not military products. And second, except for ordnance, you don't need any license to manufacture any product.
For products that can have dual-use capabilities, you need an export license that is given per customer (at least in the EU) where some due diligence is performed. If the company is a reseller in Lebanon and there are no export bans for that country, they can be sold/bought without an issue.
The fact that somewhere in transit they were modified, the manufacturer or seller cannot be held liable for it.
Doesn't matter. Hezbollah are subject to sanctions by the EU as a designated terrorist organization. Presumably, that applies to all companies operating within the EU.
Sanctions violations are very much a "do not pass go" style crime, and this looks like it was an entire batch that was delivered directly to Hezbollah.
I don't mean to be "that guy", but "military grade" means nothing nowadays. It can mean anything from "made to exactly standards" to "made by the lowest bidder, and likely to fail the minute it's used".
Just normal pagers with 20g of high explosive inserted in to them. They found a way of remotely getting the battery to overheat with would make the thing go boom.
> If Gold Apollo wants to keep selling pagers, better they start making all the carcasses on their products transparent from now on. With a big photo in the boxes showing how the correct product must look.
I don't think that would make a difference at all, explosives could be disguised in any electronic components, being transparent wouldn't help very much. The Taiwanese company's brand is now irreparably tarnished, I think that is the cost of lending the brand name to an untrustworthy partner.
> This was a direct attack to their survival as company. Will they sue Israeli government for turning their product into a bomb used to mutilate and kill people? Seems not probable.
Would Toyota or any other car manufacturer sue Arabs et al. for turning their pickups into rolling suicide bombs?
Toyota will definitely sue to death somebody --selling-- thousands of new Toyotas modified in mass to kill their drivers. If not, they would be sued massively instead, so is not something that they could just let pass.
If the owner wants later to trow their Toyota over a cliff is a different problem and not Toyota's business.
As it can be expected the situation is extremely murky. Hungarian press is abuzz with this, I will translate a few hard facts and leave speculation to others. I will also use English sources as appropriate. Hungarian sources are below the list, you can run them through automated translation to fact check me.
* There's a small consulting company called BAC after the initials of the founder Bársony-Arcidiacono Cristiana. One of their services is https://archive.fo/kwTKA "We develop international technology cooperation among countries for the sale of telecommunication products. This cooperation entails scaling up a business from Asia to new markets e.g. developing countries". Their home page https://archive.fo/dXtMx lists these: Strategic Advisor for major International Organizations including Financial companies (Venture Capitals, IAEA, UNESCO, CNRS, EC, etc.).
Business Developer and Savvy Analyst for Innovative/ Solutions in diverse fields (Sustainable Development (SDGs), Water, Energy, Resilience-Mitigation-Adaptation, Capacity Building, Complex Emergencies, Digitalization (AI, Blockchain, ICT) within Humanistic Economy.
* The official place of business is just a business "placeholder". The woman who answered the doorbell for journalists said no one ever from BAC is there, maybe once a month a mail comes which she receives.
* This house is also the registered address for a number of companies. Two companies have Russian owners. One of them is an oil wholesaler.
* BAC revenue in 2023 was 210 million forints and 13 million profit. What's remarkable is how person-related expenses (payroll etc) was a mere 0.5 million forints for the entire year. Hungarian monthly minimum wage was a bit over 0.25M HUF. One million HUF is about 2820 USD.
In conclusion, if I needed to speculate based on the LinkedIn page and the archived consulting page, what gives me pause: if this woman indeed exists she is one of the most talented people in all of Hungary. Seven languages, degrees in diverse fields and a PhD in physics. At the same time, I have indeed found a PhD from 2006 and her grants and scholarships from even earlier are probably not hard to verify either. I do not know what to think.
To me the content archived consulting page looks very much like something a large language model would generate. Impressive, but doesn't make any sense considering the size of this company. Probably good enough to fool Hezbollah anyway.
She purportedly got a PhD in London, UK. Now I do not speak English that well but to me this sentence "This cooperation entails scaling up a business from Asia to new markets e.g. developing countries" does not look correct. Is it...?
It's grammatically correct, but it's very awkward. Most people would say "We partner with technology companies to introduce their products to new markets in developing countries".
As it's written, it only mentions "a business" (singular) when it likely means multiple businesses. It also uses the word cooperation, which has different connotations than a partnership. Typically, business will say that they "cooperate" with governments, standards bodies, or trade restrictions. For friendly and mutually profitable agreements, they'll use the word "partner" to indicate that both parties benefit.
I doubt the company exists anymore or that there's anyone left in hungary who can be held responsible. Here's what i imagine took place:
step one: mossad sets up some sham manufacturing facility in Hungary or buys an existing one.
Step 2: reach out to gold apollo and make a deal to produce their pagers under license. Money no object they probably offered them very good terms. Gold apollo is so pleased by the money being offered they fail to investigate the company properly.
Step 3: mossad agents start production introducing lethal batteries into the design,
produce several thousand units then
vanish leaving apollo executives bewildered but they have the money already so they don't ask too many questions.
Step 4: sell all the pagers
at a great price to some hezbolla arms dealer, go home, buy some popcorn and turn on the tv.
In short everyone involved have probably disappeared months ago.
Also a really clever part is that they could have turned a profit on the sale meaning the operation was at least partly subsidised by hezbolla themselves.
There are lots of companies with questionable practices in Hungary. One scam I am aware of is companies that are registered in the names of homeless people whose sole function is to churn out receipts that other companies buy at fractions of their face value in order to run “clean” expenses through their books and effectively launder money.
Would not surprise me if this turned out to be something like that.
Its not just Hungary. There's a famous high street in London with a series of sweet shops (about 2 dozen) that are a very obvious front for a money laundering scheme. Allegedly the taliban or some other afghan crime ring).
I don't know why the authorities are ignoring them but it's probably such a big can of worms that everyones afraid to open it.
In all seriousness though, those “sweet shops” and “Thai massage parlours” and the like are clearly fronts for money laundering. I doubt they’re being ignored, but as you say, there’s probably some reason no one’s dealt with them yet.
Am intermediary can be sued just for damaging products through insufficient, they can certainly be sued for adding defects on purpose. Especially lethal defects.
But can the manufacturer sue? Isn’t the normal way that the customer sues, because their stuff was damaged? Can the manufacturer sue me if I buy their stuff, modify it to be deadly, and sell it again?
(I don’t mean “can the sue me” but “do they have any chance of winning” of course)
> But can the manufacturer sue? do they have any chance of winning?
For Gold Apollo the dilemma here is either to sue the Israel Government (and try to survive the experience as company), or to take the piss and be sued for the families of the people mutilated by "their" product. They are in a difficult position.
It depends on how deep are their pockets and what they think will do less damage to the brand. Also if it has Taiwanese government support or not (unlikely as they probably depend on Israel technology for defense); and if Taiwan companies team with them or not. If the "made in Taiwan" sector want to keep selling radios and pagers to the rest of the planet they need to assure that this can't happen again.
I assume that the consequences for Israel will be indirect, limited and approved by USA, or none.
Update: Gold Apollo is a small company with about 30 employees. The CEO said that this was humiliating, the products were made by a distributor in Hungary and that they were ruined for that. Small chances that they could sue anybody.
If you pretend it's legit, I'd say you're breaking trademark law, even if it isn't explosive. The same way you can't put old laptops in Macbook cases and open an online shop.
In this case there would also be a contract with specific terms for the reseller/manufacturer that certainly includes language such as "purposefully produce devices that would damage the brand".
Of course I think the customers have a more serious case to bring on (particularly ones that weren't terrorists). As well as war crime considerations.
Hezbollah and Hamas need the inherent anti Israel bias of Europe. It's the only international group with money and influence that sides with them. If they attack anything in Israel then it is a massive Israeli win.
Europe only care for geopolitical games in the Mediterranean and petroleum. The Gaza conflict has shown that oil is on its way out as a top level geopolitical influence.
Lol military grade. This is a guerilla fighting group getting leftover oil money from Iran. They were using pagers.
Israel has been fighting for 100 years with its hands tied. With the unofficial and largely official sunni/saudi Israel alliance, only Iran cares about the freedom fighters of Gaza and Lebanon, and you can put a ten year clock on that funding once EVs start taking real chunks of transport
My guess that entire company was just a Mossad front.
* They seem to have little or no actual presence at their Hungarian address
* CEO has a profile that seems to have very little to do with the manufacturing of telecom devices
* Gold owner says their payments were strange and came through the middle east.
* Orban is very pro Israel
A front yes. A front for who though? Was it a front for Hezbollah that got infiltrated or a front setup by Israel fit for purpose.
I have no sympathy for Hezbollah but empathy a plenty - I've been on that side of a security breech and step one involves tearing things apart; things that are the problem and invariably unless you've got ice water in your veins you'll tear apart things that are not the problem as well.
> "The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it"
That's whitewashing. If they license the brand, they should control every aspect of manufacturing. Otherwise they are irresponsible. If I was their client, I wouldn't trust them any longer and return all pagers.
I am curious about the technical details - where were the explosives packed, how were they connected and triggered? Did any pager survive and didn't blow up?
Unfortunately I’ve been trying to tell this to friends and family for
almost a decade in regards to clothing and home goods.
People are stuck in the 80s and 90s that a logo defines how something was made, which isn’t true at all these days. Calvin Klein is a great example where most of their income comes from licensing, not selling their own clothes. They might review designs but have no say on if the resulting garment can be sold with their logo. As long as they get get the licensing fee. Unfortunately I know people who will spend more on their items than the same garment made by the same manufacturer but with a different license on jt
Working at an electronics retailer a few years ago, this was well-known (though news to me, when I started). They hid the fact that the company no longer manufactured their products, and/or that multiple companies were selling similar or even the same product (produced in the same factory, even).
It is trouble, though, since the entire point of a "brand" is to signal provenance in manufacturing, quality, etc. It's supposed to be a way to know something about the product (if nothing else, who to hold accountable when something goes wrong). If it doesn't, what's the point?
These declarations sound so stupid to me. What's the point of having your brand on a product, if you're going to claim you have nothing to do with it? What is the point of the concept of a brand even?
To make money, like with all the merchandising that happens with a popular movie. Any number of things are licensed with the owner of the IP having very limited involvement in it, like turning down certain types of licenses as bad for the brand but not getting into the weeds of manufacturing. It's not like if there was some branded Disney cell phone that Disney is going to inspect all the board-level components. I can't speak about this pager company other than to think they're glad for any business they could get, so would license the brand.
There must be some other ostensible purpose for a brand than "to make money". People who would buy the hypothetical Disney phone would have other reasons than "to give Disney money". Nobody has that as a goal when buying stuff.
People form subconscious connections to a brand. You are more likely to buy a Disney phone for your kid if it gives you a warm feeling because you remember how much fun it was to watch Lion King with your kid. That might not be the deciding factor, but if it's functionally identical to the other other phones it might make the difference.
Yeah, but I don't think the subconscious factor is strong in the case of some pagers sold to Hezbollah. Disney was an example someone chose, and it ceases to be a useful example here.
The goal of the brand owners is to make money, for the customer the value should be a certain reputation of quality. But as long as customers don’t notice or punish it, it’s advantageous to sell out your brand to make more money (from the perspective of the brand owner)
And isn't it strange when a company publicly declares that you can't have any expectations based on their brand? Seems like they're drawing customers' attention to the thing, instead of hoping they don't notice.
To prepare for lawsuits from families of the injured in what appears to be a supply chain attack maybe without the knowledge of their licensee in Budapest (BAC Consulting), and likely without their (Gold Apollo) knowledge. Deny and distance.
Possibly the pagers had to have a popular brand to "work as designed", and this brand was up for sale, but declares it won't admit this to the real customers.
I feel like it’s reasonable to expect a brand to be aware if some organization, even Mossad, placed explosives in 5000 of their items.
It means this company is incompetent and should not be trusted. It’s one thing to have malware injected into software (pretty bad) and another to have physical explosives put into your product.
So if someone steals a box of iphones, adds a few grams of explosives inside each phone, and then resells them or gives them away, then Apple is at fault?
If you buy the boxes from an Apple store, or from an approved distributor, Apple is at fault. What's the meaning of "approved"?
If you buy them from the back of a truck, then no, Apple has no fault of course.
But there's a declaration saying "we had nothing to do with the pagers even though they have our brand". That's different from saying "they were booby-trapped after they left our hands". Not even the company itself is claiming the defense you're using.
The problem is that the company which did the rigging seems to have had an official license. If apple gave away licenses to build things branded apple and they contained explosives, I would blame apple, too.
Every brand in the world is now expected to have the ability to detect and thwart intelligence operations run by Mossad? Like, a yoghurt company needs to have a counter intelligence division?
I think they should have some control over their manufacturing. It’s not so much that the yogurt company has a counter intelligence division, it’s that the yogurt company didn’t detect someone putting poison into a few hundred truckloads.
I expect brands to have quality control procedures in place.
But the best that they can realistically do, once they've found out about the shenanigans, is to cancel the licensing deal with the Hungarian manufacturer. Which they probably will. Maybe sue them in a Hungarian court, if there's anybody left to sue.
Selling your own parts to be restamped as another brand is common though. Selling your brand to be stamped on someone else's parts is basically only useful to do this exact thing though.
Why would you say that? Many everyday products are produced under license or franchise with the brand having minimal involvement in the entire process. Even if apollo had done qc in the factory it would be easy to trick them.
Manufacturers for certain categories of products are homogenized, often regionally, whereas the brands maybe many.
Plus, clandestine supply chain attacks fall into 2 categories:
- A. With manufacturer/reseller complicity. (Not many manufacturers choose this because it would harm their business.)
- B. Without manufacturer/reseller complicity, but with logistics interception for sw/hw implants or complete substitution. (This is the method NSA TAO used to load implants into Cisco gear.)
If such a supply chain attack was in progress on a larger scale against the US, do we have mechanisms in place to detect it? Would shipments of these same devices pass through US customs?
You know, as this is a tech forum, I'll reply via a tech business, re: branding angle.
Yes Gold Apollo, they were yours. That's because you licensed your name, and your name is your business.
(EG your mark(name) of trade)
I've seen this in everything from hotels to frying pans. License that name! We made 1% more this quarter. Yeehaw!
Holiday in has corporate owned hotels, franchised hotels, and of course licensed hotels. Franchised ones have more control from corporate, licensed far less. And it shows.
Same as t-fal, which in Canada is just the cheapest junk you can get, with Canadian Tire owning and manufacturing under the name:
More concisely, why should anyone who, due to these explosions, does not trust devices branded as Gold Apollo care about a distinction between a product using a licensed trademark vs a product that has been contracted out for production of products using the brand name they own?
Or to really drive the point home, the only reason we give companies exclusive control over certain names (trademarks) is so that they can build a reputation. If companies are going to just license out the names to whoever gives them money anyway then we might as well get rid of trademarks entirely and let anybody produce crap knock off products without having to pay a trademark owner.
I suspect from a company perspective, it is all just different degree of relying on a supply chain. Any company that outsource production that goes directly to customers are relying on reputation and contracts, and the assumption that they can apologize to customers and change supplier when/if something goes wrong. I seem to hear that a common practice is to do random sampling in order to do quality control, but in terms of supply chain attacks it wouldn't do much good if the attacker is a state actor with the ability to create non-tampered version.
I think thats already happening in major ways due to online shopping where reviews mean more than brand for some imported goods. Brand names for consumer goods on my Amazon search results are often completely made up and often temporary.
Ironically this appears to be because another company wanted to protect its trademark.
> In the United States, Tefal is marketed as T-fal. This is to comply with DuPont's objection that the name "Tefal" was too close to DuPont's trademark "Teflon". The T-fal brand is also used in Canada and Japan.
It's difficult enough to secure the supply chain towards the OEM as it is. It's nigh impossible for a vendor/OEM to secure the supply chain towards retail and distribution, not relative to nation-state attackers of great sophistication and with huge budgets. This sort of thing could happen with any smartphone, any feature phone, laptops, etc. Though it was a lot easier to mount this attack given an order for thousands of units from one company.
A man in the middle redirecting to a fake web page could be enough to create an opportunity. I assume that in some countries hacking the internet could be still possible.
Or a terrorist could sell phones on the street for months, use them as sleeping devices, and wait until a big holiday or the super-bowl to spread chaos massively with minimum risk for him/her. So now we everybody need a way to be able to scan our devices and detect that risk ASAP. The Mossad still don't understand the mess that had created for every westerner by opening this door.
CTC bought Paderno, a Prince Edward Island perennial, to juice out more brand value after they’re done sucking T-Fal dry.
It's worse than that.
Panerno, a high quality manufacturer of stainless steel cookware, using North American steel, was indeed bought by Canadian Tire.
Immediately after purchase, the factory was sold to a Chinese firm, who wanted to import crappy Chinese steel, but still label cookware "Made in Canada".
It is their ingress into the North American market.
And as Paderno's plant is gone, it means that Paderno of Canadian Tire is now made with Chinese steel, not North American steel, and built to lowest quality standards.
But of course it still says "Made in Canada".
Canadian Tire has boasted in earning reports that more than 60% of its profits now come from its own brands. Often like this, quality brands bought and turned into junk.
This is one pf the reasons why many jurisdictions in Canada have warranty laws that say the retailer is liable too.
Just one quibble: Made in China doesn't automatically mean junk. Case in point: The iPhone. When it comes to Chinese manufacturing, they cater to all price points in the marketplace.
Apple's size and scope, along with direct control of production to force a high quality product helps.
Including knowledge transfer, tooling assistance, trade secrets at the start.
But the truth is, even if you can find a rare product such as this, which is really Chinese assembly with US know how, direct control, and methods, 99.999% if the stuff you buy when Made ib China will be... junk.
The exception to the rule is not relevant. Made in China means "junk".
It's not just Apple. You can buy a forged spanner (and other tools) from China that can beat the pants off of any domestically made version. It's all about what the distributor/brand will pay for.
This is just wrong. You can buy junk in China and you can buy very quality products in China. They launch rovers to the literal Moon. They produce 7nm chips. This is not junk, this is state of art.
That's your own personal experience. I don't buy junk and if I would repeat that experiment, it's very likely that I'd pick up, e.g. Fluke multimeter or some old iPhone I'm keeping around.
My example has nothing to do with what you personally buy, and instead with "what is Made in China" in a local market. I am referring to both reality, and perception.
If you have millions upon millions of products, and only a tiny, tiny, tiny number are of OK quality, then it's entirely fair to say "Made in China" is junk. That's how it works. Exceptions to the rule are simply that, and not relevant.
If a company makes fridges, and 1 model out of 100 are OK, the other 99 crap that breaks in 2 to 3 years, everyone would say "That company makes junk!". Referencing "But they made one good fridge once!" is not something anyone need care about, and is the exception to the rule.
Yet with Made in China, we're talking about a million junky, sub-par products, compared to 1 that may be acceptable. And even then, quality control is still an issue.
Made in China is junk, an entirely fair, reasonable, logical statement, predicated upon the reality of the situation for most people.
Manufacturing in the PRC defaults to “cheap-as-possible” mode if the specs aren’t explicitly laid out. Think stinky black plastic and sharp metal edges.
Most of the time, the default is compatible with what the free-market MBA crowd wants.
It's unreasonable to expect a small companies to have rogue nation states in their threat model. Apple, Microsoft, ... yeah but not a smaller business.
This attack is quite indiscriminate. There are already videos circulating of random people being collateral damage.
Israel is losing the support of people more and more, and all that due to the crusade of Netanyahu to stay in power and to not be imprisoned for his former crimes.
Despicable. So much human suffering and for what ?
Easy. When it is you or your allies committing an act, it is war and collateral damage. When it is someone else, it is terrorism.
It is often a difficult topic to discuss because both sides tend to be in the wrong. It ends up being asymmetrical warfare. The stronger side accuses the weaker of hiding behind civilians while the weaker side accuses the stronger of human rights violations.
As sad as this case is, I find it pretty interesting since it is clearly an extrajudicial act of violence carried out in a foreign land. The west will likely celebrate this, but I personally find this much worse than the Indian assassination that took place in Canada "recently" and didn't have significant collateral damage, yet the west was up in arms about.
Is the target the relevant piece or is it actual impact? If you have a single military target who is known to use X brand phone, is it war to kill 5,000 people to get this one target? Is it not instilling terror on the people who use those devices?
It is this rationalization that enables powers to bomb civilians and ethnic groups under the guise of targeting military targets who stand no chance if they segregate themselves from the populace due to the power dynamics. And then the cycle only continues as each side adds fuel to the fire.
The actually impact of every war since (a very long time) are that more civilians are killed and harmed than military personal. Looking at the statistics produced by the US military on the iraq war, civilian deaths was 3x of enemy combatants. UN has estimated that globally, modern wars has an 10:1 ration of civilian deaths to military combatants.
Looking at it from that perspective there is no line between war and terrorism. All wars are terrorism.
> targeting military targets who stand no chance if they segregate themselves from the populace due to the power dynamics
This is flawed rational. If you can't find any parking lot you keep driving, it doesn't allow you to double park and block someone else's car. If you are too weak to maintain your posture at war you shouldn't fight it on the backs of civilians. Your inability to execute your wishes legitimately doesn't provide you with any right to act illegitimately and inflict the cost and pain on others.
> If you can't find any parking lot you keep driving, it doesn't allow you to double park and block someone else's car. If you are too weak to maintain your posture at war you should't fight it on the backs of civilians.
That cuts both ways. Just like hamas should not hide amongst civilians, if Israel is too weak to go into Gaza to arrest hamas, it has no excuse to act illegitimately and bomb civilians.
Try a different approach than engaging in war/apartheid. The practice of the IDF "mowing the grass" by harming civilians has been long established and commented on. Certain Israeli politicians also empowered Hamas, in order to divide and discredit the Palestinians, so that they would not be in a suitable position to negotiate an end to the conflict. Practices like that do not produce peace. I suggest Israel do its best to look at its role in this conflict (and not just Hamas's) and then act in good faith to bring about peace, so that there are no more terrorist attacks like Oct. 7.
Oct 7 happened and you're suggesting a different approach than a war, i.e. diplomatic solutions? That's too naive—not even the most pacifist country would do that.
And let's not pretend that no diplomatic solutions have been proposed, all of which were rejected. They will only accept it if they own every inch of the land and Israel is obliterated (their own word).
> Oct 7 happened and you're suggesting a different approach than a war, i.e. diplomatic solutions? That's too naive
The actions that led up to Oct. 7 long predate it. The seeds of this have been sown every year that the IDF "mowed the grass" and every time they tried to disrupt the PLO from negotiating a peace. Remember, an Israeli prime minister was assassinated for seeking and negotiating peace- not by the Palestinians but by a radical Israeli, whose politics are aligned with the current prime minister. This current prime minister has used his long time in office to disrupt and prevent any peace from occurring.
The disappointing logic there is the idea that historical conflict of any kind, anywhere on Earth, could possibly "seed" an atrocity like Oct 7. The sheer ferocity, scale and cruelty of 3,000 terrorists storming across the border to gleefully slaughter and capture civilians young and old, is somehow reduced to "oh well, they had it coming"... "oh well, the seeds were sown"?
In my view, that is a very dark and troubling position. I will never in my lifetime form the view that Oct 7 was anything other than crossing all lines. It was end-game stuff. Standing alone in measures of evil, it therefore needs dealing with on those terms. Civilised humanity should be uniting against that senseless barbarism including renewed focus on the deeper causes and future remedies for fanatical violent groups.
This may be why many of are divided: Those who believe Oct7 crossed all lines; and those who believe Oct7 was horrific but within "resistance" seed-sowing territory. We all want peace, but it amazes me the latter has any traction at all.
> The disappointing logic there is the idea that historical conflict of any kind, anywhere on Earth, could possibly "seed" an atrocity like Oct 7
If you don't recognize causes, then you will be baffled by effects. It has been clear to observers of the Middle East that the status quo that Netanyahu has created was violent and untenable. It gave the appearance of peace only because most people remained ignorant of the underlying brutality of the situation. If you think Oct. 7 was frightening, what do you think about the generations of children that have been killed and maimed by IDF soldiers and settlers? The terrorist invasion of Oct. 7 was terrible and unacceptable, but that does not make what Israel did before or after ok. The fact that you cannot recognize that Israel has also crossed all lines, means that you are incapable of being a part of the solution.
Israel has done many terrible things, no more than any other country who has engaged in war, nothing like crossing all lines, but pain was inflicted on innocent people, for sure. So what? October 7th isn't an inevitable or just counteraction. Jews have been mascaraed repeatedly for hundreds of years, including by Palestinians and other Arabs. Can you give an example where Jews retaliated by mass raping, butchering and burning alive their oppressors?
That was a Marine barracks that was part of a "military peacekeeping operation". Granted, 128 non-military Americans were injured, but all of the dead people were military. The U.S. politicians labelled it terrorism.
Overall I agree. However, the difficulty that I see is when someone attacks a, sometimes nominally, military target in a situation or method where it will unreasonably injure or kill civilians. Or even when the military target is mostly an excuse to target civilians.
I think it can also get less clear when the target is an enemy's infrastructure, industry, or political infrastructure.
If an army unreasonably kills or injure civilians it will most probably be considered a war crime. Committing war crime is not necessarily better than being a terrorist, but it's different.
>On November 5, 2009, a mass shooting took place at Fort Hood (now Fort Cavazos), near Killeen, Texas.[1] Nidal Hasan, a U.S. Army major and psychiatrist, fatally shot 13 people and injured more than 30 others.[2][3] It was the deadliest mass shooting on an American military base and the deadliest terrorist attack in the United States since the September 11 attacks until it was surpassed by the San Bernardino attack in 2015.[4]
This military response was the opposite of indiscriminate. It was proportionate and targeted. It focussed as best as anyone ever could on the precise set of people who (hiding among their own civilians) have been launching hundreds of inaccurate rockets to kill Israeli civilians - for months.
It isn't the "best ever" as there was no guarantee the pagers were worn only by combatants. As of now, of the 9 dead, 1/3rd are definitely not: 2 children & 1 woman.
> set of people who (hiding among their own civilians)
These people should always wear military uniform and live in a separate neighborhood even when they're not on duty? What do you propose?
> have been launching hundreds of inaccurate rockets
>These people should always wear military uniform and live in a separate neighborhood
That is on the table, yes. Otherwise, while they mingle with civilians, it's clear that the civilians are in danger. If I'm one of them, and I'm intent on persuing this action, moving to military quarters is going to come to mind.
Imagine one of those pagers, hip height, at a shop queue or bus stop. Or you're on a bike in traffic next to one of them.
Everything about this sucks. It absolutely is indiscriminate. It's different than droning a guy at his house and accepting his wife as collateral damange. This is 3,000+ maiming explosive devices scattered all about with no way of mitigating the collateral damange.
I definitely agree that it's a problem that fighters are dispersed among the civilian population. However, requiring them to wear uniforms and live on a base seems like it would make it impossible for a smaller force or an insurgency to stand up to a more powerful enemy that is able to wipe out any obvious military target at will.
What's the alternative that doesn't give powerful nations more or less absolute power to push around weaker nations or people?
I don't think anyone, especially civilians, love the idea of militants hiding among the population. I don't know why they must in order to stand up to a more powerful adversary. Regardless, this isn't some kind of rule. It's more of a consideration for that individual, like "should I be hanging out at home with my family while I'm engaged in a dirty war with an adversary that is willing to strike my family to get me?"
1. It's really rather common for active duty military to segregate themselves in combat zones. One of the reasons is that there is mutual benefit in reducing the exposure of civilians.
2. There is no alternative to a powerful entity getting its way. We have the word power simply to describe that capability. It's not an annointed status.
Guerrilla warfare has been a reliable way for a less powerful entity to resist a more powerful one. However, it often requires the less powerful entity to hide within the general population; which results in the problem that we are seeing here.
That could very well be. However, you aren't really engaging with the point I'm making. If weaker powers aren't supposed to do guerrilla warfare, then what are they supposed to do? Just letting other groups roll over them isn't a viable option.
Likewise, if you target enemy personnel knowing that civilians are going to be the primary victims, you might be committing war crimes, even when it works.
"By the same token, it's totally fine for Hezbollah to raze Tel Aviv, because the IDF is based there, thus using civilians as human shields. And almost all Israelis become soldiers at age 18."
I'm not advocating for anything. I'm just saying that it's unrealistic to expect people to just roll over for an enemy with greater conventional warfare capability.
Hiding among the civilian population is bad, but so is a situation where powerful states can oppress others without any check.
Personally, I'm not sure what a better alternative is. Which is why I asked my question.
Do we know approximately how many terrorists were killed and how many civilians were killed? Do we know what steps Israel took—if any—to prevent the target pagers from falling into civilian hands?
Dropping kilotons of aviation bombs on a populated city is indiscriminate. This is nothing in comparison to that. Frankly I would even call this surgical.
There is no question that an enemy setting off thousands of small bombs in American supermarkets and homes, maiming unknown numbers of bystanders and killing children, would be designated an act of mass terrorism.
Anyone who claimed such mass terrorism is acceptable because it is not as bad as obliterating cities would be condemned as an apologist for terrorism.
They didn't indiscriminately set off thousands of bombs in supermarkets and homes. That's not at all an accurate description of what happened. That would be terrorism.
They gave a terrorist organization the ability to give its most important operatives a bomb to wear. And then they detonated that bomb. That's not terrorism. It's about as targeted of an attack as you can imagine. Blowing up terrorists is objectively a good thing.
They detonated the bombs in supermarkets and homes. It is 100% an accurate description of what happened.
If an enemy targeted members of American political parties that have sponsored terrorism and brutal dictatorships, detonating thousands of bombs in supermarkets and homes maiming nearby civilians and killing children, would you also call this “objectively a good thing?”
The bombs didn't even have enough force to kill 99.6% of people who had them attached physically to their waists. Semantically, that's a pretty big difference.
Not always. There was IRA, there was RAF, there was ETA. It's just in Middle East this problem is much bigger today, to the point where terrorist organisations can have whole countries under their control.
For powers that be, every rebellion is terrorism. This isn't new. Today, in matters concerning ME, even college kids are labelled terrorists without much thought: https://x.com/gobloid3/status/1836437489831055659
> these are both terror tactics, you're setting up a false dichotomy
Eh, there is utility to this attack beyond terror. Israel just simultaneously took out Hezbollah’s communications and definitively outed its senior members. Also, strategic bombing à la WWII wasn’t psychological—it was intended to wipe out the civilian population that worked in the war factories.
States engage in what you call terror tactics all the time, for legitimate military and illegitimate reasons. The clusterfuck with the Middle East is the sheer number of non-state actors. In Gaza, that’s complicated. But in Lebanon, it’s not—-the Lebanese state is widely recognised. Hezbollah is not a state, but it’s also not purely a political party.
> Eh, there is utility to this attack beyond terror
As there was in bombing civilian cities, which housed factory workers making war machines. You have put up another false dichotomy. Terror attacks do not need to be devoid of all non-terror utility to be considered terror attacks.
If, during America's war in Afghanistan, the Taliban had blown up pagers carried by American officers going about their lives in America it would be called terrorism. The nearby civilians injured in the blasts would be a key focus, not swept under the rug.
> If, during America's war in Afghanistan, the Taliban had blown up pagers carried by American officers going about their lives in America it would be called terrorism. The nearby civilians injured in the blasts would be a key focus, not swept under the rug.
Because they’re a non-state actor. (Hezbollah doesn’t follow and isn’t bound by the Geneva Conventions, either.) Even if it only hit American military personnel, we’d call it terrorism.
You’re labelling usual acts of war as terrorism. That punts us from the uncomfortable discussion of the human cost of war to the much more palatable one of semantics. This is war. War resembles terrorism because they’re both violent and brutal and largely indiscriminate. If this is terrorism, then we’re essentially saying any warfare is terrorism. If that is the case, then states have a legitimate right to terrorism. Not sure that’s where we want to end up.
> If this is terrorism, then we’re essentially saying any warfare is terrorism.
terrorism is primarily violence targeted at civilians, while legitimate acts of war targets military personnel (but could have civilians as collateral).
In this particular case, the pagers are targeted at non-civilian personnel, but has some civilian casualties.
Hezbollah rocket attacks, on the other hand, seems to be targeting civilians first, and military personels second (if they are accurate enough for such).
> terrorism is primarily violence targeted at civilians, while legitimate acts of war targets military personnel
States targeting civilians are a war crime. Not terrorism. The hijacking of Flight 77 was still terrorism despite targeting the Pentagon.
> the pagers are targeted at non-civilian personnel, but has some civilian casualties
That is war. That is collateral damage. Marking every military action with civilian casualties terrorism simply normalises terrorism as a legitimate war tactic.
I want to note that you are not wrong. There are many definitions of terrorism [1]. I’m just pushing back on this usage because it looks like the first step to normalising terrorism as something every power that has ever gone to war has done.
The Taliban was/is not a "non-state actor", they are and were the government of Afghanistan. And whether or not they were that has no bearing on whether or not a tactic is terrorism.
What do you mean? You fire out the "detonate" command on the frequency used by Hezbollah - only pagers connected to that network blow.
It's statistically probable you'll overwhelmingly damage terrorists. Sadly collateral damage is inevitable in war, and this is far more precise than even a laser guided bomb.
You're shopping for groceries. someone is standing next to you. Their pager explodes and you are severely injured. You never had anything to do with this war.
Still think it's surgical? By that definition 9/11 was surgical as well, after all they only targeted two towers and just a few people who happened to be there got hurt.
The US could just drop nukes on any country they have a trade dispute with. They don't, because that is insane and disproportionate and they have the capability to do better than that.
What Israel did here is something you would expect from a terrorist organization.
In comparison to bombing to smithereens the entire block, and having hundreds/thousands of people die under the rubble, some of them over the course of days - yes.
Do you know that 100 is more than 1? Some people get confused by simple arithmetic.
I'd say the pager bombing was as /surgical/ as one could possibly be.
A very sophisticated and targeted attack, putting tiny amounts of explosives in devices used by terrorist-linked individuals (ONLY Hezbollah were using the pagers because of their paranoia about Israeli monitoring of cellphones).
An example of an /indiscriminate/ attack is Hezbollah's firing of unguided rockets into Israel's civilian areas. In July, for example, a Hezbollah rocket killed 12 children playing football in the Golan Heights. THAT is indiscriminate killing.
Exactly this. It's interesting how I haven't been able to find any single media portraying this as a possible act of terror while they have been quite critical of conduct in Gaza. I hope this changes as there really needs to be a reckoning with the idea of bombs randomly triggered anywhere, maybe hospitals, schools, theaters.
It's downvoted because it's the definition of proportional.
3g of explosives personally handed to the most senior leadership of your enemy and with enough explosive force that 98% of people who had them attached to their person survived is the very definition of restrained and targeted. Certainly not "indiscriminate".
Stuffing explosives into civilian appliances is the definition of indiscriminate.
If doing this isn't already banned by the Geneva Conventions, it is only because it wasn't practical to do. But then again, very little that has happened in this region during the last 80 years has been following any international law.
hardly, pagers might be accessible by the population, but hand delivered pagers distributed by a terror organisation are not exactly the same.
Panasonic Toughbooks are technically available to the civilian population, but booby trapping a shipment of them that would be delivered to the US military would be a pretty sophisticated military strike. Hardly indiscriminite even if people took them home.
Are you seriously suggesting that you would give away a pager, handed to you by your operator so that he can send you messages, a one-way legacy communication device selected as as an alternative for standard common cellphone specifically to avoid the risk of you being tracked by an enemy?
Not a bot. Just not wishing to connect my x years old user with anything related to politics. This is my only other account and that is within the site guidelines.
I'm an Israeli. So some of my views are aligned with Israel's official views. I would estimate the percentage of the alignment of my views with the current government at a single digit number. I have a negative, visceral reaction to Bibi, and can't stand hearing him even if I want to. I think Israel under the current government is doing almost every mistake possible, and takes the wrong decisions again and again, most probably due to Bibi's criminal issues and corrupted character.
Not all organizations work as the US military. Or even as a US company.
I know nothing about Hezbollah, but there's a widespread opinion on HN that any equipment you get from "work" can absolutely only be used by yourself in said work environment. That's really not the case in all cultures, everywhere.
At my previous job, management clearly told us that we could use computers & printers for any personal activity, including paid side jobs, as long as we didn't compete with the company and didn't go completely overboard with the printers (personal judgement).
Not every organization is hostile to its employees/members.
I'm guessing Hezbollah is not comparable to the US military in many respects, and assumptions that hold true for the US military may not hold true for any other military or paramilitary group.
That said, I don't have particularly strong opinions about this attack, and I certainly do not support Hezbollah in any way. But this "it works like this here, therefore it works like this everywhere" mentality is a hindrance to understanding the situation - any situation.
If you're giving your personal communication devices away, given that it's used to summon you personally...
... honestly?
I have no words, that's fucking stupid.
It's not like it's a toy, or it can play games, or that it can be used reach out to a parent/guardian if a child is lost.
It's a pager, a receive only communication tool. An outmoded one by far, and given to you by your terrorist organisation to intentionally evade Israeli detection.
If you're giving it to your children, not only are you basically being negligent in your duties, you're also giving away something that has less utility than the device you used to use and likely have on standby.
Perhaps. Still, in any pool of 3000 people it's fairly reasonable to assume that one or two (or ~2950) are "fucking stupid". Because people, as a rule, are.
If I'd let my prejudice run loose, I'd even argue that militant religious groups have an above average quota of "fucking stupid" people, so odds are indeed fairly good that some of these devices would make it into the hands of someone other than the original owner.
Some would argue that "being related to someone who is fucking stupid" is not a capital offence.
Alright, let's take this in the context in which it's been given to us then.
-> Your task is to, with as much accuracy as possible and with the minimum loss of civilian lives as possible, target a hostile force that lives within the population and does not identify themselves. They live outside of your borders.
-> If even a single non-combatant is lost, you are a monster.
-> In the mean time, every month that passes, hundreds of rockets rain down indiscriminate destruction upon your country, an action that has cost the lives of 12 children already.
Why are you asking me? I'm not even arguing that the attack was wrong.
I just challenged your - IMO incorrect - suggestion that it's reasonable to assume that no devices would spread to anyone other than the original owner.
If there's such a thing as acceptable collateral damage, the attack may still be reasonable. I'm even leaning towards the opinion that it is.
It's possible to consider the downsides of something without being opposed to it.
> It's downvoted because it's the definition of proportional.
Two wrongs don't make a right... are we really at that level of brain activity on HN of all places ? this is schoolyard level
You can have proportional terrorism, proportional war crimes, proportional crimes against humanity. Proportionality doesn't tell you much, it certainly doesn't tell you anything about it being indiscriminate or not
Also feel free to read the actual texts defining these things, detonating explosives in supermarkets is indiscriminate by nature, there is just no way around it if you're in good faith : https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule12
Both sides are clearly operating out of the boundaries we defined for conventional wars, is it really that hard to accept ? They're not even trying to hide it really... such a strange allergic reaction to these basic facts
Proportionality is at the center of defining a war crime.
"The principle of proportionality (Article 51(5) (b) API) states that even if there is a clear military target it is not possible to attack it if the expected harm to civilians, or civilian property, is excessive in relation to the expected military advantage."
So, the case that Israel has to make here is that the expected millitary advantage from the operation exceeds the collateral damage. The fact that civilians died doesn't automatically make it a war crime from an international law point of view.
Appeal to not be emotional is even harder to take seriously when Hezbollah rockets killed 12 children and Israel has killed 10,000 children this year alone.
You’ve put me in a bad position, because by telling you you’re wrong you will interpret it as if its reasonable.
First, we’re talking about Lebanon and its population, lets not muddy the waters further by suggesting that Hamas and Gaza are part of that conflict right now. But if we did, as far as I can make out, for the entire duration of the war since 10/7 there has been a total of 7,500 children identified as being killed. Sadly that number is not backed up by any independent source and unfortunately Hamas has been known to inflate these numbers.
Nonetheless, it is a tragedy.
An entirely unrelated tragedy to the 12:1 child murder ratio of Hezbollah vs IDF this year, and under entirely different circumstances.
I would prefer more interventions in Gaza to mirror this one in its precision and lack of civilian casualties.
I’m certain that you would prefer no intervention happen at all, which is where we will have to fundamentally disagree and part ways.
> as far as I can make out ... there has been a total of 7,500 children killed
I said 10,000 for this year, which is lower than the amount coming from Gaza. You low balled it much further. Hamas might be accused for inflating numbers, but Israeli apologists are actively deflating that number. Regardless, the numbers are staggering.
> I'm certain that you would prefer no intervention ...
Firstly, you don't know me but have immediately filled in who you believe I am based on your expectations. You should reflect on that (and how much you are creating your own world), because those prejudices are exactly what motivate the hate that drives these conflicts.
I would like to see intervention in Gaza. Number one, would be to stop the indiscriminate bombing of children. Number two, would be to provide relief to all of the people who have lost their homes and livelihood, who have been maimed and are starving. Number three, would be to resolve the displacement of the Palestinians in a just manner. Number four, would be judicial proceedings against anyone (Palestinian or Israeli) who committed war crimes.
Israel cannot be bombing civilians. It is a war crime. Gaza is not a sovereign state, but a displaced people living in Israel. If Israel is too weak to go in and arrest criminals who commit heinous crimes, then it needs to contend with the problem and take a different approach to how it deals with the Palestinian people.
I can find literally no source for 10.000+ outside of the UN "estimating" it, the nearest I could find was 7.500 and that's not verified (and old). I'm not trying to downplay anything and I resent the implicaiton.
I'm perfectly content holding Israel to account for their numerous crimes, but that becomes extremely difficult to do when you have literal terrorists doing everything they can to make things as bloody and cantankerous as humanly possible to cast shadows at Israel.
Bombing civilians is not technically a war crime in of itself, people like to use the word war crime without actually fucking reading what are war crimes, such as not identifying yourself as military, hiding in the population, using medical buildings as cover and so forth.
Israeli's settling the west-bank and blockading aid under the guise of "the more material they have, the more they will use against us" is condemdable; but when 5,000 rockets suddenly launch from Gaza and a ground force invasion kills over a thousand people -- people reasonably start to think that Israel has a point, and all my criticisms against Israel suddenly start to look very impotent.
Where I get annoyed is that people have decided that terrorists are good, actually, despite clearly throwing gay people off of roofs and engaging in what are actual war crimes.
> I can find literally no source for 10.000+ outside of the UN "estimating" it, the nearest I could find was 7.500 and that's not verified (and old). I'm not trying to downplay anything and I resent the implication.
You resent the implication, but you also did not appear to do any research to support your view.
> Bombing civilians is not technically a war crime in of itself, people like to use the word war crime without actually fucking reading what are war crimes, such as not identifying yourself as military, hiding in the population, using medical buildings as cover and so forth.
> Israeli's settling the west-bank and blockading aid under the guise of "the more material they have, the more they will use against us" is condemdable
The settlement of the West Bank is in direct violation of international law (article 49 of the Geneva Convention) and is a war crime in itself.
> Where I get annoyed is that people have decided that terrorists are good, actually, despite clearly throwing gay people off of roofs and engaging in what are actual war crimes.
I don't know who thinks "terrorists are good". To me, that sounds like a strawman to avoid the realization that what Israel is doing is deeply wrong.
Even Israeli scholars on genocide like Omer Bartov (a former IDF officer) state "it was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions."
Israel is engaged in war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. That is painful to acknowledge, but in some ways is not surprising. The victim becoming the victimizer is a human story older than the Bible. The Jewish refugees from WWII underwent terrible horrors and were deeply traumatized. It is not surprising that many of them became radicalized and deeply angry. We have seen the same thing happening to the Palestinians, as well as any other people that is traumatized.
You're almost there buddy... people criticising israel here are also criticising hezbollah for war crimes... you don't have to pick a side and close your eyes on their actions
Am I misinformed, or was 3,000? They are the most senior 3,000? When you send out 3,000 explosive into the general population, how do you mitigate the collateral damage? I truly don't know the answers here. I'm under the impression that they all detonated simultaneously, so I'm keen to infer that there was very little thought given to civilians unlucky enough to be in the vicinity.
Man. Blasting off fingers and genitals is really something...
All the information I have seen indicates that they were handed to Hezbollah and distributed by Hezbollah for the intent purpose of avoiding Israeli intelligence services.
With your analogy it would be like emptying the mag in the general direction of the car of the target, praying the target actually is in the car and praying there is no one else anywhere close to him.
Please help me understand then, because from what I can understand about the facts here:
1) It was delivered into the pockets of Senior Leadership of Hezbollah, with an incentive for those pagers not to be distributed elsewhere.
2) The explosive yield was very small, of an estimated 3000 pagers; 12 fatalities were recorded, making the death rate about 0.4%. One of which was a child, a relative of a Hezbollah leader. (this is an unjustifiable tragedy, but the only recorded civilian fatality).
3) There has never been, in the history of all warfare, such a surgically precise attack with such a low casualty rate of the civilian population - considering the attack happened at a singular time where it was not possible to get all of the members away from the civilian population at all.
I'm not sure I understand your reasoning, it's not indiscriminate if it's very targeted and very localised.
It's like something in a James Bond movie, or a cheesy riff on the genre like Kingsman.
You might not want to acknowledge it, but this is definitely a new era of warfare, and one that hopefully has benefits for everyone - reducing the reliance on global supply chains that harm the environment because labour is cheaper elsewhere. (it's a very thin silver lining, let me have it).
Don't be silly, 11 criminals dead and one bystander is well within limits of even a civilian police force, military ones are considered much more broad.
NATO sets the acceptable loss threshold at 4:1; for every 4 combatants killed, 1 civilian is considered acceptable.
Yes, this is callous, and cold, and awful, but emotion has no place here, we're talking about people on both sides who feel like they are fighting for their right to exist. This is quite literally war, and there will be casualties.
Truth be told, while I'm not giddy and children dying, I'm glad we're talking about so few civilian casualties despite causing so much damage to Hezbollah operatives and operations.
Don't be silly, 11 criminals dead and one bystander
You aren't even getting the military-civilian ratio for the first wave right. According to the Lebanese Health Ministry we have at least 6 civilians killed (including 4 healthcare workers and 2 children), so that's at most a 1:1 ratio, far less than the 4:1 rate that you cite as "acceptable". And this doesn't even touch on the vastly larger number of wounded (2,750 just for the first wave).
By all indications these devices were intended to maim even more so to kill -- and to do so a great scale. From Wikipedia:
At least 12 people were killed after the first wave of attacks,[73][1][74] and more than 2,750 were wounded.[6][7] Civilians were also killed,[11][14][15] including four healthcare workers[75] and two children.[76] It is not clear if only Hezbollah members were carrying the pagers.[20] Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad said the vast majority of those being treated in emergency rooms were in civilian clothing and their Hezbollah affiliation was unclear.[77] He added the casualties included elderly people as well as young children.
Interesting, it seems there's a conflict between what the Lebanese Health Ministry said, and what Hezbollah said (as of yesterday) -- and you're choosing to go with Hezbollah's numbers.
It does seem that the reports are still coming in, and are in the process of being evaluated and fact-checked. I chose to go by WP because in most cases at least attempts to reconcile between different sources, though it's far from 100 percent accurate about anything.
Hopefully we'll have better numbers within the coming week or so.
> Article 6 - Prohibition on the use of certain booby-traps
1. ...it is prohibited in all circumstances to use: (a) any booby-trap in the form of an apparently harmless portable object which is specifically designed and constructed to contain explosive material and to detonate
> A war crime is a violation of the laws of war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility for actions by combatants in action, such as ... deception by perfidy, ...
> There has never been, in the history of all warfare, such a surgically precise attack with such a low casualty rate of the civilian population -
Go on r/combatfootage and witness hundreds of bombs dropped on 100% military targets with no civilian soul in a 10km radius... are you for real ?
> To sum up, sabotage against the enemy is a lawful operation provided the legal rules for the choice of targets and the methods and means employed are respected.
Do you think they meant: booby trapping is _illegal_ unless it's to harm military personnel ? lol
"Rule 80. The use of booby-traps which are in any way attached to or associated with objects or persons entitled to special protection under international humanitarian law or with objects that are likely to attract civilians is prohibited."
Examples of protected objects are childrens toys or medical supplies bearing the insignia of the red cross; but if you want further reading: See, the military manuals of Belgium (ibid., § 32), France (ibid., § 39) and Germany (ibid., § 43) - hard to read without translations though.
Examples of protected persons include, of course, doctors who wear the red-cross insignia. However it's also a war-crime to wear this insignia and act in the interests of any power exclusively, or operate as a combatant. - so, owning military equipment that is given out by the high command of a terror organisation would immediately disqualify you, and if you survived the blast you would be facing a tribunal.
However, Booby-traps which are used in a way not prohibited by the current rule are still subject to the general rules on the conduct of hostilities, in particular the principle of distinction (see Rules 1 and 7- linked below) and the principle of proportionality (see Rule 14). In addition, the rule that all feasible precautions must be taken to avoid, and in any event to minimize, incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects (see Rule 15) must also be respected.
But proportionality is in play if you do not fall below the NATO recommended 4:1 combatant:civilian ratio. Which it seems Israel didn't.
From Israel's perspective, this supply chain attack was undoubtedly a clever move, but I can't help but wonder about its long-term consequences.
Although it was aimed at harming Israel's adversaries, third-party countries may now hesitate to involve Israel in their supply chains. There's also the risk that other major producers could replicate this tactic, potentially leading to further escalation in the region or beyond.
In the short term, it's a smart strategy for Israel, but they've likely opened Pandora's box in the process.
I think the point is that if you're not Hezbollah or any kind of political actor, but just a customer for Israeli technology (public or private), would you really want to keep buying it? Leave aside boycotts over Israeli policy, you might be opening yourself to becoming an Israeli attack vector and either find your own interests compromised or become a target of Israel's enemies if they thought you were complicit.
I know that this is rhetorical, but I'm sure an analysis of which country is least likely to leave you exposed to the issues mentioned above could be done. I suppose it also depends on who "you" are, and the threat of communications compromise vs drawing the ire of whoever Israel decides to attack through you. I'm sure there are plenty of countries that would rather be bugged by the Chinese or Iranians than be complicit in a way that opens them to actual armed conflict.
This is another danger of letting Israel swing its sword around without any sort of real condemnation from the US/West: the rationale for geopolitical multi-polarity increases in legitimacy. Pax Americana ends because allying with us doesn't save you from being used as a tool for ends like this. If speculation is correct that Taiwan is involved... Woof.
All this fearmongering about telegram and tiktok is weird.
China can decide what it wants from me- I have no plans to visit or engage with regime; however my life is dependent on the US not thinking of me as interesting.
So, the less I give to US companies, the better.
Especially as, being a non-US citizen I have no right to privacy afforded to me in the constitution, and US companies can be forced to comply with the government in secret- much in the same way we consider that China does it to even part-owned China based companies.
The concern over tiktok is not that Xi’s autocratic regime is surveilling you, but manipulating the algorithms in its large social media market share to foment anti-American (& anti-Israeli) sentiment.
What is the real risk here? The only thing they can really do is make the case that if China invades Taiwan then the US shouldn't get involved. There problem is they might well be right; if I compare Hong Kong and Ukraine, I'd expect Taiwan would be better off going with the HK model of an "invasion" rather than fighting an actual war with the world's #2 or arguably #1 economy. So I'm not sure what the case is for quelling the message; there are some important issues there to debate.
Even if we start with the questionable idea that the US has the moral and physical might to be deciding where the borders are drawn in Asia; it isn't obvious that TikTok would be influential enough to matter. The military-industrial complex lobbyists in the US have a lot of actual power in pushing for war and experience in getting messages to the public.
I’m exaggerating a little (but not much): the risk with tiktok is that it is brainwashing Americans—particularly young ones—with anti-American sentiment. Not only does that suck for the individual, but diminishes the civil-service talent pool and weakens US institutions.
It’s like the CCP looked at what social media was doing to mental health and cable news to our political discourse and said “I can do something with that, I’ll take the extra large.”
They may well be right that the people of Taiwan, a country with a democratically elected government, should just lie down and accept a complete and undemocratic Chinese takeover of their country?
All because China is saying: "Either you submit to us completely voluntarily, or you submit by force, but you will submit"?
Yep. Just because we don't like something doesn't mean that there are good alternatives. If I were in Tawian, Option A is status quo. Option B is to put the best and brightest into diplomatic posts. And they probably have a stack of other options they're thinking about. But all else failing Option Imperial-Subject is a much better one than Option Taipei-Becomes-A-Pancake-And-Then-Imperial-Subject. If there is going to be war it'd better be war with a credible good outcome to it.
The US could step in and police this back when it was 8x, 4x, 2x the size of China. I'd be surprised if it can now. China is pretty powerful.
The good alternative is China not wanting to take over a sovereign country, and for the world to gradually normalise Taiwan as a legitimate country.
China has no urgent or pressing self defence need to attack Taiwan. It also does not have a strong legal case to justify taking it over. In any rational sense the strongest case is for China to leave it alone.
Allowing the status quo to continue is better for the people of China, for the people of Taiwan, and for the rest of us around the world.
It's pure imperialist nonsense and we shouldn't seek to legitimise it just because China is powerful.
You're thinking too literal about what to influence. The more internal divide that foreign powers can amplify, the more likely that US will not/can not intervene in other places around the world.
There's also general propaganda to make people more empathetic towards China/Russia prior to any events occurring.
Sure, there are many avenues to spread this sort of propaganda, but a state-run social media platform can certainly be a lot more effective than someone flooding someone else's social media platform with propaganda.
Assuming the Chinese government is using TikTok for influence campaigns (they'd be foolish not to), they only way to stop it is to outright ban it in your country (which the US seems to be trying to do, with possibly-disastrous effects), or find a way to get your citizens to dislike it (good luck with that).
While Russia is doing pretty well at their influence campaigns on other platforms, those platforms can choose, if they so desire, to step up their detection and banning efforts. It's a constant cat-and-mouse game, of course, but it's at least possible to stamp out most of that crap if you're willing to spend the resources to do so.
Over the years I have personally found multiple accounts on Twitter/X that appeared to be Russian propaganda trolls (or someone with resources looking to appear that way).
They would pretend to be Americans and pushing certain narratives by retweeting/following/commenting/etc.
I found one that claimed to be a single mother living in the midwest USA. It was using a cropped photo from the personal blog of an Australian woman (who had multiple kids and a husband). If you went far enough back in the history you could find accidental Russian language usage. The timestamp trends in the posting behavior were clearly not American. It followed, and was followed by, other similar troll accounts.
Most recently I found one that claimed to be a 26 year old woman from the US. No reverse image search hits on the English web. But reverse image search with yandex you'd get hits for a couple of vk profile picture databases.
From there it was possible to find the actual vk account, which was a Russian woman who clearly was not the same person.
I could link you some of the accounts but the ones I've reported have been banned or deleted by now. I'm sure the US government is wrong on some stuff but there's too much evidence for stuff like the Internet Research Agency to be fake [1]
This is a comment I made on hackernews, replying to someone who (IIRC) claimed to be German but (in my opinion) was clearly a Russian astroturfing account.
After I mentioned it they deleted their comments, and they have since all been flagged by the moderators here.
My goodness, there are so many examples of more or less direct Russian influence operations. Here's a recent one where a bunch of political influencers were being paid ~$100,000 per single podcast episode by a company in Tennessee, whose founders were fully aware that their super-generous investor was located in Moscow.
It feels like they're spending more on pro-israel sentiments, and have for decades. A biblical quote about a beam in one's eye comes to mind whenever people go "but china!".
My concern with tiktok is that it rots your brain like television, but far more effectively because it's rapid fire content constantly tuned to the individual user to keep them hooked on it. It's an instant gratification machine, effectively a drug, that fries people's attention spans. It has people spending hours a day consuming vapid short-form nonsense, and alters their psyche to make them less effective in other endeavors even when they aren't distracted by the app (particularly school, since it hits children particularly hard.)
I'm not sure why influence should be illegal. What about books and movies? Or even schools and universities? American schools are probably the greatest source of anti-American / anti-Israel sentiment in the country. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GXm-NYyWEAA1jNs?format=jpg&name=...
If you believe in freedom of speech, you should also accept that people, including foreign people, may try to influence you. China doesn't believe in freedom of speech so they censor foreign sources of influence. Does America really want to go down that path?
But dynamic algorithms, targeting exactly you, knowing what mood you have in that moment (by analyzing what you have looked at, liked, disliked), what opinions you have etc. opens up a whole different world of influence possibilities amd I think those possibilities are just starting to get explored with AI. The data is already there.
> American schools are probably the greatest source of anti-American / anti-Israel sentiment in the country.
Damn the education system, and it's penchant for teaching the history of colonialism instead of a revisionist policy. What's next, after Mandatory Palestine we'll teach our children about the Civil War and slavery too? What an anti-America sentiment, clearly we need our conservative lawmakers to... I dunno, rewrite history for both countries? Teach feel-good cookie recipes instead of international politics?
As long as America has anti-BDS laws there won't be any freedom of speech in the first place. Our first amendment rights are currently being suspended by international lobbyists that can't handle their share of due criticism. A shame, considering the US does so well to educate others on it's own embarrassing history, but is threatened with a lawsuit when anyone tries to meaningfully criticize Israel.
The constitution does not exclusively apply to US citizens is the good news.
The bad news is that there is no explicit and broad right to privacy in the constitution. You are protected by the fourth amendment requiring a warrant for searches and seizures, but the court has ruled that, citizen or not, if a third party like Meta willingly hands over your info, it’s fair game. L
You shouldn't be downvoted, the whole industry ought to know by now that Palantir aggregates multiple international sources of data for sale to American defense agencies. If you're legitimately afraid of America, the internet has few places of refuge.
> China can decide what it wants from me- I have no plans to visit or engage with regime; however my life is dependent on the US not thinking of me as interesting
If you have something of interest to Beijing and you’re doing something shameful or illegal in America, and they have evidence, they have leverage. This is human asset development 101.
Most people don’t have skills or information relevant to a foreign state. But some do, and for them being mindful about not giving a foreign adversary blackmail leverage is prudent.
> my life is dependent on the US not thinking of me as interesting
Why do people engage in this sort of larping, like they're secret agents or intellectuals that may be hunted at any moment by the grey suits in western governments?
We know it's not true for this person in particular because one click on their HN profile tells you their real name. I stopped there, but I'm sure there is plenty of additional info available with 3-4 more clicks. If they were really so afraid of government reprisal like this larping suggests, maybe they'd attempt to be at least a little pseudo-anonymous.
The actual fact is that 99.9999999999% of us are boring and will remain boring no matter what kind of comments we write on HN. It wouldn't hurt to touch grass once in a while.
Anybody that has lots of videos from you could train a deep fake realistic model and create a fake video depicting you committing a major crime. Sadly blackmail is the easier part.
The two groups are more like US+Europe+China on one hand and 'misc' on the other. Most people get by without depending on the technology from the 'misc' group at all.
This kind of incident will hurt the Israeli tech sector individually, not some imagined US/EU/Israel tech grouping.
>> Unless you can spin up your own fab (hint: you can't) you're dependent on a hegemon. US/EU/Israel isn't perfect, but pretty much as good as it gets.
It's much easier to spin up your fab tech more so now -- than ever before.
To clarify, obviously I rather live in the EU than in china, but if this system is as good as it gets, then I am quite sceptical for humanities long term survival.
I am not aware of chinese or iranian devices exploding and killing people. Spying is not worse than spying and killing. I do not get how do you get the conclusion that US/EU/Israel is as good as it gets if you are a random citizen not from any of these mentioned countries.
Yeah but if you’re dealing with hardware with any kind of Israeli involvement, do you really want to open every single customer unit to make sure one of the capacitors hasn’t been swapped for C4? I think that’s what the poster was indicating. At first I thought yesterday’s action was deviously impressive. Now I’m starting to think it’s actually shortsighted and bizarre. It’s a declaration of war on Lebanon, and obviously a declaration of a war they think they can win, but no good can come of this action.
If you want to run with this argument, they have been at war since 1948, when all of Israel's neighbors including Lebanon invaded Israel following the UN vote to grant Israel statehood and Israel's declaration of independence.
There has been a UN-brokered ceasefire since the later 2006 war. Minor issues have occurred since then, but October 8 was the first major escalation between the two in almost twenty years.
1. This is an attack against Hezbollah, not Lebanon. The two entities are tightly coupled, but they are not the same.
2. Israel and Hezbollah are already at war. 60,000 Israelis have been displaced because of Hezbollah ongoing rocket and missile attacks. Israel has retaliated in various ways.
TLDR: you can argue that this is an act of war against Hezbollah. But it is not a declaration of war, and it is not against Lebanon.
In Britain, if the mobile phones of 3000 members of the non-governing Conservative Party exploded in their pockets caused by the armed forces of a different state, one could be reasonably assured you just declared open war on Britain.
For a more accurate analogy, imagine if Conservative Party were a terrorist organization with its own military, took direct orders from Iran, had claimed for itself all of Wales, and had been firing thousands of missiles into France without cooperating in any way with either the British government or army.
Then imagine that France predictably shoots back, and takes great care to specifically target members of that terrorist group.
In this more accurate analogy, would you still say that France declared open war on Britain? I would say no - that the terrorist group is the one that declared war; and that France is clearly engaging in acts of war against that terrorist group, which happens to be embedded in a host country, like a parasite.
For a more accurate anology involving Britain, imagine that British secret services decided to detonate pagers belonging to Sinn Fein party members in the territory of the Republic of Ireland.
Yeah I agree with you. It’s also that the situation in the region around Israel is so complex and long-running that there aren’t really appropriate analogies. The two countries are at a state of war that’s fairly obvious regardless of the parties involved. I’m fairly confident Israel given its history in these matters knows what it’s doing and takes actions that will move it toward security and victory, and any potential responses from Hezbolah have been considered and accounted for. One thing that came up for me was if Hezbolah had de-escalated, what would Israel have done with the pagers? It’s clearly a kind of “sleeper” munition, I wonder what the circumstances would have been for them to never use it.
What if the pockets of IRA members had exploded (yes, I know. Say 40 years ago when they were doing their share of bombing)? Does anyone seriously dispute that Hezbollah is a proxy army for Iran?
I think your comparison stops holding wage as,soon as you mention the Conservative Party. They just aren’t the same thing as Hezbollah.
Exactly. Our concept of sovereign states has become outdated by advances in technology. Up until maybe 1990 even second-tier countries could make just about anything indigenously. It might be a little worse and a little more expensive, but still good enough. Today only China and the USA are fully sovereign in terms of having the capability to build the full spectrum of electronic, communications, and military equipment. (We might outsource some of that to save money but the latent capability and capital reserves are there.) Even with nuclear weapons, India, Russia, UK, and France are only partially sovereign. Other countries can barely even pretend anymore, and their freedom of action will continue to evaporate barring some drastic realignment of the geopolitical order.
> Today only China and the USA are fully sovereign in terms of having the capability to build the full spectrum of electronic, communications, and military equipment.
Not arguing, but I think China still relies on Russia for jet engines - though it’s making great efforts to become self-sufficient there.
(Edit: high performance / high technology jet engines)
Are those jet engines the only option for China or are they just the best option. Because if you require state of the art tech then everyone still relies on Taiwan (TSMC).
Russia is no longer a reliable supplier. They need all the engines they can make for domestic use, including replacing war losses and building airliners to service domestic routes. Production is down because all the foreign technical experts left.
How does a Bay Area tech site, when Bay Area tech has sooo many individuals who originally came to the USA as students but then couldn't go home due to tiananmen, have this kind of 'enlightened thought' on China, day in and day out?
I believe the point GP makes is not that China is a good place. More like that we are oblivious to all the points that make our own place pretty bad too.
On one hand, you can claim that it's a well-known propaganda technique (e.g. the soviets using "...And you are lynching negroes" as a rebuttal to anything). But on the other hand, the most satisfying way to avoid that form of propaganda would probably be to fix our own flaws rather than calling whataboutism.
I mean American's seem like about the most 'bring our flaws out into public and deal with them' society I have ever interacted with. Daterape is no longer acceptable. The entire way men treat women has changed in my lifetime. How we respond to domestic violence has completely changed (we don't just ignore it). LGBT+ rights have greatly changed. Race relations have completely changed (they may need work but they are so much better than the 80s where people rampantantly used the N word at work, in social situations).
The average American is much more aware of our issues, not China's. Our own place isn't pretty bad just because we have past history nor ongoing problems. It's a matter of 'what are we doing to change and improve', and are we willing/free to bring up problems that need changing, and does our societies structure allow change? Or does society pound down those nails that dare stick out? Every society is a flawed human constructed stumbled into not intelligently/humanely designed. The American systems is the most dynamic/flexible of all the ones I have been exposed to. There are more liberal ones, but less dynamic and flexible (no free speech laws in the UK which might cause the lack of reflection that you lament). There are more conservative ones that are again less dynamic/flexible.
Look - I agree. But at the same time, I've seen what the Bay Area puts out, and their product designers are more concerned with designing the next cigarette than improving anyone's life or ensuring domestic security. The US is currently relying on contractors that are asleep at the wheel.
Plainly speaking, China already took our iPhone manufacturing and our electric car business. They've got the chops, the supply chain and the export network to keep doing that for everything from the JSOW to the Harpoon missile. Unless the US makes a serious effort to invest in domestic R&D, our Bay Area vanguards are going to spend more time jerking off than participating in a healthy defense business.
Additionally, iPhones were never assembled in America. Enough manufacturing had been offshored to the PRC it just wasn’t even a consideration of any sort until late last decade, and the response from Apple has been to reshore some assembly elsewhere, not bring it into the States.
"over time" is right - if TSMC's roadmap isn't getting the US onto 3nm before 2026, then Apple could buy cheaper/denser silicon from fucking Samsung if they wanted. You know, the fab Apple has avoided for density issues and concerns that they aren't competitive. Taiwan still has the golden goose, and unless Apple's products stop relying on node upgrades (they won't) then we're not going to manufacture the majority of Apple chips in America. We'll be lucky if American fabs yield high enough to make memory controllers, let alone entire SOCs.
It's very easy to say that during peacetime. But you can't depend on adversaries for cheap labor, period. The US federal government, communist or not, just spent billions ensuring that those manufacturing jobs aren't forfeited by our multi-trillion multinationals. Our strict adherence to capitalism is just about pushing us to USSR-collapse levels of market abuse. Our consumers are completely braindead; our manufacturers aren't being given reason to stay by the government; even US agencies like NASA and DARPA are getting outdone by Chinese state-run agencies.
Regardless of how you feel about it, the CHIPS act is a line in the sand the US has just crossed. We are heading back to cold-war style economics, because this is an economic cold war.
This doesn't really mean much when those laws include "you're not allowed to expose crimes by government" not to mention drug laws and copyright. At the end it's not any less arbitrary than whatever excuses the chinese government uses to intern those they don't like.
There are also no laws against exposing crimes by the government. You’re just not allowed to break other laws just because you’re doing so.
People very frequently successfully expose corruption and abuse by governments in the US. It just doesn’t make significant news unless it’s a major national politician, and that happens multiple times a year.
It is known a priori that the laws are so vague that everyone is breaking several. If the government chooses to find out which one you are breaking, you go to prison. If you expose crimes by the government, you may find yourself suddenly being investigated for something unrelated.
That's just the government interring whoever it doesn't like, with extra steps. Or making a law that says "we have to like you" with extra steps.
No. While there were criminals also in gulags, most of people were there only because someone didn't like them or they happened to be wrong time in wrong place. That's it.
One is a failure of social order, product of greed, evil and stupidity. The other is the largest-scale arbitrary detention of ethnic and religious minorities since World War II.
No. But does China have a horrible record on human rights and abuses? Yes. Have they been ethnically cleansing the Uyghur population for years now? Yes. Not to mention bullying and threatening all neighbors across the region. Just read about the recent worries over ZMPC cranes. The CCP will and has infiltrated private companies as a vector to spy on other countries. Maybe they haven't blown up pagers like this, but they've done other things that should make anyone skeptical of buying sensitive equipment from them.
Oh wow, a country BULLYING its neighbors. Imagine a country doing that. Luckily, the US never does something like that. Or imposes sanctions on a country half a world away, sanctions which the entire world has to adhere to unless they want to lose US trading all together.
Some of these talking points fall apart upon typing them, let alone posting.
China is the one major power that doesn't seem to engage in extraterritorial assassinations, so by default I'm more inclined to at least trust that the Chinese state won't ever decide to activate a kill switch against me.
Isn't China the one country that actively sets up their own police forces all over the world? Aren't there numerous Canadians of chinese origin that China has abducted? I see news articles of Canadians being arrested for assisting China in these abductions fairly often lately.
Of course FVEY/CSIS would push anti PRC narrative. PRC's espionage behavior basically translates to "using words", it's so mild vs what others majors are doing that it needs to be characterized as "over seas police stations" to make it seem extra threatening, when it's bottom barrel espionage activity. MSS handlers using words to leverages / intimidate, to convince people to return to PRC on their own accord, i.e they're not abducting anyone let alone extrajudicial assassinate. Like the solution to countering these activities is to say... naw I'm good.
> Isn't China the one country that actively sets up their own police forces all over the world?
The US does the same thing and worse, just look for the very long arm of their FBI and Secret Service when it comes to what they allege to be “cyber-crime”. A decade or so ago I was visiting my company’s ISP one morning when I manage to stumble just as some US federal agents were doing their thing among the server racks. I live in Bucharest, Romania.
AFAICT, that's mostly propaganda. What makes them "police" centers exactly? They do not have police men in them, don't have jails, no one has been convicted of a crime in relation to them, etc. Not sure what you mean by "abductions" but if you are referring to the Canadians who was arrested on Chinese soil, one of them admitted to espionage and is even suing the Canadian government for involving him against his will.
They are called secret police centres in Canada because of the actions they pose, and the threats they make. They'll threaten to kidnap you and extrajudicially extradite you to China, they'll threaten your relatives in China, they'll force you to stop behaviours considered inappropriate by the CCP, they'll try to recruit you as a spy.
To the Chinese Communist Party, the Han ethnic group belongs to the Chinese State, and everything anyone of this ethnic background does is their business.
Some of the actions you mention would definitely be illegal and yet, no one has been prosecuted nor found guilty. In fact, the concerned centers in Canada are suing the RCMP for defamation. So you are either speculating or spreading propaganda.
But people have been charged by the Canadian government over people that have been taken to China. Referring to actual Canadian court cases that are in regards to actual people taken to China is propaganda because?
Edit: Why am I blocked from replying to the below comment?
I previously asked what you were referring to because I genuinely don't know what you are talking about. Of course I don't believe actual criminal convictions are propaganda, but there have been none in relation to the so-called "police centers".
That article pretty clearly says they were assassinations within China of people who no one disputes were actual CIA spies or handlers. So at bare minimum it wasn't extraterritorial, which I understand to be the key differentiation made by GP.
Could you clarify? I see some reports of extraterritorial assaults, as well as harassment (particularly including threats against relatives within Chinese territory), but couldn't find examples of extraterritorial killings, at least with my best attempt at ctrl-f.
I have. I just haven't heard of them resorting to assassinations. Happy to be proven wrong, but I'll need to see at least one actual example assassination.
Right afterwards, you can learn about the place called Haiti. Or Cuba. Or Venezuela. Or heck, Mexico. Oh, Vietnam. North-Korea. China. Japan. Wait until you learn about Chile. And do not forget to look up the meaning of 'Jakarta is coming'
BTW, before someone screams whataboutism: adjusting your worldview according to facts and applying your moral standards to all countries is not whataboutism. Its a prerequisite to being able to morally condemn any action.
Only in the sense that, as a US citizen who has no desire to travel to China or Russia, I don't feel all that worried that either country is going to do anything bad to me directly.
But if I lived in either one of those places... whooooa boy. I'd have to be a different person to not get in trouble. And I wouldn't call myself much of an activist or pot-stirrer, really. I feel bad for people who want to show public dissent of their government in China or Russia but can't (or do, and end up in jail), and for people in marginalized groups that the government doesn't like.
> > Literally China/Russia are more trustworthy.
>
> Only in the sense that, as a US citizen who has no desire to travel to China or Russia, I don't feel all that worried that either country is going to do anything bad to me directly.
I sort of get this PoV, but on the other hand…
If China had any information about you that was valuable for any purpose whatsoever (trade an intelligence tip to a corrupt businessman in a mafia state?) its government could do so with no legal or political safeguards.
The US government has legal safeguards against this, and would face _massive_ potential political risk for doing so against one of its own citizens.
>The US government has legal safeguards against this, and would face _massive_ potential political risk for doing so against one of its own citizens.
The US government literally steals cash money from its citizens and faces no repercussions whatsoever. If you carry cash with you in the US, you're in absolute danger of having it confiscated by the police as "drug money" and never seeing it again. You can claim the US has "legal safeguards", but until they're actually tested, it's just a supposition.
They actually have. The Supreme Court had a recent ruling, congress has passed laws to try and restrict it (to the best that federal rules can affect local state ones). The distinction definitely is important, but if you have an ideological bone to pick, it’s better to ignore it.
The US has a very large voting bloc composed of people who want their state and municipality to be free from restrictions imposed by the federal government. In practice, this leads to many places with a significantly larger amount of actually-experienced tyranny than you get in more uniformly governed countries. Ideally, this is coupled with freedom of movement, so that it's easy to get a job and housing in a state or city with more liberal governance.
If you actually believe that then you are amazingly ignorant about the legal structure of the USA and its dual sovereignty system. You should ask your civics teacher for a refund.
You think China and Russia don't do a hundred times worse to their citizens? The US is far from perfect, but it is drastically better than China and Russia.
Whataboutism. I never claimed they were better (and you're right, they're much worse). But the US is the one that claims to be the world leader in defending freedom and individual liberty. China never made any such claim that I know of.
> If China had any information about you that was valuable for any purpose whatsoever (trade an intelligence tip to a corrupt businessman in a mafia state?) its government could do so with no legal or political safeguards.
You should look up how Israel actively fishes LGBT palestinian people using fake dating site accounts, and threatens to out them in order to force them to contribute intelligence.
The US is clearly not that compromised. But they're not exactly clean either, considering some of the stuff that happened in central America.
The US is a two party system with many hereditary politicians. How free do you think your elections really are?
> They have no free press unlike US.
How did the US news report on Snownden, Assange and others the US government does not like? The US press is an oligopoly that does barely any real reporting. Theoretical freeness does little here.
> They have no independent judiciary unlike US.
Which is more than happy to shield the executive from any consequences. Qualified immunity makes this separation meaningless.
> They both rank poorly on the corruption index unlike US.
According to western definitions of corruption that conveniently do not include corporate lobbying, revolving door relationsships between politics and industry, backdoor laws via trade deals and all the other shadyness that has effectively taken over so-called democracies. But sure, pat yourself on the back for being less likely to get out of a speeding ticket by slipping the officer some cash.
Thy was what, 40 years ago? China has their great firewall set up today, never mind their social credit systems, automated CCTV citizen tracking systems, etc. Russia has people accidentally falling out of hospital windows or drinking polonium tea. I don't think this is at all comparable.
I checked Wikipedia to learn about the Social Credit System, and according to the article, no such system exists as described. Most assumptions about it seem to be based on misinformation from Western media. Could you clarify what you mean?
Do you think Hezbollah was buying stuff from Israel, or otherwise using Israeli supply chains?
The modern supply chain is vastly deep. Iran can buy something from (IDK) India which might use software or hardware from Israel. As a further example, unless there's viable phone OS I don't know about, even Hezbollah will be using Android or iOS (and so buying from the US). etc.
I think it's far more likely that Mossad has infiltrated whatever foreign (non-Israeli)
Maybe that is more likely. But I don't think my or your guesses matter so much as public perception. IE, it would change the situation that a given customer may look skeptically at an Israeli software or hardware product. Or they may not given that price and features trumps security and quality for nearly everything these days.
> I think it's far more likely that Mossad has infiltrated whatever foreign (non-Israeli) supply chain they were using.
Yeah. Wasn't there something in the Snowden leaks about the CIA intercepting servers in-transit to install implants on them? I'm sure Israel is doing something similar.
The correct analogy for espionage isn't crime. But even taking that framing, if everyone actually does steal, it doesn't do you any good to be naive and deny reality.
meh, the most probable explanation is that israel infiltrated hezbollah and whoever was in charge of ordering and distributing those devices knowingly distributed the tampered devices.
That guy got a deal and was evacuated with his family before events unfolded. Seems way easier than alternative plans.
It was pointed out to me that you shouldn't overthink it: the most likely thing which happened is Israel had someone inside Hezbollah procurement and used them to take delivery (I'd put much lower odds on this guy being in on the plan, it's doubtful he even knew he was working for Israel directly).
You've got to remember that as internet people, we want everything to have a clever storyline to it. Intelligence services exploit that exact expectation though: the first thing you attack is trust within the organization itself, since it gives you more access, more easily and once people have talked themselves into "supply chain threat" there's a real danger they've ignored "actually the guy signing off on the paperwork is taking a payoff to ignore some delivery irregularities".
I don't see this as a smart move (let alone strategy) in any time frame. As a third-party observer greatly removed from the conflict I used to view Israel as an island under attack from terrorists. Now I'm struggling to see the differences between their activities and blowing up airplanes or launching rockets from schools and hospitals. You can say I'm naive, and why would Israel care about how I feel, but as a country and a people they only exist as long as we're their benefactor, and I don't think I'm alone in how I feel.
> Now I'm struggling to see the differences between their activities and blowing up airplanes or launching rockets from schools and hospitals.
Well, the obvious difference is that blowing up airplanes or launching rockets at residential areas intentionally targets civilians in order to spread a maximum amount of terror among the civilian population while blowing up pagers that were used for coordinating attacks against Israel very specifically targets operatives involved in such activities.
Some of the initial footage shows such a device going off while innocent bystanders remain unharmed. You can't get any more targeted than that.
Yes, such a pager might have ended up in the hands of a non-involved person, but given the facts known so far that's very unlikely, because there's a reason those people were carrying these devices on them: They were afraid of being tracked down by Mossad in the first place.
Many people fail to see this. You can't compare a terrorist attack that intentionally targets civilians with no apparent military target to a legitimate attack on a defined military target that unfortunately results in some collateral damage.
There are many points on this grey line, and we often fail to recognise those in the middle. For example, between your two points is a very significant type of action that this one may well fall under: an attack on a military target that you are fully aware will result in significant collateral damage.
Many people fail to see this because they have an intact moral core. Conducting a military operation that has a fully predictable rate of civilian casualties is morally equivalent to targeting those civilians.
Israel has utilized a rate of expected civilian to militant casualties in Gaza at the rate of 100:1 [1].
> Conducting a military operation that has a fully predictable rate of civilian casualties is morally equivalent to targeting those civilians.
By that logic only the absolute number of (expected) civilian deaths matters... which can't be right.
If it were true, then exploding a city bus (1 soldier, 10 civilians) would be more moral than striking a military base (1,000 soldiers, 11 civilians.)
It would also suggest a kind of blame-shifting if one side decides to install their missile launchers in the playgrounds of elementary schools or whatever.
You are simply incorrect. “Rate” is a ratio, not an absolute number.
But to your point, Israel’s ratio in Gaza was as high as 100 civilians to 1 soldier in the shopping mall (or more accurately, refugee family shelters).
No, you've cut off the crucial second half of the sentence, which says a military operation with known risks of civilian deaths "is morally equivalent to targeting those civilians."
The phrase "those civilians" refers to a countable quantity of them.
Perhaps you meant to write "morally equivalent to targeting that proportion of civilians"?
Assuming that's a plural "you", I would paraphrase the subthread like this:
_________
(1) zer0x4d: "Many people fail to see that morality depends on intent, there is a qualitative difference between deliberate and incidental collateral damage."
(2) abalone: "No, only people suffering from broken moral cores think there's a difference. An attack when they knew a predictable rate of collateral damage is morally the same as deliberately targeting those civilians who died."
(3) Terr_: "It's based on the number of civilians who die? That doesn't make sense. Consider these scenarios, where even though fewer civilians die, the intent/planning of the act makes us judge it as morally worse."
(4) abalone: "Incorrect, I said it was about comparing the two rates of death."
(5) Terr_: "Well, that's not quite what you wrote earlier, is this other version closer to what you meant to convey?"
Hi Terr, the "you" was singular (and in reference to you, in particular). You paraphrase the subthread well enough, but your first comment within it misinterpreted what Abalone said.
> > Conducting a military operation that has a fully predictable rate of civilian casualties is morally equivalent to targeting those civilians.
>By that logic only the absolute number of (expected) civilian deaths matters... which can't be right.
Abalone (as well as myself, many others, including the signers of the Geneva Convention) is concerned about the use of force against a civilian population where it is predictable that there will be a high rate of civilian death. Abalone says that is morally equivalent to targeting those civilians and Abalone is correct (it is, in fact, a war crime). It is not necessarily about absolute number of civilian deaths, so your counterexample does not succeed.
I think the argument boils down to "what does it mean to target civilians?"
if 100 die to get 1 soldier, that sounds like targeting civilians. If 1 dies to get 100 soldiers, that sounds like (to me and many others) a successful and targeted attack with minimal collateral damage.
The argument being made sounds like if you know there could be 1 death that you should not target the soldiers and that there is no difference in that case to the 100 civilians to 1 soldier and as such, if any civilian could have been estimated to be collateral damage then no military action should have been made.
I think that is supercilious and discounts reality. Civilians are going to get killed and war is terrible. There is a difference in targeted ratios.
The act of modifying and/or deploying the devices was targeted. That’s it.
Carrying out an explosives attack across a large geographic area that includes public spaces, with no specific intelligence on the location of the devices, or who is within the blast range, is the exact opposite of targeted.
What on earth would be more targeted than compromising pagers that only Hezbollah military is using?
At some point the criticism really gets absurd. There probably was collateral damage, yes. This is what you have to account for if you start wars against another nation. Repeatedly.
Opposite of targeted are the missiles that hit northern Israel.
> Some of the initial footage shows such a device going off while innocent bystanders remain unharmed.
This is anecdotal and misleading. There are reports of civilians maimed including the murder of a child. This is entirely plausible due to the indiscriminate nature of these bombs with respect to immediate bystanders.
If an enemy had set off thousands of small bombs in American supermarkets and homes, maiming thousands of whoever was nearby and killing children, we would undoubtedly call it a mass terrorist attack.
2000+ bombs hurting 2000 fighters and one child? I'd argue that almost no war is without collateral damage, but this one action might be uniquely low in the amount of collateral damage done.
> This is anecdotal and misleading
I saw 5 videos and in every case only the person carrying the pager was hurt. Even people less than a foot away weren't harmed. Look at the video on the front page of nytimes.com right now to see what it's like. Highly targeted at Hizbullah soldiers, no bystanders hurt. The exact opposite of "indiscriminate".
You're working yourself up into some righteous anger about this, which is fine, that's your choice. But at least recognise that that's what you're doing. You need a certain narrative to be true so you're twisting facts to suit that.
Sure, there has been at least one civilian death, and others might be reported later. While we don't have numbers yet, the evidence so far suggests a low ratio of civilian casualties, probably much lower than what's possible using convention warfare against an enemy embedded in a civilian population.
Almost 3000 wounded are not a problem if they're Hezbollah, no? The child is tragic of course, but one dead child when targeting enemy soldiers is more ethical than the dead children in deliberate attacks on civilians, which is what Hezbollah is doing.
Why are you pretending otherwise? Is it the bigotry of low expectations? Arabs/Muslims can act very reasonable and humane too, so there's no reason to measure them with a different yard stick
Anyone who got resold / loaned those devices, those who were next to blast radius of those devices while going with their lives, any relatives who were unfortunate enough of having an hezbollah member in their family.
This is basically just one step above a chemical attack, and can only be excused as "the end justifies the means" by the interested parties.
Why would you use 80s technology that allows you to circumvent Israeli tracking, and get that from Hezbollah if you're not in cahoots with them? People in Lebanon can afford smart phones.
With the people next to the blast radius you have a point, but when targeting guerilla fighters that blend in with civillian populace it's hard to not inadvertantly target innocents too. But a small explosive device that is used by enemy soldiers and kept close to their bodies is the best way to avoid innocent casualties.
Also, Hezbollah hiding between innocents doesn't mean Israel shouldn't defend themselves. If you hide behind civillians you're the one to blame for casualties, not the party that defends against you
I guess you've never been in most of middle east. Pagers, shortwave radios and "80s technology" are still widely deployed among the general population.
This isn't about pagers generally, this is about a particular batch of 5,000 pagers ordered by Hezbollah. They weren't distributed to random Lebanese citizens.
Hezbollah employs doctors (heck, it runs hospitals) and Hezbollah personnel (in any of the political, armed, or social services parts of the organization) presumably fairly often live in households with children.
"Doctors and children are among the dead" isn't inconsistent with "this came from an order of devices specifically for Hezbollah" (it does cast doubt on "this was a precisely-targeted attack on Hezbollah combatants", but that's a very different claim.)
We'll need to await more info about the second wave of explosions from other devices, but the first wave was widely reported to be from a specific order of 5,000 pagers for Hezbollah, see e.g. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-planted-exp...
Again, these guys don't go to distributors saying "Hello, we're evil Inc, we want your devices for our nefarious plans!" - they were coming from a batch imported trough local resellers like...basically every other consumer retail channel.
Without taking in consideration that "Hezbollah" as a loosely defined group ranges from conservative politicians and institutions to bona fine terrorists.
These devices were being shipped in equal measure from the guys sending rockets to Israel to the local equivalent of those preppers who like to spend their weekend eavesdropping the police radio waiting for WWIII.
Unfortunately real life is a bit messier than a Tony Scott movie, and we didn't harm 5000 evil terrorists ready to destroy America and Israel from their Cobra underground lair, just a bunch of random people - a few of them genuinely bad guys (how many? thousands? hundreds? less than ten?), and everyone else who may or may have not sympathized with a group that may or may be not considered a terrorist organization, depending on who you ask.
Mainstream sources are saying it was a specific shipment of 5,000 pagers, which Hezbollah ordered from Gold Apollo (a manufacturer, not a local reseller), that was tampered with.
Are you claiming that these sources are wrong, and Hezbollah actually bought them from some retailer who happened to have 5,000 units of tampered inventory?
...God, I hate when smart people pretend to be dumb to make sure facts fit their agenda.
So, you're suggesting instead that a paramilitary group picked up their phone, called a company in Taiwan (I guess there's a taiwanese-arab translating terrorist branch), told them "Hello, I'm Hezbollah, Yes, I need 5000 pagers because...reasons, take my money", nobody batted an eyelid starting from payment processors (I can only imagine they used Bison Dollars from Street Fighter The Movie), to shipping and logistics from several countries.
Then, finally, they made a big long queue of all Hezbollah members and gave each of them one of 5000 pagers, all while saying "remember, never give this extremely common consumer device to no one else for at least five months!"
Instead of, you know, buying them locally from friendly wholesale resellers when new units were needed. (remember, it's radio and pagers we're talking about. Not guns. Not Missiles. It's basically stationery.)
I'm tempted to end this with some snarky conclusion, but I'd say no further comment is really needed.
Per Reuters, "The senior Lebanese security source said the group had ordered 5,000 beepers made by Taiwan-based Gold Apollo, which several sources say were brought into the country in the spring."
I suppose the source could be lying, but what is your alternate theory exactly? Militaries don't tend to procure their communications equipment from the shelves of Radio Shack. Lebanon doesn't have a booming pager market, so it's unlikely that some local distributor just happened to have 5,000+ pagers sitting around.
This was clearly a special order (which doesn't mean no distributor was involved), and Occam's razor suggests that Mossad tampered with that particular order, rather than tampering with random pagers and just hoping that some of them might end up being purchased by Hezbollah later.
"Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah says the group’s leadership was mostly spared during Tuesday’s attack targeting pagers that killed several members in Lebanon as they were using older devices while “new ones were sent elsewhere.”
Beacuse it's a pager, and they're rather common in most of Egypt, Turkey and middle east countries for medical support and first-time responders.
I mean, the reason Hezbollah switched to those devices was also because they're readily available in the country.
I'd be extremely, extremely surprised if this was a "targeted" shipment rather than a generic batch that was expected to a certain degree to be bought by hezbollah members.
> I'd be extremely, extremely surprised if this was a "targeted" shipment rather than a generic batch that was expected to a certain degree to be bought by hezbollah members.
Because they're not S.P.E.C.T.R.E. It's a separatist group whose more extreme members resort to terrorism, not much differently than IRA, Basque Nationalists or Bosnian Indipendentists.
Their supply channel is the same as the civilian population, they're not shopping for vibranium from Hydra.
It would be interesting if we could trace the local distributor for those devices and see where they were available at retail, it would probably match the areas in Lebanon where members of hezbollah are commonly located.
I'm confused, how do you know the 99% of those wounded aren't Hezbollah operatives?
How many innocents would get harmed during a more conventional military strike against the same group of operatives?
I would be fairly surprised if Hezbollah opsec guidelines didn't say that you must have the pager at you at all times, and make sure it can't be accessed by others.
This is likely the most precise large scale military strike of all time. You can't control for everything - some pagers might have been in the hands of innocent people - but it sure seems like an ideal attack vector.
I know there is a documented case of a non-involved person getting injured, but do you have evidence that this attack was not 99% effective? The attack vector was the device specifically used only by involved people.
A 9 year old child was killed, proving this attack wasn't as targeted as you think. However Israel is happy to accept any amount of collateral damage as long as it doesn't happen to them.
Any child death is tragic, but this is really one of the most targeted strikes in the history of warfare. It is safe to believe that everyone that was given a pager for secret communication by a terrorist group, is associated with such group, probably in a military capacity. Furthermore, videos show that extremely close bystanders are left unhurt.
I think this only goes out to show that criticism towards Israel waging warfare is not really about the way that warfare is fought, but really on the right of Israel to fight at all. As no one in history has achieved a more precise attack in urban setting towards a non-uniformed organization ever.
There is no comprehensive information yet on the ratio of civilians to militants maimed by this attack, and any claims otherwise are propaganda.
If an enemy had exploded small remote controlled bombs in American supermarkets and homes targeting members of the American political parties, the sponsors of terrorism and oppressive dictatorships in many foreign countries, there is no question we would characterize it as a terrorist attack.
> but this is really one of the most targeted strikes in the history of warfare.
You are making that up and quoting yourself. There was not a single fire-control system onboard these pagers; there was no visual designation of the target, and no confirmation that it was being carried by it's owners. The target was broadly designated and not even discriminated on a case-by-case basis. A button was pressed, and consequences including the death of a child are now in play.
Israel has the capability to field targeted strikes on their own using domestic Litening and SPICE munitions (not to say they don't end up targeting civilians anyways). The unforunate bottom line is that this was an indiscriminate and presumptive attack that generally relies on a complete disregard for collateral damage. Innocent bystanders died, ones that would not be targeted by any morally accountable soldier in the command-and-control loop. That means an error was made, in civilized armies.
Hamas may be the “legitimate” government of Gaza (or at least the most recently elected one), but Hezbollah is not the legitimate government of Lebanon; it’s a minority party with outsized influence in parts of Lebanon due to its militia and intelligence services.
I wonder if it would endanger the plane. A 20g explosive sitting in the pocket of a person will clearly cause serious injury, but I am unsure if it has penetration power to actually go through the plane body. I am reminded of mythbusters experiments with small amount of explosives to block up doors, but I don't recall how much they needed in the end.
Poking holes in the fuselage of a jetliner isn't going to take down a plane. Consider the cases of a turbine fan blade taking out a window, the case where the MAX door panel blew off, the cases where the cargo door came off, and the 737 "convertible" case. You'd have to take out a large part of the structure to bring it down.
Take a look at all the photos of B-17s taking severe combat damage yet returning home. Jetliners are a lot more redundant today than the B-17s were.
However, if the hole took out the flight controls, or set a fire, then the airplane has a big problem.
In some of the cases you mentioned, there were passenger deaths due to being ejected from the aircraft. I'm on mobile or I'd link exactly which incidents but I remember at least two cases from when I was bored in a lecture and read through most of Wikipedia's "list of deaths in aircraft incidents" list or whatever it's called
>Poking holes in the fuselage of a jetliner isn't going to take down a plane. Consider the cases of
These are all fake news. According to Hollywood, a single bullet from a gun will cause an airplane to break apart in mid-air. You can't honestly expect me to believe Hollywood movies get physics wrong.
Similarly, as soon as a car's wheels leave the ground, it bursts into a fireball according to many TV shows I've seen.
Naturally the close quarters will results in multiple people being harmed. The question is more about the physics and if the explosives has enough penetrating power to go through the walls of the plane.
The bigger risk to the plane (and passengers) would likely be if the person carrying the explosive was working in the airport and the explosion occurred during a critical moment, like when a pilot is taxiing.
Most of the flight would be out of range and I’m not even sure that explosion would take out a plane. Plus it would probably be powered off because Hezbollah is serious about flight safety.
I was thinking about this, but then it probably wouldn't even get past a security xray scan. Which makes me think, in the 5 or so months these were reported to being in the wild, one never boarded a plane?
From what I can find, the targeted pager-model can receive UHF messages in the 450~470MHz range. That could reach passenger jet cruise altitudes if the transmitter is strong enough.
I think it's safest to assume Hezbollah are using strong transmitters, because they'll want to be able to broadcast across rather large areas and in a way that resists potential jamming.
On the flip side, I'm having a hard time imagining these as threats to an entire airplane, given the tight constraints on how much explosive power can be secretly snuck into a functioning pager.
Penetration of 450-480MHz through the shell of an airplane would, on the ground,require a transmission strength of approximately .4dB/m at a distance of 1 kilometer, which is doable by most measures, but would quickly become unrealistic as the plane gained altitude.
What do they do, then? Are you implying that connections can only exist as a two way relationship? Are rivers not connected to streams, tributaries, etc?
Receiving data from a network is a connection, no matter how you want to define it.
The towers resend the message for a while so that they get through - some guy might be in a plane on approach to Beirut right now his pager coming into range as they land ....
Do we know whether or not they embedded gps tracking into the bombs?
I would think they would have that ability, not just to avoid a horrible accident like blowing up a plane, but also to gather valuable tracking intel on a terrorist organization.
My understanding is that pagers are typically radio Rx-only, and that it is not possible to track their location like a cellular device -- which is likely why Hezbollah chose to use them.
Though it would be possible to add this ability when the hardware was intercepted, a transmitting device is also easy to detect.
> blowing up airplanes or launching rockets at residential areas intentionally targets civilians in order to spread a maximum amount of terror among the civilian population
Which is exactly what Israel has been doing for decades by
and on and on and on since a time when none of us was even born. Let's not pretend Israel is the good guy here. There are no good guys, and while I don't accept the acts of Hezbollah, what is a colonized people being genocided to do when the world doesn't care about them being denied human rights ?
Israel also do bad things. Maybe it flies under the radar of being called terrorism by the west - but look at west banks settlements, jailing kids forever for throwing stones, turning Gaza into something that makes Mad Max look like a dream in the name of self-defence, appartheid conditions in Israel and the occupied territories. Offensives on Gaza before Oct 7 - 2023 was particularly bad, and the general embargo aroudn Gaza that made life pretty rotten before the current war - etc.
Israel do enough operations that ticks the "look we killed soldiers guys!" box and they really like to get media attention on that. Otherwise it is "Hamas was hiding there". Hard to verify - they may be right sometimes, but I bet not all the time based on the the number of deaths and the amount of destruction in Gaza.
This isn't happening. Kids are being jailed for throwing stones, yes. Just like you or I would be jailed if we threw a rock at a cop. But it is not "forever".
We can nuke a dictator. It's going to blow up everything within miles, evaporating millions of people, but it can't get any more targeted than that. Deal with it.
Seriously, tho, it's infuriating that a government literally triggered explosion among general public, right in front of innocent eyes. This is an act of terrorism, harming the lives of innocent people who've been largely unrelated to the conflict.
There are 100,000+ northern Israeli's who are refugees inside Israel because Hezbollah is firing hundred of rockets indiscriminately daily at civilian targets, but Israel doing something specifically targeted at higher level Hezbollah operatives makes you feel like Israel is doing exactly the same thing? All while you don't even yet know the reason for the Israeli op (was it to stop an imminent Hezbollah action? Seems odd that this also impacted so many operative in Syria, doesn't it? Why aren't people mentioning that this was larger than Lebanon?)
> The 1982 Lebanon War began on 6 June 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon. The invasion followed a series of attacks and counter-attacks between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) operating in southern Lebanon and the Israeli military that had caused civilian casualties on both sides of the border.
You asked "but what pissed them off so much". Maybe it was the PLO operating in Lebanon, not sure.
Nice, using Islam as a scapegoat. Lebanon is a democratic republic that has 43.4% Christian population. If that is their intention, why not focus on their country first rather than attacking Israel?
Lebanon had a civil war along religious lines. There are many Lebanese Christians in the USA that could help you with what seems to be a misunderstanding about the country.
Hezbollah's founders writings at the time are available online, and that they are clear about their goal being the rule of Islam. Their slogan was 'The Islamic Revolution in Lebanon'. They were founded as an Islamic revolutionary group, that is very core to who they are. Highlighting that is hardly 'using Islam as a scapegoat' whatever that means.
You are mentioning a civil war that happened a decade ago that is by no means exclusive to Hezbollah. I couldn't care less what their founders wrote, but, strangely, they care about the rule of Islam in Israel when their president is a Maronite Christian and their party is one of the parliament members. I can agree that they are Iranian proxies for war against Israel, but it's far from installing Islamic rule. I mean they are also responsible for the secular movement that comprised many religious factions [1]
I'm referring to a time when Hezbollah was founded. Kind of important to an organization, it's founding, and it's reason for being founded, don't you think?
You are trying to obfuscate Hezbollah's public statements calling for Islamic rule. Hezbollah wants Islamic rule and Sharia law for Lebanon, they are very clear about this. Currently realities that they have to put up with do not change that. They are also clear all of their actions and philosophy is consistent with and based on Islamic teaching. Again it is not deceptive to point out they are an Islamic organization.
Hezbollah is firing rockets to conduct terrorism on the civilian population living in the area. Are you are OK with terrorism if you feel it's justified?
Well, yesterday’s actions aren’t really gonna fix that situation for those 100,000 Israelis now though are they? It wasn’t designed to make that border region safer overnight because those rockets are going to keep coming even more often now. Hezbolah might even get so pissed off they go all out and rush the border.
It absolutely alleviates the situation. The rockets were going to be fired either way. Now with a few dead, a bunch of wounded, and a communication channel disabled, it's going to be harder to coordinate future rocket attacks.
There are old stories of the Russians planting mines inside children's toys during some of the later cold war conflicts. This is starting to feel a bit like that. Nobody had any way of knowing who was holding those pagers when they sent that packet but they still distributed thousands of munitions throughout the populace and pressed the red button. Now there are probably at least a hundred or so still out there that haven't exploded and are just live UXO sitting in people's desk drawers.
Yes. Except there are credible reports of Israel also doing this in the past.
"Israeli fighter planes have also attempted to kill children by dropping thousands of booby-trapped toys on Lebanese villages and towns. The Israeli occupying forces have used this method through the years and continue to do so, the most recent example being when booby-trapped toys were dropped on the town of Nabatiyah, killing and injuring children and permanently disfiguring others."
https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-180386/https://www.lorientlejour.com/article/227779/Mariam%252C_res...
So you can guarantee every single pager went to a solider of war? By that logic, soldiers in the Ukraine war also use cellphones and drones so it's A-OKAY to implant bombs in those products too?
Ok so the US DEA detonates explosives on cartel members.
Your daughter is enjoying a cappuccino at a bistro when a cartel member walks by, the device detonates burning and scarring her face. You’re good with it.
Your oldest son has ordered a deli sandwich and is waiting for his order. He kneels down to tie his shoes. Next to him is a cartel member. The device detonates, destroying his ear drum. You’re good with it.
Your sister is shopping for produce at the market, as she walks past a cartel member to choose an avocado, the device detonates, maiming her left hand. She loses her fingers and is let go from her job as a software engineer. You’re good with it.
Your mom sits down in an empty seat on public transportation. The man next to her is cartel. The device detonates and shrapnel pierces an artery in her leg. She dies. You’re good with it.
Your brother, nephew, and youngest son are walking down the street. You were supposed to pick the kids up at 3pm but had to work late. You asked your brother to walk them home instead. A cartel member is driving a vehicle down the same road. Suddenly the device detonates and they lose control, the vehicle swerves up on the sidewalk striking all three. Your brothers leg is maimed and mangled, before he passes out from pain he watches his son die, trapped beneath the vehicle. Your son is flung into a wall and suffers a severe brain injury, he survives but never walks or talks again. You change his diapers for the next 40 years. You’re good with it.
Your dad is an ER doctor, a man comes in complaining of trouble breathing. As your dad is listening to his lungs, the device detonates, ejecting shrapnel into your father’s face. The man was part of the cartel, if he doesn’t work for them, they will kill his sister. Your father is blinded and can no longer practice medicine. You’re good with it.
Two things:
1) This is war. It's not pretty and it's never not messy.
2) This is precisely why every human, and every leader of humans, should avoid war at all costs. The image of a "clean" war is a myth. Even the Allies in WWII were not immune to this, see the bombing of Dresden[1].
Whatever you think of either side in this, it's clear that neither is doing enough to end this.
Becouse christianity formed our societes like this. With help of Romans...
Becouse we learned about separating religion from power, law, medicine, science, etc. Some tries to get rid of religion completly but that another subject.
And it is absolutely sure US agency would not do such thing on "USA soil".
But down there is a open battle in WW3 - Israel delivered something to Ukraine and next day rockets started falling on them, fired by suicidal ponies.
Even if up to 30% of casualties were civilian this would still be quite a surgical strike in my opinion. At 50% I would not say so anymore. Nobody knows yet anyways.
You can bomb an ordnance storage facility even if there's a hospital right next to it (or, in fact, right not on top of it).
They've made sure the pagers were used by Hezbollah first and foremost, tough shit if few were given to kids to play.
And yes if Ukrainians were able to blow up all drones within say 50km of the front lines on the Russian side they'd be justified to do that, even if some were in civilians' hands.
You've been victim of what's called manufactured consent.
Why hasn't Israel allowed any investigations in Gaza, not showing evidence they're using to obliterate practically all of Palestine now, not allowing foreign journalists in either to document things?
No, we sure can go all the way back to 1948 and talk about how Israel gained territory in a series of defensive wars, Palestinians and their Arab allies getting their asses handed back to them every single time.
We'll sure find some occurrences of Israel chasing away Arab civilians early on, but that's beside the point. This attack, and the absolute majority of Israel attacks of the last decades, target enemy combatants, and civilians only ever suffer collaterally. Israel never mounted an attack on civilians, and went very far in reducing civilian casualties when attacking combatants - roof knocking and all that.
If your standard for engaging in military action is that they must be able to prove to you personally that their target is really a militant, you are completely delusional.
"Israeli fighter planes have also attempted to kill children by dropping thousands of booby-trapped toys on Lebanese villages and towns. The Israeli occupying forces have used this method through the years and continue to do so, the most recent example being when booby-trapped toys were dropped on the town of Nabatiyah, killing and injuring children and permanently disfiguring others."
https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-180386/
"Israel orchestrating an attack against the terrorists they're at war with makes me think less of them" is certainly an opinion. A batshit fucking stupid opinion, but you're entitled to it nonetheless.
>as a country and a people they only exist as long as we're their benefactor
Why do so many people think this? If the US stopped "giving" them "military aid" which is actually just disney dollars to spend in the US military industrial complex they would be out a small percentage of their defense budget.
When you don't treat people who are brutally uncivilized with civility, it isn't long before people forget who the bad guy is and where it all started. If you are a civilized society, you have to treat the uncivil with civility. You have to set an example.
I was trying to bridge a communication gap by offering an interpretion. In truth I don't understand your comment at all, but I never go to stack overflow empty handed for example.
To a point, but it's spot checks at best; a state actor has full access to the wide range of explosive compounds, surely there's some that wouldn't be detected (or that can be handled and packaged in such a way that it doesn't get detected)?
The explosive scanning is the thing where they pull some people out of line and run a wand over you and your gear, then put it into a machine and wait a few seconds for the analysis.
Just like everything else 90s the transparent iMac G3 look is going to be coming back only in the non-ironic prison use for having everything in a clear case (to check for contraband).
This is probably the biggest impact tbh. I wonder if the US public would support these actions if it knew it was going to come back on them with longer TSA lines.
you should really take a rigorous look into the history of early Israel and the ideologies of its founding members like Hertzl and Jabotinsky. They have always been terrorists.
Right now one of the fastest growing companies is the Israel cybersecurity company Wiz, founded by founders and investors from Israel's Unit 8200, their secretive cyber hacking group. Seems to me a massive security risk for any US company to be relying on critical security to a non American founded companies.
I actually hired, and we later fired, a couple of 'engineers' from Unit 8200. They were technically quite weak, and when Oct. 7 happened, I wasn't surprised at all. If this was the cream of the crop, the defense community should seriously re-evaluate the efficacy of the IDF.
Wiz is the WeWork of cybersecurity. The Israeli tech sector is not that powerful but has lots of investments from the West (US mainly). My experience relates to yours. I think most people have high and unrealistic expectations of people coming from Israel but this usually comes out short.
Israel has a mandatory military service, and they have been cultivating technical talent development in their armed forces for a long time. So I would think that the arrow of causality runs the opposite way.
In other words: virtually every Israeli has been in the military, and for the technically competent ones, were likely to be recruited into their offensive intelligence unit. Coupled with a government whose industrial strategy has been to promote business development in this sector, we are in a situation where practically every single founder of an Israeli tech company has a military service background.
Those with (offensive) infosec mindset end up founding infosec focused businesses, knowing that there is readily available investment available for them. As a result, the Venn diagram between the unit members and infosec business founders is likely to show a pretty big overlap.
And if you look at it more broadly, most Israelis served in the army which maintains an occupation which is illegal under international law, that is most countries on the planet deem it illegal. So, when I meet an Israeli, the instant thought that runs through my head would be: did this person participate in the human rights abuses? They might very well not have, but the possibility is there. This is a scary situation for me as well, because I do not want to be discriminating and prejudiced against anyone, but the facts are straight.
It looks like a trigger that can only be pulled once.
Thus, choice of the optimal time could be influenced by a lot of things:
- knowledge of other Hezbollah imminent action making comms disruption right now of great importance
- recognition that the vulnerability had been discovered and was about to be remediated
- via other "eyes on" prime targets, knowledge that just one or two top leaders were briefly in especially-vulnerable positions (like sleeping alongside their pagers)
- etc
And, there will be a "long tail" of damage to Hezbollah's usual communications practices & trust in devices/suppliers. Some marginal recruits may even be deterred from joining a battle against an opponent which can carry out this sort of attack – though of course, others may be emboldened.
> And, there will be a "long tail" of damage to Hezbollah's usual communications practices & trust in devices/suppliers.
It appears pager use was a solid choice. Even on full supply chain compromise the amount of explosives fitted couldn't kill even 1% of targets. A cellphone would be packed with much larger payloads able to kill much more people. Their failure was the lack of proper inspection before distribution.
I think the purpose is to terrorize your opponents. Sometimes getting seriously wounded is even worse than getting killed, from the perspective of Hez. Now they need to handle thousands of wounded members, which is much more expensive than dead ones.
if someone next to you in a supermarket was wounded from an explosive like the video shows, do you think perplexed and completely unharmed would be a good description for your experience? Maybe we saw different videos, but it's pretty hard to make such a generalized statement from a few seconds of video.
Yes? Clearly the people directly beside the target were physically unharmed and confused about what happened. For all they knew the guy had an e-vape explode or something.
Maybe in the future they'll carry some emotional damage or something, but living in a country de facto in a state of war with a formidable nuclear-power neighbour, while governed by a terrorist organization that indiscriminately fires rockets into civilian areas essentially daily, carries that risk, right? I doubt such an operation was a surprise to anyone.
> if someone next to you in a supermarket was wounded from an explosive
that "someone" is an enemy combatant currently fighting a war
if they were wearing a uniform would you stand next to a soldier during an ongoing war?
if you were a soldier would you hide in a group of civilians?
there's a lot of blame to go around and Israel is far from clean, but the Hezbollah members are clearly also putting people in harms way by using them as a shield against attacks like this
> The busy supermarket saw people standing directly beside the target perplexed and completely unharmed. This was extremely localized.
I saw that video too and I'm happy the bystanders in that case were unharmed but that was 1/2000 (or 5,000?) explosions. I wouldn't necessarily extrapolate the supermarket video to the other several thousand explosions.
Indiscriminate in the sense that bombs have an area of effect beyond the person carrying them, so they couldn't possibly account for collateral damage when firing them all at once, and a conscious decision was made that any unlucky civilians are fair game. Indiscriminate in the same sense as dropping a bunker buster on a residential block because you believe there's a handful of terrorists inside, or nuking two cities to "encourage" a military surrender.
If you believe this tactic was just, then I trust that if Mossad obliterated your child in the process of assassinating an enemy of Israel who happened to be nearby then you would be able to forgive and forget, since it was for the greater good and they tried their best. Even if they were targeting the wrong person, as it sometimes goes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillehammer_affair
Incidentally when they later killed the actual target of that operation they did so by detonating a 100kg car bomb on a public road, also killing 4 civilians and injuring 16 others.
(a) which are not directed at a specific military objective;
(b) which employ a method or means of combat which cannot be directed at a specific military objective; or
(c) which employ a method or means of combat the effects of which cannot be limited as required by international humanitarian law;
and consequently, in each such case, are of a nature to strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction.
The fact that the pagers were obtained by Hezbollah to be used for their communications, and consequently could be expected to be exclusively in the possession of combatants means the attack was not indiscriminate.
Causing collateral damage does not make an attack indiscriminate. The standard for permissible collateral damage is that an attack must not cause loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian property, etc. that is excessive in relation to the anticipated concrete and direct military advantage [1].
The fact that it was so specifically targeted, combined with the small size of the explosive charges means collateral damage could be expected to be minor. And the evidence so far suggests that to have been accurate. The death of a single child is tragic, but negligible in comparison to the military advantage gained by thousands of combatants dead or wounded.
Where in aforementioned international humanitarian law, step (c), is it preordained that one child's collateral death is negligible? See, therein lies the crux of the issue. The definition itself is wise enough that you can't just lawyerese your way through the issue.
In your scientistic rationalization using weaselwords like "expected to be exclusive", "the [subjective] standard for permissible..", "a death is [objectively] negligible", and so on, it is rather the case that your explanation is so laden with prejudiced pseudoreasoning that you are blind to it and unwittingly helping to spread ideological misinformation.
It's funny, everyone on Hacker News at least completed high school in principle. But there's so much brave conservatism that high school education should have infused students with enough critical thinking to make them think about what they're really saying, regardless of how complex or simple their version of words is.
"unlucky civilians are fair game" that's been an unfortunate fact of war since, well, war was invented. maybe you should more angry at the people who started the war and put people in harms way, instead of complaining that one of the most precise operations still had unintended civilian consequences.
taking the moral high ground is easy when you are not the one making decisions, and while the lesser of two evils (in your car bomb example) doesn't make sense on a personal level, it does make sense on a macro level
> Indiscriminate in the sense that bombs have an area of effect beyond the person carrying them
AFAICT the stock pager models are ~95 grams, and people are suggesting 3-5g of added explosives. If they used RDX, then 3g would be ~5.5 cubic centimeters, which seems like rather a lot to try to squish into a small pager unless the design also replaced the standard battery with a smaller one to make room.
In contrast, a M67 fragmentation grenade uses ~156 grams of explosives.
Basically I'm saying it sounds like the bombs are small enough that it's not quite fair to call them "indiscriminate", especially if the trigger logic involves a Hezbollah radio network that nobody else would be using.
A lot of people seem to think Hezbollah is purely military in nature because of the 'terrorism' label. The organization was founded to respond to Israel's invasion of Lebanon, and while it is a militant organization it also has seats in the Lebanese parliament, engages in a lot of non-military activities, and does not have simple politics - for example, it has condemned Al Qaeda and ISIS for terroristic attacks.
Labels such as 'terrorists' are as often designed to confuse as to inform. Reductionist categorization makes people easy to manipulate.
I think you are mistaking your emotional reflexes for objective truth. Weapons on flags historically connote a message of 'don't mess with us'. The IDF's logo is a sword and an olive branch, and is more or less the same as the logo of the Haganah...a pre-independence paramilitary organization that was considered terroristic at the time when Palestine was still a British possession, and which killed hundreds of people.
The issue is not that weapons are shown. The issue is that it’s a fist holding an assault
rifle. It’s very plainly a call for violent action. And frankly I think it’s kind of stupid to argue otherwise.
Regardless of your opinion of the IDF, their flag is clearly a very different vibe
2 American state flags depict people holding guns as well. I won't mention which two lest it lead to an outbreak of hostilities. And wait until you hear about the symbology of the US flag, or listen to the US national anthem!
More seriously, quite a few other countries have guns on the flag, reflecting a turbulent recent history. As I mentioned, Hezbollah was formed in response to the invasion and occupation of Lebanon just over 40 years ago, which was not a violence-free event. Let's not even get into swords on flags.
There's a tendency among some people to draw their conclusion first and then summon reasons for it afterwards, reasons which often lack consistency. Our violent history is glorious; theirs is deplorable. Consider, for example, the Irish Republican Army; like Hezbollah, it's considered a terrorist organization by US, UK, and many other jurisdictions. But due to the huge number of Irish American people and the subsidence of that political conflict in the last few decades, lots of Americans think the IRA is cool, while reflexively lumping Hezbollah in with other Islamic groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS.
In short, I think things like 'their flag has a gun on it' are the opposite of helpful or insightful.
Americans generally don’t know what the IRA is. Hezbollah is actively involved in anti western terrorism. That is perhaps why Americans think they’re terrorists.
Even if Hezbollah made the order, it would be difficult to be confident all would be distributed to operatives as opposed to sold to other civilian users.
Also, being a martyr on a poster with everyone celebrating you can be an attractive recruitment tool to young men. But seeing the broken beggar without eyes that people pity isn't going to be quite the same enticement to recruit for your terrorism org.
I actually think that an unintended consequence is that Mossad has permanently flagged the vast majority of Hizbullah's followers, an entire generation, on Lebanese soil.
The wound patterns will emerge for the vast majority of victims: arms, hands, eyes and hips ? Time will tell.
The Lebanese army, and the IDF, now suddenly can tell between civilian vs combatant.
I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding but it sounds like you are implying membership of Hezbollah is deep dark shameful secret in Lebanon. The designation of Hezbollah as a "terrorist organization" is great for outside political propaganda, but the actual reality is they are a major and open faction in political life in Lebanon as both paramilitary group and political party - as is my understanding. Basically Sinn Fein/IRA.
Lebanon is very generous. They have their zones, mostly in the South, Bekaa, and a specific part of Beyrouth. It is also true they have a political wing. But they also have covert enforcers outside those zones and that is what everyone else is most fearful of. They have been involved in sectarian killings tit-for-tats, for many years. Most famously, the murder of PM rafik hariri.
So, otside of those Hizbullah zones, its actually not common to see the Hizbullah yellow flags openly displayed. Or a car bumper sticker. It is for good reason. There was a civil war before, and memories run deep.
If I was wounded (or even witnessed this in real life), I would go from civilian to combatant instantly. Israel just attacked a bunch of civilian population centers. This will be seen as a huge strategic mistake, both in terms of new combatants created on the ground and continued loss of good will for Israel abroad.
I think you are missing context. 10 years of civil war and many more decades of animositiy and of strife, are not reversed overnight , even due to an event like this. For example, Israël has lobbed missiles before, and that had its collateral damage, but also didnt change a thing or win new allies to Hizbullah.
Even some druze (historically neutral sectl were kidnapped and killed in the Oct 7th events.
Now, for the 1st time in 100 years, every single rival of hizbullah is able to instantly recognize enemies, in the open.
Obe thing im certain of, Israel has managed to reset the board in its conflict with Hezbollah.
Israel has no support outside of hardcore Zionists. I don't know if you've checked out the global reaction to this terrorist act that Israel just pulled, but they just multiplied the intensity of their enemies (i.e. the rest of humanity) 10X.
I think the simplest explanation here is that pagers are small and light and don't have that much free space inside them, and it's hard to fit enough explosive into them to reliably kill people. The figures I saw was only a few grams of explosive could be fit in them. If you look at the photos and videos that have been coming out today you'll see what the injuries look like; they're not as catastrophic as getting shot with a bullet, or anything close to a real explosive with orders of magnitude more explosive in it like an artillery shell, rocket, aerial bomb, etc.
I would guess Israel would have preferred more lethal pagers, but the required amount of explosive simply didn't fit. So the resulting deaths are from the people who got really unlucky, whereas getting wounded was the modal result.
you're looking at the wrong videos. I saw videos with people's hands blown off, massive holes in their bodies, etc. reportedly something like 15-20gr of Pentaerythritol tetranitrate. Massive wounds.
I suspect it's going to matter a lot where the pager was relative to the person at time of explosion. Someone holding it in a closed fist vs reading it vs in a backpack vs in a pocket could all have very different wound patterns.
there's also going to be a bunch of plastic shrapnel either way. reports were saying that people's eyes were being hit, I think most likely by plastic shrapnel.
The death toll isn't the goal. They're after the 2nd order effects, now there are ~3,000 operatives that are marked by a scar that is relatively distinctive. They also have substantially disrupted their communication protocols and caused psychological damage.
Hezbollah members in Lebanon are not necessarily perceived as bad people - why would the scar be a problem ? Hezbollah claims it’s a resistance movement to Israel, they’re now wearing a scar caused by Israel in a mass coordinated attack, which will further legitimize Hezbollah.
I agree with the disruption of communication protocols and psychological damage though.
I don't get it. Why does Lebanon need to resist Israel? When in recent history has Israel attacked Lebanon or threatened it in any way, except in retaliation or defense against Hezbollah acts?
In the first Lebanon war, Israel invaded Lebanon to strike against PLO. At this time, Hezbollah did not really exist, or was at least small and insignificant. It grew as a force in opposition of Israel's occupation.
This was in the middle of the Lebanese civil war in 1982 , the Lebanese government had no control over anything.
Furthermore, after the Israeli entered Lebanon in 1982, they didn’t fully leave the country until 2000, which is what caused the founding of hezbollah in 1982, and the perception of hezbollah as a resistance movement since then.
Basically the Lebanese see Israel has having attacked then occupied a part of Lebanon for about 20 years, between 1982 and 2000 - this is recent enough for most people to relate to it.
The Lebanese should then have a good answer to what they expected Israel to do with attacks being launched from Lebanese soil without the Lebanese doing anything about it. I understand, they were in the middle of a civil war, but that doesn't mean Israel has to be OK with attacks happening.
The occupation came as a result of continued attacks. And after Israel left in 2000, more and more attacks happened, culminating in the 2006 war.
The fact remains that if no there were no threats against Israel from Lebanon, there would be nothing for Lebanon to fear from Israel. It's repeatedly sought and made peace with every sovereign country with which is has no ongoing disputes.
(There are, as I understand it, some minor territorial disputes along the border. I'm sure these can be quickly resolved through negotiation, if all parties are serious about it.)
Lebanon has a weak government. I think you could compare it with a house owner who does not have the means to evict uninvited guests, where the guests are much stronger and more powerful than the owner. This is both because the country consists of many ethnic groups and religions, and because it came to host a lot of Palestinian refugees and became base for the HQ of Palestinian resistance. Add on top of this widespread corruption. The situation is pretty dire.
Hezbollah considers that they must fight Israel following the Gaza war. They’ve stated they won’t stop until the Israelis leave Gaza.
The average Sunni Muslim in Beirut either remembers, or has family who remembers what happened during the (unprovoked by the Lebanese) Israeli invasion and subsequent occupation. Today, most of the Arab world supports Hamas in the Gaza war, considering that the large number of civilians being killed is essentially mass murder. Mix these two informations, and you will find very little trust towards Israelis. Add today’s attacks and things get even worse.
It’s very easy to destroy trust, and very hard to build it. None of this has to be perfectly logical - it’s not how people work.
I didn't say that the invasion didn't affect many Lebanese. Only that the Lebanese don't need to "resist" Israel, because it is not a threat to them, so long as they're not attacking it (or are in close proximity to those who are).
This is on target. Tagging collaborators certainly has advantages, not so much for invoking a social glare at home but helping to identify them to intelligence sources, certainly.
I doubt those 2,750 all have minor injuries. That's 2,750 targets, a lot of whom probably now now have missing fingers/hands, a chunk missing from their leg, face injuries.... Aka major injuries from having a small explosion on their belt or int their pocket. It's going to be 2,750 probably major injuries that will take a long time to recover from.
And then they will be 10x more dedicated to revenge. Where they may have sworn to destory Israel before, they weren't yet personally injured. It'a the same cycle of violence.
you can't fill a full bag, there is no "more" to conceive of. They are fully convinced already that all Israelis should simply be killed or worse than killed.
Wounded soldiers are often a bigger burden than killed ones. You neee to retrieve them, take care of them, and they may never be fight capable again. They are also a breathing reminder of the costs of war, and at the same time less likely to make others vow revenge.
It surely is because you corrode your target’s trust in technology. They moved from smartphones to pagers, now they’ll have to find even cruder types of communications.
If you lost half your gut or a kidney or had your stomach punctured you may be alive, but you’re definitely not battle ready. And you may never be again. A device that explodes in such close proximity to a body is more than certain that it will damage some internal organ. All these thousands of Hezbollah militia are forever incapacitated. You didn't kill them, but they can't hurt you in the future if let's say you decide to mount a full scale invasion on Lebanon.
It's not clear whether you're asserting Israel does or doesn't care whether it kills civilians, though I think you're saying it doesn't in general try to accomplish this.
Israel's history is decidedly chequered in this regard, and there have been killings, including quite recently of demonstrators / protestors, and within recent years of journalists, by Israeli forces.
But there are also practices such as "roof knocking" in which an initial nonlethal warning is exploded above a building several minutes prior to a much more destructive strike:
And to be clear, much of Israel's subsequent air and artillery assault on the Gaza strip has been far less surgical, with vast numbers of structures destroyed.
By contrast, both Hamas and Hezbollah make extensive use of highly inaccurate missiles (totally unguided in the case of Hamas, guided though low-ish precision generally for Hezbollah) which are effectively aerial mines, striking randomly largely within civilian areas. This reflects both tactics and available means, so again the picture is complex. As I've written in an earlier comment on this thread, most hats are at best grey in these conflicts, rather than clearly white.
Not to get into it here, but i believe the fancy non-lethal warnings is done for the TV audience. There are so many incidents of bombings civilian areas stretching back for decades. And the statistics for the IDF killings of children alone are off the scale.
They are not only not caring about minimizing harm, they are getting away with 11 months of wanton destruction on a daily basis. Just this month, they have dropped mk84 bombs on civilian tents. What are you babbling about?
Or the sabotage was on the verge of being discovered and their options were either to use it at an inopportune time or lose the ability to use it at all.
How do we know this didn't do this but in reverse, being used to disrupt an attack Hezbollah had planned? Edit: People seem to be ignoring the large amount of Syrian operatives this hit as well.
And how many of those wounded are totally unconnected bystanders, who just happened to be standing next to the individual in the grocery store or wherever?
exactly. The most charitable way to look at this is Israel targeted a handful fewer bystanders than a terrorist attack. I can't imagine anyone thinking longer-term strategy thought thought this was a good idea.
Really isn't though. We don't know if there was an imminent action that Israel prevented by doing this? Did Israel do this instead of blowing up apartment blocks to target individuals, in which case this might be a much more limited collateral damage action than other methods might have caused. Without knowing Israel's motives one can't make any sort of judgement not sure why you are leaping to conclusions minus any actual information.
The point was probably to reduce accidental casualties.
Also, the wounds can be quite severe.
Finally, a device like a pager cannot hold a lot of explosive substance in its spare space anyway.
I'm guessing it was to stop some tentative action on Hezbollahs and the huge number of Syrians that this attack got as wells parts that was about to occur.
Nearly every single one injured was a Hezbollah militant. Regarding militant:civilian rates, this has one of the lowest civilian impacts of any option.
Most modern wars see MORE than 1 civilian death per militant death. This pager bomb was nearly entirely militants.
That seems like an awful lot of explosive power for something that needs to be secretly added to a functional pocket pager without affecting external dimensions or adding perceptible weight.
Cautious skepticism is warranted, given how profitable some parties would find it to make such claims regardless of whether they are true or not.
This is a one shot attack. They will never be able to do it again. And I don't think most of the world has pissed off Mossad quite as much as Hezbollah. Assuming they even did it!
Only if Hezbollah take steps to avoid it. Presumably they will, but presumably there is a cost, and so Israel will continue to benefit from them having to divert resources to doing that.
> In the short term, it's a smart strategy for Israel, but they've likely opened Pandora's box in the process.
Is the short term here a few days or maybe just hours? For the reasons you pointed out and more this is likely a strategic failure for a very short term military gain. The economics you pointed out. Politically this will not help them with any but their most extreme allies while enraging their enemies and giving them the moral high-ground with their peoples and the international community. Militarily this likely did little to actual readiness since the people wearing the pagers were probably mid to upper level people so they will heal and go back to desk jobs they were doing before. So an economic, political and military strategic fail. It would have been far better for Israel had this fizzled out or been found out before it triggered. Plausible deniability would have been easier and international outrage would have been minimal all while the C&C of their enemies would have gotten the intended message that they had deep capabilities that could cause disruption. Instead they actually pulled it off and now they get all the bad consequences with very few good ones. This was a bad idea executed, unfortunately, well.
I'm not at all convinced that's the case, unless it comes out that the targeting was extremely broad (like if Israel was just putting bombs in every pager going into Lebanon rather than targeting a specific shipment going to Hezbollah) I don't think there's really any new risk for other countries.
I'd disagree - this seems highly targeted. There aren't that many people with pagers but pagers were a specific way for Hezbollah to speak to operatives.
The news reports are saying a lot of explosions happened at hospitals. Considering that pagers are still in common use by Western doctors, I'm wondering if they considered hospital staff to be acceptable casualties.
these weren't random pagers. They intercepted a shipment of thousands of pagers for hezbollah and rigged them with explosives, and set them off likely using hezbollah's own command and control network.
> Random doctors in the hospital won't have these.
To put a slightly finer point on it: Even an uninvolved doctor somehow came to own a booby-trapped pager, they wouldn't be carrying it around every day unless it was configured to listen to the hospital's broadcast network of real medical messages, as opposed to leaving it tuned to Hezbollah High Command or whatever.
They probably run their numbers and reasoned that more than 75% or something of pagers from a specific batch were used by hezbollah or subjects close to them and decided that it was an acceptable casualty ratio.
"You can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs" approach applied to armed conflicts.
There are tens of thousands of Hezbollah members. If anything, the attack was on a much smaller scale than it could have been. Unfortunately for Israel, not every Hezbollah member had a new pager.
Everyone should be keeping an eye on all their supply chains all the time, Israel-connected or not. Especially for military (or paramilitary) applications.
It reminds me a bit of when after 9/11, some of the reaction in Israel (as well as shock and sympathy) was "Of course we have locked cockpit doors, marshals on planes and other security features on ElAl. We're not barbarians!"
Also, (Hagelin) Crypto AG. Just because it's in Switzerland doesn't mean you shouldn't be paranoid.
The fact that they attacked them via their communication network that was intended to avoid Israeli surveillance, is irregular warfare at its finest.
The main injury inflicted on individuals was psychological - we got into your supply chain this far. Also, your attempts to avoid us failed.
But at an org level? They just disabled the entire comms system, whether through explosions, or by making people scared of explosions.
What's the contingency plan for this in Hezbollah? And will it have credence, given their last grand idea of "let's use pagers to avoid the Israelis" ended with a large number of simultaneous explosions?
It's a very clever attack from a psychological POV.
> The main injury inflicted on individuals was psychological
Have you seen the footage(0) from hospitals? It's likely that hundreds of Hezbollah members lost hands, eyes, etc. That will degrade their military effectiveness significantly, especially the people who were blinded. And remember that Hezbollah is trying(1) to prevent more footage of the attack from getting out, so what we've seen publicly quite likely underplays the full extent of it.
Sure, maybe you could argue that the "main" effect in terms of total numbers was psychological. But we shouldn't understate how many Hezbollah members were directly given life-long injuries that will make them ineffective forever. That's a huge win for Israel.
> In the short term, it's a smart strategy for Israel, but they've likely opened Pandora's box in the process.
Did they? Supply chain attacks, intercepted parcels, none of this is new - the US, going by the Snowden leaks, has a long history of tampering with parcels in transit, which is why a few of the "libre phone" vendors offer to seal the parcel, the device and all screws in random glitter glue and take photos prior to shipping so that any attempt at tampering in transit is not hideable (there is no known way to recreate a glitter pattern).
For me this whole things, including the previous use of AI backed social graph modelling build from digital surveillance of Palestinians, being use for as targeting intelligence, for drone strikes on people homes and families.. this whole thing chills me to the bone about ever wanting to use a social network, or a always connected mobile device ever again. Israel has taken the Dark Mirror SF speculations about the shifts in power and capability as the instruction manual and we're mostly ignoring the warnings. There nothing stopping this happening to any of us.
This is not the first time Israel has pulled stuff like this. It blew back for a while in their face, but eventually people move on. If Israel recognize this event as existential for them, then anything is allowed including nuclear weapons.
IMO, this gives IL's enemies more excuses to execute more horrible attacks. Considering pagers are civilian products and some of them might actually be delivered to non-Hez civilians, the consequence is pretty dire.
it basically says: we can do whatever we want because we can. Now imagine what the other side is going to reply.
I don't know if you've been following this conflict, but Israel's enemies don't need excuses to attack Israel. They think Israel doesn't have a right to exist, and thus see the very existence of the state of Israel as a provocation that justifies violence against Jews.
Definitely not. Hez has showed footages of UAVs inside of IL so potentially they could do some damage. They can also up their missile attacks. And there are other players such as the Houthis. Maybe they just don't want to do it because they figured it's of no good to them at the moment, but maybe the climate changes in the future and they decide to do it anyway.
Also important to remember is that Israel evacuated the civilian population in the north of the country due to Hezbollah currently indiscriminately shelling/bombing that area for the past months.
My concern now is another nation-state actor who manages certain large international supply chains doing this on a broader scale against widespread western targets. Your comment on it being a pandoras box is quite profound.
it makes me think the Israeli decision-makers are trying to leave Hezbollah no choice but to escalate into a larger war. I think Hezbollah has been trying to avoid escalation into all out war, responding in limited proportionate ways despite Israel continuing to escalate. (Can you imagine if Hezbollah had detonated thousands of such devices in Israel? I'd be scared of a nuclear response).
But Israeli leaders maybe decided Hezbollah's hesitation to escalate into all out war must mean that such a war must be good for us and bad for them? Let's try to really make em do it, so we can invade Lebanon again? Why Israeli government thinks it wants an invasion of Lebanon right now, I don't know, but it looks like that's where this goes to me and they must know it?
He’s not referring to the Gazan attacks of October 7, but the Hezbollah rocket attacks that started on October 8 and continue to this day, flouting the 18-year ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah and causing the evacuation of over 95,000 Israelis from northern Israel.
Israel leadership is probably prepping for some big October surprise timed perfectly just before the US election. Everyone is predicting it so much these days that its not really a surprise but a eventuality at this point.
Or you know, 100,000+ Israelis had to leave their homes in north Israel for nearly 1 year. You also had Druze Arab children slaughtered by Hezbollah. So what options would Israel have here?
> other major producers could replicate this tactic
it's an inefficient tactic that actual terrorists won't employ tbh. Infiltrating manufacturers just to place small explosives isn't terror inducing - and you want the recipient of the explosion to know who it came from for a terrorist attack to be effective.
Israel did it to limit the amount of collateral (instead of shooting a missile or bomb, which would require a much larger radius of damage).
The combatant to civilian casulties in this paper explosion is probably unparalleled in the warfare history. I wish all conflicts would strive to have such a great record.
I may have missed key facts about this operation, but who said Israel is part of the supply chain? Why not just intercept the truck/plane on it's way to delivery and insert the explosives on the fly? This seems much more practical IMO.
Everytime you say Israel you must insert US, just as you must insert Iran every time you mention Palestine. These are who the war is between. Hamas or Hezbollah by itself is nothing and so is a <10 million population fighting several adversaries. And the US will always win in escalation which is exactly what they have aimed to achieve and why Iran never gave a 'proper' response to the assassination of Haniyeh.
Isn’t political isolation a strategy in extremism movements? It encourages some people in the middle to move into your camp, while others who move away can become convenient enemies. So from my understanding, the consequences are possibly considered another benefit for the country’s current government.
> In the short term, it's a smart strategy for Israel, but they've likely opened Pandora's box in the process.
Absolutely. From today on, this type of attack will have to be considered part of the arsenal.
While building thousands of explosive communication devices and swapping a large shipment requires substantial resources and intelligence, the actual "sophistication" of today's attack seems to lie in the fact that the perpetrator managed to specifically target a clandestine adversarial organization.
If you don't care about that last part, I don't think it's completely out of reach for a hypothetical "state sponsored terrorist organization" to have a thousand smart phone explosives shipped into a target market, say the European Union or the United States. Such an attack, if successful, would be devastating.
> Absolutely. From today on, this type of attack will have to be considered part of the arsenal.
I doubt that. It’s way more likely that from today on, every batch of devices used by VIPs will be tested for explosives, thus rendering such attacks moot. Finding such devices would also enable figuring out who your enemy’s operatives are.
Do you really think this supply chain bringing pagers to the Hezbollah actually went through Israel?! Israel has ways of intercepting packages in other ports outside of Israel.
israel wasn't identified as israel, and hizbolla weren't identified of hizbolla
much of the work of a CIA or Mossad agent isn't breaking in to this house or murdering that person. It's working as an executive in a shell company
No one is going to sell a terrorist organization thousands of new beepers. The hizbolla probably also created shell companies. Israel knew their cover and approached them as a foreign seller. Everyone is lying to everyone
In reality the supply chain space is probably full of shell companies from all different terrorist organizations and western countries
It was just another Opsec failure (or success, depending on your perspective). I dont see israeli hardware devices being any more suspect. Same as china. They were suspect before and they continue to be. 1 is our ally and 1 ins not
There's also the hit to the reputation of the manufacturers of these devices to consider (even though they were almost certainly intercepted some time after manufacture and modified in transit, or replaced with a different batch that had been ordered by the perpetrator and modified ahead of time for a quick swap). The perpetrator may have been spying on the pager network for some time, and if so then their cover is blown and their information source is gone.
The larger issue is that if shipments of pagers can be intercepted and modified in this manner, then any electronic device can be subjected to other hardware-based attacks - eavesdropping devices, keystroke loggers, etc. What if large numbers of countries with developing tech markets start looking at the suppliers involved the way the USA looks at China's Huawei?
In general this boosts the open-soure model for both software and hardware, so the expected hardware configuration that can be checked visually and with other user-available tools. If any phone, pager, tablet or laptop can be physically hijacked and modified, the user should be allowed access to all the information and tools needed to detect it. This assumes the factory itself is not the bad actor.
Hardware security consultant firms probably have a bright future. Also robots for assistance with inspection.
Isn't that true of any supply chain that involves foreign states? Usually it's just surveillance, not destructive stuff, but expecting state actors to stay out of things is... naive?
The difference is between theoretical capability & Israel's demonstrated willingness & successful execution of it.
It's pretty reasonable now to think a little harder about "huh, I wonder if our Israeli supplier..." but yesterday it would have been a bit paranoid, not naive, to spend more than a passing moment on the thought if you weren't in a member of the March 8th club, or Iran.
China already infiltrated our supply chain at least once [1]. And then there was Stuxnet. Doesn’t seem like a leap that the Israelis can do the same and worse with their actual (as in shooting engagements) enemies.
Wait, so was the Supermicro attack real? There was a lot of skepticism around it, and nobody was able to confirm it with certainty. Then a few years later Bloomberg unexpectedly doubled down on it, again without proof (if I'm not mistaken). Was there anything new after that? I haven't been following the story since then.
It's naive to think that every country that supplies you with goods and you are at war with would go down a route like this. Is there really a single country you'd expect not to sabotage goods you buy from them if you continuously rain rockets onto their population?
I think the point is that, whatever probability a potential target would have placed on this sort of thing yesterday, those calculations have shifted now. Previously it was more abstract and something of this scale and physical attack would have been little more than a thought experiment. If a news pundit on Fox or CNN last night had been claiming China was doing this with Huawei phones then many people would have looked at it as fear mongering while of course knowing China has in all likelihood setup other supply chain attacks. Today it would sound a lot more likely.
Let's be clear here: it was a terrorist attack. Replace "IsraeL" and "Lebanon" with "iran" and "Israel" and Iran would already have bombed by the US.
Netanyahu is trying to ignite a regional war. It's the only way he stays out of prison. If the genocide in Gaza ends, his government falls and he goes to jail. He wants to drag the US into this regional war.
Do you think that's smart from Israel's perspective? Will that improve that safety of Israeli citizens? Or will it subject them to counterattacks?
You have zero information about the goal here. There could have been an imminent attack from from Hezbollah that this action by Israel stopped, an attack that could have caused much more collateral damage on both sides of the border than this targeted at Hezbollah op. You literally have nothing to base calling this a terrorist attack on at this point.
It's not a terrorist attack unless the primary goal is causing terror. The primary goal here was clearly causing damage to Hamas' command structure by putting a few thousand militants in the hospital, and also literally blowing up their communications network.
I think that they are inspiring terror, but terror against operatives. That's a good goal. Terror against civilians is the problem (according to our modern moral code)
What would you killing 8+ peole and wounding 2800+? Were it any other actor, there would be absolutely no hesitation in calling it a terrorist attack.
You know who uses pagers? Doctors and nurses. Are they legitimate military targets? Let's just say that a Hezbollah or Hamas commander was killed. What's an acceptable civilian dead or wounded count that takes it out of the realm of a terrorist attack? How many is too many?
I'd call it the lowest number of civilians casualties ever for this large scale of an attack on ones military adversaries embedded within an urban environment.
In the toilet? They practically run the world tech industry. Practically every GPU, laptop, and phone have a chip or sensor designed in Israel. FAANG companies keep growing their offices. Startup exits are at an all time high even as the war goes on (NVidia recently bought 2 more Israeli startups IIRC)
And good luck finding a Fortune 1000 company that isn’t using Monday or Akeyless or Zscaler or jfrog and I can keep going
Oh and remember Ilya sutskevers new AI company SSI? In their initial announcement they talked about opening with 2 offices, SFBA and Tel Aviv . You really can’t succeed without Israeli talent
You can like or dislike the government, but Israeli techs income and importance constantly grows YoY
I'm still amazed that many US companies willingly force every employee to install zscaler "to improve security and compliance", application which basically passes all inbound and outbound traffic through zscaler edge servers, unencrypted. Who knows who could be listening. And who can control that they aren't.
Their strategy seems to consciously be showing everyone that they are craziest mf'ers who don't care about any consequences or collateral damage ever.
I agree with you that there some pretty serious global consequences that will come back to bite them too, but, then, they pretty intentionally don't care, that seems to be the whole deal.
I have heard Trump supporters actually suggest that a similar thing is a winning strategy for Trump too. Of course he seems to be an irrational unpredictable guy who doesn't care about the consequences in foreign policy, that's great for the USA, everyone will be scared to cross him because he's so unpredictable!
Same in Gaza, it seems they are willing to kill pretty much anybody (children, journalists, humanitarians, hostages) close to a potential target, regardless of whatever their allies may be thinking. Kind of a "godfather" strategy.
As much as Israel likes to spread that narrative, religious fundamentalism had nothing to do with October 7th. And the number of innocents murdered, the amount of destruction wrought, the land stolen by Israel in Gaza since then has completely eclipsed the relative few killed by Hamas. Or are Israeli lives worth more?
Israel left Gaza before, I don't think it will happen again soon. Palestinians will also not work in Israel anymore in the foreseeable future at least.
It is not a question about which lives are worth more. There are a lot of indications that Palestinian lives are worth more in Israel than in Gaza for that matter.
To blame this attack on Israel is quite callous and I don't believe you that you care about any lives in that region. It just doesn't add up, but that is just my opinion.
If it wasn't fundamentalism, what do you think motivated the attacks?
> If it wasn't fundamentalism, what do you think motivated the attacks?
I don't mean to be snarky, but I'm finding it very difficult to take you seriously when you make preposterous comments like "Palestinian lives are worth more in Israel than in Gaza" and "Israel left Gaza before".
Hamas is not a fundamentalist group, and indeed they have frequently called out Islamic extremist groups, such as ISIS, for their murderous behaviour. Probably best we don't discuss ISIS further in the context of Israel though...
I also suspect you know very well the reasons for the October 7th attack, which Hamas have been open about[0]: in essence, it's a battle against:
- Israel's blockade and control of the Gaza strip
- Israel's occupation and colonialism of Palestinian lands
- Israel's continued violence, murder and dehumanisation of Palestinian civilians
- Continued Israeli aggression and land theft
- Israel's apartheid regime
- Israel's complete disregard for human rights, international law and the UN
- Israel's inhumane treatment of thousands of Palestinian hostages, including institutionalised violence, torture, starvation, amputation, sexual assault and rape[1]
You are making excuses, Hamas is a fundamentalist group.
We can go back into history on who started the conflict, but even then I come back to the persecutions of Jews that fought for their independence and won. The result of that is the state of Israel. A democracy. Flawed, but in another league than comparable nations in that region.
A victory some are not ready to accept but they ultimately have to. Perhaps after they manage this first step there will be hope for a Palestinian state.
And yes, Israel did leave Gaza in 2005. That there were blockades was due to security concerns, which proved to be justified not only after the October attacks.
> Israel is a sick, apartheid regime that must be stopped.
This is a quote by you in another comment. Together with your excused for Hamas your arguments seem obsessive and misdirected.
You've offered no evidence to support this repeated claim, and haven't refuted the evidence to the contrary.
> your arguments seem obsessive and misdirected
Not obsessive, just consistent; I could just as well call you obsessive for your repeated excuses of Israel's destruction of Gaza and their murder, starvation, torture and rape of Palestinians.
You have a very Israeli view on history, and it's obvious neither of us are going to change our standpoint, so I bid you adieu.
How much their charta still is relevant today is in question, but they have direct calls to kill Jews in there. They adapted that from al-Husseini, which stated it exactly like that. That was before the founding of Israel btw.
I don't think I want to indulge in proving Hamas to be an extremist organization any further.
How much their charta still is relevant today is in question, but they have direct calls to kill Jews in there.
Not the 2008 charter. The most anyone can point to is the passage that supposedly calls for the "annihilation" of Israel, but that's very clearly a mistranslation. (The actual phrasing predicts Israel will be "invalidated" by Islam, a lot more like Khrushchev's "We will leave you in the dust").
More lies, and straight out of the Hasbara playbook at that! From the Hamas charter:
"Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity."[0]
You are making excuses, Israel is a Jewish supremacist state practicing apartheid and ethnic cleansing. Your arguments seem obsessive and misdirected, and whether intentionally or inadvertently acting as if the situation began on October 7th 2023 which it did not.
Thanks. And on top of all that the fact that Israel clearly considered this situation manageable and sustainable. Netanyahu's plan was "managing the conflict", with periodic "mowing of the grass". He didn't see any need to "resolve" the "conflict", and neither did most Israeli citizens, whose lives were not effected by it at all (to the extent they would plan a music festival a mile from Gaza without a second thought).
While Palestinians in both Gaza and West Bank live intolerably. And surrounding countries that promissed not to regularize relations with Israel until the situation were resolved were abandoning Palestinians and regularizing relations anyway (for, among other things, access to Israeli weapons and technology they could use to repress their own and other populations).
This is what motivated the attack, an attempt to find _some_ way to do what other things had not, get Israel to see this as a situation that was not in fact sustainable, that they coudln't just go on like this forever no problem.
I think it is a violation of international law and a war crime to intentionally target or kidnap civilians, which I think happened that day. But it was not "unprovoked", and it does not require resorting to the explanation of "they just like violence" to explain motivation.
Certainly I don't do that and don't approve of it. I didn't say I was planning on doing it, or approved of it.
In fact, I specifically said I thought it was a violation of international law and a war crime to intentionally attack or kidnap civilians. So I'm not sure what you are saying "no" to in response to me?
Talking about motivation is different than talking about if we approve of the choices.
Bad immoral choices that are war crimes and violations of international law do not somehow prove that the motivation is "fundamentalism", right? If the question is what was the motivation for the attack, saying the motivation is something other than "fundamentalism" is not to say attacking or kidnapping civilians is ok. You asked, if not fundamentalism, what is the motivation? We told you. Bad immoral choices that are war crimes on Oct 7th also don't erase the prior decades of history, involving many many violations of international law and war crimes. Which are as we described above.
A 10 year old girl died too. They took no precautions to limit damage bystanders even assuming every person with one was a BadGuy™ which makes it terrorism and reprehensible.
I applaud your empathy but I don't think this number of active military adversaries have been taken out in cities with so little civilian casualties ever in history. We should probably be applauding this action over say the standard targeted bombing of the Hezbollah militants homes which is pretty much the previous 'least casualties' method used.
The death of that one girl, if it isn't entirely made up for propaganda purposes, is obviously very very tragic, but since almost all pro-Hezbollah commentators are referring to that one specific case that's a pretty clear sign that no other children died. Interestingly I'm now seeing comments where they're making her younger from 10yo to 9yo, now even 8yo. You can ask yourself why people are doing that.
While in their own attacks Hezbollah specifically targets Israeli civilians hoping for children to be among the victims.
> They took no precautions to limit damage to bystanders
The fact that those explosions were small enough to not kill even a single-digit percentage of several thousand targets who carried those pagers in their pockets near vital organs and blood vessels refutes your allegations.
> assuming that every person with a pager was a BadGuy™
These days, even in Lebanon, normal people simply own a cell phone so they can be called. When was the last time you even saw one? They are incredibly rare. The purpose of a pager is to receive (movement) orders and, in the case of Hezbollah, to make tracking more difficult. While it is possible that medical personnel may have used some of these pagers, it is highly unlikely that a new shipment of pagers would not primarily go to Hezbollah's "valuable" command staff, for whom being able to move and operate undetected is the greatest concern. According to Wikipedia, Hezbollah has more than 20,000 full-time fighters, and at 3,000-5,000 devices, this would not have been enough to resupply even a major part of the entire organization, so it is unlikely that any civilian outside the command structure would have received one, even less a random 10yo girl.
Ask yourself again if this is terrorism:
- if the attack was so specifically targeted at military targets
And collateral damage was minimized by:
- using a vector unlikely to be used by innocent civilians
- a sufficiently small explosion not to seriously injure people standing in close proximity to the target as indicated by the many videos floating around
> The death of that one girl is obviously very very tragic, but since almost all pro-Hezbollah commentators are referring to that one specific case, and if that case is even true, that's a pretty clear sign that no other children died. Interestingly I'm now seeing comments where they're making her younger from 10yo, to 9yo, now 8yo in order to exploit the death for propaganda purposes.
She has been consistently identified as either 8 years old or simply a "young girl" from the very first news accounts; I've never seen her given any other age in a news media account. There's probably some confusion in second-hand non-professional-news accounts (like this HN comment thread), confusing her age with other numbers in the same articles (at various times, the total number killed has been reported as 8, 9, 10, or 11 in the same articles identifying her as a particular victim. It is fairly easy to swap her age with the total victim count if you aren't being careful.)
It's not uncommon for perfectly legitimate military operations in urban areas to kill more civilians than enemy soldiers. Managing to only injure a few civilians while seriously wounding hundreds of enemy soldiers in an urban area is a remarkable achievement.
Hezbollah of course is an entirely legitimate military target. They've been indiscriminately raining down missiles on northern Israel for months, forcing tens of thousands of Israeli's to abandon their homes. Israel has every right to put a stop to that, and it would have been perfectly reasonable for them to kill tens of thousands of Lebanese civilians in the process of killing the tens of thousands of Hezbollah members responsible for this.
Let’s say for each one of these Hezbollah casualties, you replaced the pager with 4 infantry attacking them. Civilian casualties would be far higher. The fact that they couldn’t “see” the target at the time of detonation is irrelevant.
The videos I’ve seen are of the pagers exploding and someone standing less than a foot away being unscathed. Incredibly sophisticated and precise.
But you will be always riding some unproven assumptions. E.g., even if those pagers had been initially issued to maybe-combatants, they may have diffused to other audiences and uses, since. It may be well that you're just blowing up some teenagers getting messages for where the rave is.
(Also, even if you hit the intended target, it's a summary execution of people you may suspect, but who haven't done anything, yet, and may or may not have become active in any hypothetical future.)
Curious as to your reasoning here, why would a Hezbollah operative give their pager away within a month or 2 of it being issued?
And this is war, you are applying impossible peacetime standards. To put things in perspective, a rocket attack from Hezbollah killed a dozen Israeli kids/teens on a football field in July, with zero Israeli military targets impacted.
It's a pager! Also, there's some evidence for this, as 2 out of 12 killed are children.
And it's not a full-fledged war, yet, as illustrated by the fact that the targets were still in their civilian settings. Generally, this may backfire quite a bit, as in a massuve influx in recruiting. (If the same happened to the US and reservists were blown up by some obscure vector amongst their families and while shopping, what would you expect? Awe and accepting defeat?)
Seriously though. Dynamite didn't do it, nuclear bombs didn't do it, but tiny precision bombs are going to work: just kill all the people who like to fight. QED
"The New York Times reported that Israel hid explosive material in the Taiwan-made Gold Apollo pagers before they were imported to Lebanon, citing American and other officials briefed on the operation. The material was implanted next to the battery with a switch that could be triggered remotely to detonate."
“Gold Apollo said on Wednesday the pagers that were used in the detonations in Lebanon on Tuesday were not made by it but by a company called BAC which has a licence to use its brand.”
Not surprising. Recall how two Taiwanese companies were implicated when they reportedly had their device driver signing key "stolen", in the creation of Stuxnet.
Apparently they were branded Gold Apollo but not made by Gold Apollo:
Gold Apollo said on Wednesday the pagers that were used in the detonations in Lebanon on Tuesday were not made by it but by a company called BAC which has a licence to use its brand.
…
The company said in a statement that the AR-924 model was produced and sold by BAC.
"We only provide brand trademark authorization and have no involvement in the design or manufacturing of this product," the statement said.
Did they have Mossad agents doing grunt work on the assembly line? All it takes is one spy working on the assembly line to relay how the malicious pagers look like to make the operation a waste.
That's not even required. I've been a line worker assembling boards for a medical device manufacturer. I did not know what every single component did. The process was created at levels above me.
>citing American and other officials briefed on the operation.
How far should I be reading into the fact that people outside of Israel leaked this info so quickly? Does it mean the US was very unhappy with the attack? I doubt they were happy with not being given a heads up.
Could be damage control. There were rumors that it was the lithium ion batteries being made to explode. If those rumors were widely believed true, that would damage iPhone and Android and other brands.
The capacity to keep secrets, even at the state level, takes a level of mental maturity that few are capable of. So many are thrilled by the idea of knowing something few other people know to a degree that they paradoxically want to make it something everybody knows. Journalists take advantage of this and collect and share leaky sources amongst each other. The reason for the leaking is most likely just human nature.
That said, the existence of the state of Israel is such a contentious topic that the leakers may have been motivated by politics as well as the above, sure. But I doubt state-level agencies are condoning the leaking here.
> So many are thrilled by the idea of knowing something few other people know to a degree that they paradoxically want to make it something everybody knows
Some people (often due to trauma) have a very different relationship with secrets than you describe. Some people get immense satisfaction from holding secrets, and have no issue keeping it that way. Sometimes those people have other flaws or vices, as often plays out. In my understanding, managing such people is its own meta-game within these professions
I won't disagree with you about some people liking to keep secrets just as much as others like to spill them, but could you give an example of how trauma would cause someone to want to do the former?
That is pretty similar to what has been guessed so far. The posters here speculated that the charge was concealed inside the battery. Also some reports said that the batteries themselves heated up triggering the explosives. does the report mention if this was a physical switch or just some sort of control circuit?
The majority of plastic based high explosives are designed to be very stable, and require both heat and pressure to detonate, so my educated guess is they implanted something along the lines of a blasting cap into the pagers. I’ve seen PETN mentioned, but again, that is designed to be stable.
Electrical charge? There are electrically initiated caps, but you can’t place a negative and positive charge into a stick of C4 and expect it to do anything.
So trigger some kind of process to cause the batteries to overheat + detonate the blasting cap after a short delay? I'd be interested to know how it was packaged if it was done in a way that wouldn't look suspicious if someone looked inside the pager. The bomb-in-the- battery theory is a good one.
> So trigger some kind of process to cause the batteries to overheat
Where are you getting this part from? There's no evidence that the batteries were triggered to overheat; indeed doing so would be counter-productive, as it would cause the people holding the devices to know something is wrong and potentially move them farther away from their own body. The pagers exploded suddenly without warning. The only trigger/detonation involved was setting off the high explosive. The battery was uninvolved, only used to make the pager itself work.
Realistically it wouldn’t require much volume in the battery. For reference, the amount of explosive material in a blasting cap is about the size of an eraser head, and is easily capable of the explosions in the videos.
If we try to do what we are best at here at HN, let’s focus the discussion on the technical aspects of it.
It immediately reminded me of Stuxnet, which also from a technical perspective was quite interesting.
I already wonder if this was anything that was planted in the devices perviously, or if the ones responsible had similar devices, and managed reverse engineer them and craft a payload to them, that could be sent over existing cellular protocols/networks and then, similar to Stuxnet, make the device exagerte some existing functionality to a point where it caused a malfunction? Thoughts on this?
We can't really do much more than speculate right now, but it seems like the most likely answer is that a shipment of pagers was intercepted and implanted with explosives. Israel has done this before to assassinate a prominent bomb maker. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash#Assassination
> most likely answer is that a shipment of pagers was intercepted and implanted with explosives
I agree, there are photos and videos of extensive damage to furniture and injuries that go way beyond what a small lithium battery would NORMALLY do.
Also, all the CCTV footage I've seen indicates explosions and not fire.
It can be explosives planted, However it can be batteries modified to explode instead of burn&outgas. I recall a video of someone losing their lives when their vape battery exploded. IIRC the vape's metal structure acted as a container that enabled pressure build up and eventual sudden release.
There are many stories about vapes exploding, some causing serious damage similar to these:
> It can be explosives planted, but maybe it can be batteries modified to explode instead of burn.
That is not really a thing, from a technical point of view. Changing the chemistry of the battery (assuming that a suitably explosive one exists; these tend not to be developed very far) would just be swapping an explosive and not a modification. Doing something like adding some vessel to build up pressure within the battery sounds impractical (you’d need something very resistant to heat as a battery fire goes above 2000 K), at which point it’s not worth the trouble.
The most likely is either some explosive besides the battery, or something that looks like a battery from the outside, but is actually half explosive on the inside to at least pass superficial inspection.
This kind of damage really does not look like a battery gone wrong. It would have left all sorts of chemical residues and burned very differently.
> The most likely is either some explosive besides the battery, or something that looks like a battery from the outside, but is actually half explosive
That is the most plausible explanation. It can’t be an obvious thing or someone would notice it. If it looks like a plain battery pack, nobody would think of cutting it open.
The explosive here could be perhaps just 8mm x 8mm x 8mm to do the sort of blasts you see in the videos. Thats fairly small, and could easily be hidden in a device.
Inside the battery is perhaps the best hidden, but you'd need to own a bunch of battery manufacturing facilities (expensive). Cheaper would be to simply remove some other component (eg. one of two speakers) and replace it.
Most (pouch-shaped) Li-Ion batteries just look like square shapes packaged in heavy aluminum foil, with some Kapton tape to keep a small PCB with protection circuitry in place. Any determined hobbyist could buy smaller batteries and the packaging materials off AliExpress to make something that looks visually similar but has lots of space left over for explosives.
With cylindrical batteries it's a bit harder, but ultimately they are just a cylinder with pressed-on end caps. You can disassemble them (lots of videos on youtube), change the contents and reassemble them.
It is pretty high effort compared to just sticking the explosives next to the pager's electronics, but I don't think the barrier to entry is actually that high
Pagers last for a very long time. Some one-ways can last for over a month. At that point, you probably wouldn't notice it's just over 3 weeks, or maybe think the product is lying in the advertisements and lasts less but not enough to replace the "company provided" one.
There are tons of more likely explanations for that, though, with the top of the list being "dang bosses bought low quality pagers".
And if they can make the combined package big enough that the battery life is still acceptable, it's even less likely that someone will pull the pager, notice that they should be getting "great" battery life instead of "just ok", and investigate deeply.
I read elsewhere that Hezbollah recently changed to this pagers to communicate, maybe it those who put the bombs bet on the fact their victims wouldn't have time to realize that the battery have shorter life than advertised
Considering the tech industry of Israel and the bottomless military/security budget, this is very plausible.
Also considering that a plan like that must have taken many months/years start-to-end, this just makes me wonder what else is booby-trapped(?), fridges? laptops? microwave ovens? the next door flat? flower pots?
Stuff like that take the paranoia levels all the way to 11.
I fail really to see the difference between Hezbollah lunching rockets into Israel and Israel's pager bombs. Except the latter are pretty well targeted.
Frankly I believe that the people complaining pagers wouldn't if Hezbollah had managed to do the same to Israel. They'd celebrate it. So really they're just unhappy that the team they're emotionally invested in is getting shellacked.
It’s not unremarkable, or even very common. But lots of countries do this besides Israel (targeted strikes to eliminate targets and remind would-be targets that it’s hard to get out of reach). It’s true that they tend to be on the high-tech side compared to say Iran, and that democracies most of the time at least try to make it look legal.
> Inside the battery is perhaps the best hidden, but you'd need to own a bunch of battery manufacturing facilities (expensive).
Do you?
What stops you from just taking a smaller battery and packing it with some plastic explosive into the typical "battery foil"? I'm sure the IDF is capable of doing that at scale.
Something along these lines is my guess. Focus on the batteries. You can replace individual cells with explosives and cause the remaining cells to overheat to start the explosion.
Most battery packs have integrated power management chips, so you could focus on modifying the battery firmware.
You could have another component send a message to the power management controller to trigger it.
You could also use the power controller's internal current sensor and clock to watch for a device event (power draw from the screen at a certain time or the power profile for a specific set of CPU instructions), giving you means to trigger it without modifying any other part of the device.
A quick google search reveals multiple battery manufacturing facilities in Israel, including domestic and foreign owned corporations. A special order of batteries seems very plausible.
I don't see someone like Iran or Lebanon being able to do that, but Israel has a great technical know-how and a ton of resources. Making custom batteries, with embedded explosives seems plausible.
The pagers in question is believed to be a dry cell operated model. It could be a rigged AA battery.
...oh no. They must have handed out those USB rechargeable batteries as an upgrade. The bad guys want to be able to charge it, so they would be incentivized to align the charge port with case back and explosives facing the user. Then the battery could be triggered by time since synchronization && backlight current draw && button press beep.
One easy way to conceal the explosive would be to overmold it in a cavity inside the plastic enclosure. This would escape all but the most thorough inspections. And since battery terminals are typically also embedded in the plastic this can provide a clandestine supply of power and signal with something like Dallas protocol to the fuse.
All you have to do is build replacement batteries without the pressure relief vents. You can easily get a Chinese manufacture to do this for a fee and properly some complaining about how stupid it is to do.
Then wrap it in some nichrome wire and have a micro run some power through it. The nichrome wire will overheat the cell really quickly causing the cell to rapidly over pressurize and boom.
Small pouch or prismatic cells that would be used at the size of a pager generally won't burn. And I speak from experience of doing stupid shit to them in the name of testing, nothing like using the nail puller side of a hammer to puncture them, or rigging up a fixture with 3 concrete nail guns to shoot it or well, fun stuff
Explosions are essentially about extremely rapid expansion of gasses. I don’t see how a battery, even one that is rigged to fail, can explode in an instant. Shorting out, overheating, and ultimately exploding because the battery compartment can no longer contain the expansion has got to be too slow by many orders of magnitude. Your theory makes no sense to me.
Sure, but can you get 1,000 of them to explode simultaneously that way? You'd think there'd be some variation in the time of explosion, at least by tens of minutes or hours, maybe even by days.
A puncture causes runaway/explosion in seconds. Overcharging takes 13 minutes. There's not good data on a dead short (because it's unlikely during normal operation), but it's going to be between those on the faster end. From personal experience a shorts cause things to get noticeably hot after about 10 seconds, the graphs show that once you hit 60C things rapidly get worse.
A relay may have been required to hold the short as the battery stops supplying voltage.
A battery pouch is a terrible pressure vessel under these conditions. It’s designed to bulge and deform to avoid catastrophic failure. It would need to be replaced with some very stiff material that can withstand the first step of thermal runaway. A battery not submitted to mechanical stress (e.g. by being punctured, hit very hard or shot at) is going to get quite hot before expanding.
Batteries aren't pressure vessels though. Pressure vessels are generally decently large; how are you going to get one with significant capacity inside something as small and lightweight as a pager? Just putting in some plain explosives makes a lot more sense.
It's a very minimal amount of pressure it can withstand, is the point. Certainly nowhere close to lethal explosive pressure. It's not a pressure vessel in the sense of the kind of pressure vessel it takes to make an effective bomb.
It’s the simultaneous timing thats a giveaway for me. Maybe you could have a few batteries explode but 2000 of them? It’s too clean to be just batteries imo.
The accounts may be serious (even accurate!) but whoever chose the numbers was not being serious in their choice of number. Or it's quite the coincidence.
I agree with this theory even though I am not even sure it would require a specific modification like the mentioned heating wire, if you can simply use the existing circuit with some instruction to cause component overheating with the same effect.
Another reason I do not believe it was an explosive is that a clandestine explosive installation would have resulted in far greater damage and included shrapnel. Because why would you not install very high explosives and shrapnel in a shape charge that directed the explosion into the likely body of the wearer if you are taking the risk of intercepting and making a physical modification.
This is also less Stuxnet and more infiltrating insecure systems of vehicles to drive by wire accelerate cars into objects. There have been examples of this
> a clandestine explosive installation would have resulted in far greater damage and included shrapnel
No and not much. The amount of explosion you get is proportional to the amount of explosives used. Small amount of explosives == small explosion.
Shrapnel is specifically engineered into explosive military weapons - it is not an innate property of explosive reactions. If you want a lot of shrapnel you have to design the case to fragment (e.g. grenades) or pack the area around the explosive with the stuff you want to become shrapnel (as with many bombers packing nails and screws and bolts etc., around their bombs). A small explosion in a mostly plastic device will result in a small amount of small pieces of plastic being scattered, which might harm bystanders but is by no means guaranteed or even intended to do so.
A shape charge would be pointless because you can't guarantee how the device is worn- one news article mentioned most people carry them in their pockets, so a shape charge would be blowing most of the energy away from the target in 50% of the cases.
A shaped charge need not be unidirectional. It could be focuses along an axis, resulting in a two-way explosion that would be more damaging than a symmetrical one. Two copper disks on either side of the charge would constitute a functional two-way shaped charged.
I think the grocery store security video supports the two directions idea. If you watch carefully it looks like a pressure wave away from the target and clearly something takes the target down. Perhaps a pressure wave in the opposite direction too.
With a pager you can be pretty sure the target will be holding it with one hand and looking at the screen. Reports indicate the pagers beeped shortly before they went boom. So if the blast is focused in the plane normal to the screen that would focus it into the hand and face of the target. No idea whether that's actually a good idea or not.
Doing much more damage 50% of the time might be more effective, if an undirected explosion is too weak to kill anyone but a directed (and lucky) one could.
I've seen some videos. Shattered hips, abdominal wounds, hands without fingers. I haven't seen any dead person, just maimed bodies. Mission successful I guess. Oh and one kid.
You are probably right but explosives risk detection, either by the militants or by the airport security if taken to a flight to a country with serious security.
Detection by airport security might probably be avoided using the right type of explosive. I have no real idea about this, but I suspect that any nation-state with enough budget and know-how can manufacture undetectable or very hard-to-detect explosive devices. If the explosive is encapsulated in a sealed airtight container, which is properly "washed" after manufacturing, I guess there's no way to chemically detect the explosive inside. Not sure about how to avoid X-Ray detection but that's generally not the way explosives are actually detected.
And, is the device anyway going to pass through airport security? I guess the owners are not really travelling on commercial airliners.
The scanners only test for the signatures of common chemical structures of explosives, like nitro and nitrate groups, which make up the bulk of mass produced explosives. There are many lesser known chemistries for high explosives that will not be detected by these scanners. Probably the best known example actually used by terrorists are explosives based on peroxide chemistry but there are several others.
A friend of mine who visited Lebanon (and the Hezbollah museum, he gave me a Hezbollah cap by the way) then went to Israel and was subjected to a thorough explosive material search. They basically swiped some kind of broom all over his body (with a focus on genitals) and put it in some device (some kind of spectrometer ?).
These devices apparently were distributed to thousands of operatives. I would imagine that people having those are some of the more elite ones and they probably will travel for business reasons, be it personal business or Hezbollah business. A few who choose to take their pagers with them(i.e. will not be heading straight home after travel, so brings the pager) are huge risk IMHO. Even a single incident may reveal the plot.
I don't know how those detectors at the airports work exactly but they are probably playing cat and mouse game with the people who are into smuggling things and as a result they are probably aware of the more advanced methods like injecting things into the plastic.
This is the reason why I think the explosives were most likely hidden in the batteries. Some explosives have similar enough chemistry that they cannot be told apart from legitimate battery packs by the scanners.
This is a known threat, and this is the reason why some airports do extra checks on some travellers (for example asking them to turn their laptops on, asking them when and where they got the laptop and etc.)
news reports suggest 1000+ of these devices exploded.
In a country where lots of people would happily crack open the lid of a device to replace the battery or otherwise tinker, the explosives must have been well hidden, not just tucked into the case.
I don’t think they’re saying you’d need to change the chemistry though, they’re saying they could have altered way it was packaged so that when it started burning there was nowhere for the gas to go.
Similar to how firecrackers work. If you take a firecracker apart and light the powder, you’ll get a flash and a lot of smoke, but no bang. The explosion comes from the pressure building up in an enclosure.
Disclaimer: not a chemist. Just a former unwisely curious kid
"If you take a firecracker apart and light the powder, you’ll get a flash and a lot of smoke, but no bang. The explosion comes from the pressure building up in an enclosure."
True. But if you open enough firecrackers and put the powder in a small plastic container you will not get a bang but a buff and a fireball the size of a car.
Disclaimer: I am a chemist and a former very unwisely curious kid
Yeah, this should remove any doubt that there were explosives involved. At the 500 to 1000 mA hour capacity typically used in pagers, even tampering with the battery's venting in an attempt to build up gas pressure would at worst result in a pop and some smoke from the top of the bag.
Blowing a hole in the side of the bag and sending debris for several meters is obviously not plausible with that quantity of lithium.
I had a rechargeable battery explode in my kitchen recently and it was like a small grenade went off. I'll see if I can find the photos but it shattered trim and bits went through a screen on the other side of the room.
So, an "excited" AA (which, I believe is what pagers usually use) could do a surprising amount of damage.
Is an interesting problem. Maybe the experts in the area could help here. I assume that a worn battery near the end of its life is more prone to explode, but I wonder...
Would the dead cells in the battery take part in that; or are just dead and not reactive.
In other words: if a battery has only a 30% remaining alive; or a laptop has a very worn battery, would an hypothetical explosion by overheating be much less severe? or is still so dangerous as new?.
That's not to say that they couldn't have put a lithium AA or AAA battery into the pagers or inserted a modified AA/AAA battery that was a combination of lithium (with greater power density) and explosive.
It's also possible that they have fancier 1-way pagers than I'm aware of.
So that Israel couldn't track their locations via cell networks. Sure you could use Signal or w/e but it's the cell IDs and knowing where people are that was the issue. The pagers do far less, if any, two way communication so it's not likely to give away location data.
Even a dumbphone with the GPS physically removed is going to be a lot easier to target than a one-way pager, since they are always chatting with the cell towers.
No, a pager is optimized to be a case size that's comfortable for carrying and reading. The electronics could be the size of the smallest wristwatch, which is already dominated by its own form factor requirements, not the PCB + battery + display subcomponents that are scarcely the size of a nickel.
A typical pager is about 60 x 40 x 20mm. Much of this volume requirement is driven by the 16mm diameter 34mm long CR123 battery, a lot of it could be empty.
That battery is a relatively safe lithium primary chemistry, not a rechargeable Lithium polymer pounch or lithium ion cylinder that would risk fire and explode if the overpressure vents were omitted and the BMS corrupted, but the primary lasts for years.
I bet you could use a CR1216 battery (1.6mm thin, 30mAh, instead if 34mm long and 1500mAh) instead and have quite a good deal of spare volume in the battery for an explosive. If you filled the entire pager, that would be even more room, but much more easily detected.
> I bet you could use a CR1216 battery (1.6mm thin, 30mAh, instead if 34mm long and 1500mAh) instead and have quite a good deal of spare volume in the battery for an explosive.
I'd be fascinated if that was the physical vector...
However, tainting a component pre-integration seems a lot more likely than simply packing explosive in the case.
Israel inserts the compromised components upstream in the supply chain, they're duly assembled into pagers, which then make their way to Hezbollah, where they're inspected, look normal, and work normally, and are then distributed.
That would still require a firmware hack to presumably trigger though (incoming message stack to component trigger).
> The electronics could be the size of the smallest wristwatch
Swatch actually used to sell a wristwatch that includes a pager! Battery life was pretty bad though; it came with a keychain accessoire to store a spare CR2032 and a battery swapping tool.
According to the manufacturer the pagers have a nominal battery life of about three months so it's not likely someone would actually notice if this number is cut in half or less.
Those thin coin cells can't output enough currents to replace most use cases. I've once tried to run ESP32 with couple CR2032, the ESP just browns out.
An ESP32 is a power hog meant to be plugged into a wall. Here are the current requirements for the various modes according to [1]:
Active mode, 260mA to 790 mA (!)
Modem sleep, 20mA
Light sleep: 0.8 mA
Deep sleep: 10 uA
Hibernate: 2.5 uA
Even with fancy DTIM beacons, Wifi and Bluetooth IoT devices just have a really power-hungry protocol stack and radio system to run.
Compare that to something like an STM32U5 microcontroller [2]:
3.1 mA Run mode at 160 MHz
19.5 μA/MHz Run mode at 3.3 V
6.6 µA stop 2 mode with full SRAM
1.7 μA stop 3 mode with 16 Kbyte SRAM
0.5 uA standby mode with RTC
0.3 uA standby mode (24 wakeup pins)
0.1 uA shutdown mode (24 wakeup pins)
And probably more importantly, an actual low-power microcontroller can wake from sleep in something like 4 microseconds, do something for a few cycles, and go back to sleep. Pager protocols are designed for this, putting the pager to sleep for sometimes an hour, and the crystal oscillator restarts the battery-powered device moments before the frame arrives, then goes back to sleep. Conversely, booting up the whole protocol stack on the ESP32 and acquiring a connection can take literally 4 seconds.
That results in a power consumption ratio on the order of 100,000,000. ESP32s are not efficient.
Because it takes a surprisingly small amount of high explosive to cause the kind of damage shown in the footage we’ve seen so far. All it would take is for the battery to be replaced with a combo package - part battery, part explosive. No need for additional internal space.
Disclosure: my first job was in the Australian Defence Science Technology Organisation, Materials Research Lab, Explosives Instrumentation Group.
If cost per unit isn’t a consideration, I suspect you can shrink the size of the electronic components used in the pager to make room for a 20 gram explosive charge.
Pagers—especially commodity models—aren’t profitable enough to warrant cutting edge tech with the latest advances in microelectronics. Lots of room to improve things if you are making a set of them at a loss.
One possibility is to replace part of the battery. The smaller battery can be designed to lie about its charge, or you can replace with a higher energy-density battery and use the space saved for a detonation system (perhaps even incorporating the battery itself into this) and a small quantity of high explosive, which is pretty stable and safe until detonated. Contrary to popular belief, high explosives are actually relatively safe, and usually even burn safely or are hard to ignite at all in some cases. Package it up into something that looks identical to an unmodified battery. Modify device firmware and battery control circuitry to detonate it on receipt of a specific signal and... boom.
Thinner (less durable, but who cares?) plastic shell to free up space for explosives, but would likely be obvious if someone opened it - which might be a common thing if these were being used as remote triggering devices.
If they were using a AA battery, replace the battery with something that provides you space to work (e.g. put in a AAAA or button cell that would provide appropriate power but lower capacity) because you don't really care if the battery life drops from months to weeks.
I can easily envision a scenario that would preemptively “explain” why the pagers are internally different from past models:
Supplier: “Hey, we’ve got a refreshed model of the pager you wanted to buy in bulk. Interested?”
Buyer: “I don’t know, how do they work?”
Supplier: “Same as the other ones, minus a bit less plastic protection. With the weight savings they’ve added a new hardened receiver that’s supposedly more secure and will keep communications private. Also, they are 50% cheaper per unit…”
Exactly that. There is a video of a hole blown through a table surface with one. That is not happening with any off the shelf battery technology as is currently being heavily misreported. They were modified with explosives clearly.
Of course there is paranoia being sewn now about hacking and the batteries which is likely part of the ongoing operation as it will disrupt anyone they didn't explicitly target.
I’m not sure which image you are referring to but there are images of lithium battery explosions blowing holes into counters and faces. There are some linked here.
Ahh so a simple supply chain attack. I was thinking it might have leveraged the built in batteries. But it was always unlikely, especially in a receive-only device.
Still, if you have the capability of such a supply chain attack, I would imagine the rewards of silent surveillance (tracking, audio) would be of much higher value than this kind of attack where 3 out of 1000s targets were killed.
Hezbollah has been escalating their armed attacks against Israel for almost an entire year, parallel with the war in Gaza. Every day tens of rockets hit Israel, almost the entire north of Israel is evacuated of civilians.
I realize that this is not widely known, attacks against Israel receive far less attention in the news than do Israeli retaliations.
Yes, there are blurbs about it if you know where to look and are already familiar with the situation. But a small blurb once about Israel being attacked is drowned out by the literally thousands of articles about Israeli actions, which mention time and again every small detail or infringement.
I don't agree; I think you're pushing some vague nonsense media conspiracy here. I haven't been following the war that closely, but I hear about Hezbollah attacks fairly regularly. I'm very critical of Israel right now, but it's not even remotely unknown that they're facing attacks from multiple fronts.
The "news" doesn't even seem to exist anymore. News providers have adapted to the readers only wanting hear their own views supported.
Not only are there specific providers for specific worldviews, but major providers seem to spit out articles catering to every viewpoint. You can find probably find multiple pro Israel and anti Israel articles coming from a single news source on a single day.
So, I dunno maybe we need some kind of cumulative news app to get any kind of meaningful idea of how things are actually leaning. Like an AI summarizing sentiments of the 20,000 articles on Israel in the last week to determine if the news is slanted.
They advertise pretty heavily, and I’ma bit skeptical of their ability to make money. but it basically uses AI to summarize stories, and it groups stories from many media outlets, categorizes their bias, and shows the slant of the topic overall.
> attacks against Israel receive far less attention in the news than do Israeli retaliations.
I think retaliations are pretty fruitless anyway. Both sides have been lobbing missiles at each other for decades. This eye for an eye thing keeps going even though both sides have run out of eyes a long time ago.
Yes. Killing more of theirs in response to an attack on yours is fruitless. It just perpetuates the situation. And also, every time you kill one civilian there, their kids become terrorists for life (or at least have a good chance to). Hitting military targets is ok, but just lobbing a few missiles that way in retaliation because they fired some on you last week is really not going to help in any way. It only perpetuates the death and destruction.
Netanyahu seems to be very much against negotiations and keeps blowing the situation up because he doesn't want to 'look weak'. But this does nothing to actually help the Israeli people get safer. The only way they can actually be safe is to sit down and make peace. And of course not to keep taking more and more territory as Israel has been doing (and was even condemned by the UN).
Seriously, this shit has been going on since the founding of Israel. If they keep it up they will never feel safe. Neither side will ever be fully bombed into submission. Remember both Russia and the US tried that in Afghanistan, it didn't work there and it won't work here. All it does is keep the military industrial complex fed and wrecking lives in the process.
Someone has to take the first step and stop retaliating. And make some agreements which are fair to both parties. Then they can both build up a society and have less reason to upset things because they have a thriving society to lose.
I'm not defending Hamas nor Hezbollah. But this has to stop and 'responding' or 'retaliating' isn't going to help.
Only the Gazans charge that Israel kills civilians. The Lebanese understand exactly that Israeli targets Hezbollah. Read any Lebanese newspaper - they blame Hezbollah.
There's disagreement on how carefully they try to avoid doing it, but even their closest geopolitical ally the US has urged them to do more to prevent civilian casualties.
Hezbollah has been warning its members not to use cell phones because they get targeted by using them too. Seems like the pagers were supposed to be the workaround for that.
Lots of pagers operate in one-way only mode. Towers transmit messages without expecting acknowledgement a few times, pager is configured to filter out and only alert on messages routed to its ID.
Sure, theoretically one can detect a receive-only radio, but its massively more difficult than detecting something which actively transmits.
Most pagers do, yes. They are also usually unencrypted. And due to the one way nature, even if they are encrypted, PFS (perfect forward security) is impossible. Meaning that if someone captures the encrypted messages they can decrypt them all the way back when the encryption key is obtained.
But the impossibility of any kind of location tracking is definitely a plus of one-way pagers. Not just for terrorists. I'd get one if there were still a network where I live. It'd be really nice to be reachable and not be tracked 24/7 for once.
While the messages are not encrypted, you just have your actual message coded. Have agreed on phrases and what not discussed out of band. Send dummy messages to throw people off and not know what is a real transmission or a dummy one. Is that numbers station just spouting gibberish or communicating with spies?
The market closes at 5, dinner at the hotel, Grandpa will bring home the wine, bring your hat. Charlie 5 Alpha 2 4 7 3 Bravo. Maybe this is just discussing someone's evening, maybe its coordinating a group action.
Many pagers are receive only. The tower has no idea who's listening; it just broadcasts out the messages that it's told to. Pagers are much less trackable than phones.
> Surely a pager message isn't transmitted from every tower everywhere.
They generally are!
Some systems required the sender to select a geographic region to increase bandwidth efficiency, or alternatively the pager owner to update their coarse-scale location with the operator after moving significant distances.
The latter is what the old Iridium satellite pagers did (do?), for example. (Not sure how the new GDB-based ones work.)
The new Iridium pagers are two-way as far as I've heard. Only the old ones were one-way.
I think the service is finally being decommissioned due to the Iridium Next satellites not supporting it anymore. It has been supported for more than a decade without onboarding new customers though.
> The new Iridium pagers are two-way as far as I've heard.
Apparently that's optional:
> Iridium Burst-enabled devices can be configured as receive-only so that no transmissions are made, a feature valued highly by some customer segments.
> I think the service is finally being decommissioned due to the Iridium Next satellites not supporting it anymore.
If that's the case, it would have been inoperable since 2017 – they deorbited the old satellites immediately after confirming deployment of the new ones.
That's exactly how they work, actually. Or at least worked, traditionally. There are assuredly some two-way pagers out there now.
But yeah, you'd usually pay for service in a certain (large) geographic area, and if you wanted to take your pager out of that area while on a trip, or if you moved, you'd have to let the pager company know so they could start broadcasting in the new area.
They might have watched The Wire: you page Alice, and she uses a public phone to call you. Undetectable unless you wire all public phones in the city, or someone is dumb enough to always use the same phone (which is what happens in the series; they eventually switch to burner mobiles).
To be fair, they rotate the burners in the series every 2 weeks and it takes the police more than a week to get up on the new ones.
It was cool to see that it was in fact an opsec fail (the guy buying the phones all over the country got lazy and bought too many from the same shop) to break through that. Pretty realistic. Like most of the wire in fact.
Although one thing in the wire I don't understand. Pagers are really easy to intercept, anyone with a scanner (with discriminator output) can do it and could do it in those times. I did it many times during the days when pagers were still in full swing. I really don't understand why they needed a court order for that (in season 1).
> Pretty realistic. Like most of the wire in fact.
The show creator worked for years as a journalist on the crime beat in Baltimore, I expect most of the opsec seen in the series comes from real cases.
> really don't understand why they needed a court order for [wiretapping pagers]
As others said, you need it from a legal perspective rather than a technical one. This is particularly true in the US, where the "fruit of poisonous tree" doctrine is pretty strict: if your evidence was not gathered in the proper manner, it must be discarded and it invalidates any further effort based on it. In specific, wiretapping is illegal even when done by authorities, unless they've been authorized by judges - the relevant US laws were tightened up after it emerged (with Watergate) that president Nixon was eavesdropping on his political rivals.
They recently introduced pagers because they're less trackable than phones. Presumably the ones which have pagers are more important so its probably more impactful than targeting 1 or 2 percent of the regular terrorists.
They have about 100'000 members, and this attack has killed about a dozen, and injured about 2000. Only one recent shipment of pagers was affected. I don't think they are unable to respond.
Face saving. It's easier to put a PR spin on something only a few people actually saw. It's going to be hard to convince their rank-and-file this isn't a bit deal and deserving of retribution.
Why not both? Location data would be relatively easy to collect and forward, audio not so much (much higher storage and transmission throughput requirements for very low quality source data given the limitations of piezoelectric microphones and the fact that pagers are usually worn on belts).
If you're getting GPS data, collecting people's movements for a month or three probably provides 99% of what you will ever want to know. Once the patterns have been established you're into diminishing returns territory, while the risk of discovery goes up, which would neutralize the value of the explosive attack.
The strategic value of such a perfectly targeted surprise attack is massive, notwithstanding the relatively low fatality rate. Injuries are expensive and often devastating, and the psychological impact is brutal. Logistically, Hezbollah (and many other organizations, militant or not) are going to have to review and/or replace part of their communications tech. That's a massive technical disruption, a significant economic cost, and risks further exposing supply chain information. It's also going to create paranoia about many other electronic devices, poison in the food, and so on.
I'm not sure about the ethics of this. If one were certain that only Hezbollah officers were being targeted then it would be an acceptable kind of asymmetric attack through a novel vector.
However this also seems to have impacted quite a few civilians, and there is a claim (unverified so far) that a hospital just replaced all its pager equipment a couple of weeks ago and would otherwise have been impacted: https://x.com/SuppressedNws/status/1836080190855795092
If this happened in the US pursuant to one of the wars we've been involved in, we'd definitely be calling it terrorism and/or a war crime. It's a big strategic win for the Israelis in the short term but can hurt them two ways in the longer term. Hezbollah and other enemies of Israel will be significantly more motivated retaliate in some equally creative/unpredictable fashion, and non-aligned economic partners of Israel are likely to view Israeli products with renewed skepticism, hurting exports.
It would be a bit rich for us to call this a war crime, since our standard M.O. for targeted strikes --- like everybody else's --- routinely kills innocent civilians in much larger numbers than this.
The point was that the US government regularly accepts civilian casualties in trageted strikes, so it would be hypocritical for the US government to complain now.
Notably, this doesn't apply to anyone who hasn't supported such strikes in the war against terror.
From your source: "killing at least nine people and wounding around 2,800 across [Lebanon]". That's a total casualty count, and does not distinguish civilian from Hezbollah casualties.
Hezbollah itself claims 100,000 members, by which this would represent ~3% of the total force as targets of the attack.
The devices in question were ordered by, and delivered to, Hezbollah, per an NYTimes report I've just mentioned in another reply to another of your comments.
Wikipedia reports some civillian deaths, "including four healthcare workers and two children" citing NBC News, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and Associated Press:
Given the very many highly motivated eyes on this story, I'm highly confident that if there were credible reports of a higher civilian casualty rate we'd be hearing about it in spades.
It's clear that there was some broader damage, but overall the attack was highly specific to Hezbollah. Arguments that this wasn't a highly-specifically-targeted attack don't pass the credibility test.
Again, I'm not uncritical of Israel, and try to follow the many nuances of the overall situation. I also realise that it's exceptionally difficult to remain dispassionate when its you and yours who are subject to attacks, and in a conflict spanning generations.
It says thousands were injured, not that the thousands injured were civilians. In fact, it’s likely that most casualties were Hezbollah operatives.
From the first link:
“Reports from Lebanon said Hezbollah recently received a new batch of imported pagers, which were being used to share information about possible Israeli drone strikes and other attacks.”
From the second link:
“The Lebanese armed group Hezbollah said the pagers belonged to the group’s officials and blamed Israel for orchestrating what appeared to be an unusual synchronized attack on Hezbollah’s communications system.”
Based on that, and the limited effective range of the blast (as visible in videos and the fact that the injuries are consistent with a pager in a hand or a pocket), it’s likely that the majority of injuries were of Hezbollah personnel.
Please explain to me how exactly Mossad got these pagers into only Hezbollah hands. It was just a shipment of pagers that was interfered with while in transit. There were absolutely non Hezbollah that had these things. Also please explain to me how nearby innocents were protected. That's right, they weren't.
The pagers, which Hezbollah had ordered from Gold Apollo in Taiwan, had been tampered with before they reached Lebanon, according to some of the officials. Most were the company’s AR924 model, though three other Gold Apollo models were also included in the shipment.
The US would call this terrorism if it occurred in the exact same fashion to itself or allies. The hypocrisy is blindingly clear. It's hypocrisy because they don't complain. Your logic is completely backward.
1. It appears that the AUMBC referenced replaced their equipment but that had nothing to do with this and their doctors weren't impacted.
2. Your note of "...other enemies of Israel will be significantly more motivated retaliate in some equally creative/unpredictable fashion..." is strange considering that this is already the norm. Almost all (perhaps all) of the attacks against Israel have been from terrorists targeting civilians.
Given Israel's successful precision targeting of various senior Hezb members in recent months, I wonder if the pagers were initially used as such, but as suspicion mounted, and chances of an overhaul increased, they decided to hit the kill switch while they still could.
Although as as per an WSJ article: "The affected pagers were from a new shipment that the group received in recent days"
It's possible that they expected a higher kill rate. It's also possible that the kill rate will turn out to be higher after the consequences of injuries have time to play out.
> I would imagine the rewards of silent surveillance (tracking, audio) would be of much higher value than this kind of attack where 3 out of 1000s targets were killed.
The reason they were using pagers, as opposed to phones, was to avoid exactly this kind of potential attack.
Pagers are (typically) a broadcast technology, the pager has no transmission capability. A page is broadcast from every tower, it has no idea where the receiver is. A targeted page is done by the receiver filtering out and ignoring pages that it isn't the recipient for (eavesdropping all pages is trivial).
The pager device is simple, it doesn't contain a GPS or have any concept of it's own location. No microphone or audio capability, very little processing capability. And adding such capability with something like a bug would be reasonably apparent to anyone opening one up and inspecting it.
How did they make sure a large percentage ended up in the hands of the targets? Seems like this could hit a lot of random people, just anybody using pagers. Unless they had way to target certain customers.
I think you're assuming that all pagers of this model were being sent out like this. That's unlikely.
Much more likely is they compromised someone in Hezbollah that was doing the ordering, or the distributor/vendor they ordered from, modified a couple thousand devices and sent them pretty much directly to their enemy, and only their enemy, to distribute among themselves. Then waited a bit, and set them off.
True but so can explosives. Clearly they were not competent.
Radio signals can be detected of course but it's possible to mitigate that a lot by only doing that at specific times and locations, or on request. And send the data out in batch. Ideally while you have the subject under observation so you know they're not monitoring for signals.
The same way Volkswagen hid their engine manipulation from tests by recognising the test and adjusting parameters.
Well, slightly off topic, but in the case of Volkswagen, everybody knew they (and other car companies) were doing it for at least a decade before the scandal blew up : car magazines were even publishing articles about it !
There are several sources online claiming the model used is the Gold Apollo Rugged Pager AR924. This pager is made in Taiwan, a country that has close ties with Israel and it's most important ally USA. Just a week ago Taiwan's Foreign Minister Lin Chia-Lung openly emphasized the critical importance of intelligence sharing and technology cooperation with Israel.
It was reported in Turkish news (allegedly via IRGC on X) that pagers are all Motorola branded, and supposedly at least include the Motorola LX-2 model.[1][2] However, the provided image of a Motorola LX-2 is also the first image on the Wikipedia English page for pagers.
There is also a photo circulating of a destroyed pager[3] which has visible writing "Distri: GOLD" and "Model: AP" (or "AR"). This has been matched to the Gold Apollo AR-924 model pager that is manufactured in Taiwan and is not a Motorola pager.[4][5][6][etc][7][8][9]
Correction after more information has become available:
The Gold Apollo AR-924 model pager is reported to have been manufactured under license by Budapest-based company "BAC Consulting KFT", but the head of this company denies manufacturing the devices and instead described themselves as an intermediary, without providing further information. The Taiwanese company which allowed these devices to be manufactured under license also reported receiving strange remittances from BAC via banking systems in the Middle East (not Hungary).[1]
"Taiwan has no record of Gold Apollo pages being shipped to Lebanon or the Middle East"
"Gold Apollo founder and chairperson Hsu Ching-kuang told reporters on Wednesday that his firm had signed a contract with a European distributor to use the Gold Apollo brand. Hsu said the distributor, which he did not name, established a relationship with Gold Apollo about three years ago."
You are not thinking past the first point. Considering what these people have been doing lately, even if you are currently on their good side, what happens when you’re not or don’t want to serve them anymore? Think places like India and Brazil may be rethinking their supply chains right now?
Any .org should be considering the risk of allowing devices unfettered into onto their businesses premesis which could be used to trigger remote explosions, allies and enemies.
95g, USB-C rechargeable up to 85 days of operation, separate control and charging boards, multiple replaceable components for easy maintenance.
Probably lots of ways to free up space, most notably by using a smaller battery but with a few resources you could probably combine the boards and probably not even be obvious ("generation 2, less expensive to produce"). With state-actor level resources new boards would be easy as would something concealed within a LiPo battery.
I wonder, if these devices could be suspect, why don't they order these cheap
Chinese GSM modules. You can't hide explosives in those.
Also, afaik all GSM modules broadcast their IMEI numbers over the network. Explosives or not, I'm sure they can all be tracked and triangulated, since they talk to the towers. I don't think these things are secure anyways.
Pagers are truly receive only. A pager is effectively a pocket FM radio fixed to one station, that vibrates when a relevant message was digitally read aloud on the radio.
GSM on the other hand is cellular and bidirectional so triangulation problem applies.
That would make sense, since there's no such thing as a one-way GSM device. GSM towers (cells) need to keep track of which devices are in their vicinity and do smooth handovers to neighboring towers.
I'm not sure how the protocol you mentioned works, but I'd imagine it still needs some info about the whereabouts of the receiver to route the messages to him.
A Russian helicopter pilot had his family escape Russia, stole a helicopter, fled to Ukraine with it and cashed out on the bounty money offered. Then he was found and assassinated in Spain by the FSB. We are living in interesting times.
> Then he was found and assassinated in Spain by the FSB.
And that only because he seems to have lost his sense of self-preservation and basically lived his life in the open, in a Spanish town full of Russian ex-pats. And scoffed at the idea that he'd be safer in Ukraine.
Apparently the worst mistake was contacting his former girlfriend in Russia:
>Exactly how the killers found him has not been established, though two senior Ukrainian officials said he had reached out to a former girlfriend, still in Russia, and invited her to come see him in Spain.
>“This was a grave mistake,” one of the officials said.
Questionable opsec is almost always the culprit. Even all these online black markets, it wasn’t some sophisticated operation to catch them. Many times, they use the same username on another website and now there’s a link. Hell, one of them used to send email verification for their black market using their personal email.
It doesn’t just stop there. A 49ers wide receiver got shot a couple weeks back because he posted on Instagram about buying a Rolex and he was lucky to survive. That’s also questionable opsec.
You should check out any of the books written by Ben Macintyre, especially "The Spy and the Traitor". It turns out a lot of spy novels aren't that far off from reality.
That does sound like spy novel stuff but it seems plausible enough? Dude was turned, and he wanted money and an escape to somewhere safe in exchange for cooperation.
Exactly. Snowball's chance anyone could get a series of capacitors and transistor to do too much more than "let the smoke out," even with the largest influx of EM energy. Most batteries give pretty big warnings before they do anything close to explode, making this a pretty obvious 'attack' vector they utilized.
I'm also happy to offer political opinions for anyone that wants to hear ;)
Given history, given adversary, given all facts known thats practically sure. Usually Mosad doesn't say anything so we won't get much more anytime soon.
There will be few movies and documentaries about this for sure once things calm down a bit. I presume they used pagers instead of phones to not be so easily trackable via google/apple software and hardware?
A pager is passive receiver only. It never transmits. So you can't track it. That allows an operative to get to a secure line or obtain a burner device.
Whoever did this just killed that as an information channel as both the devices and the network are now compromised.
>Whoever did this just killed that as an information channel as both the devices and the network are now compromised.
This is also true for Hezbollah. They must now distrust their own network, equipment and procurement channels. The reshuffling resulting from the casualties will make the organization less effective, at least temporarily, thus delaying any attack plans and allowing moles to rise through the ranks.
You might as well be arguing all cell phones are iPhones, because here's a model which is an iPhone. Sure, some are two-way pagers and do transmit, but most aren't.
Loads of pagers are passive, receive-only devices. There's a reason why there's a common distinction between "pager" and "two-way pager".
Until we know the attack vector, I wouldn't say the network is compromised. Perhaps a specific message was used to detonate, that wouldn't require compromising the network. Perhaps there was a separate radio that wasn't using the pager network at all.
It's pretty insane to see remote detonation technology
used and implemented in 1996, considering cell phones looked like Nokia bricks and the RF hardware needed to implement this needs to fit in a pretty tight space in the phone.
Its one thing to figure out how to wire the vibrator in a phone into an external explosive activation circuit.
Its a whole other thing to do a supply chain intercept on an entire factory run of pagers, build a difficult to detect explosive into them, get them into the hands of your enemies, and remotely trigger them over infrastructure you don't directly control.
This is an incredible level of execution. And, presumably, the IDF or some attached intelligence agency demonstrating how deeply they own their adversary's networks.
I'm not sure they necessarily need to deeply own their adversary's networks. I'd be impressed if Lebanese pager tech has any serious kind of encryption, for example. And we're already accepting at face value that they sabotaged the devices, so it's possible this was done with a separate RF signal than their own cellular network, even if it is locked down.
But yes, the supply chain sabotaging is certainly impressive.
You probably need firmware and some major component modification, such as a display or battery, but not more than this, to pull it off. So at a minimum, two components, or perhaps one smart component such as a display.
It seems the model was the AP-900, not the AR-924, which used alkaline (ie removable) batteries, so a new theory is an EFP (explosively formed penetrator) manufactured into the device.
It appears the devices do not function on cell phone networks but instead on internal radio networks such as those used within industrial or medical settings.
Best guess is the displays because:
1) there is enough room for the EFP,
2) you could modify the component to trigger itself, meaning it doesn’t need coordination between any other parts of the device
3) there are a lot of injuries to the face reported — with a display you could trip on button push without needing access to the button, when people tend to be looking right at the EFP
4) in the videos the explosions look very directional
If an entire shipment was intercepted and modified, how many other pagers are out there? How many non-targeted persons are walking around with a bomb in their pocket?
I watched a video of one of these exploding in the pocket of someone at a grocery store with someone standing directly next to him, so close they were rubbing shoulders, and the bystander was fine. No doubt there were many dozens of civilian casualties, but if the numbers net out the way you'd expect they would (ie: people carrying these pagers, which link to Hezbollah's own communications network --- they run their own phone company --- are overwhelmingly Hezbollah operatives) this is going to pencil out as one of the most surgical attacks of all time.
Every military strike in modern warfare will involve someone in some sense not worrying about innocent people getting hurt. This isn't Agincourt. Wars happen in cities now.
There are too many threads and this is too complicated a topic for a technology forum website so I’m not going to weigh in everywhere.
But you yourself recognize that a) Hezbollah is a de facto government, not just a military or terrorist organization and that b) its folly to do some sort of algebra on casualties in these conflicts and intent is what matters.
It’s hard to come up with a plausible intent for a strike that injured 2700 people, with only the weakest of targeting mechanisms across a population that ranges the gamut of occupations, other than terrorism.
We would certainly view it as such if Hezbollah blew up 2700 phones of the Israeli government and military.
That depends on who the 2700 people are, right? If it's 2700 random people, I agree. If it's 2600 Hezbollah operatives, not so much. If Hezbollah managed to surgically strike 2600 IDF soldiers, injuring and killing an additional 100 bystanders, I promise you I would offer the same analysis.
I'm measuring this against the standard of military operations conducted by western countries, the state of the art of which is Hellfire missiles fired into cars and apartment buildings.
I'm trying to be hedge-y as I write this stuff. We could absolutely learn things that would change my take on this!
And yet it took 5 hours for IDF to respond to Hamas breaching their border - where it only takes a maximum of 45 minutes via helicopter to get to any point along the Israel-Palestine border?
Is there any technology possible to help people more seriously see incongruences for what they are, technology to help prevent people from propaganda - or is that primarily simply a systems control issue - education system, information system, etc - that would be party to a censorship-suppression narrative control and distraction apparatus?
Hamas coordinated strikes against Israeli c4i to hinder the IDF response to the invasion. This is trivially verifiable. Not all of Hamas are barely-educated fighters capable of little more than being pointed at innocents and told to kill.
Most sophisticated-best funded military in the world doesn't have automatic alert systems in place, redundancies, etc, eh?
You probably also don't believe that the Hannibal Directive was deployed on Oct. 7th as well, even though Israel is known to have done the same as early as 1986.
P.S. There are IDF intelligence agents who are whistleblowers that say that this had to have been allowed.
I think the planners of the operation weren't your average terrorist: They outmatched the border barriers' design basis threat, they knew the default Israeli response and targeted critical c4i nodes to hinder it, and they had a bit of luck and a lot of audacity. Those added up to a black day for Israel.
How much confirmation bias do you think you're leaning into, in order to not have to swallow the equally, if not more likely case, that the IDF was ordered or purposefully delayed in their response by higher ups?
And about the Hannibal Directive you didn't respond? We can assume too then, since you like assumptions, that they were deployed to kill their own citizens as well - right?
Im assuming you’re saying they were looking for a casus belli. They well might have, but surely the assailants knew this was a likely consequence. Why did they proceed to breach the border if they didn’t want to trigger a war?
You do know this so-called war didn't start on Oct. 7th, right?
This world needs to be mandated to watch all of the actual evidence, and just propaganda by those who mostly control the mainstream-social media channels.
These pagers were 100% a supply chain attack. Intercepted and modified with small explosives embedded in them or swapped the entire shipment out with ones with a small explosives in them.
There is no possibility these explosions are from battery overloads via an exploit or firmware hack.
There's still the question of how the explosive capsule would have been triggered. It couldn't just explode at the first incoming call. There must be more to that.
The microcontrollers inside the pagers probably have a spare GPIO pin, so they'd just have to modify the software and attach the detonating electronics to that gpio pin.
Since i'm supposedly "posting too fast", to answer the post below:
> Just curious, is it possible to program the pins so that it triggers by wireless or satellite command? With that scale I don't think wireless is possible though.
Technically it is, but requires additional electronics and antennas. It's much easier to just use the existing pager network and trigger when some specific message (or pager code) is detected. Paging networks are simple to implement.
It seems pretty plausible that the actual supply chain attack here would have been Israel subbing out whole shipping crates of pagers for sabotaged devices Israel manufactured itself, which would allow for arbitrary complex designs.
Just curious, is it possible to program the pins so that it triggers by wireless or satellite command? With that scale I don't think wireless is possible though.
the pager is already wireless. So adding functionality to trigger wirelessly (over the phone network) is trivial. And it can trigger only with a special message.
My best guess is explosively formed penetrator in the display.
I don’t think wholesale replacement of the pagers was likely to work for a number of reasons.
They had to go one step up the supply chain.
The EFP display could be set to trigger on a certain message, or even the clearing of a certain message, which in devices without said display would do nothing.
The display is most likely to be pointed at the user’s face, or opposed to their waistline (EFPs sort of fire both ways but in one axis.
The battery, if it were a cylinder as would be likely, would fire tangentially, likely not hitting much.
A prismatic battery would make a good place for an EFP but difficult to interface with and likely requires a second compromised component.
Theory: A prismatic battery with an explosive core and an electronic fuse swapped to trigger the explosive instead of disconnect the battery. Firmware change to short the battery. No visible signs of tampering even in iFixit like conditions.
Would someone be able to make one that worked but weighed eg five grams, then fill the rest with explosive? Would anyone be able to discern that the back of the glass wasn’t liquid crystal but explosive, especially as they are usually taped over?
Nothing, they aren’t looking for 2”x1” sheets of copper within electronic devices, and presumably the thin layer of explosives would be sealed and washed.
How do you mean? I am trying to understand what you're saying, it seems you mean that people on HN only _think_ they understand how battery technology works saying this is impossible, but in reality they have no idea, and it's trivial to make an explosive device like out of pager batteries?
Simple logic and science. Batteries do not cause forceful explosions like we've seen today. These pagers were intercepted and implanted with explosives (or entire load swapped with pre-made malicious ones) and then allowed to continue on to their destination. Thus I can say with 100% confidence that this was a supply chain attack.
I bet lots of people with that model of pager are now ripping them open to check for explosives. If we don't see pictures of unexploded ones, then I'd guess they were all triggered, and the only ones we might see are devices that were turned off at the time.
> make the device exagerte some existing functionality to a point where it caused a malfunction? Thoughts on this?
I'm actually astounded by the things that must have been in place to make this attack even plausible, let alone viable. At the same time, the ramifications are sobering. Here's where my head is:
- Hezbollah failed to inspect electronics that, if tampered with, could have lead to some kind of intel breach. That or the explosive modifications were indistinguishable from the real thing.
- Operatives knew what pager numbers were in use by Hezbollah, perhaps exclusively to the rest of the population.
From there I have three possible explanations for how this may have been executed:
1. Many shipments of such pagers bound for Hezbollah in Lebanon and other places in the region, were identified, intercepted, modified, and sent on their way with minimal delay. You probably don't get many opportunities like this (how often do you replace a pager?), so this is really quite a hat-trick.
2. Or: there are many more pagers out there with a very dangerous vulnerability on board, with only a special pager sequence that stands between the user and sudden death. This suggests simply infiltrating the manufacturer instead. This also has much more favorable lead times and can leverage the manufacturer's resources to that end.
3. Or: There's a pager manufacturer out there with gob-smackingly bad engineering and software on completely stock units, which operatives simply exploited to (sub)lethal effect.
You don't have to intercept a shipment and tamper at large scale with incredible speed if you're posing as the supplier.
That's what I believe happened. Specially likely if you consider that terrorist orgs are not exactly putting RFPs or doing large orders at legit vendors. That gives you the chance to pose as a helpful supplier that operates on the down low and accepts cash on delivery, etc.
This is where it gets confusing. We all remember the pagers running on cellular/2G networks but it seems that nowadays most pagers are HF devices and mostly broadcast receivers. Quite unclear which one are involved.
You're right. It existed and had a short span of life/fame in some countries but that is all. Most pagers were on their own protocol/frequency. the protocol seems to be mostly the same theses days: POCSAG
Many commenters here also assumed like I did it was some cellular/SIM devices but it wasn't that much widespread.
>I already wonder if this was anything that was planted in the devices perviously
That seems to be the case with almost complete certainty. They said it was a new batch of pagers that the targets/victims/whatever you choose to call them received in the last few months.
>The pagers that detonated were the latest model brought in by Hezbollah in recent months, three security sources said.
> If we try to do what we are best at here at HN, let’s focus the discussion on the technical aspects of it.
Technical? Yes it's interesting but you are missing the biggest part here: how do you convince such a huge organization to switch so many devices?
This human engineering is the really interesting part here.
Israel has an intelligence agency that's generally recognized to be quite competent. I'm sure it would have taken them approximately 5 minutes to learn from their many spies that a new form of communications is being used.
The IRGC itself has clearly and spectacularly infiltrated; read the details of the Haniyeh attack. So, yeah, at this point I don't think anyone in the IRGC network can trust anybody else. The messaging here is pretty intense.
Theoretically, pagers are simpler devices, meaning it would be much easier in principle to analyse both hardware and software to check for issues, unlike a mainstream phone OS which has a bigger software attack area and can have at least some zero day attacks known to a state level actor like Israel.
Although, if it really was explosive inside the pagers it seems Hezbollah didn't do this.
I mean Israel is behind Pegasus, so it's not exactly a secret that they can get into any cellphone. Israel didn't need to infiltrate Hezbollah, they just needed publicity.
Exactly.
But this buyer is not a regular buyer, he is not getting a tracking number and refreshing some random website to see where it's shipment is.
The buyer must have been with the goods from a point before it reached its destinated country.
There are so many plays that had to play here in order to orcestrate this.
Should make a really good heist movie, just with a different prize at the end.
You find where the pagers are coming from. They probably had a supply chain going to cycle through pagers. 2,700 pagers being replaced regularly is an easy target.
My hunch is that IL intelligence bought some 3,000 - 4,000 pagers of the same models, fixed them with explosives and trigger systems, and swapped them with the package sent to Hez in the middle of transport or (probably) in the Lebanon distribution center.
So they needed to know: which company manufactured those pagers; which models are sent to Hez; when they were in transport and arrived at the distribution center; which packages went to Hez operatives, and much more information.
BTW rumors says the pagers were manufactured by a Taiwanese company, not confirmed though but some of my friends were able to read from the pictures that show what was left of the pagers.
If the footage on Twitter is legit, then there was a small detonation, with a bang, not a burning battery with a 'whoosh' and flames. Which indicates that the internals of the pager had been replaced with something rather more explosive than a lithium battery.
Lithium ion batteries in devices are sandwiched layers enclosed in a kind of 'pouch', right? So what if you manufactured one of these that looked identical to the normal battery, but only had half a battery inside, and the rest of it was plastic explosive. Maybe put a tiny chip in there that, when a particular pattern of current draw happens, fires a detonator. Then, some firmware hack in the device proper that responds to some event and actuates that current draw pattern. It wouldn't even look suspicious if you opened it up.
That's an interesting idea, and it wouldn't even need a firmware hack... a real time clock circuit with a specific date/time to detonate would be simpler and easier to coordinate simultaneous detonation.
How much stuff is there to fuck with in a standard, untampered-with pager? Seems unlikely this was pure cyber (and some novel battery hack). And if you need supply chain interception to carry out the attack in the first place, why wouldn't you insert explosives? There's a history of these kinds of attacks.
Yeah, agreed. Also agreeing with the sibling posters that the videos that emerge look nothing like batteries catching fire but rather like actual detonations. Nothing an untampered pager should be able to do.
Shaped charge hidden in the battery casing. Sounds like batteries heated up which is consistent with one method that shaped charges could be detonated. No extra wires needed going into the battery (better concealment).
This is unlikely to be a shaped charge, there is not enough space. High explosives are inherently directional depending on the geometry of the explosive and point of detonation. As a practical matter of fitting explosives into a pager, I would expect most of the explosion to be directed perpendicular to the face of the pager in both directions. In almost all cases, carrying or using the pager would put the person directly on the main axis.
You might prefer a shaped charge to reduce the likelihood of injuring bystanders and to ensure that what little explosive you can fit in there can kill whoever is using it.
Watching the grocery store security video, I think a multi-directional shaped charge is plausible with pressure evident in two directions. But very hard to draw any conclusions.
Yeah, everyone talking about shaped charges or (micro-) explosively formed penetrators seems to overlook the fact that, compared to just a regular bomb, they'd be less strictly effective for situations where you can't control the alignment of the charge to the target.
Don't overthink it - just a bit of RDX and a detonator does wonders.
Most high explosives need a high impact detonation source. You can literally set C4 on fire and it wont explode. It needs high temperature and pressure. And I do not think the 120F that a "hot" battery could get to reliably could trigger a high explosive in a way that wouldn't accidentally trigger beforehand. The middle east is a warm place.
Compared to Stuxnet it's also a first where this kind of attack was done at scale. Regardless of the particular target it's of course the question whether this is a desirable practice in cyber warfare. For such a new field there are very few ethical guidelines yet, like we do have for more conventional warfare.
Unlike stuxnet, this attack had a lot of non-hezbolah civilian casualties. It’s "targeted" in a sense, but not really much more targeted than a drive-by assassination attempt. Anybody close to these people could have sustained serious injury, and there are reports of children injured and dead. We’ll have to wait for details to emerge.
Politically, this is the sort of action that invites comparison to conventional terrorism. It also begs the question of why Hezbollah or other actors shouldn’t try a similar attack against civilian targets. It’s almost like a chemical or biological attack, which most countries shy away from because it’s so hard to defend against (a big part of why it’s illegal). No country can perfectly safeguard its supply chain from intentional sabotage.
I’m afraid that the entire world is a little bit less safe after this move. Maybe Israel is goading Hezbollah into all-out war, who knows, but this affects all of us.
For a non-infantry massed attack on a military asset, the ratio of military to civilian casualties here is probably going to end up being unprecedented in the history of modern warfare; this will probably end up being an extraordinarily surgical attack by any military standard. Civilians are routinely killed in targeted strikes, because targeted strikes are almost always conducted by air. This attack may end up being distinguished by how few civilians were harmed.
Neither Israel nor Hezbollah is mobilized for all-out war here. Hezbollah is depleted from its disastrous efforts in Syria; Israel is fully committed to combat operations in Gaza. The north of Israel has been evacuated for months because of indiscriminate rocket attacks from Hezbollah. Hezbollah is an arm of the IRGC, which is more or less at open war with Israel. If either side could have launched an all-out assault (or, I mean, a more conventional all-out assault than this one), they would have done so already.
> Hezbollah is depleted from its disastrous efforts in Syria
From what I understand this is inaccurate. Prior to the events of today, Hezbollah moral is very high and they have plenty of armaments from Iran - everything from small arms and uniforms to long-range rockets and drones. In fact, they even produce a very nice local drone made from foam and duct tape - literally.
They lost double digit percentages of their fighting forces, with several thousand additional casualties in non-Hezbollah Lebanese military and paramilitary forces. I'm sure they can duct tape drones together or whatnot, but there are reasons Hezbollah has --- quite notably at this point! lots of stories written! --- not escalated in the south even as the conflict between Iran and Israel heats up.
> Hezbollah is depleted from its disastrous efforts in Syria;
There is an awful lot of reporting stating the opposite of this, and I haven't really seen anything credible questioning the fact that Hezbollah has many thousands of missiles and rockets at the ready, along with a sizable number of competent fighters. In fact, the threat from Hezbollah is widely considered one of the largest deterrents Iran has against a direct attack from Israel.
Despite their potential to harm Israel, the group would almost certainly lose an all out war against the IDF. Many if not most of the members would be killed in such a conflict and Lebanon would be plunged into a war zone. So it's easy to see why Hezbollah would be hesitant to get into a full scale war, despite their combat potential.
Since 10/7 a number of top Israeli officials have advocated for a preemptive assault on Hezbollah. So far they have lost the argument but it still could conceivably happen at any time. Eliminating the looming threat and allowing civilians to return to the north are compelling reasons, but the risk of heavy losses and getting bogged down into another quagmire in Lebanon are serious concerns.
> Unlike stuxnet, this attack had a lot of non-hezbolah civilian casualties. It’s "targeted" in a sense, but not really much more targeted than a drive-by assassination attempt.
You should know that Hezbollah recently shot a rocket at an Israeli playground, 12 or 13 children were killed. The chance of a few civilians being injured is calculated against preventing the enemy from dropping another rocket on another playground.
I read the news in Arabic, there are credible reports of an 8 year old girl being killed in this attack. I haven't seen that yet in English language news. That is a horrible price to pay. But it is part of a calculated risk that, as per those same news sources, killed between 10 to 12 Hezbollah operatives and injured 2700 more.
It's implausible that any "civilian" company was involved. Pretty much all companies involved in the Iranian infrastructure, especially covert nuclear projects, are directly or indirectly owned by IRGC.
That's a good summary of the dangers of normalizing the actions that previously were the domain of only terrorists. The world works because most countries and people rejected amoral results-based reasoning and considered such actions in the light of another dimension: morality. It's difficult to define, but there was some sort of consensus. How long those agreements, formal and simply normative, will last remains to be seen. I do not look forward to their further erosion.
It does not make a whole lot of sense to distinguish the explosives packed into the warhead of an AGM-114 Hellfire missile from those of an explosive vest or a compromised pager. What distinguishes terrorism from military action is target selection, not weapons choice.
I cannot see any comment in the immediate sub-thread making a distinction between explosives per se?
Certainly to me I don't see the difference between explosives supplied in a missile produced with US tax-subsidies to arms profiteers or explosives produced by someone else. Except that in the first case US voters have some control over the supply -- not much, but some.
The GP comment is clearly talking about the lack of precision or targeting. Here you may have a point if we consider absolute quantities instead of some relative measurement: a US-taxpayer-supplied-with-profits-to-a-private-company Hellfire missile fired into a refugee camp full of women and children might kill 10 obviously-innocent people for 1 presumed-to-be-a-terrorist-without-any-sort-of-trial person; whereas a pager bomb exploding might blow up the we-dont-know-yet-anything-but-he-was-in-Hezbollah and his ten-year old daughter.
If I were a moral simpleton I might argue that the Hellfire missile murders were worse than the pager murders.
But what do I know? After all hundreds of years of protocols and treaties and norms about this sort of thing are probably just old and in need of being re-envisioned by some clever code jockey.
Do you honestly believe that "protocols and treaties" established "hundreds of years" ago have any bearing on modern conflict? Do you have any arguments that would be persuasive to those of us who believe them to be more or less irrelevant since the Franco-Prussian War? I'm an American. We firebombed Dresden and Tokyo, then got up the next day and made breakfast. Pick another major combatant nationality anywhere on the globe, and I'll tell you a similar story.
By the standards of modern warfare, what happened today was probably weirdly humane.
I wonder what modern humane outcome plays out to a tiny nation state surrounded by arabs they're engaged in these kind of hostilities with. It seems this balance depends on large imbalanced external support, which will be called into question more and more as the USA loses global grip.
It was astonishingly humane especially considering how effective it was:
1.) Communication network completely destroyed (anyone with a working pager in Lebanon has thrown it in the garbage).
2.) Most targets, while severely injured and even blinded, are still alive - I'm sure their families prefer this to them being dead.
3.) If you are an enemy of Israel, what can you even do now? You cannot assume your phones or your furniture or even your cat is safe. Any one of these things could detonate and kill or maim you at any time. And you can't trust anyone in your organization either.
I deplore zionism, but that doesn't change how humane and effective and incredibly precise this attack was. Probably its humane-ness was not particularly on purpose, and was more a side-effect of the constraints they were working with (hiding explosives in a small pager while still maintaining its correct operation), but that doesn't take away from how much better this is for all the casualties compared to, for example, Hamas casualties in Gaza.
The peace of Westfalia established state sovereignity. That is a cornerstone of international relations, and when it is breached it is usually condemned.
> peace of Westfalia established state sovereignity. That is a cornerstone of international relations
The Westphalian treaties gave France, Sweden and later Russia the explicit right to intercede (i.e. invade) to guarantee the Imperial constitution [1]. (Westphalia was concerned with the Holy Roman Empire.)
Historically there has never been any such moral consensus in the Middle East. It's been a continuous series of wars, massacres, and terrorism going back millennia — since long before Hezbollah or the modern state of Israel even existed.
It was successful clearly, not disagreeing with that. So were Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My point was more that this is a truly significant line that has been crossed for the first time by a major military at this scale. People comparing this to isolated assassinations with booby trapped phones, or to wiretapping and other surveillance, are massively downplaying this.
Hezbollah already attacks civilians indiscriminately for one. Second, "won't someone think of the children" is a tired argument. Hate to be that guy - but maybe this will be a lesson on allowing these terrorists to roam your streets. Avoiding civilian death in a warzone is an impossibility. Limiting it is all you can do. Knowing that, this was an absolutely amazing job at target selection. Of all methods of target selection this is probably the most precise you can get with the exception of snipers, AGM-114-R9X, etc. The psychological damage from this attack alone is probably worth more than any other method. Hezbollah will be crippled at least temporarily and likely afraid to use any technology they don't control the supply chain for.
> which most countries shy away from because it’s so hard to defend against
This is not why. It's shied away from because it's extremely difficult to target effectively without causing mass unwanted causalities and the associated killing mechanism is considered cruel and unusual. "Being hard to defend against" is exactly something factored in with weapons. Why would I want to use a weapon that is easy to defend against? If that's the case, the US would march with clubs and bows, you know, "to make things fair".
People like Einstein and Oppenheimer would disagree. We are humans first and not tech workers, the best we can do is to try prevent humans tragedies unfolding everyday.
My other thought is that these probably came from the Iranian military, and it’s quite possible the Iranian military puts explosives in them so they can remotely detonate one that falls into enemy hands. And that Isreal simply found out about this and managed to figure out how to activate that.
This is reaching. How would this mechanism even work? If the enemy has control of a communications device then (1) they've had it and you didn't know for some time and (2) they already know how it works. There's no benefit to putting a self-destruct mechanism into such a thing, since if you know it's compromised then you just stop messaging it.
The self-destruct is pointless, because you can't even verify that it was successful and you have no actual technology to protect (unlike say, US military drones which self-destruct to protect technological details of their construction - and the US would still prefer to commit a mission to bombing a crash site to be sure if they can).
Basically you answer your own problem: the most likely outcome of a self-destruct mechanism is that it goes off accidentally against your own forces, or gets exploited - while it would deliver no actual benefit to you.
Which is to say: when analyzing an adversaries likely actions you don't start by assuming they're stupid or irrational (which is different from whether or not their overall goals might be stupid or irrational).
Militaries around the world have robust networks to infiltrate supply chains for sabotage. It’s kind of a basic part of the whole intelligence covert and clandestine operations capabilities expected of a “first world” nation.
Israel is one of the better countries at doing this undetected so, no surprises here.
If it's basically a remotely controlled IED via a public communication network, then there's nothing technically interesting about that, really.
But the aspect of some supposedly civilized state staging a mass terror attack via a remotely controlled IEDs, putting suddenly thousands of people, many of them civilians (yes, Hezballah are also civilians, because they're a major political party in Lebanon) into hospital, killing ~10, critically infuring ~200, is way more interesting.
You can generate many questions about that aspect. Like the whole why on both strategic and tactical levels? How does this fit with the international law? Why are people kinda chill about this?
Re the response below: No proof of specific targeting of combatants, yet. No proof of any attempt to not affect bystanders, etc. Yet, there are videos of bombs exploding while people are shopping with children around, etc. Pretty much indiscriminate.
Definitely not battery burnings: https://t.me/hamza20300/293409 these are the scale/type of injuries that this caused. (Two children there just in this single scene in one hospital, so beware.)
No, a mass terror attack would indiscriminately target victims. This is almost entirely opposite -- an organization widely recognized as a terrorist group (1) is narrowly targeted.
Also because one would have to weigh the alternative.
Imagine Israel declared an old fashioned war against Lebanon as response to the missile strikes originated from its territory.
I think the number of civilian casualties of a conventional "legal" war would be much much higher than the collateral damage of this operation.
Now, does that make it "right"? To me war is horror and is to avoid at all cost. Is a smaller horror a cost one's willing to pay to avoid a bigger horror? Hard to say. But I think it's still important to at least try to see things in a broader context otherwise we may never understand why people on the ground make the choices they do.
I find it extremely unlikely that this was done with the native capabilities and equipment in the devices. It would be extremely interesting if it were. A far simpler explanation would be explosives implanted en-route.
The more interesting question is whether any sort of remote-detonate capability was involved, or this was just timed explosives.
If you look at something like this [1], then the obvious way to do this is to replace one of the NiMH batteries with a lithium cell providing the full output voltage, and replace the other cell with the explosive payload.
A basic timer set them off, and installation would be straightforward. You could probably even arrange this to not be distinguishable on X-Ray by playing with the structure of the explosive device so it would look like a battery.
Getting a little fancier, setting your timer up so the pager "waits for a page" by current draw (from say, the buzzer motor) would be a way to try and ensure the user was holding it near their face before it went off.
What's missing in the current reporting is whether this was simultaneous, keyed to a page, or what have you.
The implications of weaponising a lithium battery, which seems like what was done, are potentially really significant.
Lithium batteries are everywhere, most of them significantly larger than the one in a small pager. This includes secure environments like military/intelligence facilities and aircraft.
Proof that a lithium battery pack can be weaponised as a bomb, in a way that avoids easy detection, should be a significant concern to anyone who tries to maintain the security of those spaces.
For manufactured cells, integrated safety devices would likely preclude such a fault.
People say they have seen cells explode, but don't realize those are probably highly engineered failure modes (the cells are/need to be specifically designed not to explode).
It's why people are burned by consumer product battery fires, and die from fire, but I think death from explosion of consumer products is rarer.
I don’t think there’s anything in a standard pager to cause an explosion large enough to injure ~3000 people. This is almost certainly an explosive added to them at some point.
Has anyone find the FCC ID or manual on the AR924 Rugged pager? CNN mentions that they sold 220,000 units world wide, including the US. And there's nothing about the thing for both FCC and CE.
Having seen some of the aftermath I find it extremely hard to believe this was the result of overloading batteries. It looks like small grenades exploded in their hands. If lithium batteries can indeed explode like this I would suspect no one would ever carry one again after this. They should certainly be illegal to have on planes for example.
There is no way an unaltered pager has enough potential to explode in any way that could be harmful using a software-based exploit. Unless somehow the BMS (even if there was one) allowed you to short the battery with software, which seems really stupid to design into such a system.
I suspect supply-chain attack (probably started some time ago), combined with a pager signal software hack.
I really hope that they didn't figure out a way to make unmodified kit explode, because it would only be a matter of time, before our devices were blowing up everywhere, as folks do it for the lulz.
I agree on both points and it's worth noting the cell phone in everyone's pocket has a lot more battery in it than a pager does.
IF this was truly done to unmodified pagers, then we ALL probably need to reconsider how we use and carry our phones and what the mAh rating on our batteries implies in the context of a similar attack.
> they didn't figure out a way to make unmodified kit explode
I don’t think so no, just observing the aftermath of each shows that it was modified. Also, assuming it was unmodified way, it will go both ways so I doubt it.
> let’s focus the discussion on the technical aspects of it.
The headline chosen here is already biased: "Dozens of _Hezbollah members_ [..]"
Anyone following this closely can see that plenty other title choices could be used. There are headlines that would be credibly neutral, headlines that favor the IDF, and headlines that favor Hezbollah. HN is currently choosing to go with a non-neutral, non-technical headline for this story. Maybe we should make the headline neutral as well before telling the commenters to focus solely on the technicals?
If you don't understand what I'm referring to, look at some of the downvoted and hidden comments here.
Honestly struggling to comprehend how this one isn't neutral.
As far as we know this was a supply-chain attack specifically on military pagers actively used by Hezbollah, and (right now) it looks like most injured are in fact Hezbollah members (which makes sense, since no one else has any reason to carry such a pager). (With some sad and unfortunate exceptions.)
After I posted my comment the title was updated to be a little bit more neutral.
The previous headline was emphasizing a little too strongly the assumption that this attack was against Hezbollah only, and as you mention there are "exceptions", meaning, civilians and non-militants (including children) were killed and injured.
EDIT: in other words, the headline is/was written with the assumption that whoever was attacked was a member of Hezbollah, but this isn't true.
we could also talk about the technical aspects of the nazi gas chambers, but maybe its only human if first we condemn this for what it is, a war crime. i for one am sick of the normalization of it
Of course we can read anything we want from the silence, as it’s unlike we’re getting any details about it. Anything in the range of “of course they did, we’re talking about a civilized country” to “of course they didn’t, how could they”.
Do you have a reference for that? And does it explain how Israel's assassins were sure none of the pagers weren't resold, nor given away, nor that someone's kid was playing with it?
Hezbollah also has a massive social services wing, operating hospitals, schools, etc. I'd keep that in mind when hitching my wagon to this line of thinking.
Nothing in the linked article backs up the implication that only members of Helbollah’s militant wing had these.
It did, however, mention that an 8 year old girl was killed by one of them. Which is a foreseeable consequence of widely distributing a bunch of bombs and then detonating them without regard for who’s nearby.
Some sources are saying that some medics have been victims. Pagers are apparently a very useful resource for emergencies/medics (see motorola website).
"Enough" to meet what criteria? A couple foot blast on handheld device on a military personnel is brain surgery in comparison to typical rockets with accuracy and blast radii measured in double digit meters
Hezbollah operates a parallel telecommunications network. They are not a terrorist group so much as the de facto government of Lebanon and a parallel armed forces. It is unlikely that anyone unaffiliated with Hezbollah could have used these pagers.
Small charges (measured in grams) are extremely local and typically highly directional. They have a distinctive signature that is in evidence here. It isn't like a giant bomb going off.
That's an impressive supply-chain hack. Spend years showing how insecure modern telecom devices are and scare your enemy into going old-school, receive-only. Set up a shell company to sell pagers to your enemy's shell company. Give them devices implanted with a small explosive charge pointed inward, knowing they will be worn around the waist most of the time.
Hack the backend server, send a coordinated page to all the pagers at the same time. You've just injured and identified most of your enemies, incapacitated them, completely broken their communication network and effectively given you weeks of disarray to do whatever you want to further disrupt them.
You have to hand it to them -- it's a clever strategy with minimal casualties outside of your enemy. This is a Stuxnet-level hack that we'll probably never fully understand.
> You have to hand it to them -- it's a clever strategy with minimal casualties outside of your enemy
I agree it’s clever, but there are reports now of thousands wounded. Feels like a lot of collateral risk, if these people who were targeted were out and about (grocery shopping, bank, etc.)
I have no doubt that innocent civilians have been injured. But it's also worth noting that there are thousands of Hezbollah members, so the number alone doesn't necessarily tell us much about the number of civilians injured. (Similar to the casualty figures that come out of Gaza.)
I hate the idea of any innocent civilian being injured. But it might also be instructive to consider the alternative: if Israel wanted to achieve similar results via a conventional war against Hezbollah, it seems virtually guaranteed that far more innocent people would have been injured and killed—not to mention the Israeli civilians on the other side, whose lives also matter.
> if Israel wanted to achieve similar results via a conventional war against Hezbollah, it seems virtually guaranteed that far more innocent people would have been injured and killed
"It's OK that Israel causes excessive amounts of civilian casualties, because in the alternative scenario Israel would also cause excessive amounts of civilian casualties"
I don't find it very persuasive to simply assume that the casualties are "excessive." Whether they are actually excessive is really the whole issue. As of right now, there is no strong evidence that I'm aware of that the injuries from today's attack are "excessive" much less those of a different purely hypothetical attack.
And even then: to judge whether casualties are excessive requires an understanding of the goal to be achieved, which is almost completely absent from this discussion.
I think the problem many people have is that Israel's goals entirely revolve around killing people.
That is: If your goal is to murder someone, and you accidentally kill an innocent bystander in committing that murder, the number of civilians killed is infinitely too high. The number of acceptable total deaths is 0.
I understand this is idealistic. But it's the judgement many will choose to make. For the record, no I don't only think it's bad when Israel murders people.
I don’t understand. It seems clear enough to me that Israel’s goal is to prevent Hezbollah from continuing to launch rockets at Israeli towns in the north. Killing is a means to that end. One may disagree with that choice of means, but I don’t see how you can claim that “Israel’s goals entirely revolve around killing people.”
That being said, you might think that killing is never an appropriate means of achieving anything. If so, fair enough. But I think that’s a tough position to maintain when you are actively under attack.
I think Israel consists of quite different people with different goals.
Some of them have the goal, to own all of the land, because they believe it is their religious duty - and some of them are indeed part of the government.
And some of them just want to live in peace.
And on the other side it seems quite similar to me. Probably with a higher percentage of ruthless killers, but desperation tend to make people ruthless.
It really isn't a simple conflict that can be solved with more killing, unless we are talking about genocidal levels of killings.
> It seems clear enough to me that Israel’s goal is to prevent Hezbollah from continuing to launch rockets at Israeli towns in the north. Killing is a means to that end. One may disagree with that choice of means, but I don’t see how you can claim that “Israel’s goals entirely revolve around killing people.”
Well, let me start with the necessary disclaimer: First, I'm not an expert on geopolitics or Israel or the ME. That's probably obvious. It could be that my coarse understanding is just completely wrong, but I think it's a broadly correct picture which is lacking lots of detail.
I also don't know much about the conflict with Hezbollah specifically, but what I see from Israel tells me that the prevention of rocket smay not be their top goal. I also believe that even if it is, killing is a means that I disagree with!
The rhetoric I hear about Hamas (not Hezbollah, so it may be different there, but I suspect it's not substantially so) from the Netanyahu administration is about murder. Protecting Israelis is a means to an end; the end goal is to kill every single member of Hamas (and, reading between the lines, the expulsion of all Palestinians). It's widely reported that many Israelis openly feel Netanyahu is not making meaningful efforts to recover hostages, and I've also understood that significant lapses in Israeli security were what made the Oct 7 attack last year possible. Meanwhile, some of the things Netanyahu says about Hamas and Palestine sounds genocidal, frankly.
Again, could be wrong about all that. Every word on the subject is biased in one way or another. Additionally, I know very little of the situation with Hezbollah, so I'm extrapolating: The prioritization of murder over safety that I see in the war with Hamas demonstrates to me that Israel is not making choices in the utmost interest of safety, generally, if the murder of its enemies is on the table.
Of course, I'll also reiterate that even if all of the above is wrong, their means are unacceptable to me: I don't believe one of the most powerful nations on the planet needs to murder its impoverished neighbors to keep itself safe. It's much easier than diplomatic and nonlethal approaches, yes; but I don't think it's necessary.
Thanks for the thorough explanation. I think there are two things worth adding to your picture that distinguish Hezbollah from Hamas.
The first is that about 60,000 Israelis are currently displaced because they lived in a zone that Hezbollah is targeting with rocket attacks. (Which, FWIW, appear to intentionally target civilians.) Many of them have been living in hotels for nearly a year. Just yesterday, the Israeli cabinet updated its official war goals to include allowing residents to return to their homes in the north. What I hear is that this is now an issue roughly on par with returning the hostages from Gaza in terms of its salience within Israel.
The second is that Hezbollah is far more powerful than Hamas ever was. Unlike Hamas, I think Israel must recognize that elimination of Hezbollah is not a realistic aim.
At some point you have to ignore these perspectives because they are wrong. Look into the founding of Hezbollah. It isn't a secret, their stated goals is to expulse Jews. It cannot get much more plain as that.
Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying. Israel is one of the most powerful nations on Earth, Hezbollah is not even close. I don't think genocide is an appropriate response to the hatred of a much, much weaker enemy.
Hezbollah is a militia and has more manpower and equipment than the Lebanese army. They get high tech supplies from allies like Iran and they have more military power than a lot of the surrounding countries, who also fear them for that reason.
They aren't a civilian force and they are a serious military threat, especially with the backing of Iran.
Sorry, I meant that I don't believe they are, but I believe they would if it became opportune. And I'm not aware of any indication otherwise; it can be assumed they would choose against it, but I don't make that assumption.
Why isn't it better to cause fewer civilian casualties &/or those of lesser severity than a shooting fight or missile attack?[1] Given the situation has already degenerated to its current state where fighting is the status quo and all options lead to innocent casualties then minimizing those is the horrible "OK" option. Not okay in the sense of desirable, not okay in the sense that things should never have degenerate to this level to begin with, only okay as the less horrible option.
[1] Videos show the explosions highly limited in their ability to cause injuries as bad as a bullet to anyone ever a foot or two away from the explosions, much less than I would expect from anything more conventional.
Israel isn't causing any civilian casualties in South Lebanon. Hezbollah declaring war on Israel by firing rockets onto civilian areas since the 8th of October caused them.
my family was evacuated due to incessant rocket fire in the golan heights, hezzbollah has been firing indiscriminately since 10/8 do you have any alternative?
Hezbollah is of course not a country (though they're a proxy for Iran), but they occupy parts of Lebanon, so you can't attack them without attacking Lebanon.
I wonder if people are unaware that Hezbollah and Israel have been shooting rockets at each other for months. There are roughly 1000 deaths in the conflict and hundreds of thousands of civilians evacuated. If we’re talking about harms to civilians, this incident is probably small compared to the war overall.
These are Hezbollah pagers and Hezbollah only exists to terrorize Israel and it is their sole purpose. Of course there is still a danger of collateral risk, but I don't think it can get much more targeted.
"Hezbollah only exists to terrorise Israel and it is their sole purpose." This is a very curious take, what makes you think a group of hundreds of thousands of people, investing so much time, efforts and resources, exposing themselves and their loved ones to fatal risks just to terrorise Israel?
> According to Hezbollah's Deputy-General, Naim Qassem, the struggle against Israel is a core belief of Hezbollah and the central rationale of Hezbollah's existence.
I tend to believe their own statement on this matter. Where do you see wiggle room for another argument? Or even to find the argument "curious"? What is curious about it?
Only on HN, “This is curious. Why would people do an irrational thing similar to the irrational things that people have done for the entirety of human existence?”
Looks like Lebanese civilians have indeed been injured/maimed; but it appears cool to some since it is an "impressive supply-chain hack", so let's leave it at that and not call it terrorism.
You could've labeled it terrorism had Lebanon and Israel weren't at war with each other over the past 12 months, and had the people carrying those devices were random uninvolved civilians.
If you were to consider the fact that Hezbollah has been shelling Israeli cities and civilians on a daily basis for the past 12 months (killing many, also children, and driving hundreds of thousands of people out of their homes), with the UN peacekeeping force failing to keep Hezbollah north of the Litani river - then perhaps you would understand that this is likely as close as you can get to a "precision strike" on an enemy you're at war with.
This may in-fact be the most precise military strike on an enemy paramilitary group in the history of modern warfare.
You either have a very unrealistic idea of what a war actually looks like (0% civilians casualties or injuries), or an agenda.
The unfortunate thing is that regardless of politics, this will be seen as further escalation that ratchets up the risk of greater regional conflict. All wars eventually end, its just a question of how long, and how much death (both militarily and civilian) will be endured by everyone in the region. I hope there are diplomatic possibilities to de-escalate, but it seems those windows are closing.
Fair enough, and thanks for being open about this. With this in mind, all I can say is that your original comment is based on 100% emotion and 0% analysis and rationality.
do you realize that nurses in hospital, civil servants workers are among people carrying this device? That not all, not even majority of Hizbollah personnel have no military responsibility whatsoever?
There's absolutely no reason for uninvolved, random and peaceful civilians to be carrying a classified wartime-ready pager issued by a paramilitary terrorist organization. If you were carrying the device you're either Hezbollah, or cooperating with them - which makes you a legitimate military target.
Israel has given Lebanon and Hezbollah enough ultimatums to stop the aggressions. This is what happens when diplomacy fails.
But we already have videos of people standing in very close proximity to the devices being detonated - and not getting hurt. In-fact, many of the people carrying the device in their pockets ended up not sustaining life-threatening injuries.
I'm not saying civilians weren't hurt by this. But I'm also saying that no war has 0% civilian casualties. Those two countries are at war with each other.
This war is about Hezbollah and Hamas shelling civilians in Israel. Like hundreds of rockets per night. If, to stop that, it may harm a few civilians who are waiting next to Hezbollah members,
…you would let people keep shelling civilians by hundreds and hundreds of rockets?
How do you choose your actions, do you always support the guys who cause the maximum deaths? How does it work, “indiscriminate damage” is as soon as a person is inconvenienced while they were holding Hezbollah’s grocery bags? Shouldn’t they … distance themselves?
Pun unintended. But it’s a very good question. Shouldn’t they distance themselves from active murderers?
This won't do anything meaningful to reduce civilian deaths. Less than 0.1% of Lebanon injured, and 10x that number now even more enraged. Not meaningfully repeatable either, won't create significant attrition
The massive disruption of Hezbollah's communication network may cripple them enough to shorten the duration of the conflict, and possibly help turn public sentiment from Lebonese civilians into pressure to find a way to end things. The civilians are the people who on average do not feel strongly enough to fight, and may have large number pissed that a group-- even if they believe in its cause-- has brought violence to their communities through a surprise attack against a more powerful enemy. More than half of the Lebonese population believe there is no military solution to the overall dispute: https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/shadow-h...
> …you would let people keep shelling civilians by hundreds and hundreds of rockets?
I said no such thing though do find it interesting that any questioning of the methods used by one party is interpreted as blanket acceptance of all methods used by the other.
> Pun unintended. But it’s a very good question. Shouldn’t they distance themselves from active murderers?
How could they possibly know? I’ve never been in line for a sandwich and thought to ask if the person in front of me might spontaneously explode.
If they were truly indiscriminate and and indifferent to collateral damage, there are far easier and more effective ways to kill a few dozen people in Lebanon.
The whole complex and contrived attack speaks of tying to minimize collateral damage.
All available evidence suggests there's nothing "classified" or "wartime ready" about these - they were your basic, cheap, totally unencrypted POCSAG/Flex pager. The same as any other pager carried by doctors and all the other people who use them - aside from the hidden explosives, of course.
I doubt that was the case for these specifically hacked and weaponized devices. The operation appears to be ingenious and precisely layered in design. It very specifically targeted a group of people who were first convinced to ditch their mobile devices because they were hackable by Israel. Then the target group was provided the weaponized devices. They were bulk triggered at a specific moment of time. The weaponized device (while certainly lethal in some cases) was seemingly designed to maim and minimize damage beyond the person holding the device. And… perhaps most importantly, they were expected to be kept in a front pocket increasing the likelihood of physically emasculating the target group. It’s the ultimate “you don’t want to fuck with us”.
Terrorism definition is independent of whether there is ongoing war or not, lets not divert the subject with simple whataboutism.
We all know what happened, on both sides, including deaths of tens of thousands of civilians including thousands of palestinian children who did fuck nothing to anybody, just were born at bad place at bad time.
What would be enough kill ratio israeli : palestinian civilian, or even better israeli civilian : palestinian kid/baby that would satiate Israeli government to stop the war? Very conservative estimates put deaths of direct US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to around 500k, meaning its 500:3 ratio and factual defeat of US army to withdraw and cut losses. So thats the threshold of civilized western world? Israel already surpassed that long time ago.
They can't and won't win with Hamas and they know it, its exactly same situation as Taliban, ISIS etc. Regroup, strike back, stronger, smarter, better equipped, more motivated. Spiral of death can go on and on till there is nobody standing on neither side.
If I had to choose where the next nuclear detonation happens it would be for me 50:50 Ukraine : Israel, and this is how you get there.
Violence has been probably the biggest driver of innovation for us as a species. I would categorize thousands of weapons as "cool" viewed dispassionately. Aircraft carriers, Fighter Jets, Cruise missiles. They are all definitely cool when viewed from afar.
Which they would probably agree to. Purists do not care for practical matters such arbitrating what would be the best course of action in order to have the less casualties because for them the only acceptable number of casualties is zero because any war and casualty is immoral.
I have sympathy for this kind of reasoning because it's been mine for a long time. There is something important for the preservation of the self in refusing all kinds of wrong in the world. The problem is that by refusing to engage with the world, they can affect nothing (and probably accept that, everybody should just stop being immoral, that's easy in their mind)
> Hack the backend server, send a coordinated page to all the pagers at the same time.
You likely don’t even need to hack anything if you coordinate based on time. A built in clock would eliminate the need for any external signal and work in a, no pun intended, dead zone.
If the pager itself is hacked, the software could also pretend to receive a page a moment before detonation to maximize the chance the device is held with the receiver in the open.
if you physically control the pager I don't even think it's called hacking anymore. you can change the hardware and software willy nilly. put an extra SIM that you control in there, and call it. put a radio receiver. a timer. heck, a dog whistle audio detector, you blow it and they blow up. infinite possibilities.
Pagers don't have SIMs, they are simply programmed with a "Cap Code" which is basically the address of the pager.
Pagers can be programmed with multiple cap codes, and can function differently based on which cap code address receives a message. For instance, a single cap code could be programmed to just vibrate the pager, vs an audible alert.
Pagers are sent out via very high power distributed transmitters as one way transmissions simulcasted transmissions.
I mean they probably did hack to some degree the default software/hardware in the pager to get it to do something nonstandard. I doubt they have access to the full source code and build stack of the OG pager, so even just modifying the software running on it to do something different is indeed a hack.
That doesn't follow. You could have a timer that causes the pager to vibrate as if it had received a message or an alarm had rung. That would make the attack simpler, in that one wouldn't also have to compromise (or risk leaving traces in) the phone system to activate thousands of pagers.
Pagers just simply have an address (called a Cap Code) to receive messages. It's like a mailbox number. A pager can be programmed with usually up to 4 Cap Codes at a time.
If I was speculating on what happened, I would bet that the pager had 3 Cap Code addresses programmed, the mailbox cap code the owner of the pager expected to have for receiving messages, a cap code that was the same programmed in all the pagers to that functioned normally to received messages, and then the 3rd cap code programmed in all the pagers that when receiving a specific message triggered the explosive.
The folks responsible simply sent a message to the 2nd cap code to get all the pagers to go off, presumably to get the targets to get the pagers out and look at them, and then immediately the trigger message next to the 3rd cap code to detonate the explosive.
I'd imagine a backup timer, with the ability to trigger early if required for strategic or tactical purposes.
I almost surprised this wasn't coordinated with (or saved for) an incursion into Libanon. That seems to be something Israel wants to do, and this would be a great way to disrupt the defense at the most critical moment.
A timer is too risky. The was done months in advance - what if the war was over?
I think this was meant for intelligence gathering - now that they know who the important operatives are, you go backwards using video and see where they went and who they talked to.
Seems easier to install a transmitter and GPS in the supposedly receive-only device. Then it could actually track people and show where they had been. It could store up readings and only transmit while the device was in motion at around walking speed, with signal strength above Y. That means the person was probably outdoors and moving, thus probably ot being swept by bug detectors. Well maybe not any more, now that everyone is thinking that way ;).
I’m saying even that could be time based to ensure it does not depend on the signal being received. Just pretend you got a message and add a delay of a couple seconds.
It could be, but it would be very risky. These pagers would have been distributed months in advance. How could you possibly know the perfect time to set them off?
And since pagers are already receiving remote messages, it doesn't make sense to do it any other way.
>You've just injured and identified most of your enemies, incapacitated them, completely broken their communication network and effectively given you weeks of disarray to do whatever you want to further disrupt them.
And affected their recruitment. Because of how pagers are worn, a significant number of injuries are going to be genital injuries.
Given, that your primary recruits are young men, that is important.
In that demographic, the young men may actually fear non-lethal genital injuries more than they actually fear death.
We'll see about that. Some of the footage indicates the targets were all just out and about in public. I think it's likely there will be collateral damage. I assume it didn't happen since it's not being reported, but what if one of them was on a plane?
Seeing some video from one of the hospitals, there's a lot of variety to the injuries. It looks like some people were looking at the pager when it exploded (injury to face and hand), some were wearing it on hip, some in pocket, some probably in an across-the-chest fanny pack.
It would seem this attack has managed to kill some, maim many, tag all, terrorize, and disrupt.
The shell company isn't a strict requirement, and I'd wager less likely. Infiltrating the delivery process would be easier and would instead require knowing about the pager purchase and being able to swap the actual package for an alternative package. Theoretically all of this is possible with some data interception to discover the pager order, a team to construct the exploding pagers, a person to deliver the exploding pagers, and a person to intercept the actual pagers (which could be the same person delivering the exploding pagers).
> Hack the backend server, send a coordinated page to all the pagers at the same time.
I worked on these before and I don't think you'd need to hack anything at all to send a page. Its just a broadcast. Especially if you had access to the receiver as they seem to have had, I can't imagine they compromised the actual Hezbollah transmission tower.
Yeah I mean it's basically just like mass-sending a spam text, no? All they need to know is the phone numbers of the pagers. Or even just the number range from which the pager numbers were assigned, and then spam the entire range. Spammers have simple enough software that can do all this; it doesn't seem like a sticking point for Mossad.
It Depends... Sure you could spam the pager system triggering them one by one, but because how pagers work you could trigger them all at the same time.
Pagers are basically just a receiver of a One-to-Many network. A pager will receive all pages being broadcast as they are "listen only" devices. As the pagers don't talk back to the service provider the SP doesn't know which transmitter to use, so the SP will broadcast the pages out across their whole network. The circuity/software of the pager will then filter out only the messages intended for that pager out of all the pages it receives. To reach pagers out of range/switched off the SP would just repeat the page for a period of time.
(note: for message privacy you can add encryption to the message but back in the day that didn't happen, and you could just pull clear text out of the air.)
This "receiver only" style of device allowed pagers to be low power and would run for a very long time on a single AAA battery (or even on a watch battery, because they built a pager into a watch! The Timex Beepwear... Oh I so wanted one as a kid!). But it has the benefit that because they are one-way/"listen only" you can't track them because they are not communicating back to the mothership! It would be like trying to track an AM/FM radio in a car.
If you are adding an "add-on board" to the device, you could tap the receiver of the pager and do your own decoding of the pages. So you could have the add-on board trigger on a "certain message for this pager only" but you could also trigger on "a certain message sent to pager serial 1234567890".
If you knew the phone number assigned to the pager with the serial 1234567890 (because you just so happened to have paid for service for that pager by what ever clandestine means you wanted) you could trigger them all with a single phone call from a public phone or a disposable cell phone to a pager not even associated to the target group of devices.
EDIT: Just a note to say 2 way pagers do exist, this type of pager allows the pager to confirm receipt of a page and even send their own pages to other pagers, but I would suspect that the type of pager being used in this case is the one-way type pager because its reported they were using them because they are harder to track.
I dont think you have to hand it to them. I just think that they have to know who the people are. And a code has to be uploaded to the pagers that cause the explosion.
There have been several presentations on this before. It was for old cell phones.
> Hezbollah does not reveal its armed strength. The Dubai-based Gulf Research Centre estimated in 2006 that Hezbollah's armed wing comprises 1,000 full-time Hezbollah members, along with a further 6,000–10,000 volunteers.[200] According to the Iranian Fars News Agency, Hezbollah has up to 65,000 fighters.[201] In October 2023, Al Jazeera cited Hezbollah expert Nicholas Blanford as estimating that Hezbollah has at least 60,000 fighters, including full-time and reservists, and that it had increased its stockpile of missiles from 14,000 in 2006 to about 150,000.
Israel probably knows from the number of pagers ordered (and probably from spying on their pages' contents, since if you're going to mount this sophisticated a supply-chain attack to plant bombs in a device, you might as well also plant spyware) just how many active members Hezbollah has [or had, since many of them are now inactive members].
Minimal what? They just indiscriminately bombed anyone near anyone with this branded pager. It's really disgusting to see you marveling at mass civilian destruction or terrorism.
Another example of why outsourcing manufacturing is a national security concern, and how the absolute free market can lead "winners" to harm themselves by chasing "success" at all costs.
Arguably, it's off-topic, though I agree with the point. Lebanon has been struck by poverty, and as a result, they might have far fewer choices when it comes to providers in general. Manufacturing within Lebanon or trading with neighboring countries might not be affordable for them.
It’s important to take a step back before generalizing an economic or political statement that may not be applicable in other contexts. There are little chances that the supply chain in Lebanon is in the same state as Europe countries' ones, for instance. Thus, this is not another example.
Just because something is not affordable doesn't mean its affordable alternative is a viable option, especially when information asymmetries caused by foreign manufacture obscure plastic explosives in the devices or whatever triggered these.
It is the same attitude. "Outsourcing is the only way we can be competitive" / "Buying these cheap pagers is the only way we can afford it"
Unthinkable, or at least not feasible, in the sense of supporting the current level of technological advancement and average quality of life in many countries.
lebanon has an economy that's currently in shambles, and its never been known for its productive capacity. even if they wanted to start making simple comms devices it might rely on infrastructure that they can't invest in, and take tech/capital they have not accumulated
it would be more realistic for them to receive it from the iran but there might be political hurdles to this and it would end up costing the iranians as hezbollah can't be expected to pay much for it
100 years ago Lebanon didn’t have running water and still had slavery. The Middle East hasn’t been a producer of goods, even domestically, since antiquity.
I wouldn’t count it as a good produced though. It’s just a commodity pulled out of the ground and processed elsewhere (largely in the US). It requires no ingenuity or hard work, just the luck of being on top of oil fields due to geographic peculiarity.
This almost reads like science fiction, what an incredible attack from a technical POV. A couple of thoughts:
1. The beepers were compromised and have been for a long time. I don't know how easy it is to exfiltrate data from them if they are receive-only devices. At any rate it shows that Israel is capable of intercepting and manipulating low-tech comms. What's left for Hezbollah to use?
2. The next step is to hack into hospital record systems and get a list of all patients admitted today.
> Hezbollah recently upgraded their pagers with the American University of Beirut
Please do not conflate Hezbollah and AUB.
The claim is that AUB medical school pagers were replaced a week or so ago. This is either pure coincidence, false or fake news to imply that AUB has Israeli operatives, or indeed that the pagers used were compromised and that the USA was aware of the impending attack and did not want to harm AUB medical staff - who probably are mostly not connected with Hezbollah.
I wasn't thinking years, but months but I didn't know about the recent upgrade. At any rate, if the pagers allowed any data exfiltration they have been collecting that data since whenever the last upgrade was.
The reason for using pagers instead of phones is that they are receivers only, they do not transmit, therefore they cannot be localized.
So no data exfiltration was possible using the pagers. The only purpose of the modified pagers was to maim or kill their possessors, by detonating all of them simultaneously.
It is still way more difficult to localize a local oscillator (especially one that's trying even slightly to shield itself) than something trying to transmit to a tower a few miles away.
This makes an assumption that Israel cares about making it's list of targets as small as possible. Israel has shown over and over again that it is happy casting a very wide net when labelling people as legitimate targets, using fuzzy machine learning to label large numbers of people without any direct evidence. Israel also has a higher acceptance of the deaths of innocents than any other western aligned & supplied nation, literally happy if dozens or more civilians are killed in order to kill one member of Hamas or Hezbollah. They or their proxies then blame their opponents for the deaths of innocents, ignoring that the accepted rules of war are that civilian deaths should be minimized.
For sources, search for "Israel Lavender system" and pick your media source of choice.
I think the value is in knowing the network and cross-reference against it. Innocent bystanders or people who happened to just go to the hospital today will probably fall off during this process. Not to mention that you can filter out by the type of injury to get a more accurate list.
Yikes the "list of patients" thing is scariest part of all of this: if they feed that into some monster AI that creates new targets... I can only imagine the diminishing accuracy of who is really deserving of being targets
But that is exactly what modern AI-era big data warfare would look like. By its nature, and by choice, less accuracy / more innocent targets, but oh well
I heard a story according to which a similar scheme was used in the Algerian war of independence, so these is more retro than scifi. Radio sets were left by the French military for the Algerians to grab. The explosive was hidden in the frame and components, and the trigger was a specific audio frequency. The device looked exactly like a stock military radio set if you disassembled it. So it's not that scifi.
I am for some reason reminded of this classic scene from The Wire [1] where a detective sells a trove of preemptively wiretapped burner cell phones to a drug organization
Dark Wire by Joseph Cox came out this earlier in the summer that covers the 2010s version of this with an Android phone company being stood up as a replacement for Blackberries
The Australian Federal Police and the US FBI launched a similar attack a few years ago where they sold a few thousand phones to underworld figures. The phones had an apparently encrypted and hidden chat app pre-installed on them which was feeding all the messages and data to the police.[0]
For those who don't know, "EncroChat was a Europe-based communications network and service provider that offered modified smartphones allowing encrypted communication among subscribers. It was used primarily by organized crime members to plan criminal activities."
20 grams of C4 or similar plastic explosive would be more than adequate to produce the effects seen. CL-20 wouldn't be a good choice for this deployment: it's not particularly stable for rough handling even with a good phlegmatizing blend, and tends to decompose at the temps one would expect a pager to be exposed to (hot car, etc).
That's a fair point my knowledge of explosive chemicals only stems from conventional missile-based warheads and propellants. It's very possible a different explosive was used.
So apparently, it must be less than 20 g of RDX, and/or a weaker explosive: if the fatal distance was within 0.64 meters, there would be significantly more reported deaths.
This seems like it would have the potential for a lot of collateral damage due to the possibility that modified pagers might enter general distribution. That is to say, how do they insure that a given shipment of pagers are only going to Hezbollah as opposed to some of them going to people like aid workers?
I suspect that is an intentional side effect against the whole pager network. It is now totally compromised which means they can no longer use passive channels as a communication medium. This effectively shut down their comms structure.
As for aid workers, they mostly use whatever low ball android phones they can get their hands on I know someone who volunteered out there and everyone uses them and Telegram). I don't think that will impact them at all.
Well, now that everyone knows it's feasible to hide a small bomb inside a pager, what's to stop people from checking their pagers for tiny explosives before using them?
Well nothing which is why people are spreading stuff about it being a hack causing the batteries to explode. Which disrupts everything with a network connection and battery. Adds confusion to the situation.
As I said elsewhere this is a one shot attack. They would never be able to pull this off again at this scale.
It's effects might have been intended as much for psychological as lethal results. This specific vector may be a one-and-done tactic but Hezbollah members would be foolhardy not to regard every electronic device that is, at minimum, younger than $pager_age with suspicion. At this point even if it's a wired copper POTS line I'd be asking the intern to take my calls and shout things out from a few rooms away.
You only need to vet what the inside of a pager should look like once, and spread the knowledge around... using them will become more of a hassle, but not entirely impossible.
The tampered pager likely looks nearly identical, and even un-tampered pagers will vary a little bit from manufacturing. It's possible an expert might be able to visually distinguish that a particular strand of wire is the wrong gauge or the soldering pattern suggests it wasn't made on the appropriate machine, but there shouldn't be something obvious.
presumably the only difference between an explosive-laden battery and a normal battery is it's capacity. All else will appear identical. And tearing down the battery to inspect it destroys the battery.
Lot's of pager batteries are the shrink-wrapped cylinders with 2+ cells, so I'm guessing it might be possible to dress up one of those cells as a dummy w/ explosives instead.
Assuming the stock of replaceable batteries is large enough to handle them all being replaced simultaneously, that the replacement batteries are not likewise compromised, and that the battery is indeed the compromised component.
Realistically just replacing the pagers is not only safer but also probably cheaper.
I've used them for DevOps on-call in the last ten years in the US, as a backup to phone-based alerts. It's far too easy to mess up phone DND settings, forget to charge a phone, be outside cell service, or leave a phone in the wrong room. The pager had a long battery life and I clipped it to my pants waistband. I definitely caught pages via the pager that I would have missed over the phone.
If you're worried about the cell network going down, they serve as a backup comms device as well since they use different infrastructure.
Hezbollah is essentially a government entity in much of Lebanon, they totally would. Hezbollah runs schools, hospitals - it's easily the largest social services provider in large swathes of Lebanon. That's why it enjoys so much support, in many ways it was a much more competent alternative to the failed Lebanese government.
People who work in schools in Lebanon carry smartphones like everybody else. Pagers are obsolete. Some doctors may carry them because they work when the cell network is down, but they don't all re-up from Iran all at once. Hezbollah carries pagers because they're one-way devices that are hard to track, which is not a problem a Lebanese school teacher has with his Chinese Android phone.
What makes you think pagers are obsolete? When I worked at a big-three cloud provider (2016) we used them and it was a great fit for on-call requirements. I regularly find I don't have cell service when in large buildings, out in the woods, or even just random spots in US cities. The pager didn't have those issues, and helped us build highly available services. Does Fly use something different for on-call alerts?
A quick search shows the US Government/Army [1] and hospitals use them [2] [3] [4]. I'm not familiar with Lebanese wireless networks, but pagers are certainly still used for these use-cases in the US.
"Residents reported that they used one-way pagers for work-related communication more often than smartphones" (2018)
People still use pagers for specialty purposes, like being on call in disaster zones, or serving as a parallel armed forces in a country with a hostile neighbor who has infiltrated your cell phone network.
I've said this like 5 times on this thread and feel bad for continuing to repeat myself, but: Hezbollah operates its own telecommunications network. The Hezbollah pagers probably do not work on the normal Lebanese telecoms systems. This in addition to the fact that Hezbollah procures pagers for its service members; it does not go to the Cricket Wireless store at the corner of Mousa al Sadr and Kouds and pick them up retail a couple at a time.
Pagers don't use normal telecom systems, and they're not limited to paramilitary organizations. They're very useful in any critical application because they have low infrastructure requirements.
The comment you're replying to explains how they're used routinely in most hospitals in the world for this purpose.
You can't buy pagers off stores on the corner, either. They don't have SIM cards and most of them can't report back to the network, so they need to be pre-configured by the network operator. Just the same way, if you work at a hospital and are issued a pager, it will be issued to you by your employer and you won't be able to pick it up off the street.
In a country with extremely unreliable telecom infrastructure, it's not at all unlikely for an organization to use pagers, especially if it operates emergency services, and they would have to be procured through that organization.
Lebanon has incredibly unreliable cell service. Anyone who needs to receive messages in a timely and reliable fashion would have no choice to have a pager or similar device. That would include many people in schools and most people in a hospital.
> they don't all re-up from Iran all at the same time
Who says anyone does? Hezbollah has 40k fighters, and we have reports of 2000 people being injured, so clearly Hezbollah, military or civilian, didn't "all re-up from Iran all at once", the numbers are more than an order of magnitude off for you to conclude as much.
Reuters has specific shipments and provenance for the pagers attributed now, and also notes that the explosions were concentrated in Hezbollah strongholds (Dahiah, Bekaa, southern Lebanon), lending further evidence that these were not off-the-rack pagers.
No one is saying these were off the rack or that they weren't distributed as part of Hezbollah's operation, so I don't understand how this is relevant.
The point I made is that less than half of Hezbollah is combatant, therefore the possession of a device procured and distributed by Hezbollah cannot be dispositive evidence as most Hezbollah members aren't IHL combatants. The fact the pagers were ordered by Hezbollah doesn't contribute anything in the context of a discussion on civilian Hezbollah members that would need to use pagers.
This is such a strange take. As if CIA operatives and a random teacher at some elementary school just both reach into a box with pagers and pick one because they're both employed by the government.
If the US government was sanctioned to the extent Hezbollah was, someone like an elementary school principal would most likely have to ask a higher-up to provide them with something like a pager, which would likely have been smuggled together with others.
You can buy mobile phones in Lebanon just fine, there's no reason why anyone except active duty members of Hezbollah would get their communication equipment from Hezbollah.
Mobile phone service is horrible in Lebanon and cannot be relied on in any type of emergency.
Also, the whole point of this is that active duty members of Hezbollah includes hospital staff and teachers. Hezbollah's civilian division is about as large as the paramilitary one, if not larger. So it's not possible to confidently state that anyone affected was part of a milita with the information we have right now.
Why would employees of Hezbollah carry Hezbollah communication devices? That doesn't seem like the question you're trying to ask, in which case, what is a 'military' pager and how is it different from a 'civilian' pager? How are you able to tell apart a 'military' pager from a 'civilian' pager with such confidence as to present it as an unquestioned assumption?
I've spent quite some time looking, and I cannot find such a thing as a military pager. The only pagers I can find mentioned in a military setting are no different from the pagers that civilians would use, for example, the use of commercial pagers in US military hospitals.
At the same time, I don't think there's any reason to disbelieve accounts (and video footage) of children among the injured. Unless you're sending operatives with pistols and killing targets individually, I don't think there's a way to do a strike of this scale without killing innocents.
Actually this is probably more accurate than a pistol. Bullets miss and ricochet. Plus other people would fire back, leading to a gun fight and more deaths.
So 1-2 feet away is safe from serious injury resulting from the explosive force itself. Though the probability seems high at least some out of thousands had people standing close enough for worse, or further away and hit with shrapnel.
I’m just commenting on injury though, not making a moral or ethical judgement. That’s not an easy call when an opponent is embedded in a population of non-combatants.
not sure of band allocations around israel, but in the US pagers were long wavelength devices and, as such, could receive signals much further inside buildings than pre-wifi cellular bands could reach. again, band / frequency (wavelength) allocation dependent. but if similar there, pagers might get signals in tunnels whereas cellular bands may not, for one plausible conjecture.
These pagers were used by Hizbullah because, unlike mobile phones, they cannot be tracked. The people who had them were certainly not random aid workers, but people in the Hizbullah chain of command. This is also indicated by the statements of Hizbullah itself (which are themself to be questioned and not taken at face value), according to which so far one non-combatant was reported killed and no other non-combatant were reported injured out of a total of 4,000 exploded explosive devices.
The CCTV footage also shows that even in a crowded supermarket, no one was injured apart from the Hizbullah member with the pager.
First: Innocent people can use their phones just fine and have their comms intercepted by the IDF. Only Hezbollah wanted an alternative to hackable phones.
Second: If you distribute to Hezbollah and detonate already months later, it's unlikely many unaffiliated people already have Hezbollah pagers.
As I understand it, people are saying that the most likely way that this was carried out was that a shipment of pagers where intercepted and modified. My concern is that part or all of the shipment might not go to Hezbollah. Perhaps the shipment gets rerouted to somewhere else due to supply chain issues. Perhaps only half of the shipment was intended for Hezbollah. Perhaps a postal worker steals a few and sells them on the black market. Perhaps Hezbollah decides they have more than they needs and does something with the rest. Perhaps part or all of the shipment gets delayed and is sitting in a post office when it goes off.
Basically: warfare via mail bomb seems like it might be irresponsible.
Maybe they don't? But they definitely have their own phone infrastructure, and since the switch to pagers was entirely about opsec, it would be very weird if they were dependent on civilian telecoms infrastructure for them.
No essentially about it. Hezbollah is part of the government, one of many political parties in Lebanon. Just like most of the other major political parties in Lebanon, they maintain their own militia separate from the Lebanese military.
I think this is something that many people may not grasp about Lebanon.
The "There's Your Problem" podcast did an episode on the fertilizer explosion that leveled Beirut's port in 2020. The amount of breakdown that had to occur for that outcome was both astonishing... And utterly predictable given Lebanon's governmental structure, which is barely functional. It's less a government and more a power detente that hard-codes sectarian differences in the culture into the power structure, like trying to build a government out of a band of feuding warlords with no particular underlying agreement amongst the warlords to leave each other alone. Among other things, this makes their foreign policy heterogeneous; a given faction can just wage war without the government's consent, and the government lacks top-level power to do anything about it.
(Ironically, one of the things that minimized the potential damage in the fertilizer blast is that much of the material had been stolen and shipped away before the explosion. Likely by actors with the tacit support of high-level government functionaries looking the other way and refusing to do enforcement).
It would be easy to include a little microcontroller that can check what frequency the pager is set to. This allows you to target specific pager networks (government, military) while leaving pagers that are unlikely to be in use by targets intact for follow-up attacks.
I've seen this before. Your proof is a single person's opinion. Note that it is an opinion, with no evidence or data to back it up. It contains numerous tropes of IDF apologists and is written by a person who has a long history of opposing any investigations into the actions of the military and having generally right wing, militant, pro-European and anti-Muslim views. the letter appeals only to those who want to believe it.
More tragic than funny but it is human nature. Propaganda mills like PragerU exist because they work. People are happy to pick up other people's opinions because it saves them doing the hard work of forming one themselves. Lots of people believe things that are patently false, from religion to pseudo science to flat earth. Just believing something because it aligns with your existing opinions and prejudices doesn't make it true, it makes it confirmation bias.
The source of this shoddy opinion is PragerU, a very well funded and openly right wing, Christian, pro-Israel media outlet. It is literally paid my its wealthy right wing ultra rich donors to publish one sided content that pushes the donors' views for the donors' benefit. It is as far from a neutral objective source as you can get.
Pagers could have certain security options that would interest only a military organization. We don't know at which stage these were intercepted. They could just as easily be targeted to Hezbollah from the beginning of the sale. Advertise something that could be catered to them and once they take the bait go ahead and booby trap them all
I'm not sure why it's being assumed that they detonated all of the pagers. They presumably have unique device IDs / phone numbers that can be tied to individual people. For all we know, they may have just detonated the ones known to be in use by Hezbollah operatives.
This being a hack is improbable in my opinion. If you see the pictures of the aftermath, the damage is too big to be the result of a lithium battery explosion. Moreover the devices exploded at the same time in different locations (won’t happen if they made the battery overheat till explosion) HA probably bought a bad batch with implanted explosives and they set it off now.
There's footage on Twitter showing an actual detonation, with a bang. Not a huge blast (the man falls to the ground injured, but bystanders seemed unharmed). Definitely not the rapid burning 'whoosh' of a battery fire.
The context clearly explains what OP means. The meaning is that "This is not something that is achieved via simply hacking a normal device remotely. This is something that is achieved via doing something extra to the device first, and maybe then hacking it remotely."
Another thing is that if we begin to use "hack" for every means of attack and unauthorized access, then the word loses its meaning. There is no supply chain hack, but there is a supply chain attack.
Pretty much, yeah. The hack was used only to activate it remotely, and in pager systems, it should not be a hard task. But I highly doubt it was only due to battery overheating. I have seen scooter batteries exploding before, and they don’t burst as quickly as this one.
It must be a combination of hardware (put a bomb in it) and software (trigger an explosion when a particular command is received) hack. Triggering an explosion of all devices is needed because if people started hearing about exploding pagers, they'd place their own far away from anything precious to them.
Geez, I thought this kind of hack is the stuff of (bad) action movies.
I wonder if there's a pager that was powered off during the attack and if somebody will dissect how they did it.
Warning, under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations in the US civil fines of up to $500k per violation apply to software exports classified as related to munitions or military applications. You may want to consult an attorney before sharing such algorithms on a public forum.
They’re pagers, so it could also be a modification of the firmware to listen for a certain message (could it be as simple as a pocsag network where all of the pagers would get every message and only alert if it’s targeted for them?)
I doubt it has anything to do with the battery, pagers typically use the far more stable (and less energy dense) NiMH composition over a typical lithium one.
Most pagers also aren’t designed incinerate/explode when they receive a signal, so I don’t know if we can make assumptions based on what typical pagers do. Seems a lot easier to short a LiPo battery than conceal a tiny explosive. An explosive can be found, but they’re unlikely to find out that the BMS is bugged to short the battery to ground
A LiPo will burn, aggressively and hot, but they don't explode.
To get a LiPo to explode you'd need to both puncture/rupture it and somehow contain the escaping gasses long enough to build up pressure.
No, I'm as convinced as I can be that this was a supply-chain attack, and used a purpose-built "addition" the pagers in the form of an explosively formed penetrator.
Given that an EFP is usually concave, I'll even go so far as to say I bet it was disguised as part of the speaker assembly.
LiPos used today burn because they have vent slits. Remove the vents and it’s far more likely to explode. In any case, we’ll probably find out in a couple weeks.
I saw some videos of explosions, the pagers received some sort of signal or message that made the holder look at the pager.
Most of the injuries were to the hands or eyes. It was a very very weak explosion - even people right next to the person were not harmed, just the person holding the pager.
If it was not a terrorist attack and a war crime but a targeted operation against the militants, why wouldn't Israel claim responsibility for the successful operation?
Israel has had a “no comment” policy for many years. Why? I can think of a few reasons. One is that some operations, if acknowledged by Israel, would trigger a proportionate response by the target, but if not acknowledged would allow the target to save face by downplaying what happened, if neither side actually wants war.
That probably doesn’t apply to this case, but has occurred in the past. And no-comment policies are more effective when applied unconditionally.
If a car bomb went off next to an IDF post killing a bunch of IDF soldiers and one 10-year-old kid, it would be declared a terrorist attack immediately.
If this involved China and Taiwan, North and South Korea, or Russia planting bombs on Ukrainian soldiers, nobody would be debating whether it was a terrorist attack.
It’s certainly a relief when polite society can recognize it that way. So, that ends one discussion but starts another. When foreign intelligence is tasked with, say, breaking laws and moral codes in Lebanon; it lives in the shade because we cannot distinguish it from terrorism or organized crime or a financial scam. It’s been this way for a long time and the debate nowadays is whether or not, on balance, we’re prevailing over evil.
Sometime in the 20th century, hot war killed more combatants than civilians and that’s mostly changed with drastic disproportionality. So, intelligence agencies have been forgiven because they describe themselves as non-combatants killing non-combatants to prevent civilian massacres. This explains a change in ideals mid-century.
countries i think don't comit acts of war randomly without annoucement or claim. This in itself would be borderline criminal, though i'm not sure if it's an actual thing noted in the geneva conventions. Those do state that any act of war should give an opportunity for retaliation. So in essence this is just as criminal as bombing people using armed drones, because these fighters did not have any opportunity to strike back.
It's not random: Hezbollah and Israel have been fighting for a while[0] and Hezbollah's mission is to eliminate the state of Israel[1]. I'm sure no member of Hezbollah is surprised that Israel would attack them.
This is all one conflict, it does not make sense to treat this as an isolated conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. And it is dishonest [1] to portray the conflict as Israel resisting various groups that want Israel removed from the map and not mention that the Israel similarly wants Palestine removed from the map. And I am not sure how one can dispute this as the Israelis themselves say it. When the State of Israel was established, Ben-Gurion was hoping that Israel will eventually encompass all of Mandatory Palestine and today Netanyahu says in no uncertain terms that there is no room for an independent Palestinian state. And the actions in between do not paint a different picture either, whether it is the construction of settlements to further fracture the land or to support of Hamas in order to weaken the PLO.
[1] This is not necessarily an accusation of the commenter I replied to, maybe they just deemed it unnecessary to mention. I think it is worth mentioning to not create a skewed image for people unfamiliar with the conflict, that is why I wrote my comment. However reading it again I have to admit that the wording is far from perfect.
you understand Hezbollah and Hamas are different right? Lebanon is not Palestine and has no interest in Palestine. They are an Iranian proxy. Shows how little you know about the situation before sharing your slanderous views as fact.
Israel invaded Lebanon to fight the PLO and Hezbollah was founded to fight back. They are absolutely part of the wider conflict. And if you read my comment again, you will find that I said none of the things you mentioned.
You're throwing "criminal" around without, I suspect, understanding the laws of warfare. Blowing enemy operatives isn't criminal (even if some civilians get hurt - within reason; here's the ratio of militants to civilians hurt is virtually unheard of, in a positive way). Bombing militants from above, whether by airplane or drone isn't criminal, and nothing in the laws of warfare claims you need to let the enemy an opportunity to strike back.
There is no comprehensive information yet on the ratio of civilians to militants maimed by this attack, and any claims otherwise are propaganda. If an enemy had exploded small remote controlled bombs in American supermarkets and homes there is no question we would characterize it as a terrorist attack.
And my question stands, if this is legitimate warfare, why wouldn't Israel admit it carried out the attack? US does not hide that they eliminated Bin Laden. The answer is pretty obvious here.
Because that provides international legitimacy for retaliation by Hezbollah, even though everyone knows who did what. Same as the assassination of Ismail Hanyeh in Tehran.
At the cashier, one video clip shows a guy paying then he looks at the massage that beeped his Appolo pager, then it exploded, this trigger message is supported further with first responders' statements on large numbers of those treated for impact on eyes.
There was a really dumb but also really entertaining Awkwafina/John Cena movie that I watched recently called Jackpot https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26940324/. At one point in the middle of the movie one of the characters calls a 3 letter agency friend and asks them for a "Phone Strike on his location". There is a mob gathered outside of their room, and within 30 seconds everyone's phone blows up and the protagonists escape. The movie is R rated but obviously it's hollywood so instead of blown off fingers and holes in ribs that we see in Lebanon, its just someone's crotch is aflame, that's about it. But it was the first thing that jumped to me when I heard about it. Go hollywood!
I have a working theory that real life 3 letter agency plots make it into Hollywood movies because intelligence agents and script writers hang out at the same bars. Likely a mix of intentionally planting tropes so that when someone claims the government is doing it they look like a conspiracy theorist who watched "The Rock" too many times, and retired folks having one too many whiskies and letting their secrets slip knowing that there's no way to prove it anyhow, and those make it into scripts just because they're good stories
2. My grandma used to say not to wear my phone on me, especially close to my heart or my balls, because she thought it was dangerous somehow. Turns out she was right!
It is reasonable to assume a Mossad agent would have pagers as potential way to communicate. Pagers work on separate networks from cell phones and usually do not have the same location tracking.
It is also fair to assume that Mossad would want the ability to remotely destroy an agents pager. If it was captured, etc. So very likely these were already a standard part of their equipment and then distributed to Lebanon.
It is also interesting how fear of cell phone tracking drove them to pagers, which was then exploited in response.
It is different from Stuxnet and a form of terrorism. Same as all the assassinations. They are crossing all of these lines that can be a double edged sword in the long run.
Amazingly enough, the concept of hacking personal communications devices to explode was explored recently in the "phone strike" scene in Jackpot!, an Amazon MGM Studios movie released a month ago.
Yeah GP is probably merging two things that happen in the movie. One, the villain (played by Samuel Jackson) implants all of his "inner circle" with exploding implants to guarantee compliance, and late in the movie they are hacked so that the entire group is simultaneously assassinated with a single signal. Two, that same villain gives out free SIM cards to everyone on the planet that can be remotely triggered to throw everyone in range into a homicidal rage. The latter is probably what GP was thinking of, but they misremembered the effect.
Why was this flagged? I vouched for it as it would make for an interesting discussion about the security of these devices and how this kind of cyberattack might have happened.
Are smartphones, for example, also vulnerable to it?
There might be other explanations than a cyberattack though. The pagers could have been prepared in some way before distribution.
From the videos, it looks like the explosions were quite sudden and remarkably violent for such a small device.
So in addition to people-hunting FPV drones, we now have the equivalent of exploding collars from science fiction movies like Running Man. I don't like where we're heading, but it was probably inevitable that technology would be used this way.
As mentioned in this thread by others, this is not a new attack vector and won’t be the last. The only difference is the scale. And technically speaking, anything can be weaponized.
>Are smartphones, for example, also vulnerable to it?
Yes if Israeli intelligence gets their hands on your smartphone (probably before you buy it) and installs an explosive and a software-hardware back door.
They usuall burst with fire. You'd have to have hardshell battery with no venting, and likely no protection circuit, and a way to cause sustained load on the battery, without the user noticing the heat first. Eh.
A short on a battery with protection circuit installed basically does absolutely nothing to the battery.
I'm yet to see a video with fire and a lot of smoke at minimum.
Anything any particularly motivated group dislikes here gets flagged; always been this way. Thanks for vouching.
> Are smartphones, for example, also vulnerable to it?
I also would love an answer to this question. Up until 12 minutes ago, I would never have thought _blowing up_ hundreds of pagers simultaneously was a realistic scenario.
If anyone can make sense of how this actually worked I'd be grateful. If it can be done to pagers, it seems likely that it can be done to other networked lithium devices: phones, tablets, laptops, smart watches, cameras, drones, medical devices, toys, and even electric vehicles.
Lest anyone tries to deny this happened: There's video of two separate cases on the nowinpalestine Instagram page.
"Political" (including geopolitical) posts on here lead to an enormous amount of anger and noise and I fully get why they're verboten. In this case it's actually a fascinating issue that has a lot of crossovers with the domain of this site, but invariably the conversation would get overwhelmed with geopolitical noise instead of just focusing on the technical aspects.
98% sure these were booby trapped with plastic explosives or similar, meaning it’s a supply chain attack more than a cyber attack. LiPos exploding would be more sizzle and less instant boom, you can’t just hack your way through thermal runaway without all the smoke and building temperature first.
I am just out of the gate, but the videos show sharp percussive explosions and no lithium evidence. So C4 or RDX in the devices on a 'mod board' with the explosive disguised as a big capacitor or something. It had to be put into the devices. In order to justify an operation like this the explosions had to be near-simultaneous so the mod board had to have its own clock, which would be as accurate as the crystal in the clock circuit provides, maybe drift of +/- a few seconds since installation.
The broadcast pager network does not offer this level of time precision for a detonation message so as ugly as it sounds, I believe at the moment that 9/17/2024@3:30pm (or whatever) was preloaded into the 'mod boards'.
Perhaps the 'mod board' had the capability for the future time to be set with a broadcast message, but that introduces such complexity! It requires the page system itself to be compromised. The victims' paranoia served them badly in this case, a recent warning about cell devices and a lower tech 'solution' is rolled out and they would only trust one source, so all you'd have to do was get an explody batch into the supply chain with (reasonable) assurance that only Hezbollah members would get them.
In the coming days I'd look for clues in: The simultaneity of the explosions with times to the second // were any duds found and disassembled? // is there a separate radio receiver on the mod board (to set future detonation time) // when did the 'rollout' of the devices begin? // How many pager carrying non-members were injured and what were the circumstances ('medics' being one group) // Will suspicious broadcasts be discovered from logs or logged radio intercepts?
Given the people we are dealing with (I mean both sides) I am thinking that the operation avoided ANY covert channels at all and was a simple date-time bomb.
The subject is unfortunately likely to start a flamewar. I still think this should be on the front page because the technology and scope of this attack is unheard of if true. Israel somehow managed to weaponise hezbolla pagers by sending a message that caused them to explode. (Edit: i see the link i submitted has made it to the front page so it seems the moderators won't kill the story)
The reports right now are that these were ordinary pagers and that some sort of software attack overloaded the batteries and caused them to explode.
But I work lithium batteries. I've overloaded lithium batteries before and let them explode for safety testing. The videos released of these things exploding on people doesn't look anything like what I would expect, especially not from something as small as a pager battery. You would need to seal lithium batteries in a metal tube or something to cause that kind of explosion.
I highly suspect that this was a supply chain attack, and that there's a high explosive charge hidden in these things, with some sort of radio backdoor that allows them to be detonated by whoever controls these things.
Seems old pagers were replaced last month at the American University of Beirut. It may or may not have to do with this operation, but the timing seems very suspect. Those devices may have been tampered with explosives at some point before being distributed to the victims.
Looking at pictures of mangled devices, it would seem to confirm that they were Motorola Gold Apollo pagers. In which case they just used standard alkaline batteries which would rule out a malware targeting the battery, and confirm it was a supply chain attack with planted explosives.
I also seem to recall them using modified cell phones to blow up militants or use them to triangulate their location. I can't seem to find the article(s) about this, unfortunately.
I'm a long way from Lebanon, but carry two pagers for Emergency Services (one per service). One used to be an Apollo Gold but now it isn't. From what I've read these were modified pagers, but I still rang one manager for reassurance. We need a strong statement for all the emergency responders and medical staff that still use these things that it's not going to happen to you.
Israel drone struck Jose Andres' food truck program this year.
Between these acts of war between stupid, angry countries, there needs to be not just guarantees for aid workers, but broad international condemnation of tactics that violate the Geneva Convention and related principles. And those principles are long overdue for high-tech drone strikes, robotics and electronics warfare.
So either this was planned long enough ago to replace a large number of devices over time, or communication about a larger order has been provided to the enemy and fulfilled without suspicion. Either way, that sounds like a crazy infiltration effort.
Also, we can assume that anything sent to those pagers so far has been forwarded to Israel and now that channel is burned, right?
> Shin Bet agents gave him a cell phone and told him it was bugged so they could listen in on his conversations.[17] They did not tell him that it also contained 15 grams of RDX explosive
I imagine technological progress has been made in the field of explosives as well. I guess the volume and weight can very very small when you can determine that the phone is being held at the head and the explosion can partially be directed to it. Maybe it's even possible to leverage the energy within the battery?
> More than 1,000 people, including Hezbollah fighters and medics
The CNN title implies that only Hezbollah members were targeted were reality seems different. It's crazy a country is capable of doing a "special security operation" on civilians of another country without any international sanctions.
If it was targeting pagers used for Hezbollah's military wing then yeah, kind of justified. But Hezbollah is bigger than that, and seems this attack targeted the whole organization, not just the one that is commonly designed a terrorist organization.
I guess for an American comparison it's a bit like attacking all republicans for the actions of the Proud Boys or any other militia.
That sounds nice, but by that logic no bomb would ever be fired. Under international law collateral damage must not be excessive, but it is permitted. If it was unacceptable, evil armies would do what they want and good armies would never fire a shot.
When you drop a bomb you at least know where it's going, here you have no idea.
Look at what's going on in Ukraine, if you can't tell a good from a bad shit you have to get your eyes checked. Hitting a column of tank isn't the same as targeting a civilian building
Wars are always bad and there will always be war crimes on all sides, it doesn't mean that everything is equal
In WW2 20% of US bombs fell within 1000 feet of their target, which were often in densely populated areas. Its only modern technology that lets us know where its really going
> In WW2 20% of US bombs fell within 1000 feet of their target, which were often in densely populated areas. Its only modern technology that lets us know where its really going
Is this supposed to be a gotcha ?
WW2 is the reason we updated the Geneva conventions to protect civilians lol
Then they also die/get injured. Being in close contact with a terrorist is a dangerous pass-time, and armies targeting foreign threats need to accept some level of collateral damage. In this case, we have thousands of injured terrorists, with hundreds dead, and an additional fraction of those numbers being non-military targets (civilians). It's certainly unfortunate and unpleasant, but this is an excellent ratio.
Let’s assume you accurately determine which thousand pagers are going to which people, and that you accurately determine which thousand are Evil Hezbollah Members and definitely not someone’s cousin or whatever.
Regardless of these (tenuous) assumptions, if you detonate a thousand small bombs, it seems fair to also assume that some of them might not be on the bodies of their intended targets, but rather outside on the counter by the shower or over by the car keys or something.
So no, I’d say this is a pretty tough sort of operation to justify.
It's war. Much worse things have been happening in this war already (e.g. Hezbollah explicitly targeting Israeli residential areas and killing civilians). By contrast this action seems much more targeted and justifiable.
If your bar for taking action is "there can't even be a chance of hurting a civilian", then your army can't do anything, and your entire civilian populace is slaughtered when it's taken over by the enemy intent on destroying your country.
I am more pro-Israel in these conflicts, but you are a military target or you aren't, you don’t leave the military when you remove the uniform, only when you agree to leave the military.
In fact it is a common tactic of Hamas, when it is discovered they have passionately murdered civilians, that they immediately claim that it was an IDF soldier. Such as the case with Shanni Louk
I admire the clarity of your moral compass. But consequently if that is ok, then targeting reservists is also ok, right? And since almost everyone in Israel is a reservist there are really no civilians in Israel only military targets, right? So, Hamas an Hezbollah blindly firing rockets are actually striking military targets with surgical precision
The problem for your “argument” comes when you apply the harsh light of actual fact to it. Israel has 169,500 active personnel and 465,000 reservists. This represents 6.6% of their population. Furthermore, those age 18-40 can be called up in a national emergency just as most countries can call up a draft. This is not the same as reservists and still represents a fraction of the population.
Attempting to pass off as fact that everyone in Israel is a reservist and are therefore legitimate targets is simple disinformation. You already knew that, though. But hey - you had a point to make, right?
I probably haven't used the right term, I thought reservists are people who went through military service. This article (with obvious agenda)
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/the-myth-of-compulsory-militar...
says that the enlistment rate plummeted from 75% to 50%.
So, >every other person in Israel has gone through military service. If you compare that to "collateral damage" when killing Hamas' terrorists, shooting rocets blindly is more accurate
That's a weird question. It's war. There's no morality involved. But if your question is "is it within the norms of war to strike service members when they're not in uniform", then the answer is emphatically "yes".
That's why countries make agreements such as the Genocide Convention, Geneva Conventions, etc. There are (meant to be) strict consequences for breaking these rules. (I noticed you change your wording from 'rules' to 'morality' - still wrong.) Breaking these rules is why we have the concept of 'war crimes'.
The word 'war' also implies two armies battling, rather than an invasion following occupation. In any case, the Geneva Conventions apply in all armed conflicts.
Since the Geneva convention still exists*, no, it is not "within the norms of war to strike service members when they're not in uniform". See Protocol I.
Targeting off-duty or non-uniformed service members violates both international law and the core moral principles of warfare, as outlined by the Geneva Conventions and other international agreements. Denying this isn't just factually wrong, it's deeply immoral.
* Along with the Principle of Distinction, Proportionality, Non-Combatant Immunity and Civilian Impact, etc.
This is likely to settle out as one of the most surgical non-infantry attacks in the history of modern warfare, and because Israel is involved, 20% of the commentary is about how the people who set it in motion belong in the Hague. Think about what that says to people weighing the (correct!) claims that Israel has committed widespread war crimes in its occupation of Gaza.
None of that changes the facts stated, or makes any substantial argument as to how this doesn't constitute a war crime.
> This is likely to settle out as one of the most surgical non-infantry attacks in the history of modern warfare,
No, it isn't. There's already reports of murdered children, and people as far away as Syria getting injured. The Iranian ambassador to Beirut was reportedly injured, meaning this could precipitate nuclear war.
> because Israel is involved, 20% of the commentary is about how the people who set it in motion belong in the Hague
No, it isn't. You're literally the only person mentioning the Hague in the whole thread.
But yes, they do. That's where war crimes are prosecuted, and this is a war crime (see above), even if 'just' one of many thousands.
> Think about what that says to people weighing the (correct!) claims that Israel has committed widespread war crimes in its occupation of Gaza.
Huh??
Explain to me, please, how more targeted war crimes excuse completely untargeted war crimes, and war crimes targeted at journalists, aid workers, health workers, teachers, children, families, little old ladies in churches, premature babies, etc.
What you're doing here is establishing yourself as someone who believes a weirdly, ahistorically, spectacularly surgical attack on Hezbollah fighters is a "war crime". Which is fine, but people are going to point that out when you call other things a war crime, and you might care about that, because in those other instances you might actually be right (if it's Israel you're talking about, it's very likely you will be right), and the extra credibility might be helpful.
What I'm saying is that you're setting yourself up to be dismissed as someone who believes "a war crime is when Israel does war".
If the Geneva Conventions (among other agreements) which you're so determined to ignore didn't exist, then you may have been right.
But, they do, and you're wrong.
You're also moving goalposts. Are you still standing by your statement that war has no rules/morality?
> you're setting yourself up to be dismissed as someone who believes "a war crime is when Israel does war".
Israel set themselves up for that belief, not me.
By doing war crimes. A lot of them. Like this one.
Consider, if you would, that this effort to move the Overton Window on what constitutes war crimes is severely misguided. And you really ought to stop.
> No, it isn't. There's already reports of murdered children, and people as far away as Syria getting injured. The Iranian ambassador to Beirut was reportedly injured, meaning this could precipitate nuclear war.
Why would Israel fire nuclear weapons at Lebanon and Iran, two non-nuclear states?
edit: Also, can you cite anything to back this claim?
> Targeting off-duty or non-uniformed service members violates both international law and the core moral principles of warfare, as outlined by the Geneva Conventions and other international agreements.
I don't mean just it's in one of the articles of the Geneva Convention I mean where you're making your inference more specifically.
Hezbollah is a political organization with a paramilitary wing. The wing is designated as a terrorist group in many countries, the organization as a whole is designated as a terrorist group by not as many countries. France or EU as a whole, for example, consider Hezbollah a political organization and only the paramilitary arm as the terrorist group.
> Lebanon has been shooting rockets at Israel for a while now.
Correction: Israel and Lebanon have been firing across the border for a while. More Israeli attacks on Lebanon than the other way around and more Lebanese dead too.
"Between 21 October 2023 and 20 February 2024 the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) recorded an estimated 7,948 incidents of artillery fire from the south of the Blue Line (from Israel to Lebanon) and 978 incidents of artillery fire from the north side (from Lebanon to Israel)."
The answer isn't straight forward. 1980s invasion of Lebanon by Israel and it's withdrawal in 2000 was what made Hezbollah into the force that it is today.
The answer is pretty straight forward in the sense that the current round of war was initiated (proudly) by Hezbollah, and that while if Hezbollah stops shooting Israel would have no business with Lebanon, if Israel stops shooting into Lebanon Hezbollah has no intention of stopping too. Hezbollah wants to destroy Israel (they say that, not me), while Israel has no desire to destroy Lebanon. Hinting at some kind of symmetry here seems weird.
Israel invading into Lebanon in the late 1970 was a response to an attack originating there [0].
Israel has been attacking Hezbollah non-stop in Syria for the last decade[0]. "The current round of war" is quite literally just Hezbollah firing back.
It's strange to me how Israel is able to fly sorties around the entire region and it's not considered an escalation, but the moment that we see responses it turns into the other side being the aggressor.
> while Israel has no desire to destroy Lebanon
The Israeli Dahiya doctrine[1] is literally based on the idea of destroying as much of Lebanon as possible to screw with Hezbollah's support and morale.
Even the spokesperson of Hezbollah wouldn't say that the current round of war is "literally just Hezbollah firing back". If you're joking then I'm sorry for not catching it, but if not - Hezbollah announced that it's attacking Israel in support of Hamas's attack on Israel.
As for your second point, you're pointing to an Israeli strategy of fighting Hezbollah by pressuring Lebanese citizens against it. This has nothing to do with having the demolition of Lebanon as a goal.
Edit: I also recommend you read the Hebrew version of the Dahiya doctrine wikipage. As the doctrine is Israeli and in Hebrew originally, it explains it in much greater details. The doctrine has nothing to do with destroying Lebanon.
That doctrine has worked. 2006 to 2023 is the longest period of time without conflicts on this scale since before 1970. Until 2006 there were significant showdowns at most every 5 or 6 years.
The doctrine also is targeting infrastructure for the purpose of denying it to Hezbollah, which is utilizing it to support their fighting. Otherwise, per the wikipedia link on this doctrine, the doctrine has reduction of civilian casualties baked-in:
"in the first stage targets were attacked which formed an immediate threat, and in the second stage the population was evacuated for its protection, and only after the evacuation of the population were Hezbollah targets attacked more broadly."
> The doctrine also is targeting infrastructure for the purpose of denying it to Hezbollah
It also describes the infrastructure as literally every single Shiite city. I hope for all of us that Iran or similar doesn't apply this doctrine to Israel.
Hezbollah didn't exist in 1970s. It was founded in 1982
Like the famous quote said "We make peace with our enemies, not our friends" (I can't recall the source) - what is lacking here is diplomacy.
To repeat - Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1980s was the catalyst for Hezbollah's rise. While they curbed PLO they created a more formidable adversary.
First, I forgot an 's there - I meant 1970s. Second, unfortunately for Lebanon, Hezbollah wasn't the only terrorist organization growing in it [0]. "The proximate cause of the Israeli invasion was the Coastal Road massacre that took place near Tel Aviv on 11 March 1978"
Hezbollah was founded in 1982. With benefit of hindsight we can see that while Israel's Lebanon Invasion in 1980s was successful in curbing the PLO who perpetrated the massacre, they created a more formidable adversary in form of Hezbollah.
Hezbollah is somewhat of the successor organization of the most militant wings of groups like the PLO and Fatah, so I think it is relevant to speak of Hezbollah as in some sense existing in a nascent form prior to its founding
> Hinting at some kind of symmetry here seems weird.
Both sides (Israeli state, and Hezbollah) want to destroy each other. It's a simple symmetry. Conflating the military force with the territory and civilians living on it only obfuscates this.
> Have Israel lay down their arms and focus on peaceful gardening and few Israeli Jews will survive.
That's because the entire notion of Israel as a concept is predicated on it being under constant existential threats.
If Hezbollah goes away, then nothing changes in Lebanon: Lebanese identity isn't based on armed resistance. Israeli identity, however, has nothing else going for it besides armed conflict.
If conflicts were to go away, so would Israel. Israeli Jews would just be absorbed into whatever local culture they're in, just as they were prior to the formation of Israel (and just like they are outside of Israel). The remaining ones would be the ones engaging in armed conflict -- just as the original groups like Irgun and Lehi were.
What are you even talking about? Israel is a country with a population of 9 million people. Do you think if the conflicts stop, this population would just disappear or something?
Whatever the "Jewish identity" was in 1948, Israel now has more than 70 years of existence, giving it an independent identity from just "Judaism".
Sure, what is that identity? Is there uniquely Israeli cuisine, dances, anything? What is the Israeli identity outside of an existential threat on Jews?
> The idea of the sabich sandwich was most likely created in Iraq
Yeah, it's about as Israeli as chicken schnitzel. It's just a regular Iraqi eggplant sandwich.
> Israeli folk dances were created as way of helping to create a new Israeli culture in the land of Israel
At least the developers of that folk dance appreciate the fact that there was (and still is) a distinct lack of any sort of national culture and have to _develop it_. Even still, from your source, these newly developed dances haven't reached any level of mainstream success save for the Horah which is Southern/Eastern European.
Note the original comment: "Israeli Jews would just be absorbed into whatever local culture they're in, just as they were prior to the formation of Israel."
> Yeah, it's about as Israeli as chicken schnitzel. It's just a regular Iraqi eggplant sandwich.
Ask any Iraqi if they know what a Sabich is, they'll say no. Show them a picture, they'll say they have never seen it. the "idea" was created in Iraq doesn't mean what you're trying to say it means.
> these newly developed dances haven't reached any level of mainstream success save for the Horah
That's a very funny way to read "In spite of the many changes in the values, dreams, and ways of life of the Israelis, many dances of the 1940s and 1950s remain popular. However, some of these dances are no longer danced. It is hard to specify which dances have fallen out of favour, but the Hora remains common".
But honestly - I think we're done here... It's been a pleasure giving you a taste of our culture. It's unclear to me why you think it's outrages that Israelis want to maintain a majority of Israelis in their country, while every other country does the same, and why you think it's weird that our food is inspired by our neighboring countries, even though that's true in literally every country in the world, and why you think it's a problem that we don't dance exactly like we did in the 50s anymore, even though, I sure hope you don't dance like your grandparents. But cheers! I don't know what country you come from, but I'm getting the impression that manners and respect to others isn't exactly part of the culture there.
> Show them a picture, they'll say they have never seen it
I'm going to write this off as ignorance, given that it's classical Iraqi street food. You can have at at quite literally any Iraqi falafel spot, including in the diaspora. It's the same, through to the amba. The Kuwaitis call it "Mushakal" which just means "mixed", referring to adding everything (falafel, eggplant, cauliflower). But that's just an option, you can go eggplant exclusive.
> It's been a pleasure giving you a taste of our culture
Pleasure is all mine! I've visited multiple times, would visit again just for the turkey shawarma.
> why you think it's outrages that Israelis want to maintain a majority of Israelis in their country
Because Israeli here is being used as a synonym for Jewish, and that's racist. It's not only exclusionary to the non-Jewish Israelis but also sets a clear path forward that even in absolute peace, the Israeli view involves Jewish dominance in culture, population and government.
> even though that's true in literally every country in the world
I don't think the US (or most other developed countries) seek for ethnic or religious dominance. Most horrible countries do, though.
> it's weird that our food is inspired by our neighboring countries, even though that's true in literally every country in the world
Maybe sticking with Iraq, I'd encourage you to look at Persian, Turkish or Arab (i.e Saudi) cuisine and compare it to Iraqi cuisine. It's one thing to suggest there is influence, and it's another thing to carbon copy things and make it your national dish.
> and why you think it's a problem that we don't dance exactly like we did in the 50s anymore
Well given that these dances had all of a 20 year run, I wouldn't exactly call them cultural any more than calling Crank 'Dat by Soulja Boy an American cultural dance.
> I sure hope you don't dance like your grandparents
I do! Most places in the world have cultural dances that are shared and danced with their grandparents. Not too dissimilar from the Horrah :-)
> I don't know what country you come from, but I'm getting the impression that manners and respect to others isn't exactly part of the culture there
Sorry if it comes across as disrespectful, I've tried to be civil.
What are you even talking about? Do you think a country of 9 million that's existed for 70 years doesn't have any unique identity?
There's Israeli writing, Israeli music, Israeli theatre, Israeli dance... some of these are internationally famous. There's Israeli cuisine, a lot of which is based on other cuisines imported from countries that Jews fled from or were kicked out of.
And of course, there's all flavor of Israeli technology and other innovations, from agriculture to food to, of course, software and high tech.
What do you think Israelis are doing on a daily basis, sitting around worrying about existential threats on their life?
> What are you even talking about? Do you think a country of 9 million that's existed for 70 years doesn't have any unique identity?
Yeah. It has no unique national identity. There's a lot of Jewish culture, sure, but I'm hoping we can distinguish Jewish culture from Israeli culture (i.e, Iran is a Muslim country but Iranian culture isn't a subset of Muslim culture).
> There's Israeli cuisine, a lot of which is based on other cuisines imported from countries that Jews fled from or were kicked out of
Agreed. That's the point here.
> What do you think Israelis are doing on a daily basis, sitting around worrying about existential threats on their life?
Israel as a nation, yes. You sort of reaffirmed that by adding "countries that Jews fled from or were kicked out of" in your reply. The existential threat quite literally shapes all of Israeli day-to-day culture. The agriculture, tech and everything else is based on that existential threat.
As I've mentioned elsewhere though, this lack of culture isn't unique to Israel, it's just heavily multiplied due to the population being a collection of diaspora. This might change over the next couple hundred years but it's equally wild to assume that a 70 year old country is somehow going to have anywhere near the same level of culture (and cultural resilience) as undisturbed groups.
> As I've mentioned elsewhere though, this lack of culture isn't unique to Israel, it's just heavily multiplied due to the population being a collection of diaspora. This might change over the next couple hundred years but it's equally wild to assume that a 70 year old country is somehow going to have anywhere near the same level of culture (and cultural resilience) as undisturbed groups.
This statement makes sense - of course Israeli culture, being younger than, say, US culture, is less developed.
But that's not your original claim that I disagreed with, what you originally said was this:
> If conflicts were to go away, so would Israel. Israeli Jews would just be absorbed into whatever local culture they're in, just as they were prior to the formation of Israel (and just like they are outside of Israel)
There's a big difference between saying "the culture isn't quite unique" and implying that without conflicts, Israel would somehow disappear, and Jews would be absorbed into the surrounding culture (of what, Lebanon? Jordan?).
> Yeah. It has no unique national identity. There's a lot of Jewish culture, sure, but I'm hoping we can distinguish Jewish culture from Israeli culture
First of all, 20% of Israel's population isn't Jewish.
Secondly, I think the Israeli culture, even if only focusing on Israeli Jewish culture, is different from, say, American Jewish culture or other Jewish cultures around the world.
> There's a big difference between saying "the culture isn't quite unique" and implying that without conflicts, Israel would somehow disappear, and Jews would be absorbed into the surrounding culture (of what, Lebanon? Jordan?).
I was talking about the national identity. There is frankly no point to Israel's existence, internally and externally, outside of the existential threat. It has no culture outside of the self-fulfilling prophesy of being a Jewish homeland. The culture is literally just foreign influences mixed in with the Jewish faith.
Yes, I strongly believe that without the existential threat that Israel would cease to exist. It's this existential threat that drives the agriculture and tech which is just attempts at self-sufficiency. If Jews didn't have this sentiment, the desire for a nation would fizzle out and the endless conflict with its neighbours would no longer make sense. The oppressive treatment of Palestinians would no longer have any sort of justification. Kosher slaughter and Beetroot kubbeh isn't enough.
> of what, Lebanon? Jordan?
I think you'd find that Jordan and Lebanon, at least in the developed parts, are culturally almost exactly the same. The Mizrahi influence on day-to-day Israeli culture is huge, more than some Israelis probably realize (given another commenter was convinced that Sabich would somehow be foreign to Iraqis).
> First of all, 20% of Israel's population isn't Jewish.
Israel's identity is exclusively Jewish. The extras are just there as tokens non-Jews.
> Secondly, I think the Israeli culture, even if only focusing on Israeli Jewish culture, is different from, say, American Jewish culture or other Jewish cultures around the world.
Agreed, which speaks to the lack of resilience. Compare this with, say, American Lebanese or Australian Lebanese diaspora which you can drop into Lebanon and see no difference.
There's another example of this in that region that's also visible: the existential threat on the Palestinians is what formed their national identity as well. Without that threat which shapes all of their day-to-day lives (including those in the diaspora), they would have just been absorbed into their neighbors too.
> I was talking about the national identity. There is frankly no point to Israel's existence, internally and externally, outside of the existential threat.
What is the "point" of any national identity? What is the point of a French identity? A US identity? A Ukrainian identity?
Maybe all of these places, like Israel, had no culture of their own when they were getting founded, and maybe their initial "reason for being" was some kind of existential threat, but they all developed their own culture. Like every place that has humans living in it for so long.
I really feel like you're arguing something that doesn't make any sense, at all, for any place in the world, least of all a country with a population that has a very old shared religion, traditions, etc.
> If Jews didn't have this sentiment, the desire for a nation would fizzle out and the endless conflict with its neighbours would no longer make sense.
A country that's existed for so long is pretty self sustaining at this point. Multiple generations have been born in Israel. What do you think, they'll wake up one morning and say "oh actually we don't want a country?". Even if they did, where exactly do you imagine they'd go instead?
> The oppressive treatment of Palestinians would no longer have any sort of justification.
The treatment of Palestinians is because of the security threat they pose, at least mostly. If there was no threat any more, that would presumably be because some kind of peace was reached with all neighbors, including the Palestinians. So of course in this hypothetical the interaction with Palestinians will change.
> I think you'd find that Jordan and Lebanon, at least in the developed parts, are culturally almost exactly the same. The Mizrahi influence on day-to-day Israeli culture is huge, more than some Israelis probably realize (given another commenter was convinced that Sabich would somehow be foreign to Iraqis).
I'm sure there's overlaps and similarities, but I would indeed be surprised if it's as close as you make it seem. Sure, there are Mizrachi influences in Israel, but also many other influences. In many ways the country was founded more by Ashkenazi Jews, there's a fairly influential Russian influence, etc.
I think you're letting superficial things like cuisine be the definition of a culture, which is honestly kind of silly; it's a fairly small part of culture.
> Israel's identity is exclusively Jewish. The extras are just there as tokens non-Jews.
First, I don't think referring to a group of people as "extras" or "tokens" is something anyone should do.
Yes, there is definitely an internal question in Israel to what extent it's a Jewish state, and how that fits in with its other self-conceptions, like being a democratic country. But even within the Jewish population, there's a lot of variation, from completely secular and often atheist Jews, to religious Orthodox Jews.
> Agreed, which speaks to the lack of resilience. Compare this with, say, American Lebanese or Australian Lebanese diaspora which you can drop into Lebanon and see no difference.
I don't know about Lebanese, but I don't think this is a good measure of anything. I'm fairly certain you couldn't drop Italian-Americans into Italy with no problem; do you think that means Italy has no culture?
> There's another example of this in that region that's also visible: the existential threat on the Palestinians is what formed their national identity as well. Without that threat which shapes all of their day-to-day lives (including those in the diaspora), they would have just been absorbed into their neighbors too.
I think this is a good example, though I'm not sure I agree with your conclusions.
For one thing, Palestinians could've been absorbed into surrounding countries, if they chose to do so; that's what usually happens to a population in such circumstances (as happened to 10s of millions of people since WW2). I think what makes the Palestinian case unique is partially that the surrounding countries chose not to absorb them, for the most part, and that part of the areas where they live were captured by Israel again.
That all said, I think this example exactly negates your main point - the Palestinians developed a national identity partially because of all of these influences, but that identity exists now, and I don't expect it to disappear!
It is straightforward. There was no conflict there for that past decade plus, Hezbollah started attacking Israel in October to join their Islamic brethren.
So given the context, why is Hezbollah not responsible for the current escalation?
Hezbollah was founded to drive Israel out of Lebanon, and Israel is no longer in Lebanon, so not sure how that context makes any difference to who started and is to blame for the current round of escalation.
You are implying that the context that matters is equal to the context where Israel hasn't done anything wrong. If you don't know you're doing that, I don't know what to tell you. Maybe you're used to entertaining a much less observant audience on this topic.
It's pretty simple - tell me why you think it's justified for Lebanon to attack Israel?
You're dancing around the "context" but not actually saying why that context makes it legitimate for Lebanon to attack based on the pre Oct 7th status quo. Sure Lebanon and Israel have some territorial dispute, but it's like 20 sq km, not something you should start a war for.
Lots of neighboring countries have a bloody history, that doesn't mean starting a new war is legitimate, right? Can Poland start firing rockets at Germany because Germany invaded them in the past?
No thanks. You're obviously brainwashed by particular narratives, and have only absorbed one perspective of the facts that you were already emotionally dependent on. Not at all unusual on this topic.
I'm very open to hear different narratives, but seems like you aren't exactly willing to hear or share, so not even sure why you commented from the get go.
This is a discussion board, and in more than happy to discuss the topic, there's no need for personal attacks.
> The question is who started shooting rockets at the territory of the other.
I think you can always go back further. A good overview is this article on the history of Hezbollah-Israel conflict, with links to the various flare-ups:
Per that wikipedia entry this current conflict began with an attack on Israel. Hezbollah attacked a much more powerful enemy so a statement that stops at "they've both been doing it" does not accurately capture the casus belli:
"Israel and <strikethrough>Lebanon</strikethrough> Hezbollah have been firing across the border since an October 8th strike against Israel in 2023..." etc.
> if the pager network was compromised, thus burns the compromised network
I wouldn't necessarily call this type of attack a network compromise. All it takes is knowing the target phone numbers and sending a specific message, which is a paging network working exactly as designed. Phone detonated bombs have been a thing for a long time too.
Calling it a hardware supply chain attack seems more accurate.
it does seem like a purely escalatory move. wounding but not killing 1000+ of your deepest adversaries, slow clap... I'm sure Hezbollah will give up now that their pagers are destroyed.
And you thought "Key Escrow" or "Chat Control" was bad!
Future maximum-security states may just require every mobile phone to have an explosive charge pre-installed, with the detonation-codes only available to the authorities, of course.
Then when they detect a device in active use by a [terrorist|child-pornographer|subversive|tax-evader], ka-blewie! Problem solved at the press of a button.
See also: 'Black Mirror' s3e6, 'Hated in the Nation'
Stanislav Lem wrote a short story about a tyrant that made his subjects wear highly enriched uranium earmuffs so that if more than two of them got together they would assemble a critical mass.
Italo Calvino wrote a short story about politicians having to sacrifice parts of their bodies in order to hold positions of power, like you'd have to have a hand chopped off to serve one term, a leg to serve another, and so on.
Maybe a dumb question, but I wonder if this was a software attack or IL was able to modify the physical pagers that are issued during Hezbollah onboarding. If this was a pure software attack, are only pagers susceptible? Or are we unknowingly carrying around bombs in our pocket, waiting for the counterattack?
If the description of "exploding" and "tearing [a] bag to shreds" are accurate then it has to be a physical modification of the pagers, lithium ion batteries don't explode with a lot of force when they go up.
It is indeed not the kind of explosion I would expect to see from lithium ion. (Those usually are a lot more flame-y at least the ones I have seen so far.). But I'm not an expert.
NB: that's probably backwards. Batteries contain a lot of energy, they just don't release it particularly quickly.
Most explosives have relatively low energy density, however the energy they have is released far faster than with conventional fuels. By unit mass, TNT (or other comparable explosives such as C4, RDX, etc.) have about 1/10th the energy as liquid petroleum fuels (petrol, diesel, kerosene).
Though again most battery technologies also have fairly low energy densities. But those are probably roughly comparable with most mainstream explosives.
TNT has an energy density of 4.184 MJ/kg.
A LiON battery: 0.36–0.875 MJ/kg.
Motorola pagers (a widely used type) seem to typically take a 3.5V 500mAh battery, which if I'm doing my conversions correctly (mAh * V * 3.6) works out to about 23 kilojoule. That would be the energy equivalent of ~5g TNT. A light charge, but one you wouldn't want going off on your hip.
(Note: I've corrected an off-by-an-order-of-1,000 error above, earlier read 23 MJ / 180g TNT. As I said, I'm not entirely certain of my calculations, which are using the Wikipedia energy densities noted and GNU Units.)
Again, batteries won't explode as footage of the presumed Israeli attack on Hezbolla members shows. But they do contain appreciable energy. It would more likely burn rapidly at worst case.
> Motorola pagers (a widely used type) seem to typically take a 3.5V 500mAh battery, which if I'm doing my conversions correctly (mAh * V * 3.6) works out to about 23 MJ.
Batteries should really quote energy, not charge, for this reason. The voltage is not a constant.
But something’s wrong with your math. Even assuming a constant 3.5V, that’s 1.75Wh, and 1Wh is 3600J, so that’s 6300J.
Probably because they have been stalking for a while, and this escalation is a precursor to further action. Destroying lines of communication is usually done before military action.
I think the "clever show" was the point. The physical damage may not actually justify the investment here. You need the resultant paranoia and suspicion from Hezbollah or it wasn't worth putting resources into.
Assuming a lithium battery and control over the firmware+power draw, couldn't you theoretically make the battery output more charge than safe, leading to at least overheating and maybe more?
I also find it unlikely this was just a remote attack rather than supply chain, but with little to no details we can only assume for now.
Not really. This is about the worst your can do with a lithium battery in practice https://youtu.be/oieH2wwDGzo and that's a proper short in something way bigger than a pager. They don't explode like these were reported to.
If you put yourself in the position of Hezbollah's IT chief, you get a different picture than this question assumes.
Let's assume you're somewhat competent and aware of supply chain vulnerabilities.
Let's also assume that pagers are not that popular anymore, and you insist on a pager that's completely passive. It can't emit any signals at all, or the Mossad would track it.
So you probably find some supplier of gear to the Iranians and other non-Western countries, and give them your specifications. That supplier is reliable, you think. It probably listens to a signal that Hez and only Hez transmits. It's Security By Obscurity, the choice of naive buyers everywhere.
You certainly don't buy anything off the shelf. Well, we know what's wrong with Security By Obscurity: Mossad only has to decipher one secret.
Honestly just slept on the thing and the story seems even more surreal to me now.
How come they needed to replace their pagers AT ONCE recently? Has there been some great breakthrough in pager technology? I have a 5 year old phone and no desire to replace it for at least a couple years more.
How come everyone had the EXACT same model? Even if the Israelis didn't compromise it, even the most incompetent intelligence agency would notice somebody ordering thousands of an item with an usual order count of zero.
Anyone with a very basic knowledge of supply chain attacks knows you don't buy just one kind of item. If they bought fifty different kinds of pagers, this attack would've been impossible.
I'm sure even in benign cases, placing an order of thousands of items on some niche product causes a lead time of months/weeks. Never mind that the Israelis had to painstakingly modify every single one under the cloak of secrecy. Didn't that raise any flags?
And after they did order thousands of the same item, they didn't bother opening up even a single one?
Honestly I don't think incompetence could explain this, I'm 99% sure Hezbollah is compromised at a high level.
> How come they needed to replace their pagers AT ONCE recently?
Hezbollah recently switched to using only pagers for communication, because they were worried about Israel hacking their phones. It's likely they all bought pagers at the same time because of that, because I doubt any of them would have owned pagers already
I agree with all of your questions. But covert organizations fall victims for this type of vulnerability all the time. Operation Trojan Shield and the ANOM network is one example. Operation Firewall and the ShadowCrew takedown was another. I believe LulzSec was taken down by bad opsec in the internal IRC channel as well. Bin Laden wasn't able to mix up his use of couriers and locations enough to stay hidden forever. It's easy for us to see the mistakes and point out that the criminals should have been more diligent or mixed up their operations more, but that would take more effort than anyone can consistently give over time.
Operational security is really hard and requires constant dedication which most organizations can't keep up over time. Eventually the most professional organizations will slip up and make some of the mistakes you point out above. It's very likely that someone has spies or informants inside organizations such as Hizbollah and Hamas. But this can also have been a lapse in standard operations that was finally detected and exploited by Mossad after actively watching for a long time.
> The affected pagers were from a new shipment that Hezbollah had received in recent days, according to sources familiar with the matter cited by the Wall Street Journal.
Presumably someone, likely Israel, intercepted them before they got to Hezbollah and added an explosive payload that could be remotely triggered.
Hard to see how a remote exploit could detonate the battery, which was my initial thought.
From a legal perspective, are there any regulations on these kinds of attacks? Meaning, are they allowed? Are they considered a war crime or maybe this is still a gray area?
It's not that there is a list of approved ways to attack your enemy. Inventing new ways to take enemy by surprise is absolutely a part of warfare. What's important from legal perspective is the ratio between military effect and collateral damage. In this case so far it seems it was better than if conventional warfare was used.
If the pagers had been equipped with lasers that caused blindness, there is a Geneva Convention protocol going back to 1995[0].
I would like to think that the spirit behind that protocol is that the intent to cause permanent blindness in your opponent should be considered a crime. And not that it's not a crime so long as you don't use a laser to do it.
So you can put me in the camp of "this should be considered a war crime", even if it's not in any books yet.
If the pager was sent a message that would encourage the soldier to bring the pager to their face, it would certainly fall under an intentionally blinding attack.
Not at all, that's why we have moderators. Hacker news is interesting because they stay focused on the right topics. If you let people just talk about whatever they want, you're just gonna get an inferior Reddit. Topic != "Whatever we want to talk about", the topic is very often the technical and technological aspects of a story or article. Talking about politics on HN is definitely "off topic".
One aspect here that is not commented on but has long-term security implications:
Assuming these were indeed Hezbollah devices, its likely every single Hezbollah operative now has an identifying wound, possibly a missing limb or wound at the hip level. The wound may be in fact, unmistakable.
What happens later with the lebanese armed forces and with IDF, when they see the ops in the open, its anyone's guess
I might be misinterpreting, but news coverage seems to say that Hezbollah fighters as well as medical personnel were injured. That might mean that the attack was aimed at pagers rather than Hezbollah pagers.
Such lack of precision would be what you'd expect in any kind of operation targeting so many devices.
Those medical personnel may also be members of Hezbollah. Doctors, nurses, and emergency responders can have ideological beliefs. For example, in my country, there are medical personnel with far-right and extremist views, some even holding leadership positions in such ideological organizations.
It's surely possible and or even plausible ideology has infiltrated civic institutions. Still it's quite a stretch to assume any victim of what looks like a supply chain attack is guilty, simply because of the scale of the attack.
Sounds like Israel added plastic explosives to pagers and managed to supply them to Hezbollah. Then, I assume, they triggered only those pagers belonging to known operatives. I'm guessing some did not explode and we'll get to see the device inside and possibly understand the mechanism.
Hmm. I have a couple of politic fiction questions. Lets would imagine that somebody takes a flight with a pager or a second-hand bought phone.
1) How could be sure that there is not a small amount of explosive hidden in their devices or batteries?.
Most devices are sealed. Would the phone smell like something in particular? Would be detected by dogs or x-rays? (I assume that a tiny amount of explosive can be put inside a battery or anything, enough to start a chain reaction with the whole battery while remains hidden to x-rays).
2) What would be the legal path on the defense of this person? just "I didn't knew" does not seem very convincing in a trial. If somebody manipulates a phone are the data stored somewhere?
Actually, I trust Apple's hardware security enough that I think it is probably impossible for anyone in China (even though they have physical access to the devices) to alter an iPhone or Macbook so that its own electronics can be used to trigger any explosive the attacker might install in the device, so in addition to an explosive, the attacker would need to install his own radio receiver. And the attacker probably won't be able to use the device's electronics to eavesdrop on the device's user, so no ability to tell whether the user is in the group the attacker wants to target unless again the attacker installs his own electronics (including radio transmitter) to do the eavesdropping.
> it is probably impossible for anyone in China (even though they have physical access to the devices) to alter an iPhone or Macbook so that its own electronics can be used to trigger any explosive the attacker might install in the device
It would be trivial for a Mossad-level adversary to get around this. The pager explosives were disguised inside the battery, not around it. If you replaced the iPhone's 4500mAh battery with a 3500mAh one containing RDX and a 3G radio, you'd have to be mega-paranoid before you noticed the difference.
This is exactly the sort of hubris modern intelligence agencies rely on in order to exploit your misplaced trust. Apple's hardware security, much like their software security, is mostly predicated on marketing and not the transparent or accountable defense of your device.
I didn't say they had to specifically play by your rules. There is nothing that prevents them from avoiding iPhone mainboard hardware entirely to perform this exact same exploit at-scale.
Right, but at that point, Mossad might as well put the explosive and the electronics to receive the signal to detonate in a shoe or or a hamburger or something. The only advantage of putting them in an iPhone is people's tendency to not want to be without their iPhone even when sleeping and keeping it very close to the body.
> If you replaced the iPhone's 4500mAh battery with a 3500mAh one containing RDX and a 3G radio, you'd have to be mega-paranoid before you noticed the difference.
There’s a 0% chance Apple wouldn’t detect that. A huge difference in battery life like that would fail QC and even the weight would have to be very close before it wouldn’t be flagged for inspection. The liability for battery fires means so dude at the factory isn’t just saying “probably fine” and using them anyway.
> Apple's hardware security, much like their software security, is mostly predicated on marketing and not the transparent or accountable defense of your device.
Have you personally audited it, or are we just being asked to accept this because it would support your tribal affinities?
They don't have to. This could be an entirely aftermarket addition, feasibly even with functional battery DRM. I (and probably nobody here) expect Apple to be putting RDX in every iPhone, but it's entirely feasible for a targeted attack.
> are we just being asked to accept this because it would support your tribal affinities?
You are being asked to accept this because the Mossad and Israeli tech industry are the foremost exporters of iPhone hardware and software exploits. We've already seen how Apple vs. the Israeli state goes, and it apparently ends with Israel selling hardware exploits to American law enforcement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellebrite
"Israel managed to hack the portable pagers and cause them to explode" sounds like they uploaded firmware to make the device explode. In fact, it was a supply chain infiltration and they modified the devices with explosives inside. It's weird to call it hack.
Was going to ask how common pagers were, but suppose still used by emergency services etc and especially in warzones of questionable cell network reliability
Assuming you aren't joking: Pagers are receive-only, which is why they'd use them in preference to cellphones, which transmit even when just idling to register on cells.
This has not been true for some time. Pagers attach to a network in the same way a cell phone does. It is true they are more reliable in the receive only sense, as they can receive the broadcast message in the area they last attached to and the acknowledgment is not required to see the message but they do indeed transmit.
Although, if I was an intelligence agency or police force, I’d definitely give pagers a second look, right? Like they have uses but somebody picking a pager over a cellphone is doing something unusual—maybe something unusual and good, like running an emergency services organization, but still unusual enough to take a second look.
As I'm trying to better understand the situation from a technology perspective, I'm curious: has anyone experienced a lithium battery catastrophically failing during use (not charging) and without plenty of warning (ie. gets warm, hot, scalding)?
My experience has been that at worst, they overheat over minutes to hours, and then hiss, smoke, pop, and catch fire.
I guess what I'm wondering is: is it at all plausible that this happened without the use of some amount of added explosives? (edit: I saw a few videos. I cannot imagine a mobile lithium battery is capable of such a sudden and violent explosion)
Let's assume that the battery in the pager is replaced with half C4 half battery.
AA battery weighs about 20-25g, so 12.5g C4 total.
12.5g of C4 has roughly 84,000J of energy.
For comparison, a 62 grain 5.56 NATO round has about 1,700 J of kinetic energy.
The C4 is undirected, so the target is getting a fraction of the impact, but that much C4 detonating near your body is going to do some serious damage.
So, if the method was to substitute the batteries for ones containing explosives, then how were they triggered simultaneously?
Wouldn't this also require some additional HW/SW in the pagers to trigger the devices? Otherwise, if it was just battery terminals connecting to the battery, how would a remote signal trigger them?
Or maybe it's as simple as the adulterated batteries containing timers and thus not needing external triggering?
Aside from the death and injury, what concerns me about this is why now?
There is little doubt in my mind that the Prime Minister of Israel is highly motivated to engage in a wider war and drag the US along.
This mass bombing could well be in preparation for imminent further action - such as an invasion of Lebanon. Regardless, the escalation this represents is extremely concerning.
UN Security Council Resolution 1566 outlines what is considered as terrorism:
"criminal acts, including against civilians, committed with the intent to cause death or serious bodily injury, or taking of hostages, with the purpose to provoke a state of terror in the general public or in a group of persons or particular persons, intimidate a population or compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act."
If their purpose was really about scaring Hezbollah away, this attack can be labelled as terrorism. I'm pretty sure politicians have different ideas there.
Yeah, true. It's either terrorism or borderline-terrorism at least. But people still gotta talk if they're not willing to wage another war against each other. We clearly have too many wars going around, so politicians will have to forge up some bullshit excuses.
These were detonations, not batteries gone wild. A few grams of common explosives like PETN could have been dabbed to look like a small component in a pager. An exploding bridge wire (EBW) detonator can be blown by a charge pumped array of small low voltage capacitors charged in parallel, then switched to discharge in series. No booster needed.
I highly doubt that it’s a result of hacking the battery power management. Lithium batteries don’t explode the way I have seen these pagers do so far. They usually smoke or start catching fire before they explode due to overheating, which should’ve given enough time to dispose of them. But what happened is sudden and strong. Definitely, something extra was added and was activated remotely later.
It's just a matter of knowing your battery's power management firmware. You can overload the power control circuits that pagers or smartphones by creating a massive surge (sending signals to the IGBT drivers) that will cause the battery to explode. If the battery is moderately charged, the explosion is devastating. Hacker teams from the notorious Israeli ShinBet know of many bugs of this type.
Other comments here are suggesting it was more likely a real explosive put in as part of a physical supply chain attack. Anyone able to say which is more plausible?
It is possible that there was an explosive planted, plus some sort of thermal detonator that was triggered electronically, or even that the battery was used as a thermal detonator to detonate an explosive.
While the Note 7 exploded with quite a bit of force, they never caused injuries like these, and the Note 7 likely had much bigger battery than these pagers had.
We won't know for sure until the devices have been examined.
>>GoaChronicle through its intelligence network has learned that Israeli intelligence successfully intercepted a shipment of pager batteries that had been ordered from B&H Photo. The order was placed from Lebanon. Acting on a confirmed tip, the intelligence agency seized the shipment and covertly modified the batteries. Small, undetectable explosives known as Kiska 3 were inserted into the battery casings and connected to the battery wires via a discreet chip. The pager model was Rugged Pager AR924 IP67. The operation code word was ‘Below the Belt’.
If it is confirmed I'd expect it to actually boost B&H's business, as long as B&H didn't actually know of or participate in the tampering with the shipment.
As you note B&H is well known for being run by Orthodox Jews. So why the heck would Hezbollah, an organization that wants to destroy Israel, buy their batteries from B&H?
It suggests that B&H is a really great place to buy things, so much better than the alternatives that even if dealing with Jews goes against your fundamental beliefs it is worth it.
They must really be in desperate need for more conflict to keep their population at bay. For Netanyahu certainly conflicts come at a convenient time. First he tried to swing himself up to dictator like figure, taking away power from judiciary, tens of thousands of people go to protest. Then October 7 happens. Suddenly a war keeps him in power. Now that that has been going on, and hundreds of thousands are on the streets, they are doing many things to provoke another conflict/war. I think if they fail to keep Israel in a war-like state, his days will be over quickly. He knows that, so he tries to escalate. Not that Iran and their allies aren't provoking and escalating either, but for Netanyahu this is all very convenient.
You're forgetting that tens of thousands of Israelis from the north of Israel have been homeless and internally displaced since shortly after October 7th when Hezbollah started indiscriminately targeting Israeli residential neighborhoods in North Israel with rockets, artillery, and ATGMs, killing several civilians. This is not a tenable state of affairs, not militarily, nor politically. Israel is going to address it one way or another, one day or another, and perhaps they're starting now.
So in one sense you're right that it's to keep their population at bay -- because their population is absolutely fed up with the situation in North Israel and how people have been homeless for nearly a year now and a huge swath of the northern part of the country, will billions of dollars in real estate in total, is uninhabitable. And if this government can't provide security for its citizens, which is the most important thing a government can do by the way, then it will be replaced with one that can.
The opposite is probably more true. By the admission of some of Netanyahu's own command staff, the only reason the IDF is still committed in Gaza is to keep Netanyahu in power; as soon as Gaza is resolved, he's likely to be ousted (and then to face criminal charges). Israel cannot stay fully engaged in Gaza and open up a conventional military front in southern Lebanon. If we're using this kind of logic --- message board logic, let's be clear --- today's action harms Netanyahu's immediate interests, by hastening the point at which the IDF will substantially withdraw from Gaza.
Yup, Netanyahu is certainly taking advantage of the situation to secure his position, at the cost of innocent lives and the expense of the United States. As long as Israel remains committed to its purely-Jewish-state ideal, the conflict will continue, draining more money from US taxpayers.
I think this is the case of both sides knew about each other's plan all along and yet Oct 7 happened. What could be the reason for both sides to execute it. Just to find out what happens?
Like George Carlin said, “you don’t need a formal conspiracy when interests converge”
There are other governments who also benefit from war in the region that most likely have a hand in encouraging, directly or indirectly, for continued conflict.
Unfortunately Netanyahu has gained and lost the prime minister position multiple times without wars. He's just somewhat popular. Between his first government in 1995 and today, people forget there were prime ministers Sharon, Olmert, Barak, Lapid, Bennet, just 18 months before 10/07 his opposition was in power. Did they not have any part of ignoring the preperations?
Even if he would have lost his position if 10/07 never happened, history has shown he always ends up back in leadership due to a million+ voters for his own party, and millions of votes for other religious and right wing parties.
People can rightfully hate them all they want, but he has the votes, and Israel doesn't have a limit on the number of times you can be prime minister
This is only half joking but the only "solution" to the Netanyahu problem is to replace the voters
The reason you are asked to prove your laptop can boot at airport security is that batteries and bombs have similar densities.
It would be pretty straight forward to rig a pager to run off of one battery while the other is an explosive charge made to look like the actual battery.
Especially now that it is abundantly clear that a pager's batteries are large enough to be replaced by quite an effective bomb. And cell phones are a fair amount larger than pagers.
It seems the pager bombs only killed the users. But they also harmed a lot of people around them.
I wonder if this is possible in devices that actually use a small asic to handle all aspects of battery control. They're even more complex than a BMS, for instance macbook batteries have had these for around 20 years [0]. They're even common in vapes and vape batteries. I have to wonder if these asics can be bypassed with malware?
Seems like the cells in these pagers were massively over-discharged and then allowed to be over charged? Potentially a capacitor used to drive the vibration motor was then used to cause the battery to catastrophically explode?
Israel infiltrated the supply chain and inserted a bomb into the device configured to be detonated 3 seconds after a specific message is received. Then they waited x months and sent the page.
Another working theory is that it could just be an opportunistic cyber attack - compromising lithium batteries. Though some of the videos coming out look like a bigger explosion that just a battery going off: https://www.reddit.com/r/lebanon/comments/1fizgag/ha_member_...
Nah, batteries don't explode like that... heat, burst of fire somewhere, sure... full on explosion, no way. This was done somewhere in the supply chain, devices were replaced, explosives were added.
And israel will wonder why suddenly even more lebanonis want to fight them after.
Gold Apollo, the company whose brand was on the devices says they did not manufacture them, they only licensed their brand to BAC, a Hungarian company. Well, I'm sure income from licensing fees in their accounting books say differently. You profit from it, you should pay for it. Any other way to see this will allow this type of vulnerability to spread and the buck will stop nowhere.
I am very surprised Hezbollah didn't think of supply chain security and didn't do the most cursor inspection of these devices. The post mortem would be very interesting on this one.
Obvious #1 Question - did Mossad manage to feed Hezbollah a huge number of weaponized pagers - or are there pagers which could be rooted in such a way that the stock hardware can "detonate"?
In the real world, threat models are much simpler (see Figure 1). Basically, you’re either dealing with Mossad or not-Mossad. If your adversary is not-Mossad, then you’ll probably be fine if you pick a good pass-word and don’t respond to emails from ChEaPestPAiNPi11s@virus-basket.biz.ru. If your adversary is the Mossad, YOU’RE GONNA DIE AND THERE’S NOTHING THAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. The Mossad is not intimidated by the fact that you employ https://. If the Mossad wants your data, they’re going to use a drone to replace your cellphone with a piece of uranium that’s shaped like a cellphone, and when you die of tumors filled with tumors, they’re going to hold a press conference and say “It wasn’t us” as they wear t-shirts that say “IT WAS DEFINITELY US,” and then they’re going to buy all of your stuff at your estate sale so that they can directly look at the photos of your vacation instead of reading your insipid emails about them.
"""
Pretty wild that this mentions a mobile device supply chain attack explicitly.
Nah, it's like how the existence of Star Trek influences future development of technology. Did Mickens call it, or did the Mossad get the idea from Mickens?
Tangentially related - Hezbollah used pagers because they could not trust mobiles. One reason is that mobile basebands are locked down: if they weren't, it's quite possible that by now someone would have implemented a baseband firmware which preserves opsec, that could be used on (rooted) phones . That is probably one of the reasons why governments are hostile to modifiable radio firmware.
It's surprising that Mossad arranged a massive destruction of communication technology without it being the precursor to a major military operation. Very curious why they chose this moment to execute an operation they clearly had ready to go for months.
I don't think it would be quite the same as in explosive ordinance put into a device but it is very similar in that a mass hack could use the navigation system to target pedestrians and calculate the speed required to plow through them without losing control to maximize victim count. All that would be required in another remote hack as has been demonstrated on live highways in the past [1] combined with some form of AI or gaming engine. A mitigating control could be more bollards near sidewalks and more hydraulic bollards on intersections that have a lot of foot traffic to confine the hacks to smaller blast zones. This won't protect the occupants but maybe drive by wire car manufacturers could start adding a "oh crap" manual handle to physically disengage power and apply some type of physical friction brake.
A parking garage full of electric vehicles properly compromised (at least some of them) would be very ... energetic. Burning lithium batteries aren't precisely explosive, but they are still very angry. It is plausible that you could destroy a building with a chain reaction of battery fires. That is one of the safety concerns I think might not yet be fully accounted for (what happens when a bunch of electric cars are in a full closed lot and one of them starts on fire).
Any of the smart plugs or other devices plugged directly into the grid could be intentionally compromised to start a house fire. Millions of homes simultaneously catching fire would be catastrophic. Apartment buildings where a fire starts in 10%+ of the units.
This is a strong statement that probably isn’t true. The power transformers in those devices usually aren’t controlled and the things which are controlled will only sometimes be able to start fires. No doubt that some “smart” devices will have vulnerabilities that could cause fire, but just because there’s an available controller does not mean there’s an avenue to set fire to a device.
In short, unless a device is profoundly poorly designed, there’s no way to blink an LED so incorrectly that it starts a fire. (And many smart devices really aren’t doing much more than that)
The greater concern is lithium batteries catching fire while they are being charged. NYC seems to have a problem with dubious e-bikes already. If a few hundred or thousand battery controllers become compromised and the battery pack is charged with too much current it's like the bat bomb on testosterone.
> maybe drive by wire car manufacturers could start adding a "oh crap" manual handle to physically disengage power and apply some type of physical friction brake
It depends on the manufacturer, but I think this is already the case with Tesla cars? The brake specifically isn't drive-by-wire, it's an electrically assisted hydraulic brake - so even if a malicious actor could get the car to not do the assist part anymore, you can still stop by pressing the pedal hard.
I feel like bollards and other form of separating roads from pedestrians are unviable on the large scale. I hope manufacturers start focusing more on sandboxing any internet-connected parts of their software and leaving the whole car-driving part inaccessible from any of that.
I haven't seen images of the damage, but the difference in damage between an exploding lithium ion battery and 10-15 grams of RDX explosives is going to be "night and day", as they say.
Edit: OK, I've seen some videos. Looks like much less than 10-15g of RDX levels of explosions.
Weren't these people mostly emergency responders? Like doctors and EMTs? And yes, killed several, but also injured thousands? I'm a little concerned by the vocabulary used in the op title.
Hezbollah started encouraging its operatives to switch to pagers months ago, out of fear that Israel would compromise or had compromised their cell phones.
A lot of what I have been following is from here[1] and mentions:
- "Today's attacks exposed many members at various levels. While the group says many of those injured are medical staff or administrative personnel and not fighters..." as well as
- "Then we started seeing CCTV from inside shops and supermarkets of these small explosions targeting people doing their groceries or paying at the checkout.
Then for hours on end [we heard] the wail of sirens. The internal security forces were asking people to get off the streets because traffic was overwhelming the city."
And from my understanding of that region's geopolitics, isn't Hezbollah a political party? So this is like reading about a nation state blanket bombing targets that are of members of the Republican party right?
I just noticed my use of 'mostly' which unintentionally is doing more heavy lifting than it should. I was incorrect to use that word, but the point remains.
Question: what's the possibility of doing this with non-tampered with modern mobile phones?
Many phones today have a 5000mah battery, which I'm assuming could be triggered to overheat via a malicious app or webpage. Imagine this being used on a grand scale.
It's not easy. Lithium-ion batteries are designed to withstand heat without presenting an immediate or non-obvious threat to the user. The easiest way to cause a pyrotechnic discharge is to penetrate the battery itself, and even that isn't terribly explosive (here's a laptop battery "exploding": https://youtu.be/oieH2wwDGzo )
If someone did try heating up your phone to implement such an attack, you would feel it burning through your denim pockets long before it hits 210f. Futhermore, both phone SOCs and battery firmwares tend to implement emergency shutoff contingencies for when the phone overheats. Without prior tampering, nothing will really behave like it does in this attack. It is 100% a supply-chain threat.
I seriously doubt there is any way at all for software to trigger a dead short, and even if you did, the path would burn out quickly and the hardware only BMS part would cut power due to the massive voltage drop.
Would the explosives in these pagers have been caught by something like TSA? I could imagine that at please *some* of the owners had to have flown with them.
Hezbollah is considered a terrorist organization by most countries that also have airport security. I really doubt the people with these pagers would go anywhere near a TSA checkpoint.
This article [1] has an image of the pager and a video supposedly showing one exploding in the bag of some guy while shopping groceries. From that I would suspect a supply chain attack integrating some explosive, that seems way too violent for just an exploding battery or anything else you would usually find in that kind of device.
The batteries are the only major energy storage device there to breach.
Clearly Israel has found a software vulnerability that lets them overload some otherwise minimally used processor and overheat the batteries. Above ~140f lithium ion cells go into thermal runaway.
I was discounting the possibility that Mossad was in control of global supplychains with sufficient intensity and recklessness to hide semtex and a detonator in an entire brand of consumer electronics, in its urgency to provide retroactive justification for every antisemitic conspiracy theory out there and ignite war with the entire Middle East.
The only thing in a pager that SHOULD BE THERE with enough energy to 'explode' on demand, is a lithium ion battery. Which is evidently, given further reports, not what happened here.
If it's a child sitting on the lap with her father, and her father is related to Hezbollah (and as such carrying a pager), this stuff could happen, I think.
Apparently a message was sent to the pagers right before exploding. I saw in a couple videos where the victim looked down at their hip and angled it to see the screen. It makes sense as a trick to ensure the target is close by when it goes off, but a kid could just as easily pick it up off a table after hearing it buzz.
Is there a pager model sophisticated enough to accept remote firmware updates (or whatever condition for a software exploit) but lacking a battery protection IC? Otherwise wouldn't sabotage elsewhere in the chain be more likely?
It was most likely a supply chain attack integrating explosives into the pagers, this article [1] says the affected devices were from a recent shipment. The explosions are way too violent for malfunctioning batteries.
This is a pretty amazing exploit by the attackers. Either they had access to the pagers during shipment and installed malware or had access to RCE on the devices.
This is terrorism. Israel is not an island defending from terrorist, they are the ones spreading terror. What they did to their neighbouring countries could be happen to others. Can we stop praising this as clever and impressive attack and start holding Israel accountable!?
It's the most precise targeting of enemy combatants ever. Hezbollah (and effectively Lebanon) started a war on Israel on Oct 8th in solidarity with Hamas' attacks on Israel (before Israel has even responded really) and has continued indiscriminate attacks against Israeli civilians since resulting in more than 100,000 internally displaced people in Israel. Many dead and injured. Most recently children in a soccer match.
Israel has repeatedly demanded Hezbollah stop attacking it and warned it of grave consequences. This is consequences.
The only "neighbouring countries" of other countries that have something to worry about are those that start wars against their neighbours.
I hope people discuss using more precise terms. UN Security Council Resolution 1566 outlines what is generally considered as terrorism:
"criminal acts, including against civilians, committed with the intent to cause death or serious bodily injury, or taking of hostages, with the purpose to provoke a state of terror in the general public or in a group of persons or particular persons, intimidate a population or compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act."
Physically the attack was likely well targeted. It was shipped very recently, so it's likely only few of those beepers made into the public market.
However, the attack happened right in the middle of general population far away from the theater of war. This obviously intimidates and mentally damages innocent people living their normal lives. So it can be considered as a form of terrorism.
No government, especially those of developed countries, should be allowed to inflict harms on individuals, living in peace, in any form, whether physical or mental.
>No government, especially those of developed countries, should be allowed to inflict harms on individuals, living in peace, in any form, whether physical or mental.
That's why they targeted members of Hezbollah (a terrorist organization) and not children playing football like Hezbollah does.
Yeah, but, again, it was a large scale attack right in the middle of general population. It wouldn't be problematic if this attack was targeting few key members, but thousands certainly intimidate normal people unnecessarily.
Their neighbouring country whose southern region is run by a designated terrorist organisation? The same org that has been indiscriminately launching rockets at civilians towns for a year straight? Oh yeah Israel is definitely the terrorist you’re right XD
> Former Israeli officials have openly acknowledged Israel's role in providing funding and assistance to Hamas as a means of undermining secular Palestinian factions such as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, who served as the Israeli military governor in Gaza during the early 1980s, admitted to providing financial assistance to Mujama Al-Islamiya, the precursor of Hamas, on the instruction of the Israeli authorities.
> in 1998, it was revealed that Netanyahu suggested Turkey to support Hamas. Netanyahu said "Hamas also has bank accounts for aid in banks, we help them too, you [Turkey] can help too."
> In an interview with Politico in 2023, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that "In the last 15 years, Israel did everything to downgrade the Palestinian Authority and to boost Hamas." He continued saying "Gaza was on the brink of collapse because they had no resources, they had no money, and the PA refused to give Hamas any money. Bibi saved them. Bibi made a deal with Qatar and they started to move millions and millions of dollars to Gaza."
Israel is surprised that the terrorists they funded do terrorist things?
The obvious conclusion is that they WANTED Hamas to do those terrorist things.
POCSAG is an ideal for broadcasting low-sensitivity push notifications, like "report to your local commanding officer by 15:00 today". These messages don't need encryption, just a reliable way to reach militants without revealing their location.
The expected collateral damage here seems severe even for Israel. It makes me wonder if there was a coding error where a subset of the devices were supposed to explode but they all did by mistake…
I wonder why they did this, thus revealing that they compromised a lot of devices and losing that capability, instead of quietly continuing to monitor them and using their location to perform attacks via other means if needed.
Maybe they hope the psychological effect is a big deterrent?
Nothing in that particular report says anything about the pagers exploding individually. It may of been a box, labelled as containing pagers, delivered to a group of people and detonated in one location.
Many questions remain, but, also, one: If Mossad had the capability to pull off such a complex supply chain fiesta here, could they not as certainly hack the firmware to intercept all traffic? (Now that Hezbollah is alledged to be using them to communicate?)
Maybe they did, and - at this point - decided that detonating them was preferable to having the asset - and whatever information it was yielding ...
... which is worrying.-
PS. There's talk of this being a "use it or lose it" kind of scenario, with the pagers being close to compromised.-
My guess is they infiltrated the pager supply putting the bombs in all pagers and triggered them with Hezbollah's own encoded message system so only the guilty parties would be effected.
Seems more likely their explosive implant used a separate RF trigger -- makes the whole thing much simpler for them, less detectable. They could run a plane or drone overhead to send the radio initiate message.
Looked like 5-10g (maybe up to 20g?) of explosive, NOT battery. I think you could fit the whole package inside an AA battery, along with an AAAA battery, so you could do something crazy there, or just replace a rechargeable battery pack with something of smaller battery capacity containing the explosive, some electronics, etc. Or just use spare volume inside the case and hope no one does gross physical inspection.
It's trivial to sniff a data line to the LCD and look for a specific message(I regrettably had to do this in the late 90's to fix a bug using an additional Z8 microcontroller). That said, it would be more work than inserting a separate module with its own message reception logic.
Market data suggests that Lebanon is completely saturated with smart phones, like everywhere else in the developed world, so it seems likely that there are only "guilty" pagers (certainly in this shipment, but more likely in the region).
I doubt it's just a cyberattack, the videos of the explosions indicate small explosives rather than batteries.
Don't think we'll know exactly what happened until Israel tells the world or an independent investigation concludes but so far my impression is there was a supply chain infiltration and thousands of pagers with explosives have been distributed to Hezbollah.
> Sucks to be them, why they even use pagers is laughable, unencrypted or encrypted. Cell infrastructure is easily traceable.
That's the point why they're using pagers: pagers are passive only. A cellphone can guide a rocket to its target, a pager just listens and cannot be used to guide a rocket, to act as a listening bug or confirm someone's presence (or absence).
There's two-way pagers which transmit, but receive only pagers can be broadcast reception only; there's no check-in / message acknowledgement, although messages may be rebroadcast to help ensure reception in case of bad signal conditions.
You'd probably get some small amount of RF emissions though, most receivers radiate something as a result of using superheterodyne signal processing.
I read somewhere that these were likely Motorola devices. Does that mean they are complicit in adding explosives to their pagers (wtf?) or is Mossad conducting supply chain attacks on such a massive scale? How do they ensure only the right pagers explode? Or did they randomly blow up a bunch of innocent pager users?
Guessing they compromised the devices with a firmware backdoor, perhaps to remotely trigger an exploit that heats up the devices battery to dangerous levels once a signal is received. Paranoid about this happening with my vape mod with two 18650 cells
More likely this has nothing to do with the batteries and this batch of pagers was physically intercepted and rigged with actual explosives. A very concrete example of a supply chain attack.
Could be true but that requires a lot more steps. Need the materiel to be implanted, delivered to targets, then have a software payload execute, instead of just the last step. However, most battery packs for pagers im seeing are 650 mAh which isn't much energy at all. Two 18650s have almost ten times as much capacity, and they don't explode.
That's enough to vaporise about 100 g of water according my back of the envelope calculations. Overkill? Or is modified for an entirely different purpose?
Apartheid Israel really are terrorists. This was representative of that, killing 2 children in the process. There could be 186,000 deaths since October in their current Genocide of the Palestinians. No wonder Hamas and Hezbollah exist, the same way uMkhonto we Sizwe existed in Apartheid South Africa. They need to be sanctioned and their leaders put in a court of the ICC.
It's very easy to imagine what they'd do with the battery in an electric car. They would do the same thing they did to the pager: put a bomb in it. You cannot "detonate" a lithium ion battery with remote code execution unless you have tampered with the components surrounding it.
It's not so much about the security on vehicles and more about the practical limits. Thermal runaway is only going to happen if you manage to disable the battery's shutoff safeguard (which is usually replicated in hardware and firmware). Unlike phones, you can't really heat up the CPU and force the battery to take the heat. You would have to manipulate the drivetrain in a way that unnaturally damaged the hardware, something a driver would notice almost immediately.
Getting the conditions right for a software-based exploit is a circus act compared to installing a plastic explosive and remote detonator outside the battery stowage.
Cant help but be reminded of that james mickens article about the mossad vs not mossad threat model https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf where he joking says that mossad will replace your cellphone with a blick of uranium (as a joke to imply you shouldnt worry about nation state actor type threats when building a stupid web app that nobody cares about, because its impossible)
These appear to be actual explosions, not battery combustion (there's footage on Twitter of at least one of them going off, it's a detonation rather than intense burning)
Definitely some non-standard internals in those devices...
We live in a world where iPhones get shipped directly from China. I know this is pretty much conspiratorial but if China wanted to hack a bunch of iPhones in the hands of government officials, there’s nothing to stop them. This episode made me realize how loose security is around supply chains.
I find it hard to believe that people are seriously considering the cybersecurity angle in this situation. Yes, there may be some extremely rare and unlikely scenarios where you could hack into a device and cause the attached lithium-ion battery to overheat and combust. However, it’s important to understand that lithium-ion batteries don’t actually explode—they combust gradually over the span of a few seconds to minutes. Even if they did explode, which they don’t, we’re talking about something with the energy equivalent of a single AAA battery, not a large and powerful EV cell. Given these facts, it’s far more plausible that those pagers were intercepted and deliberately implanted with explosives, rather than being manipulated through hacking.
Honestly, at this point, I see absolutely zero difference, from a moral perspective, between the Israeli government and their enemies.
Both are as bad as each other and have been implicated in many war crimes and human rights abuses, however Israel has more firepower and can inflict much more damage (E.g. demolish an entire apartment block, killing hundreds of innocent people from the air).
The last thing any country should consider doing is arming or funding either side, that will be like throwing fuel on a fire. Taking sides in what is essentially a regional ethnic conflict between extremists on both sides is not a good idea.
Again, not condoning or justifying the actions of either side or taking any sides here - they are both as bad as each other.
I do and the latest war completely reaffirmed my perspective. The little spot that allegedly tries to genocide everyone around them while their enemies have that as the stated goals in their respective charters. It is the reason for the existence of Hezbollah even. Why not believe them?
The positions aren't equal, in fact they are worlds apart and Israel treats enemy civilians better than the terror regimes they do live under despite facing constant wars of aggression by said nations.
If someone broke into your house, took over most of it and killed your family member while the police said it was perfectly fine, how would you respond? Just live and let live? Probably not.
We can argue who killed more or was more justified to do it, but that isn't progress. The latest issue is the attack on Israel. There is no equivalence and no justification for that.
The latest issue is an attack on Israel? Are you referring to Oct 7?
Oct 7 had a 71-72% civilian casualty. Project Lavender considered a 90-100% civilian casualty rate to be acceptable and the number of civilians killed vs number of Hama killed far exceeds the ratio on Oct 7.
Israel has systematically destroyed Gaza building by building ruining the lives of millions of people. That is the latest and continuing issue. Ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity.
Are you seriously suggesting, in any way, that blowing up an entire apartment building and all of the innocent civilians inside is not murder?
Israel holds many innocent Palestinian civilians in its prison as its own hostages. These people are held without trial and subjected to rape and other abuses. The difference? Its a state doing it, so to alot of people this somehow makes it ok.
Again, not taking sides here, but both sides are as bad as each other.
What's definitely novel is the scale, perhaps not the tactic, which has been used many times before (speculative assumption being that the devices were tempered with)
Intelligence agencies put their bugs within the hardware of electronic devices you order online.
If you believe being the target of an intelligence agency never order anything online. They will put the bug inside, especially if it is an electronic device such as a phone/laptop/TV/coffee machine.
Best solution is to go buy it from a random store and have a good home security system.
Also weigh your electronic devices laptop/phone to check if the weight differs from its original weight, it should not deviate.
> Also weigh your electronic devices laptop/phone to check if the weight differs from its original weight, it should not deviate.
What kind of errors are acceptable here? Or maybe better, how accurate are the measurements given from the manufacturer?
I have a iPhone 12 Mini for example, Apple says (https://support.apple.com/en-us/111877) it should weigh 135 grams. Measuring with a scale of 0.01g precision (which is also calibrated right before) I get 133.5g, so it's ~1.5g off.
Measuring a 50g weight gives me exactly 50g, so the scale is correct, so either the weight of my phone is off, or Apple doesn't give exact weight.
What if they replaced the battery with a physically smaller battery to make room for the explosives? If the explosives are less dense than the battery the rigged phone would weigh less than the original.
"These devices don't appear to be designed to be lethal.[..] They are, for the most part, low charge so not packing enough to actually kill somebody.[..] Let's not forget that this comes on the same day that Israel has extended its war aims to including expelling Hezbollah basically from the border."
-- BBC's Security Correspondent Frank Gardner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNEb-dY3tRY
I'm not sure if I'm allowed to link to a gory video, but there is commonly circulating video of a pager detonating in a grocery store. There are a few people around the man but only the man appears to be impacted, all bystanders seem OK.
Media is reporting that most casualties are caused by the pager detonating while driving. Obviously because it would impact other drivers that happen to be around the now incapacitated driver.
Just to put some numbers on that, ToI are presently reporting 9 deaths and 2,800 injuries (those numbers are of course preliminary and very much in flux), which taking the 2nd value as a denominator would be a <1% lethality rate. The BBC's characterisation does seem to be accurate.
Already confirmed as there is one 8 year old girl reportedly in the fatalities. This attack will add to the stereotype that Israel attacks indiscriminately.
Is "stereotype" the right word when it accurately describes what's been happening? Amnesty International, the UN, and even the president of the United States have described their attacks as "indiscriminate".
Tbh I only use the word stereotypes because speaking in absolutes here leads to really grimy political discussions with under the guise of semantic or technical discussions. Anyone with eyes can see that Israel acts with protection of the US military and has no reason to be specific with their targets, even while being scolded by that military
Definitely sad when there is collateral damage. But I don't see how it is possible to fight a war with absolutely zero collateral damage - do you? Hezbollah started firing rockets at Israel on Oct 7 before they even responded.
It is better not to fight a war at all, but this is not always an option.
Watch some of the videos, they are remarkably targetted. One man is standing at a checkout line in a grocery store, 2 women near him. He looks at his pager before it explodes. The women around him are unharmed.
If the man is unarmed, I don't think they can be considered a legitimate target. If that is the case, then you could argue all Israelis who have a military background are legitimate targets and that includes most of the population.
The concept of legitimate targets is from the Geneva convention.
> A fundamental premise of the Geneva Conventions has been that to earn the right to protection as military fighters, soldiers must distinguish themselves from civilians by wearing uniforms and carrying their weapons openly
Hezbollah fighters clearly aren’t doing this and this is whether the fundamental argument around how Israel behaves comes from - what is a legitimate target and rules of engagement when the fighting force blends itself into the general populace? For all the criticism, Israel by some accounts does seem to do better than the US in similar circumstances when they were in Iraq and Afghanistan in terms of protecting civilian populations. And for all their criticism (some well deserved some not) they could certainly be even more indiscriminate in their targeting.
What do you mean? I am not in any way supporting Hezbollah but their soldiers are definitely "wearing uniforms and carrying their weapons openly." Hamas and Hezbollah are not the same. Hamas is more decentralized though so that doesn't happen as often in that case. Hezbollah soldiers are also salaried and more properly equipped by Iran/Syria.
The biggest difference between Hezbollah and Hamas is that in Hezbollah's case, their soldiers are more motivated by money rather than ideology. They treat it more like a "professional" job, work for promotions, and dress accordingly. It's a significantly more top-down structure too.
Hezbollah has been accused of employing similar tactics of hiding among civilian populations and hiding military equipment in civilian buildings which makes sense both given that Iran is backing both these groups and from a strategic view if you’re fighting a significantly more advanced enemy.
As for ideology vs money, it’s hard to distinguish which motivates them more va Hamas given these movements started from seed money and personnel from the Iranian revolutionary guard.
But certainly hezbollah started indiscriminately shelling Israeli civilian targets and Israel is responding by targeting military personnel and infrastructure. It’s up to the Lebanese government to control Hezbollah (which they cant) and Hezbollah is responsible for collateral civilian casualties that stem from attacking them
That's just the videos that have been published and the ones that happened to be captured by CCTV. If 1000 devices were indiscriminately detonated, even a 5% collateral damage rate would mean up to 50 innocent people harmed, maimed, or killed. At 15%, 150, and so forth.
That would still make it the least indiscriminate long-range attack in the history of warfare.
Give me another example of a military that injured/incapacitated over 1000 enemy combatants from hundreds of miles away with so few civilian casualties.
It's absurd that this was flagged and pushed off the front page. Either it was a supply chain attack with explosives installed, or this was a hack that caused battery explosion. Either way this is extremely relevant to Hacker News.
J*sus. I fully plan to stop going around with my iphone everywhere (until this is fully explained). We could all be 1 glitch (think CrowdStrike) away from getting lithium exploded mysteriously.
Pager networks are 100% clear text. If you're stupid enough to be using them to coordinate operations in 2024, I feel like you kind of deserve whatever happens to you.
You're telling me nobody in Hezbollah watched The Wire?
Pagers are one-way, not bidirectional like cell networks. That's their whole point. Their HQ can broadcast a message and you won't find out who is the receiver, because pagers don't transmit, only listen.
I never said they were two-way. I said you have the metadata of the sender and the receiver.
The page data contains the receiver/pager address, but remember this is RF. Triangulating source of transmission on a frequency you are actively monitoring is table stakes for nation states.
Once you flag receiver addresses there are techniques to work out who that party is, especially for a nation state sophisticated enough to intercept the supply chain in the first place. Correlating transaction data to people is tedious but doable. Even with receiver addresses only though you can work out how the network works and what cells there are and that's a ton of useful intelligence already.
Also if the "code" being used was in any way breached it could be used to trick receivers into self-identifying.
Israel just skipped all of that effort with "ring ring, boom" though.
Let's be fair. This is probably the communication channel for grunts that command doesn't give a shit about and they're using E2EE apps for command and this for grunts.
Oh yes most definitely. Pagers are usually used this way in all of the other uses anyway (to quickly contact and inform ground actions like in emergency services).
I'm getting tired of everybody saying "supply chain, supply chain":
first, you have no information.
second, it's so non-specific, it's less informative than "they inserted exploding batteries into the supply chain" vs "a container that was unloaded was not actually from the source" which I would say isn't even supply chain, like if I leave a box of dog poop at your door, I haven't tampered with your "supply chain"
maybe this hack started with hearing that they were going to upgrade devices. maybe it this hack started with convincing them to upgrade. maybe Turkey did it. maybe ISIS did it, they hate hezbollah.
it doesn't make you sound more informed to say "supply chain", it makes you sound less.
>second, it's so non-specific, it's less informative than "they inserted exploding batteries into the supply chain" vs "a container that was unloaded was not actually from the source" which I would say isn't even supply chain, like if I leave a box of dog poop at your door, I haven't tampered with your "supply chain"
Almost all of the global commerce happens by contained carried by ship or plane. That someone can take a container full of electronics, tamper with them, and sell them without even the manufacturer noticing has very serious implications. Your phone and your laptop were also inside of a container, and were also handled by dozens of middleman companies. have you ever opened them and check every component? Can you assert you are not carrying a timed bomb in your pocket?
This is really sick and should result in major sanctions against Israel. USA should never give them another penny, take the nukes, and let them wither. They've become pure hate. This is a standard that can't be allowed and Israel must be punished.
Israel's Mossad spy agency planted a small amount (3 gm) of explosives inside 5,000 pagers made by Gold Apollo (a Taiwanese company). "The Mossad injected a board inside of the device that has explosive material that receives a code." 3,000 of the pagers exploded when a coded message was sent to them.
Gold Apollo founder Hsu Ching-Kuang said the pagers used in the explosion were made by a company in Europe that had the right to use the Taipei-based firm's brand, "The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it"
Hezbollah fighters have been using pagers as a low-tech means of communication in an attempt to evade Israeli location-tracking,
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/3-grams-of-explosives-per-pa...
> Gold Apollo founder Hsu Ching-Kuang said the pagers used in the explosion were made by a company in Europe that had the right to use the Taipei-based firm's brand, "The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it"
He also said it was strange he got paid from "Middle East". That statement of his also indicates this was not a long standing "licensing" agreement. Someone likely called up from "Europe" and asked for the license for that specific device.
Conclusion: the company in Europe is a paper fiction. The devices were made in "Israel" and the only time they may have been in Europe was to get them from Middle East to so a "European" company can ship them back.
This also means Hezbollah has an asset in its upper ranks. We can assume this since they announced before "We're gonna use pagers from now on folks" and thus prior to this Shin Bet had no reason to run a cutout in "Europe" making pagers. The entire production chain was then a fiction setup likely recently, certainly post "headsup everyone, pagers" announcement by the targeted organization.
So the chain of events is clear:
- "Did all you hear we are going to use pagers?"
- Shin Bet sets up the phony production Taiwan -> EU.
- Devices made in "Israel".
- Asset recommends make / model / seller.
- boom.
Why are you referring to Israel with its name in quotation marks?
To be fair, they also put Europe and Middle East in quotation marks
I think from now on future OEMs will be very careful indicating whether a product was in fact made by them, under their supervision, or was license made by some third party.
You'd think that. Here in America, the NSA has been intercepting and bugging servers for decades, and manufacturers have been suspiciously quiet about the whole affair.
Suffice to say, when enough pressure can be exerted by a government agency, OEMs are happy to keep their mouth shut.
Has anyone actually found and documented one of these bugs?
How they looked and what they did was presented in some of the Snowden files.
I have doubts those servers and other devices with implants made it into the wild since they were specifically targeted for high value target customers of those companies.
Yes.
https://www.engadget.com/2014-05-16-nsa-bugged-cisco-routers...
> planted a small amount (3 gm)
The abbreviation for gram is simply "g". I was a bit confused but at least the link cleared things up.
Americans will do anything to avoid using the SI metric system :)
NDTV is an Indian news site...
g is the correct SI unit symbol, not only an abbreviation
Thanks. I am usually not super pedantic but I've noticed some people using "mt" for meters recently. I immediately fall into confusion when the wrong symbols are used. Then go down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out if it is a cultural or regional thing.
People have used all sorts of abbreviations for the SI prefixes and SI units for as long as I can remember. I want to ask—are people not taught this in school? I had multiple introductions and revisions of the SI units and SI prefixes in secondary school, pre-university, and university, and every time, a wrong prefix or a wrong symbol was penalised by half a mark per question. I had classmates who mixed them up regularly and lost something like seven marks each time. They learnt very quickly not to, as those seven marks could make one or two grades' difference.
As someone who champions sole use of the SI units, this annoys me to no end.
I've seen things like 'kgs', 'gm', 'gms', 'mtr', 'mt', 'K' instead of 'k' (note capitals) for 'kilo-', mixing 'm' and 'M' (which are supposed to mean 'milli-' and 'mega-' respectively), usage of 'u' instead of 'μ' for 'micro-' (the one exception I will concede is 'mc' in the medical field, because people apparently confused 'μ' and 'm' which results in a 1000× over/underdose), and don't bother with the degree symbol (Alt+numpad 0176 on Windows, Option-Shift-8 on macOS) for °C, or use °K for kelvins (there is no degree, as it is an absolute scale and not relative to anything else, unlike the Celsius/centigrade and Fahrenheit scales), and so many other typographical errors.
https://www.nayuki.io/page/common-mistakes-when-using-the-me...
I love this, thanks so much for writing it! I'm writing a blog post on metrication and this will be a super-useful resource for the sort of pedantry I intend to engage in.
Then see my point about the UK/metric/Imperial. ;-)
Incidentally, in that link there's a very common example of bad usage namely the volt/voltage. 120V is shown as bad usage and 120 V good. One sees the former usage on machines, appliances, in printed material etc. so often that it's almost a de facto standard.
I'm inconsistent in my use too, one time I'll include the space at other times not.
> are people not taught this in school?
I agree about standardization, but I think this framing comes off as lacking empathy. Plenty of folks either
- Avoided the topic in school or put all their effort into other subjects
- Didn’t learn this in school—there are a wide variety of education systems across all the decades and distances that folks on this site may have grown up in
- Learned this in school, but a lifetime ago, and haven’t had a reason to revisit it. At a certain distance, your life experience and work experience massively overshadow what you learned in school.
Forgive the inference, but based on your recall of specific grading policies I would guess that your time in school is still near to you, or at least very important. It’s not that way for everyone.
(I am of course doggedly accurate with my unit abbreviations.)
[edit: list formatting]
"People have used all sorts of abbreviations for the SI prefixes and SI units for as long as I can remember."
In the US that is, not in metric counties that use SI by default.
For those in the US (and to a lesser extent the UK) there are multiple metric systems. The other notable system that's still in use is the cgs (centimetre–gram–second) system.
'cgs units' are still used in some areas notably physics as they can make calculations easier, there they're called Gaussian-cgs units.
Incidentally, often, as here, 'cgs' is in lowercase to reflect the case of the units' abbreviations. That said, the uppercase abbreviation is also often used. For instance, as I typed this my browser kept correcting the lowercase to 'CGS'.
> In the US that is, not in metric counties that use the SI system by default.
India which metricated in the late 1950s is still a big (ab)user of poor SI symbolism. A lot of the 'cms', 'gms', 'cc', 'kgs', etc come from Indian writers and Indian publications (case in point: the article in this thread).
> The other notable system that's still in use is the cgs (centimetre–gram–second) system.
> 'cgs units' are still used in some areas notably physics as they can make calculations easier, there they're called Gaussian-cgs units.
I'm not sure they're used all that much—I was under the impression most CGS units fell out of favour as MKS and eventually SI took over. I was an RA at my physics department for a while and we used SI as much as we could. Some specialisations use a certain form of natural units (like geometrised units in general relativity), but by and large SI dominated.
Right, there are offenders everywhere but the chief offender is the US by far (many don't have a clue about SI let alone metric, ask an American what 20°C is in Fahrenheit and they've no idea).
The UK is also troublesome in that whilst supposedly a metric country Imperial is still commonplace. For example, there's widespread use of antiquated units like the 'stone' (14 pounds)†, even BBC medical programs still regularly use the term.
Re Gaussian/cgs, in physics it's still widely used especially in field theory/Maxwell, SR (Special Relatively), etc. because in charge calculations and such involving permeability, permittivity, speed of light certain terms can be restated as 1 instead of their actual SI values.
Personally, I understand why this is done but from my perspective it's confusing if not misleading for reasons well outside this discussion (but who am I to argue with those more learned than me?). This Wiki provides justification of sorts (see Unit of charge): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_units.
† In Australia where I am, only people of my generation who've been around for decades would even know what a 'stone' was. Anyone born after say the mid 1970s would likely think you're talking about a rock. Trouble is, we see BBC/UK programs here. Fact is the UK is oblivious to the problem or it'd first correct its exports.
Why would your average American need to know what 20°C is in Fahrenheit? Very few people use Celsius here. All our appliances use Fahrenheit, weather reports use Fahrenheit, our recipes use Fahrenheit, and for science and physics we use Kelvin.
Honorable mention for "cc", which stands for "cubic centimeter" which is exactly equal to 1 ml. I can't find any logic to explain why cc is used in some contexts and ml in others.
And the SI for that is... cm³.
The problem is old habits die hard and to be (or appear) to be consistent then an official designation can be unwieldy, as here.
I simply cannot remember when I last saw cm³ but cc and ml are everywhere including on commercial chemical reagent bottles etc.
The same nomenclature problem is all over chemistry too, the preferred IUPAC name for say isopropyl alcohol is propan-2-ol, and the preferred name for acetone is propan-2-one (systematic 2-Propanone). I can't say I've ever heard anyone ask me to pass them the bottle of propan-2-one, it's just not done (not in my world anyway).
If there's a choice between an awkward or simpler term then the simpler one wins out every time.
I wouldn't wish to be in the PR damage control team of Gold Apollo right now.
This was a direct attack to their survival as company. Will they sue Israeli government for turning their product into a bomb used to mutilate and kill people? Seems not probable.
Will they sue the Hungarian company making the bombs? That would be a more realistic target. Now Hezbollah has an excuse to attack Hungary interests in the EU and the conflict could escalate. That company should be crushed and closed for good by the Hungarian law system IMO. Either you are a military grade company or you aren't.
If Gold Apollo wants to keep selling pagers, better they start making all the carcasses on their products transparent from now on. With a big photo in the boxes showing how the correct product must look.
> That company should be crushed and closed for good by the Hungarian law system IMO. Either you are a military grade company or you aren't.
Were the pagers military grade? Hungarian company providing military equipment to Hezbollah would be a scandal on its own.
I assume that you, as a company, need a special permit to manufacture lethal weapons or military products on EU. Either you have it, or you don't. And if you don't have and still do it, I understand that you are breaking a dozen of EU laws.
The EU now needs to do something about it, and do it fast. Or to pretend that nothing happened, surrender to Israel, create a dangerous legal precedent "for the cause" and send a clear message that EU manufacture laws are a joke: "All those security filters painfully raised around EU products worth zero and can be easily jumped over". This is a really bad message for all the EU makers.
A franchise of your brand also signed a contract to make your product. I assume that changing the functionality or specifications of your registered product is strictly forbidden in that contract. I bet that this move violated some laws on Taiwan also.
If I was the CEO of Gold Apollo I would be fuming and furious at this moment.
Israel not only pushed them into the middle of a war that is not their war, without their consent or knowledge; also destroyed the brand image and painted a target in the backs of each employee and reseller of Gold Apollo.
At this moment, nothing suggests that the Taiwan based company were part of this. They should apologize, clear things, and detach themselves from this PR mess as soon as possible.
I understand that from the Mossad point of view this can be a big success, but from the point of view of the companies that try to sell their legit products, this is an direct attack.
> Israel not only pushed them into the middle of a war that is not their war, without their consent or knowledge;
Weren’t they already selling pagers to Hezbollah? It seems like they were already in the war as a supplier of goods to a terrorist organization.
I wonder if this is why Israel made this move because the manufacturer was already breaking international sanction by supplying Hezbollah so they have little recourse.
If I was the CEO of Gold Apollo, I’d be investigating why my franchisee was selling stuff to Hezbollah in the first place.
But it’s beepers and only 5,000. How expensive is this at the end of the day? It’s probably the last time a company lends then brand name for a small amount.
> Weren’t [Gold Apollo] already selling pagers to Hezbollah?
Selling pagers to Lebanon citizens is legal if I'm not wrong.
Not necessarily. At this moment, all suggests that somebody (Ehem, Mossad) was impersonating a reseller of the brand [1]. How do they knew that the buyers were from Hezbollah?. Did the buyers wear a t-shirt?. What if somebody was buying it to resell it later and bank some profit?. This stuff could ended being sold to innocent people, or distributed by all the schools of Lebanon.
[1] New facts can change this picture and I may be wrong about this.
> If I was the CEO of Gold Apollo, I’d be investigating why my franchisee was selling stuff to Hezbollah in the first place.
Agree. Definitely, the maker should make a move about that, just to be sure. And to be very transparent about that investigation.
> Selling pagers to Lebanon citizens is legal if I'm not wrong.
This is true. But only the thousands of Hezbollah pagers blew up, right? There are a lot of details needed to see if they knowingly supplied Hezbollah or just sold a big batch to a random customer. I assumed, perhaps falsely, that a 5000 pager order for Lebanon is pretty specific and does anyone really use pagers any more? My thinking was that this is a specific tech used by Hezbollah. Although it is a consumer tech, maybe pagers are super popular in Lebanon. But 3000 people were injured so I thought that the vast majority of these pagers were used exclusively by Hezbollah.
My point is their stuff was already in a war. Israel making them explode doesn’t seem to change that.
> only the thousands of Hezbollah pagers blew up, right?
Hopefully! Just out of curiosity I had a look for that brand of pager on eBay, but didn't see any. I'd hate to think that there were a few rogue units out there that had potential to cause harm!
They were most probably devices sold at retail in areas where members of hezbollah are located.
You could be right
After ABC news, "an AP photographer in the city of Sidon saw a mobile phone shop damaged after devices exploded inside".
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/gold-apollo-p...
It may be legal but with little or no civilian demand due to preference for cell phones. The only person I know with a pager is an on call doctor.
> Weren’t they already selling pagers to Hezbollah?
Apollo pagers are everywhere and sold through resellers through out the world, even in the US. Let’s not do Hasbara-style speculation
> Weren’t they already selling pagers to Hezbollah?
I don't have info about those specific models, but this is pagers and not rockets. If someone makes an order for 5000 units I can't image you'd have an expectation to do a background check with references.
It's basically like ordering 5000 units of Raspberry Pi, would you consider that a military export?
Raspberry Pis ending up in Russian weapons used in Ukraine is currently an issue actually, which it's illegal to export them to Russia.
For the US, at least, I am forced to confirm that those 5000 raspberry pis aren’t going to a terrorist organization. Isn’t the EU the same way? So it’s not that it’s a military export, but that it’s a sanctioned organization (Iran and Hezbollah).
How are you realistically able to do this though? It's not like they can't order batches to some neutral-country intermediary and then ship them from there.
It's about assigning liability and making it more difficult, not a definitive solution.
Communications equipment is commonly restricted for it's potential military use.
The company was just an letter box. Apollo HongKong produced these devices: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x50wwGjX2Ao
This stunt is great for Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions folks though. Here in the US, many states require fealty to Israel in the form of promising you won’t boycott them if you want to do business with that state’s government. Now there’s an easy out: no one is boycotting Israel, they’re just avoiding the liability of Mossad intercepting and tampering with a shipment.
Would that even hold up in court? Would be amazing at counteracting these unconstitutional laws. The biggest problem is that these laws are much easier to get passed then to get repealed. Because each repeal requires a long winded lawsuit that can sometime only get the law slightly altered.
Well, pagers are not military products. And second, except for ordnance, you don't need any license to manufacture any product.
For products that can have dual-use capabilities, you need an export license that is given per customer (at least in the EU) where some due diligence is performed. If the company is a reseller in Lebanon and there are no export bans for that country, they can be sold/bought without an issue.
The fact that somewhere in transit they were modified, the manufacturer or seller cannot be held liable for it.
They will fold. It’s Israel and Germany and France will push the EU to memory hole this.
Doesn't matter. Hezbollah are subject to sanctions by the EU as a designated terrorist organization. Presumably, that applies to all companies operating within the EU.
Sanctions violations are very much a "do not pass go" style crime, and this looks like it was an entire batch that was delivered directly to Hezbollah.
This is the right answer.
> Were the pagers military grade
I don't mean to be "that guy", but "military grade" means nothing nowadays. It can mean anything from "made to exactly standards" to "made by the lowest bidder, and likely to fail the minute it's used".
Been a while since I did fmeca work but it used to mean different tolerances for the parts.
A type of people that uses pagers all day is Physicians. Hospital staff.
"military grade means 'from the lowest bidder', but can tolerate being a dropped a few times"
Just normal pagers with 20g of high explosive inserted in to them. They found a way of remotely getting the battery to overheat with would make the thing go boom.
> If Gold Apollo wants to keep selling pagers, better they start making all the carcasses on their products transparent from now on. With a big photo in the boxes showing how the correct product must look.
I don't think that would make a difference at all, explosives could be disguised in any electronic components, being transparent wouldn't help very much. The Taiwanese company's brand is now irreparably tarnished, I think that is the cost of lending the brand name to an untrustworthy partner.
> This was a direct attack to their survival as company. Will they sue Israeli government for turning their product into a bomb used to mutilate and kill people? Seems not probable.
Would Toyota or any other car manufacturer sue Arabs et al. for turning their pickups into rolling suicide bombs?
Toyota will definitely sue to death somebody --selling-- thousands of new Toyotas modified in mass to kill their drivers. If not, they would be sued massively instead, so is not something that they could just let pass.
If the owner wants later to trow their Toyota over a cliff is a different problem and not Toyota's business.
As it can be expected the situation is extremely murky. Hungarian press is abuzz with this, I will translate a few hard facts and leave speculation to others. I will also use English sources as appropriate. Hungarian sources are below the list, you can run them through automated translation to fact check me.
* There's a small consulting company called BAC after the initials of the founder Bársony-Arcidiacono Cristiana. One of their services is https://archive.fo/kwTKA "We develop international technology cooperation among countries for the sale of telecommunication products. This cooperation entails scaling up a business from Asia to new markets e.g. developing countries". Their home page https://archive.fo/dXtMx lists these: Strategic Advisor for major International Organizations including Financial companies (Venture Capitals, IAEA, UNESCO, CNRS, EC, etc.). Business Developer and Savvy Analyst for Innovative/ Solutions in diverse fields (Sustainable Development (SDGs), Water, Energy, Resilience-Mitigation-Adaptation, Capacity Building, Complex Emergencies, Digitalization (AI, Blockchain, ICT) within Humanistic Economy.
* The official place of business is just a business "placeholder". The woman who answered the doorbell for journalists said no one ever from BAC is there, maybe once a month a mail comes which she receives.
* This house is also the registered address for a number of companies. Two companies have Russian owners. One of them is an oil wholesaler.
* BAC revenue in 2023 was 210 million forints and 13 million profit. What's remarkable is how person-related expenses (payroll etc) was a mere 0.5 million forints for the entire year. Hungarian monthly minimum wage was a bit over 0.25M HUF. One million HUF is about 2820 USD.
* NBC talked to the founder. According to her "I don’t make the pagers. I am just the intermediate. I think you got it wrong". https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/taiwan-firm-denies-making...
* The founder's linkedin is still up https://www.linkedin.com/in/cristiana-b%C3%A0rsony-arcidiaco... Her PhD from 2006 is at https://ucl.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay?do... so it seems real.
https://hvg.hu/kkv/20240918_hezbollah-bac-consulting
https://archive.is/QWlXw
https://telex.hu/belfold/2024/09/18/mit-lehet-tudni-a-magyar...
In conclusion, if I needed to speculate based on the LinkedIn page and the archived consulting page, what gives me pause: if this woman indeed exists she is one of the most talented people in all of Hungary. Seven languages, degrees in diverse fields and a PhD in physics. At the same time, I have indeed found a PhD from 2006 and her grants and scholarships from even earlier are probably not hard to verify either. I do not know what to think.
To me the content archived consulting page looks very much like something a large language model would generate. Impressive, but doesn't make any sense considering the size of this company. Probably good enough to fool Hezbollah anyway.
She purportedly got a PhD in London, UK. Now I do not speak English that well but to me this sentence "This cooperation entails scaling up a business from Asia to new markets e.g. developing countries" does not look correct. Is it...?
It's grammatically correct, but it's very awkward. Most people would say "We partner with technology companies to introduce their products to new markets in developing countries".
As it's written, it only mentions "a business" (singular) when it likely means multiple businesses. It also uses the word cooperation, which has different connotations than a partnership. Typically, business will say that they "cooperate" with governments, standards bodies, or trade restrictions. For friendly and mutually profitable agreements, they'll use the word "partner" to indicate that both parties benefit.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240401000000*/www.bacconsultin...
The timeline of web archive snapshots is strange. No real change or activity for years - then a flurry of changes in 2024.
Anything before 2021 is not this company at least according to the Hungarian corporate registry.
Also, https://web.archive.org/web/20211210194900/https://www.bacco... this is interesting, it's 2021 Dec and yet, it has AI on the front page.
And now there's a second set of explosions, this time using handheld radios.
I'm hopeful that this won't escalate, but I'm very anxious that it will.
One more thing: she posted Russian propaganda to her LinkedIn feed.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/cristiana-b%C3%A0rsony-arcidi...
She also regularly reposts antivaxx posts.
Which does not really mesh with her supposed education level.
Weird.
I doubt the company exists anymore or that there's anyone left in hungary who can be held responsible. Here's what i imagine took place:
step one: mossad sets up some sham manufacturing facility in Hungary or buys an existing one.
Step 2: reach out to gold apollo and make a deal to produce their pagers under license. Money no object they probably offered them very good terms. Gold apollo is so pleased by the money being offered they fail to investigate the company properly. Step 3: mossad agents start production introducing lethal batteries into the design, produce several thousand units then vanish leaving apollo executives bewildered but they have the money already so they don't ask too many questions.
Step 4: sell all the pagers at a great price to some hezbolla arms dealer, go home, buy some popcorn and turn on the tv.
In short everyone involved have probably disappeared months ago.
Also a really clever part is that they could have turned a profit on the sale meaning the operation was at least partly subsidised by hezbolla themselves.
There are lots of companies with questionable practices in Hungary. One scam I am aware of is companies that are registered in the names of homeless people whose sole function is to churn out receipts that other companies buy at fractions of their face value in order to run “clean” expenses through their books and effectively launder money.
Would not surprise me if this turned out to be something like that.
Its not just Hungary. There's a famous high street in London with a series of sweet shops (about 2 dozen) that are a very obvious front for a money laundering scheme. Allegedly the taliban or some other afghan crime ring).
I don't know why the authorities are ignoring them but it's probably such a big can of worms that everyones afraid to open it.
Gummy worms?
In all seriousness though, those “sweet shops” and “Thai massage parlours” and the like are clearly fronts for money laundering. I doubt they’re being ignored, but as you say, there’s probably some reason no one’s dealt with them yet.
Can a company sue you because you modified their product? Even if that modification caused harm?
Am intermediary can be sued just for damaging products through insufficient, they can certainly be sued for adding defects on purpose. Especially lethal defects.
But can the manufacturer sue? Isn’t the normal way that the customer sues, because their stuff was damaged? Can the manufacturer sue me if I buy their stuff, modify it to be deadly, and sell it again?
(I don’t mean “can the sue me” but “do they have any chance of winning” of course)
> But can the manufacturer sue? do they have any chance of winning?
For Gold Apollo the dilemma here is either to sue the Israel Government (and try to survive the experience as company), or to take the piss and be sued for the families of the people mutilated by "their" product. They are in a difficult position.
It depends on how deep are their pockets and what they think will do less damage to the brand. Also if it has Taiwanese government support or not (unlikely as they probably depend on Israel technology for defense); and if Taiwan companies team with them or not. If the "made in Taiwan" sector want to keep selling radios and pagers to the rest of the planet they need to assure that this can't happen again.
I assume that the consequences for Israel will be indirect, limited and approved by USA, or none.
Update: Gold Apollo is a small company with about 30 employees. The CEO said that this was humiliating, the products were made by a distributor in Hungary and that they were ruined for that. Small chances that they could sue anybody.
If you pretend it's legit, I'd say you're breaking trademark law, even if it isn't explosive. The same way you can't put old laptops in Macbook cases and open an online shop.
In this case there would also be a contract with specific terms for the reseller/manufacturer that certainly includes language such as "purposefully produce devices that would damage the brand".
Of course I think the customers have a more serious case to bring on (particularly ones that weren't terrorists). As well as war crime considerations.
Hezbollah and Hamas need the inherent anti Israel bias of Europe. It's the only international group with money and influence that sides with them. If they attack anything in Israel then it is a massive Israeli win.
Europe only care for geopolitical games in the Mediterranean and petroleum. The Gaza conflict has shown that oil is on its way out as a top level geopolitical influence.
Lol military grade. This is a guerilla fighting group getting leftover oil money from Iran. They were using pagers.
Israel has been fighting for 100 years with its hands tied. With the unofficial and largely official sunni/saudi Israel alliance, only Iran cares about the freedom fighters of Gaza and Lebanon, and you can put a ten year clock on that funding once EVs start taking real chunks of transport
Gold Apollo claims the devices were assembled in Hungary by a company named BAC.
My guess that entire company was just a Mossad front.
* They seem to have little or no actual presence at their Hungarian address * CEO has a profile that seems to have very little to do with the manufacturing of telecom devices * Gold owner says their payments were strange and came through the middle east. * Orban is very pro Israel
A front yes. A front for who though? Was it a front for Hezbollah that got infiltrated or a front setup by Israel fit for purpose.
I have no sympathy for Hezbollah but empathy a plenty - I've been on that side of a security breech and step one involves tearing things apart; things that are the problem and invariably unless you've got ice water in your veins you'll tear apart things that are not the problem as well.
Very appropriate name for such outcome. BUM or BOM would be better but it is what it is.
> "The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it"
That's whitewashing. If they license the brand, they should control every aspect of manufacturing. Otherwise they are irresponsible. If I was their client, I wouldn't trust them any longer and return all pagers.
I am curious about the technical details - where were the explosives packed, how were they connected and triggered? Did any pager survive and didn't blow up?
Unfortunately I’ve been trying to tell this to friends and family for almost a decade in regards to clothing and home goods.
People are stuck in the 80s and 90s that a logo defines how something was made, which isn’t true at all these days. Calvin Klein is a great example where most of their income comes from licensing, not selling their own clothes. They might review designs but have no say on if the resulting garment can be sold with their logo. As long as they get get the licensing fee. Unfortunately I know people who will spend more on their items than the same garment made by the same manufacturer but with a different license on jt
Same for Toshiba TVs and many others
Working at an electronics retailer a few years ago, this was well-known (though news to me, when I started). They hid the fact that the company no longer manufactured their products, and/or that multiple companies were selling similar or even the same product (produced in the same factory, even).
It is trouble, though, since the entire point of a "brand" is to signal provenance in manufacturing, quality, etc. It's supposed to be a way to know something about the product (if nothing else, who to hold accountable when something goes wrong). If it doesn't, what's the point?
These declarations sound so stupid to me. What's the point of having your brand on a product, if you're going to claim you have nothing to do with it? What is the point of the concept of a brand even?
To make money, like with all the merchandising that happens with a popular movie. Any number of things are licensed with the owner of the IP having very limited involvement in it, like turning down certain types of licenses as bad for the brand but not getting into the weeds of manufacturing. It's not like if there was some branded Disney cell phone that Disney is going to inspect all the board-level components. I can't speak about this pager company other than to think they're glad for any business they could get, so would license the brand.
There must be some other ostensible purpose for a brand than "to make money". People who would buy the hypothetical Disney phone would have other reasons than "to give Disney money". Nobody has that as a goal when buying stuff.
People form subconscious connections to a brand. You are more likely to buy a Disney phone for your kid if it gives you a warm feeling because you remember how much fun it was to watch Lion King with your kid. That might not be the deciding factor, but if it's functionally identical to the other other phones it might make the difference.
Yeah, but I don't think the subconscious factor is strong in the case of some pagers sold to Hezbollah. Disney was an example someone chose, and it ceases to be a useful example here.
The goal of the brand owners is to make money, for the customer the value should be a certain reputation of quality. But as long as customers don’t notice or punish it, it’s advantageous to sell out your brand to make more money (from the perspective of the brand owner)
And isn't it strange when a company publicly declares that you can't have any expectations based on their brand? Seems like they're drawing customers' attention to the thing, instead of hoping they don't notice.
To prepare for lawsuits from families of the injured in what appears to be a supply chain attack maybe without the knowledge of their licensee in Budapest (BAC Consulting), and likely without their (Gold Apollo) knowledge. Deny and distance.
Possibly the pagers had to have a popular brand to "work as designed", and this brand was up for sale, but declares it won't admit this to the real customers.
I guess with QR-Code Menus, Smartphones replacing their tech almost everywhere, Starlink etc. they where happy to take any revenue.
Brands died as anything reliable from the consumer perspective when the Chinese bought all the dying brands in the 2000s.
The only cheap goods with maintained brands are things like McDonald's which have recurring relationship with consumers.
Even if brands have died, companies admitting it is somewhat novel.
You can judge them to be not a generally super-trustworthy brand.
But I would grant them that their responsibility for the deaths of these people is limited.
Few civilian brands would survive the scrutiny if every product they put their stickers on were required to be Mossad-proof.
I feel like it’s reasonable to expect a brand to be aware if some organization, even Mossad, placed explosives in 5000 of their items.
It means this company is incompetent and should not be trusted. It’s one thing to have malware injected into software (pretty bad) and another to have physical explosives put into your product.
So if someone steals a box of iphones, adds a few grams of explosives inside each phone, and then resells them or gives them away, then Apple is at fault?
If you buy the boxes from an Apple store, or from an approved distributor, Apple is at fault. What's the meaning of "approved"?
If you buy them from the back of a truck, then no, Apple has no fault of course.
But there's a declaration saying "we had nothing to do with the pagers even though they have our brand". That's different from saying "they were booby-trapped after they left our hands". Not even the company itself is claiming the defense you're using.
The problem is that the company which did the rigging seems to have had an official license. If apple gave away licenses to build things branded apple and they contained explosives, I would blame apple, too.
Every brand in the world is now expected to have the ability to detect and thwart intelligence operations run by Mossad? Like, a yoghurt company needs to have a counter intelligence division?
I think they should have some control over their manufacturing. It’s not so much that the yogurt company has a counter intelligence division, it’s that the yogurt company didn’t detect someone putting poison into a few hundred truckloads.
I expect brands to have quality control procedures in place.
Aware, of course, they're aware of it now.
But the best that they can realistically do, once they've found out about the shenanigans, is to cancel the licensing deal with the Hungarian manufacturer. Which they probably will. Maybe sue them in a Hungarian court, if there's anybody left to sue.
Selling your own parts to be restamped as another brand is common though. Selling your brand to be stamped on someone else's parts is basically only useful to do this exact thing though.
Why would you say that? Many everyday products are produced under license or franchise with the brand having minimal involvement in the entire process. Even if apollo had done qc in the factory it would be easy to trick them.
Manufacturers for certain categories of products are homogenized, often regionally, whereas the brands maybe many.
Plus, clandestine supply chain attacks fall into 2 categories:
- A. With manufacturer/reseller complicity. (Not many manufacturers choose this because it would harm their business.)
- B. Without manufacturer/reseller complicity, but with logistics interception for sw/hw implants or complete substitution. (This is the method NSA TAO used to load implants into Cisco gear.)
If such a supply chain attack was in progress on a larger scale against the US, do we have mechanisms in place to detect it? Would shipments of these same devices pass through US customs?
Thank you. Where do you have this information from?
Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-planted-exp...
You know, as this is a tech forum, I'll reply via a tech business, re: branding angle.
Yes Gold Apollo, they were yours. That's because you licensed your name, and your name is your business.
(EG your mark(name) of trade)
I've seen this in everything from hotels to frying pans. License that name! We made 1% more this quarter. Yeehaw!
Holiday in has corporate owned hotels, franchised hotels, and of course licensed hotels. Franchised ones have more control from corporate, licensed far less. And it shows.
Same as t-fal, which in Canada is just the cheapest junk you can get, with Canadian Tire owning and manufacturing under the name:
https://www.canadiantire.ca/en/pdp/t-fal-viva-aluminum-fryin...
Anyone buyong t-fal pans there will think t-fal is the cheapest junk ever. Because it is.
This worked well pre-Internet, but now people see reviews for Canadian Tire t-fal when researching pans in Europe. Way to trash your local name.
Licensing your name doesn't work the same in 2024 as 1994. Don't do it.
More concisely, why should anyone who, due to these explosions, does not trust devices branded as Gold Apollo care about a distinction between a product using a licensed trademark vs a product that has been contracted out for production of products using the brand name they own?
Or to really drive the point home, the only reason we give companies exclusive control over certain names (trademarks) is so that they can build a reputation. If companies are going to just license out the names to whoever gives them money anyway then we might as well get rid of trademarks entirely and let anybody produce crap knock off products without having to pay a trademark owner.
I suspect from a company perspective, it is all just different degree of relying on a supply chain. Any company that outsource production that goes directly to customers are relying on reputation and contracts, and the assumption that they can apologize to customers and change supplier when/if something goes wrong. I seem to hear that a common practice is to do random sampling in order to do quality control, but in terms of supply chain attacks it wouldn't do much good if the attacker is a state actor with the ability to create non-tampered version.
I think thats already happening in major ways due to online shopping where reviews mean more than brand for some imported goods. Brand names for consumer goods on my Amazon search results are often completely made up and often temporary.
What is the point of building a reputation if you can’t sell it later? /s
TIL Canadians call Tefal t-fal
Ironically this appears to be because another company wanted to protect its trademark.
> In the United States, Tefal is marketed as T-fal. This is to comply with DuPont's objection that the name "Tefal" was too close to DuPont's trademark "Teflon". The T-fal brand is also used in Canada and Japan.
The alphabet T is pronounced "teh" in French. So insofar as the French company is concerned, T-fal sounds close enough to Tefal.
It sounds more like "tay" (as pronounced in English).
https://forvo.com/word/t/#fr
And it would hardly make sense to make a name for US market based on how it sounds in French.
It's difficult enough to secure the supply chain towards the OEM as it is. It's nigh impossible for a vendor/OEM to secure the supply chain towards retail and distribution, not relative to nation-state attackers of great sophistication and with huge budgets. This sort of thing could happen with any smartphone, any feature phone, laptops, etc. Though it was a lot easier to mount this attack given an order for thousands of units from one company.
> This sort of thing could happen with any smartphone
The amount of intelligence services that could pull this off if you ordered iphones directly from apple is very very low.
A man in the middle redirecting to a fake web page could be enough to create an opportunity. I assume that in some countries hacking the internet could be still possible.
Or a terrorist could sell phones on the street for months, use them as sleeping devices, and wait until a big holiday or the super-bowl to spread chaos massively with minimum risk for him/her. So now we everybody need a way to be able to scan our devices and detect that risk ASAP. The Mossad still don't understand the mess that had created for every westerner by opening this door.
How would you man in the middle a website or “hack the internet”? Every modern browser uses TLS.
I wouldn't, but I assume that somebody with knowledge and motivation could. Phishing is still a problem. Do every country use modern browsers?
(UPDATED: I really wrote Fishing? LOL)
You only need to do that if you're targeting someone. If your goal is terror, you just sell as a 3rd party on Amazon.
It’s okay. CTC bought Paderno, a Prince Edward Island perennial, to juice out more brand value after they’re done sucking T-Fal dry.
I don’t think they’ve started including explosives in their product yet.
CTC bought Paderno, a Prince Edward Island perennial, to juice out more brand value after they’re done sucking T-Fal dry.
It's worse than that.
Panerno, a high quality manufacturer of stainless steel cookware, using North American steel, was indeed bought by Canadian Tire.
Immediately after purchase, the factory was sold to a Chinese firm, who wanted to import crappy Chinese steel, but still label cookware "Made in Canada".
It is their ingress into the North American market.
And as Paderno's plant is gone, it means that Paderno of Canadian Tire is now made with Chinese steel, not North American steel, and built to lowest quality standards.
But of course it still says "Made in Canada".
Canadian Tire has boasted in earning reports that more than 60% of its profits now come from its own brands. Often like this, quality brands bought and turned into junk.
This is one pf the reasons why many jurisdictions in Canada have warranty laws that say the retailer is liable too.
Just one quibble: Made in China doesn't automatically mean junk. Case in point: The iPhone. When it comes to Chinese manufacturing, they cater to all price points in the marketplace.
Apple's size and scope, along with direct control of production to force a high quality product helps.
Including knowledge transfer, tooling assistance, trade secrets at the start.
But the truth is, even if you can find a rare product such as this, which is really Chinese assembly with US know how, direct control, and methods, 99.999% if the stuff you buy when Made ib China will be... junk.
The exception to the rule is not relevant. Made in China means "junk".
It's not just Apple. You can buy a forged spanner (and other tools) from China that can beat the pants off of any domestically made version. It's all about what the distributor/brand will pay for.
This is just wrong. You can buy junk in China and you can buy very quality products in China. They launch rovers to the literal Moon. They produce 7nm chips. This is not junk, this is state of art.
This is just wrong. You can buy junk in China and you can buy very quality products in China
Even if true, irrelevant, because for the rest of the wotld, my statements stand true.
Put another way, let's say I put all Made in China products I can buy in Canada, into a room. Millions of them, surely.
Now I am to pick a product at random. Will it be junk? Yes. Out of those millions and millions of products, maybe 10 or 20 wouldn't be junk.
Everyone knows this, because it's true. It doesn't matter why, for what reason, all that matters is that it's true.
That's your own personal experience. I don't buy junk and if I would repeat that experiment, it's very likely that I'd pick up, e.g. Fluke multimeter or some old iPhone I'm keeping around.
My example has nothing to do with what you personally buy, and instead with "what is Made in China" in a local market. I am referring to both reality, and perception.
If you have millions upon millions of products, and only a tiny, tiny, tiny number are of OK quality, then it's entirely fair to say "Made in China" is junk. That's how it works. Exceptions to the rule are simply that, and not relevant.
If a company makes fridges, and 1 model out of 100 are OK, the other 99 crap that breaks in 2 to 3 years, everyone would say "That company makes junk!". Referencing "But they made one good fridge once!" is not something anyone need care about, and is the exception to the rule.
Yet with Made in China, we're talking about a million junky, sub-par products, compared to 1 that may be acceptable. And even then, quality control is still an issue.
Made in China is junk, an entirely fair, reasonable, logical statement, predicated upon the reality of the situation for most people.
If I could maintain a worldview that simple my life would be so much easier.
Manufacturing in the PRC defaults to “cheap-as-possible” mode if the specs aren’t explicitly laid out. Think stinky black plastic and sharp metal edges.
Most of the time, the default is compatible with what the free-market MBA crowd wants.
It's unreasonable to expect a small companies to have rogue nation states in their threat model. Apple, Microsoft, ... yeah but not a smaller business.
Correct, but the country hosting those companies should. Of course since this is Israel, I doubt the EU is going to demand an answer.
Oh wow!
I never understood why I felt that t-fal was garbage in Canada but mediocre in the US. Now it makes sense: they're totally different products.
What is this news source NDTV? I've never heard of it. Are they reputable?
Indian network, a bit tabloidy but i think they are mostly ok.
Where is the line between war and terrorism ?
This attack is quite indiscriminate. There are already videos circulating of random people being collateral damage.
Israel is losing the support of people more and more, and all that due to the crusade of Netanyahu to stay in power and to not be imprisoned for his former crimes.
Despicable. So much human suffering and for what ?
> Where is the line between war and terrorism ?
Easy. When it is you or your allies committing an act, it is war and collateral damage. When it is someone else, it is terrorism.
It is often a difficult topic to discuss because both sides tend to be in the wrong. It ends up being asymmetrical warfare. The stronger side accuses the weaker of hiding behind civilians while the weaker side accuses the stronger of human rights violations.
As sad as this case is, I find it pretty interesting since it is clearly an extrajudicial act of violence carried out in a foreign land. The west will likely celebrate this, but I personally find this much worse than the Indian assassination that took place in Canada "recently" and didn't have significant collateral damage, yet the west was up in arms about.
Terrorism is attacking civilian targets in order to create political pressure from fear.
War is attacking military targets to reduce the enemy’s capability to wage war against you.
Civilian target = terrorism
Military target = war
There absolutely are grey areas and overlap between the two but not nearly as much as people like to make out.
Is the target the relevant piece or is it actual impact? If you have a single military target who is known to use X brand phone, is it war to kill 5,000 people to get this one target? Is it not instilling terror on the people who use those devices?
It is this rationalization that enables powers to bomb civilians and ethnic groups under the guise of targeting military targets who stand no chance if they segregate themselves from the populace due to the power dynamics. And then the cycle only continues as each side adds fuel to the fire.
The actually impact of every war since (a very long time) are that more civilians are killed and harmed than military personal. Looking at the statistics produced by the US military on the iraq war, civilian deaths was 3x of enemy combatants. UN has estimated that globally, modern wars has an 10:1 ration of civilian deaths to military combatants.
Looking at it from that perspective there is no line between war and terrorism. All wars are terrorism.
> targeting military targets who stand no chance if they segregate themselves from the populace due to the power dynamics
This is flawed rational. If you can't find any parking lot you keep driving, it doesn't allow you to double park and block someone else's car. If you are too weak to maintain your posture at war you shouldn't fight it on the backs of civilians. Your inability to execute your wishes legitimately doesn't provide you with any right to act illegitimately and inflict the cost and pain on others.
> If you can't find any parking lot you keep driving, it doesn't allow you to double park and block someone else's car. If you are too weak to maintain your posture at war you should't fight it on the backs of civilians.
That cuts both ways. Just like hamas should not hide amongst civilians, if Israel is too weak to go into Gaza to arrest hamas, it has no excuse to act illegitimately and bomb civilians.
True, that's why Israel army is in Gaza right now fighting Hamas instead of burning down the entire strip.
> instead of burning down the entire strip
Their bombing campaign begs to differ
But if they hide amongst civilians and Israel is too weak, what do you suggest Israel should do instead?
Try a different approach than engaging in war/apartheid. The practice of the IDF "mowing the grass" by harming civilians has been long established and commented on. Certain Israeli politicians also empowered Hamas, in order to divide and discredit the Palestinians, so that they would not be in a suitable position to negotiate an end to the conflict. Practices like that do not produce peace. I suggest Israel do its best to look at its role in this conflict (and not just Hamas's) and then act in good faith to bring about peace, so that there are no more terrorist attacks like Oct. 7.
Oct 7 happened and you're suggesting a different approach than a war, i.e. diplomatic solutions? That's too naive—not even the most pacifist country would do that.
And let's not pretend that no diplomatic solutions have been proposed, all of which were rejected. They will only accept it if they own every inch of the land and Israel is obliterated (their own word).
> Oct 7 happened and you're suggesting a different approach than a war, i.e. diplomatic solutions? That's too naive
The actions that led up to Oct. 7 long predate it. The seeds of this have been sown every year that the IDF "mowed the grass" and every time they tried to disrupt the PLO from negotiating a peace. Remember, an Israeli prime minister was assassinated for seeking and negotiating peace- not by the Palestinians but by a radical Israeli, whose politics are aligned with the current prime minister. This current prime minister has used his long time in office to disrupt and prevent any peace from occurring.
> The seeds of this have been sown...
The disappointing logic there is the idea that historical conflict of any kind, anywhere on Earth, could possibly "seed" an atrocity like Oct 7. The sheer ferocity, scale and cruelty of 3,000 terrorists storming across the border to gleefully slaughter and capture civilians young and old, is somehow reduced to "oh well, they had it coming"... "oh well, the seeds were sown"?
In my view, that is a very dark and troubling position. I will never in my lifetime form the view that Oct 7 was anything other than crossing all lines. It was end-game stuff. Standing alone in measures of evil, it therefore needs dealing with on those terms. Civilised humanity should be uniting against that senseless barbarism including renewed focus on the deeper causes and future remedies for fanatical violent groups.
This may be why many of are divided: Those who believe Oct7 crossed all lines; and those who believe Oct7 was horrific but within "resistance" seed-sowing territory. We all want peace, but it amazes me the latter has any traction at all.
>> The seeds of this have been sown...
> The disappointing logic there is the idea that historical conflict of any kind, anywhere on Earth, could possibly "seed" an atrocity like Oct 7
If you don't recognize causes, then you will be baffled by effects. It has been clear to observers of the Middle East that the status quo that Netanyahu has created was violent and untenable. It gave the appearance of peace only because most people remained ignorant of the underlying brutality of the situation. If you think Oct. 7 was frightening, what do you think about the generations of children that have been killed and maimed by IDF soldiers and settlers? The terrorist invasion of Oct. 7 was terrible and unacceptable, but that does not make what Israel did before or after ok. The fact that you cannot recognize that Israel has also crossed all lines, means that you are incapable of being a part of the solution.
Israel has done many terrible things, no more than any other country who has engaged in war, nothing like crossing all lines, but pain was inflicted on innocent people, for sure. So what? October 7th isn't an inevitable or just counteraction. Jews have been mascaraed repeatedly for hundreds of years, including by Palestinians and other Arabs. Can you give an example where Jews retaliated by mass raping, butchering and burning alive their oppressors?
Some examples found after cursory googling:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killings_and_massacres_during_...
I mostly agree with you, but I also agree with a parent comment that part of that gray area depends on who's side you're on. For instance:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Beirut_barracks_bombings
That was a Marine barracks that was part of a "military peacekeeping operation". Granted, 128 non-military Americans were injured, but all of the dead people were military. The U.S. politicians labelled it terrorism.
Doesn’t matter for the point but the article says 6 civilians were killed, it doesn’t seem like all of the dead people were military.
Oh thanks -- I only caught that there were injuries, not deaths. Thanks for catching that.
Overall I agree. However, the difficulty that I see is when someone attacks a, sometimes nominally, military target in a situation or method where it will unreasonably injure or kill civilians. Or even when the military target is mostly an excuse to target civilians.
I think it can also get less clear when the target is an enemy's infrastructure, industry, or political infrastructure.
If an army unreasonably kills or injure civilians it will most probably be considered a war crime. Committing war crime is not necessarily better than being a terrorist, but it's different.
Who decides what is a civilian vs military target?
Fire bombing Dresden or Tokyo - terrorism, or war?
Nighttime Bombing a factory that produces ball bearings - terrorism, or war?
Fort Hood?
>On November 5, 2009, a mass shooting took place at Fort Hood (now Fort Cavazos), near Killeen, Texas.[1] Nidal Hasan, a U.S. Army major and psychiatrist, fatally shot 13 people and injured more than 30 others.[2][3] It was the deadliest mass shooting on an American military base and the deadliest terrorist attack in the United States since the September 11 attacks until it was surpassed by the San Bernardino attack in 2015.[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Fort_Hood_shooting
Exactly this >Easy. When it is you or your allies committing an act, it is war and collateral damage. When it is someone else, it is terrorism. <
Terrorism is a statecraft term of art used as part of a propaganda campaign. Outside of that is a meaningless term.
This military response was the opposite of indiscriminate. It was proportionate and targeted. It focussed as best as anyone ever could on the precise set of people who (hiding among their own civilians) have been launching hundreds of inaccurate rockets to kill Israeli civilians - for months.
> It focused as best as anyone ever could
It isn't the "best ever" as there was no guarantee the pagers were worn only by combatants. As of now, of the 9 dead, 1/3rd are definitely not: 2 children & 1 woman.
> set of people who (hiding among their own civilians)
These people should always wear military uniform and live in a separate neighborhood even when they're not on duty? What do you propose?
> have been launching hundreds of inaccurate rockets
Guess what else is also reckless and killed civilians? https://www.stephensemler.com/p/israel-has-fired-over-11k-mu...
>These people should always wear military uniform and live in a separate neighborhood
That is on the table, yes. Otherwise, while they mingle with civilians, it's clear that the civilians are in danger. If I'm one of them, and I'm intent on persuing this action, moving to military quarters is going to come to mind.
Imagine one of those pagers, hip height, at a shop queue or bus stop. Or you're on a bike in traffic next to one of them.
Everything about this sucks. It absolutely is indiscriminate. It's different than droning a guy at his house and accepting his wife as collateral damange. This is 3,000+ maiming explosive devices scattered all about with no way of mitigating the collateral damange.
I definitely agree that it's a problem that fighters are dispersed among the civilian population. However, requiring them to wear uniforms and live on a base seems like it would make it impossible for a smaller force or an insurgency to stand up to a more powerful enemy that is able to wipe out any obvious military target at will.
What's the alternative that doesn't give powerful nations more or less absolute power to push around weaker nations or people?
I don't think anyone, especially civilians, love the idea of militants hiding among the population. I don't know why they must in order to stand up to a more powerful adversary. Regardless, this isn't some kind of rule. It's more of a consideration for that individual, like "should I be hanging out at home with my family while I'm engaged in a dirty war with an adversary that is willing to strike my family to get me?"
1. It's really rather common for active duty military to segregate themselves in combat zones. One of the reasons is that there is mutual benefit in reducing the exposure of civilians.
2. There is no alternative to a powerful entity getting its way. We have the word power simply to describe that capability. It's not an annointed status.
Guerrilla warfare has been a reliable way for a less powerful entity to resist a more powerful one. However, it often requires the less powerful entity to hide within the general population; which results in the problem that we are seeing here.
Being reliable doesn’t mean it isn’t a war crime. If you hide among the general population, you might be committing war crimes, even when it works.
That could very well be. However, you aren't really engaging with the point I'm making. If weaker powers aren't supposed to do guerrilla warfare, then what are they supposed to do? Just letting other groups roll over them isn't a viable option.
Likewise, if you target enemy personnel knowing that civilians are going to be the primary victims, you might be committing war crimes, even when it works.
Using civilians as human shields is a war crime. You are advocating for war crimes.
"By the same token, it's totally fine for Hezbollah to raze Tel Aviv, because the IDF is based there, thus using civilians as human shields. And almost all Israelis become soldiers at age 18."
https://x.com/Frances_Coppola/status/1836331295770632514 / https://ghostarchive.org/archive/QWVJ0
I'm not advocating for anything. I'm just saying that it's unrealistic to expect people to just roll over for an enemy with greater conventional warfare capability.
Hiding among the civilian population is bad, but so is a situation where powerful states can oppress others without any check.
Personally, I'm not sure what a better alternative is. Which is why I asked my question.
Do we know approximately how many terrorists were killed and how many civilians were killed? Do we know what steps Israel took—if any—to prevent the target pagers from falling into civilian hands?
Dropping kilotons of aviation bombs on a populated city is indiscriminate. This is nothing in comparison to that. Frankly I would even call this surgical.
There is no question that an enemy setting off thousands of small bombs in American supermarkets and homes, maiming unknown numbers of bystanders and killing children, would be designated an act of mass terrorism.
Anyone who claimed such mass terrorism is acceptable because it is not as bad as obliterating cities would be condemned as an apologist for terrorism.
They didn't indiscriminately set off thousands of bombs in supermarkets and homes. That's not at all an accurate description of what happened. That would be terrorism.
They gave a terrorist organization the ability to give its most important operatives a bomb to wear. And then they detonated that bomb. That's not terrorism. It's about as targeted of an attack as you can imagine. Blowing up terrorists is objectively a good thing.
They detonated the bombs in supermarkets and homes. It is 100% an accurate description of what happened.
If an enemy targeted members of American political parties that have sponsored terrorism and brutal dictatorships, detonating thousands of bombs in supermarkets and homes maiming nearby civilians and killing children, would you also call this “objectively a good thing?”
The bombs didn't even have enough force to kill 99.6% of people who had them attached physically to their waists. Semantically, that's a pretty big difference.
I don't know what to tell you, but "warning" people like this is generally how terrorists do it.
clearly this was an attack of military targets. not a warning.
Ah, that magic word terrorist to justify any heinous crime. Funny how it always is folks in the Middle East who are.
Not always. There was IRA, there was RAF, there was ETA. It's just in Middle East this problem is much bigger today, to the point where terrorist organisations can have whole countries under their control.
For powers that be, every rebellion is terrorism. This isn't new. Today, in matters concerning ME, even college kids are labelled terrorists without much thought: https://x.com/gobloid3/status/1836437489831055659
The non-euphemistic term for that kind of bombing is "terror bombing". It is called "strategic bombing" by those who wish to sanitize it.
Anyway, these are both terror tactics, you're setting up a false dichotomy.
> these are both terror tactics, you're setting up a false dichotomy
Eh, there is utility to this attack beyond terror. Israel just simultaneously took out Hezbollah’s communications and definitively outed its senior members. Also, strategic bombing à la WWII wasn’t psychological—it was intended to wipe out the civilian population that worked in the war factories.
States engage in what you call terror tactics all the time, for legitimate military and illegitimate reasons. The clusterfuck with the Middle East is the sheer number of non-state actors. In Gaza, that’s complicated. But in Lebanon, it’s not—-the Lebanese state is widely recognised. Hezbollah is not a state, but it’s also not purely a political party.
> Eh, there is utility to this attack beyond terror
As there was in bombing civilian cities, which housed factory workers making war machines. You have put up another false dichotomy. Terror attacks do not need to be devoid of all non-terror utility to be considered terror attacks.
If, during America's war in Afghanistan, the Taliban had blown up pagers carried by American officers going about their lives in America it would be called terrorism. The nearby civilians injured in the blasts would be a key focus, not swept under the rug.
> If, during America's war in Afghanistan, the Taliban had blown up pagers carried by American officers going about their lives in America it would be called terrorism. The nearby civilians injured in the blasts would be a key focus, not swept under the rug.
Because they’re a non-state actor. (Hezbollah doesn’t follow and isn’t bound by the Geneva Conventions, either.) Even if it only hit American military personnel, we’d call it terrorism.
You’re labelling usual acts of war as terrorism. That punts us from the uncomfortable discussion of the human cost of war to the much more palatable one of semantics. This is war. War resembles terrorism because they’re both violent and brutal and largely indiscriminate. If this is terrorism, then we’re essentially saying any warfare is terrorism. If that is the case, then states have a legitimate right to terrorism. Not sure that’s where we want to end up.
> If this is terrorism, then we’re essentially saying any warfare is terrorism.
terrorism is primarily violence targeted at civilians, while legitimate acts of war targets military personnel (but could have civilians as collateral).
In this particular case, the pagers are targeted at non-civilian personnel, but has some civilian casualties.
Hezbollah rocket attacks, on the other hand, seems to be targeting civilians first, and military personels second (if they are accurate enough for such).
> terrorism is primarily violence targeted at civilians, while legitimate acts of war targets military personnel
States targeting civilians are a war crime. Not terrorism. The hijacking of Flight 77 was still terrorism despite targeting the Pentagon.
> the pagers are targeted at non-civilian personnel, but has some civilian casualties
That is war. That is collateral damage. Marking every military action with civilian casualties terrorism simply normalises terrorism as a legitimate war tactic.
I want to note that you are not wrong. There are many definitions of terrorism [1]. I’m just pushing back on this usage because it looks like the first step to normalising terrorism as something every power that has ever gone to war has done.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_terrorism
The Taliban was/is not a "non-state actor", they are and were the government of Afghanistan. And whether or not they were that has no bearing on whether or not a tactic is terrorism.
There is no way to control where the pagers will end up. No way to control who will be near them, even if they are owned by a target.
You do know that carpet bombing is a war crime by Geneva Conventions ?
What do you mean? You fire out the "detonate" command on the frequency used by Hezbollah - only pagers connected to that network blow.
It's statistically probable you'll overwhelmingly damage terrorists. Sadly collateral damage is inevitable in war, and this is far more precise than even a laser guided bomb.
Carpet bombing is a large area bombardment done in a progressive manner to inflict damage in every part of a selected area of land. (From Wikipedia).
In what way does the pagers attack resemble covering an entire area with a carpet of bombs?
You're shopping for groceries. someone is standing next to you. Their pager explodes and you are severely injured. You never had anything to do with this war.
Still think it's surgical? By that definition 9/11 was surgical as well, after all they only targeted two towers and just a few people who happened to be there got hurt.
surely more surgical than what these guys were doing, which is repeatedly shoot missiles at densely populated areas, for months.
Are you talking about the IDF's indiscriminate bombing of civilians in Gaza?
Two wrongs don't make a right.
The US could just drop nukes on any country they have a trade dispute with. They don't, because that is insane and disproportionate and they have the capability to do better than that.
What Israel did here is something you would expect from a terrorist organization.
In comparison to bombing to smithereens the entire block, and having hundreds/thousands of people die under the rubble, some of them over the course of days - yes.
Do you know that 100 is more than 1? Some people get confused by simple arithmetic.
Israel has clearly steeped into terrorism and beyond before day 3 of this war.
Indiscriminate?
I'd say the pager bombing was as /surgical/ as one could possibly be.
A very sophisticated and targeted attack, putting tiny amounts of explosives in devices used by terrorist-linked individuals (ONLY Hezbollah were using the pagers because of their paranoia about Israeli monitoring of cellphones).
An example of an /indiscriminate/ attack is Hezbollah's firing of unguided rockets into Israel's civilian areas. In July, for example, a Hezbollah rocket killed 12 children playing football in the Golan Heights. THAT is indiscriminate killing.
Exactly this. It's interesting how I haven't been able to find any single media portraying this as a possible act of terror while they have been quite critical of conduct in Gaza. I hope this changes as there really needs to be a reckoning with the idea of bombs randomly triggered anywhere, maybe hospitals, schools, theaters.
It's so weird that this super mild take is downvoted on HN... I got the same yesterday.
Everything has to be binary, good vs evil, once you pick your side you have to ignore everything that compromises your idyllic vision.
It's downvoted because it's the definition of proportional.
3g of explosives personally handed to the most senior leadership of your enemy and with enough explosive force that 98% of people who had them attached to their person survived is the very definition of restrained and targeted. Certainly not "indiscriminate".
Stuffing explosives into civilian appliances is the definition of indiscriminate.
If doing this isn't already banned by the Geneva Conventions, it is only because it wasn't practical to do. But then again, very little that has happened in this region during the last 80 years has been following any international law.
hardly, pagers might be accessible by the population, but hand delivered pagers distributed by a terror organisation are not exactly the same.
Panasonic Toughbooks are technically available to the civilian population, but booby trapping a shipment of them that would be delivered to the US military would be a pretty sophisticated military strike. Hardly indiscriminite even if people took them home.
> hardly, pagers might be accessible by the population, but hand delivered pagers distributed by a terror organisation are not exactly the same.
Over god knows how many months you don't think they would spread ?
You don't think a dad would gift a pager to his kids or wife to stay in touch ?
Are you seriously suggesting that you would give away a pager, handed to you by your operator so that he can send you messages, a one-way legacy communication device selected as as an alternative for standard common cellphone specifically to avoid the risk of you being tracked by an enemy?
Ok "not a bot" ilbeeper who's account was created explicitly to regurgitate Israel talking points
Not a bot. Just not wishing to connect my x years old user with anything related to politics. This is my only other account and that is within the site guidelines.
I'm an Israeli. So some of my views are aligned with Israel's official views. I would estimate the percentage of the alignment of my views with the current government at a single digit number. I have a negative, visceral reaction to Bibi, and can't stand hearing him even if I want to. I think Israel under the current government is doing almost every mistake possible, and takes the wrong decisions again and again, most probably due to Bibi's criminal issues and corrupted character.
No, I don't.
If the US military gives you a laptop, you don't give it to your kids for schoolwork.
Not all organizations work as the US military. Or even as a US company.
I know nothing about Hezbollah, but there's a widespread opinion on HN that any equipment you get from "work" can absolutely only be used by yourself in said work environment. That's really not the case in all cultures, everywhere.
At my previous job, management clearly told us that we could use computers & printers for any personal activity, including paid side jobs, as long as we didn't compete with the company and didn't go completely overboard with the printers (personal judgement).
Not every organization is hostile to its employees/members.
I'm guessing Hezbollah is not comparable to the US military in many respects, and assumptions that hold true for the US military may not hold true for any other military or paramilitary group.
That said, I don't have particularly strong opinions about this attack, and I certainly do not support Hezbollah in any way. But this "it works like this here, therefore it works like this everywhere" mentality is a hindrance to understanding the situation - any situation.
If you're giving your personal communication devices away, given that it's used to summon you personally...
... honestly?
I have no words, that's fucking stupid.
It's not like it's a toy, or it can play games, or that it can be used reach out to a parent/guardian if a child is lost.
It's a pager, a receive only communication tool. An outmoded one by far, and given to you by your terrorist organisation to intentionally evade Israeli detection.
If you're giving it to your children, not only are you basically being negligent in your duties, you're also giving away something that has less utility than the device you used to use and likely have on standby.
Perhaps. Still, in any pool of 3000 people it's fairly reasonable to assume that one or two (or ~2950) are "fucking stupid". Because people, as a rule, are.
If I'd let my prejudice run loose, I'd even argue that militant religious groups have an above average quota of "fucking stupid" people, so odds are indeed fairly good that some of these devices would make it into the hands of someone other than the original owner.
Some would argue that "being related to someone who is fucking stupid" is not a capital offence.
Alright, let's take this in the context in which it's been given to us then.
-> Your task is to, with as much accuracy as possible and with the minimum loss of civilian lives as possible, target a hostile force that lives within the population and does not identify themselves. They live outside of your borders.
-> If even a single non-combatant is lost, you are a monster.
-> In the mean time, every month that passes, hundreds of rockets rain down indiscriminate destruction upon your country, an action that has cost the lives of 12 children already.
How do?
Why are you asking me? I'm not even arguing that the attack was wrong.
I just challenged your - IMO incorrect - suggestion that it's reasonable to assume that no devices would spread to anyone other than the original owner.
If there's such a thing as acceptable collateral damage, the attack may still be reasonable. I'm even leaning towards the opinion that it is.
It's possible to consider the downsides of something without being opposed to it.
> that it's used to summon you personally...
Man you sure know a lot about hezbollah internal processes... either that or you're full of shit
> If the US military gives you a laptop, you don't give it to your kids for schoolwork.
And how does the US army relate to the hezbollah ?
Both are asking you to kill people and supplying you with equipment to do so.
> It's downvoted because it's the definition of proportional.
Two wrongs don't make a right... are we really at that level of brain activity on HN of all places ? this is schoolyard level
You can have proportional terrorism, proportional war crimes, proportional crimes against humanity. Proportionality doesn't tell you much, it certainly doesn't tell you anything about it being indiscriminate or not
> Certainly not "indiscriminate".
Cool, go tell that to the two kids who died: https://www.rte.ie/news/2024/0918/1470609-hezbollah-israel/
Also feel free to read the actual texts defining these things, detonating explosives in supermarkets is indiscriminate by nature, there is just no way around it if you're in good faith : https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule12
Both sides are clearly operating out of the boundaries we defined for conventional wars, is it really that hard to accept ? They're not even trying to hide it really... such a strange allergic reaction to these basic facts
Proportionality is at the center of defining a war crime.
"The principle of proportionality (Article 51(5) (b) API) states that even if there is a clear military target it is not possible to attack it if the expected harm to civilians, or civilian property, is excessive in relation to the expected military advantage."
https://www.diakonia.se/ihl/resources/international-humanita...
So, the case that Israel has to make here is that the expected millitary advantage from the operation exceeds the collateral damage. The fact that civilians died doesn't automatically make it a war crime from an international law point of view.
I don't believe those children who died care about definitions. In fact they don't care much about anything anymore since they are dead.
Appeal to emotion is harder to take seriously when Hezbollah rockets killed 12 children this year alone.
Appeal to not be emotional is even harder to take seriously when Hezbollah rockets killed 12 children and Israel has killed 10,000 children this year alone.
You’ve put me in a bad position, because by telling you you’re wrong you will interpret it as if its reasonable.
First, we’re talking about Lebanon and its population, lets not muddy the waters further by suggesting that Hamas and Gaza are part of that conflict right now. But if we did, as far as I can make out, for the entire duration of the war since 10/7 there has been a total of 7,500 children identified as being killed. Sadly that number is not backed up by any independent source and unfortunately Hamas has been known to inflate these numbers.
Nonetheless, it is a tragedy.
An entirely unrelated tragedy to the 12:1 child murder ratio of Hezbollah vs IDF this year, and under entirely different circumstances.
I would prefer more interventions in Gaza to mirror this one in its precision and lack of civilian casualties.
I’m certain that you would prefer no intervention happen at all, which is where we will have to fundamentally disagree and part ways.
> as far as I can make out ... there has been a total of 7,500 children killed
I said 10,000 for this year, which is lower than the amount coming from Gaza. You low balled it much further. Hamas might be accused for inflating numbers, but Israeli apologists are actively deflating that number. Regardless, the numbers are staggering.
> I'm certain that you would prefer no intervention ...
Firstly, you don't know me but have immediately filled in who you believe I am based on your expectations. You should reflect on that (and how much you are creating your own world), because those prejudices are exactly what motivate the hate that drives these conflicts.
I would like to see intervention in Gaza. Number one, would be to stop the indiscriminate bombing of children. Number two, would be to provide relief to all of the people who have lost their homes and livelihood, who have been maimed and are starving. Number three, would be to resolve the displacement of the Palestinians in a just manner. Number four, would be judicial proceedings against anyone (Palestinian or Israeli) who committed war crimes.
Israel cannot be bombing civilians. It is a war crime. Gaza is not a sovereign state, but a displaced people living in Israel. If Israel is too weak to go in and arrest criminals who commit heinous crimes, then it needs to contend with the problem and take a different approach to how it deals with the Palestinian people.
I can find literally no source for 10.000+ outside of the UN "estimating" it, the nearest I could find was 7.500 and that's not verified (and old). I'm not trying to downplay anything and I resent the implicaiton.
I'm perfectly content holding Israel to account for their numerous crimes, but that becomes extremely difficult to do when you have literal terrorists doing everything they can to make things as bloody and cantankerous as humanly possible to cast shadows at Israel.
Bombing civilians is not technically a war crime in of itself, people like to use the word war crime without actually fucking reading what are war crimes, such as not identifying yourself as military, hiding in the population, using medical buildings as cover and so forth.
Israeli's settling the west-bank and blockading aid under the guise of "the more material they have, the more they will use against us" is condemdable; but when 5,000 rockets suddenly launch from Gaza and a ground force invasion kills over a thousand people -- people reasonably start to think that Israel has a point, and all my criticisms against Israel suddenly start to look very impotent.
Where I get annoyed is that people have decided that terrorists are good, actually, despite clearly throwing gay people off of roofs and engaging in what are actual war crimes.
In fact, the number I go from my source was also just Gaza's health ministry telling the UN; it's never been independently verified as far as I can tell; https://www.npr.org/2024/05/15/1251265727/un-gaza-death-toll...
> I can find literally no source for 10.000+ outside of the UN "estimating" it, the nearest I could find was 7.500 and that's not verified (and old). I'm not trying to downplay anything and I resent the implication.
16,500 children (Updated Sept 17. 2024) https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-ham...
You resent the implication, but you also did not appear to do any research to support your view.
> Bombing civilians is not technically a war crime in of itself, people like to use the word war crime without actually fucking reading what are war crimes, such as not identifying yourself as military, hiding in the population, using medical buildings as cover and so forth.
"Laws of war likely ‘consistently violated’ in Israeli strikes on Gaza: UN rights office" https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/06/1151196
Not distinguishing between combatants and civilians, causing indiscriminate death and suffering, collective punishment, etc, are all war crimes.
Once again, you have strong beliefs but have not done your research to back them up. Here is the website for the the Geneva Conventions, so that you can question your self: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/geneva-conven...
> Israeli's settling the west-bank and blockading aid under the guise of "the more material they have, the more they will use against us" is condemdable
The settlement of the West Bank is in direct violation of international law (article 49 of the Geneva Convention) and is a war crime in itself.
> Where I get annoyed is that people have decided that terrorists are good, actually, despite clearly throwing gay people off of roofs and engaging in what are actual war crimes.
I don't know who thinks "terrorists are good". To me, that sounds like a strawman to avoid the realization that what Israel is doing is deeply wrong.
Even Israeli scholars on genocide like Omer Bartov (a former IDF officer) state "it was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/13/israel...
Israel is engaged in war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. That is painful to acknowledge, but in some ways is not surprising. The victim becoming the victimizer is a human story older than the Bible. The Jewish refugees from WWII underwent terrible horrors and were deeply traumatized. It is not surprising that many of them became radicalized and deeply angry. We have seen the same thing happening to the Palestinians, as well as any other people that is traumatized.
You're almost there buddy... people criticising israel here are also criticising hezbollah for war crimes... you don't have to pick a side and close your eyes on their actions
They're not though.
AOC being the most prominent example that comes to mind immediately.
Their death is tragic, but such is war unfortunately... Lebanon is participating in this one whether they like to or not.
That aside, these definitions were written for a reason, even if they have no appeal to the current victims.
Am I misinformed, or was 3,000? They are the most senior 3,000? When you send out 3,000 explosive into the general population, how do you mitigate the collateral damage? I truly don't know the answers here. I'm under the impression that they all detonated simultaneously, so I'm keen to infer that there was very little thought given to civilians unlucky enough to be in the vicinity.
Man. Blasting off fingers and genitals is really something...
Were they not hand-delivered to Hezbollah?
All the information I have seen indicates that they were handed to Hezbollah and distributed by Hezbollah for the intent purpose of avoiding Israeli intelligence services.
I'm not disputing that. But that's not where stuff happened. They detonated wherever the recipient happened to be.
And materially it's different than assassinating them with a pistol because?
You're arguing in such bad faith...
With your analogy it would be like emptying the mag in the general direction of the car of the target, praying the target actually is in the car and praying there is no one else anywhere close to him.
Please help me understand then, because from what I can understand about the facts here:
1) It was delivered into the pockets of Senior Leadership of Hezbollah, with an incentive for those pagers not to be distributed elsewhere.
2) The explosive yield was very small, of an estimated 3000 pagers; 12 fatalities were recorded, making the death rate about 0.4%. One of which was a child, a relative of a Hezbollah leader. (this is an unjustifiable tragedy, but the only recorded civilian fatality).
3) There has never been, in the history of all warfare, such a surgically precise attack with such a low casualty rate of the civilian population - considering the attack happened at a singular time where it was not possible to get all of the members away from the civilian population at all.
I'm not sure I understand your reasoning, it's not indiscriminate if it's very targeted and very localised.
>3) There has never been, in the history of all warfare, such a surgically precise attack with such a low casualty rate of the civilian population
How do you know this ?
That sounds like a canned talking point. Up there with "Most moral army ever".
Well, I'm in awe to be perfectly honest with you.
It's like something in a James Bond movie, or a cheesy riff on the genre like Kingsman.
You might not want to acknowledge it, but this is definitely a new era of warfare, and one that hopefully has benefits for everyone - reducing the reliance on global supply chains that harm the environment because labour is cheaper elsewhere. (it's a very thin silver lining, let me have it).
>Well, I'm in awe to be perfectly honest with you.
Why? They killed 12 people including a child.
If it was bank robbery and the police shot through a child but killed 11 robbers there would be a lot of heads rolling at that police department.
No there wouldn't.
Don't be silly, 11 criminals dead and one bystander is well within limits of even a civilian police force, military ones are considered much more broad.
NATO sets the acceptable loss threshold at 4:1; for every 4 combatants killed, 1 civilian is considered acceptable.
It's very fluid, but you'll be hard pressed to find something more conservative than this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio
Yes, this is callous, and cold, and awful, but emotion has no place here, we're talking about people on both sides who feel like they are fighting for their right to exist. This is quite literally war, and there will be casualties.
Truth be told, while I'm not giddy and children dying, I'm glad we're talking about so few civilian casualties despite causing so much damage to Hezbollah operatives and operations.
Don't be silly, 11 criminals dead and one bystander
You aren't even getting the military-civilian ratio for the first wave right. According to the Lebanese Health Ministry we have at least 6 civilians killed (including 4 healthcare workers and 2 children), so that's at most a 1:1 ratio, far less than the 4:1 rate that you cite as "acceptable". And this doesn't even touch on the vastly larger number of wounded (2,750 just for the first wave).
By all indications these devices were intended to maim even more so to kill -- and to do so a great scale. From Wikipedia:
Interesting, at least 8 were confirmed as hezbollah by hezbollah earlier today[0]. The maths don’t work if they are telling the truth.
50% of 11 is a lot lower than 8.
I suspect that news outlets are picking and choosing “facts” based on their desired narrative already.
[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd7xnelvpepo
Interesting, it seems there's a conflict between what the Lebanese Health Ministry said, and what Hezbollah said (as of yesterday) -- and you're choosing to go with Hezbollah's numbers.
It does seem that the reports are still coming in, and are in the process of being evaluated and fact-checked. I chose to go by WP because in most cases at least attempts to reconcile between different sources, though it's far from 100 percent accurate about anything.
Hopefully we'll have better numbers within the coming week or so.
> Please help me understand then
Bro, it's the text book definition of a war crime, that's it, like it or not.
https://disarmament.unoda.org/ccw-amended-protocol-ii/
> Article 6 - Prohibition on the use of certain booby-traps
1. ...it is prohibited in all circumstances to use: (a) any booby-trap in the form of an apparently harmless portable object which is specifically designed and constructed to contain explosive material and to detonate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crime
> A war crime is a violation of the laws of war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility for actions by combatants in action, such as ... deception by perfidy, ...
> There has never been, in the history of all warfare, such a surgically precise attack with such a low casualty rate of the civilian population -
Go on r/combatfootage and witness hundreds of bombs dropped on 100% military targets with no civilian soul in a 10km radius... are you for real ?
Sabotage of military devices (with military targets) is permitted so long as there is minimal (or minimised) harm to civilians.
http://casebook.icrc.org/a_to_z/glossary/saboteur
ctrl-f devices: 0 results
> To sum up, sabotage against the enemy is a lawful operation provided the legal rules for the choice of targets and the methods and means employed are respected.
Do you think they meant: booby trapping is _illegal_ unless it's to harm military personnel ? lol
No, booby trapping is really clear:
"Rule 80. The use of booby-traps which are in any way attached to or associated with objects or persons entitled to special protection under international humanitarian law or with objects that are likely to attract civilians is prohibited."
Examples of protected objects are childrens toys or medical supplies bearing the insignia of the red cross; but if you want further reading: See, the military manuals of Belgium (ibid., § 32), France (ibid., § 39) and Germany (ibid., § 43) - hard to read without translations though.
Examples of protected persons include, of course, doctors who wear the red-cross insignia. However it's also a war-crime to wear this insignia and act in the interests of any power exclusively, or operate as a combatant. - so, owning military equipment that is given out by the high command of a terror organisation would immediately disqualify you, and if you survived the blast you would be facing a tribunal.
However, Booby-traps which are used in a way not prohibited by the current rule are still subject to the general rules on the conduct of hostilities, in particular the principle of distinction (see Rules 1 and 7- linked below) and the principle of proportionality (see Rule 14). In addition, the rule that all feasible precautions must be taken to avoid, and in any event to minimize, incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects (see Rule 15) must also be respected.
But proportionality is in play if you do not fall below the NATO recommended 4:1 combatant:civilian ratio. Which it seems Israel didn't.
Rule 1: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule1
Rule 7: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule7
Rule 14: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule14
Military Manuals: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/src/iimima
Sources: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/sources
From Israel's perspective, this supply chain attack was undoubtedly a clever move, but I can't help but wonder about its long-term consequences.
Although it was aimed at harming Israel's adversaries, third-party countries may now hesitate to involve Israel in their supply chains. There's also the risk that other major producers could replicate this tactic, potentially leading to further escalation in the region or beyond.
In the short term, it's a smart strategy for Israel, but they've likely opened Pandora's box in the process.
Do you think Hezbollah was buying stuff from Israel, or otherwise using Israeli supply chains?
I think it's far more likely that Mossad has infiltrated whatever foreign (non-Israeli) supply chain they were using.
So this can happen regardless of whether you're using Israeli supply chains or not.
I think the point is that if you're not Hezbollah or any kind of political actor, but just a customer for Israeli technology (public or private), would you really want to keep buying it? Leave aside boycotts over Israeli policy, you might be opening yourself to becoming an Israeli attack vector and either find your own interests compromised or become a target of Israel's enemies if they thought you were complicit.
What are you gonna buy? Chinese tech? Iranian tech? Russian tech?
Who do you want to be able to spy on you and compromise your hardware?
Unless you can spin up your own fab (hint: you can't) you're dependent on a hegemon. US/EU/Israel isn't perfect, but pretty much as good as it gets.
I know that this is rhetorical, but I'm sure an analysis of which country is least likely to leave you exposed to the issues mentioned above could be done. I suppose it also depends on who "you" are, and the threat of communications compromise vs drawing the ire of whoever Israel decides to attack through you. I'm sure there are plenty of countries that would rather be bugged by the Chinese or Iranians than be complicit in a way that opens them to actual armed conflict.
This is another danger of letting Israel swing its sword around without any sort of real condemnation from the US/West: the rationale for geopolitical multi-polarity increases in legitimacy. Pax Americana ends because allying with us doesn't save you from being used as a tool for ends like this. If speculation is correct that Taiwan is involved... Woof.
> Who do you want to be able to spy on you
I buy chinese IP cameras. China cannot block my bank account / employment / communications.
Agreed.
All this fearmongering about telegram and tiktok is weird.
China can decide what it wants from me- I have no plans to visit or engage with regime; however my life is dependent on the US not thinking of me as interesting.
So, the less I give to US companies, the better.
Especially as, being a non-US citizen I have no right to privacy afforded to me in the constitution, and US companies can be forced to comply with the government in secret- much in the same way we consider that China does it to even part-owned China based companies.
The concern over tiktok is not that Xi’s autocratic regime is surveilling you, but manipulating the algorithms in its large social media market share to foment anti-American (& anti-Israeli) sentiment.
Russia seems totally capable of doing that just by paying people and using bots.
Indeed, but that doesn't mean you should expose the youth more to belligerent foreign controlled agitprop information channels.
What is the real risk here? The only thing they can really do is make the case that if China invades Taiwan then the US shouldn't get involved. There problem is they might well be right; if I compare Hong Kong and Ukraine, I'd expect Taiwan would be better off going with the HK model of an "invasion" rather than fighting an actual war with the world's #2 or arguably #1 economy. So I'm not sure what the case is for quelling the message; there are some important issues there to debate.
Even if we start with the questionable idea that the US has the moral and physical might to be deciding where the borders are drawn in Asia; it isn't obvious that TikTok would be influential enough to matter. The military-industrial complex lobbyists in the US have a lot of actual power in pushing for war and experience in getting messages to the public.
I’m exaggerating a little (but not much): the risk with tiktok is that it is brainwashing Americans—particularly young ones—with anti-American sentiment. Not only does that suck for the individual, but diminishes the civil-service talent pool and weakens US institutions.
It’s like the CCP looked at what social media was doing to mental health and cable news to our political discourse and said “I can do something with that, I’ll take the extra large.”
They may well be right that the people of Taiwan, a country with a democratically elected government, should just lie down and accept a complete and undemocratic Chinese takeover of their country?
All because China is saying: "Either you submit to us completely voluntarily, or you submit by force, but you will submit"?
That's imperialism.
> That's imperialism.
Yep. Just because we don't like something doesn't mean that there are good alternatives. If I were in Tawian, Option A is status quo. Option B is to put the best and brightest into diplomatic posts. And they probably have a stack of other options they're thinking about. But all else failing Option Imperial-Subject is a much better one than Option Taipei-Becomes-A-Pancake-And-Then-Imperial-Subject. If there is going to be war it'd better be war with a credible good outcome to it.
The US could step in and police this back when it was 8x, 4x, 2x the size of China. I'd be surprised if it can now. China is pretty powerful.
The good alternative is China not wanting to take over a sovereign country, and for the world to gradually normalise Taiwan as a legitimate country.
China has no urgent or pressing self defence need to attack Taiwan. It also does not have a strong legal case to justify taking it over. In any rational sense the strongest case is for China to leave it alone.
Allowing the status quo to continue is better for the people of China, for the people of Taiwan, and for the rest of us around the world.
It's pure imperialist nonsense and we shouldn't seek to legitimise it just because China is powerful.
> What is the real risk here?
You're thinking too literal about what to influence. The more internal divide that foreign powers can amplify, the more likely that US will not/can not intervene in other places around the world.
There's also general propaganda to make people more empathetic towards China/Russia prior to any events occurring.
Knives are perfectly capable of killing you, so let's not worry about nuclear bombs?
Sure, there are many avenues to spread this sort of propaganda, but a state-run social media platform can certainly be a lot more effective than someone flooding someone else's social media platform with propaganda.
Assuming the Chinese government is using TikTok for influence campaigns (they'd be foolish not to), they only way to stop it is to outright ban it in your country (which the US seems to be trying to do, with possibly-disastrous effects), or find a way to get your citizens to dislike it (good luck with that).
While Russia is doing pretty well at their influence campaigns on other platforms, those platforms can choose, if they so desire, to step up their detection and banning efforts. It's a constant cat-and-mouse game, of course, but it's at least possible to stamp out most of that crap if you're willing to spend the resources to do so.
No. Not at the scale of Tiktok.
really? any proof?
Over the years I have personally found multiple accounts on Twitter/X that appeared to be Russian propaganda trolls (or someone with resources looking to appear that way).
They would pretend to be Americans and pushing certain narratives by retweeting/following/commenting/etc.
I found one that claimed to be a single mother living in the midwest USA. It was using a cropped photo from the personal blog of an Australian woman (who had multiple kids and a husband). If you went far enough back in the history you could find accidental Russian language usage. The timestamp trends in the posting behavior were clearly not American. It followed, and was followed by, other similar troll accounts.
Most recently I found one that claimed to be a 26 year old woman from the US. No reverse image search hits on the English web. But reverse image search with yandex you'd get hits for a couple of vk profile picture databases. From there it was possible to find the actual vk account, which was a Russian woman who clearly was not the same person.
I could link you some of the accounts but the ones I've reported have been banned or deleted by now. I'm sure the US government is wrong on some stuff but there's too much evidence for stuff like the Internet Research Agency to be fake [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency
Nothing wrong with that https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40656550
This is a comment I made on hackernews, replying to someone who (IIRC) claimed to be German but (in my opinion) was clearly a Russian astroturfing account.
After I mentioned it they deleted their comments, and they have since all been flagged by the moderators here.
My goodness, there are so many examples of more or less direct Russian influence operations. Here's a recent one where a bunch of political influencers were being paid ~$100,000 per single podcast episode by a company in Tennessee, whose founders were fully aware that their super-generous investor was located in Moscow.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/13/media/right-wing-media-influe...
Maybe you missed the recent news...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-rt-employees-indicted-cov...
from the government directly at war with Russia. sounds like a super credible source.
Who started that war again, and under what pretenses?
I'm not saying Ukraine is some golden child or whatever but they weren't the aggressor.
What source would you accept if you wouldn't accept this?
Isn't Israel doing enough to foment anti-Israeli sentiment anyway?
It feels like they're spending more on pro-israel sentiments, and have for decades. A biblical quote about a beam in one's eye comes to mind whenever people go "but china!".
Isreal is doing just fine, drumming up dissent, based on it's behavior alone.
Right. That, and a few hundred million petrodollars
My concern with tiktok is that it rots your brain like television, but far more effectively because it's rapid fire content constantly tuned to the individual user to keep them hooked on it. It's an instant gratification machine, effectively a drug, that fries people's attention spans. It has people spending hours a day consuming vapid short-form nonsense, and alters their psyche to make them less effective in other endeavors even when they aren't distracted by the app (particularly school, since it hits children particularly hard.)
The medium is the message.
This is a very valid concern but it also applies to many "western" social media and entertainment channels.
I have the same concern with those western apps too.
I'm not sure why influence should be illegal. What about books and movies? Or even schools and universities? American schools are probably the greatest source of anti-American / anti-Israel sentiment in the country. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GXm-NYyWEAA1jNs?format=jpg&name=...
If you believe in freedom of speech, you should also accept that people, including foreign people, may try to influence you. China doesn't believe in freedom of speech so they censor foreign sources of influence. Does America really want to go down that path?
Books are quite static.
But dynamic algorithms, targeting exactly you, knowing what mood you have in that moment (by analyzing what you have looked at, liked, disliked), what opinions you have etc. opens up a whole different world of influence possibilities amd I think those possibilities are just starting to get explored with AI. The data is already there.
The Netherlands also doesn’t believe in freedom of speech.
Many countries don't.
> American schools are probably the greatest source of anti-American / anti-Israel sentiment in the country.
Damn the education system, and it's penchant for teaching the history of colonialism instead of a revisionist policy. What's next, after Mandatory Palestine we'll teach our children about the Civil War and slavery too? What an anti-America sentiment, clearly we need our conservative lawmakers to... I dunno, rewrite history for both countries? Teach feel-good cookie recipes instead of international politics?
As long as America has anti-BDS laws there won't be any freedom of speech in the first place. Our first amendment rights are currently being suspended by international lobbyists that can't handle their share of due criticism. A shame, considering the US does so well to educate others on it's own embarrassing history, but is threatened with a lawsuit when anyone tries to meaningfully criticize Israel.
The constitution does not exclusively apply to US citizens is the good news.
The bad news is that there is no explicit and broad right to privacy in the constitution. You are protected by the fourth amendment requiring a warrant for searches and seizures, but the court has ruled that, citizen or not, if a third party like Meta willingly hands over your info, it’s fair game. L
"You have no privacy, get used to it!" -Scott McNealy
Scott was not saying "you should have no privacy"; he was making a statement of fact. That was nearly two decades ago, and he was prescient and right.
> So, the less I give to US companies, the better.
and all of a sudden, you're interesting.
You shouldn't be downvoted, the whole industry ought to know by now that Palantir aggregates multiple international sources of data for sale to American defense agencies. If you're legitimately afraid of America, the internet has few places of refuge.
> China can decide what it wants from me- I have no plans to visit or engage with regime; however my life is dependent on the US not thinking of me as interesting
If you have something of interest to Beijing and you’re doing something shameful or illegal in America, and they have evidence, they have leverage. This is human asset development 101.
Most people don’t have skills or information relevant to a foreign state. But some do, and for them being mindful about not giving a foreign adversary blackmail leverage is prudent.
> my life is dependent on the US not thinking of me as interesting
Why do people engage in this sort of larping, like they're secret agents or intellectuals that may be hunted at any moment by the grey suits in western governments?
We know it's not true for this person in particular because one click on their HN profile tells you their real name. I stopped there, but I'm sure there is plenty of additional info available with 3-4 more clicks. If they were really so afraid of government reprisal like this larping suggests, maybe they'd attempt to be at least a little pseudo-anonymous.
The actual fact is that 99.9999999999% of us are boring and will remain boring no matter what kind of comments we write on HN. It wouldn't hurt to touch grass once in a while.
cleber. but china can blackmail you into working for them. you will have no recourse if it does.
Blackmail me how? By giving information to the people who would have had it otherwise?
Hardly a defensible position to blackmail someone from.
Anybody that has lots of videos from you could train a deep fake realistic model and create a fake video depicting you committing a major crime. Sadly blackmail is the easier part.
I am failing to understand why I would prefer the US to have the ability to do this over China though.
Swiss sounds reliable, but a Swiss communications company was also bought and compromised by the CIA since the 70s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG
> US/EU/Israel
A bit of a false bundle there.
The two groups are more like US+Europe+China on one hand and 'misc' on the other. Most people get by without depending on the technology from the 'misc' group at all.
This kind of incident will hurt the Israeli tech sector individually, not some imagined US/EU/Israel tech grouping.
Intel and Nvidia are still pretty big in tech, despite the latest fall in shares price.
Until you look at the cybersecurity industry players. Many big players are based in Tel Aviv
Many more aren't than are.
Just because Slovakia is good at manufacturing cars doesn't mean that car manufacturing is dependent on Slovakia.
Many of those that aren't based in Tel Aviv probably have R&D offices in Tel Aviv, as do many of the tech behemoths which you use every day.
Cybersecurity industry? More like voluntary malware industry.
>> Unless you can spin up your own fab (hint: you can't) you're dependent on a hegemon. US/EU/Israel isn't perfect, but pretty much as good as it gets.
It's much easier to spin up your fab tech more so now -- than ever before.
"US/EU/Israel isn't perfect, but pretty much as good as it gets."
I really hope you are wrong about the conclusion.
To clarify, obviously I rather live in the EU than in china, but if this system is as good as it gets, then I am quite sceptical for humanities long term survival.
We’re all buying Chinese tech one way or the other.
American tech, chinese tech, all made in Taiwan
Some of it made in Korea.
I am not aware of chinese or iranian devices exploding and killing people. Spying is not worse than spying and killing. I do not get how do you get the conclusion that US/EU/Israel is as good as it gets if you are a random citizen not from any of these mentioned countries.
Yeah but if you’re dealing with hardware with any kind of Israeli involvement, do you really want to open every single customer unit to make sure one of the capacitors hasn’t been swapped for C4? I think that’s what the poster was indicating. At first I thought yesterday’s action was deviously impressive. Now I’m starting to think it’s actually shortsighted and bizarre. It’s a declaration of war on Lebanon, and obviously a declaration of a war they think they can win, but no good can come of this action.
Israel and Hezbollah have been at war since October 8, when Hezbollah started firing guided rockets at Israel.
They have been at war since they were founded in 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1982_Lebanon_War
If you want to run with this argument, they have been at war since 1948, when all of Israel's neighbors including Lebanon invaded Israel following the UN vote to grant Israel statehood and Israel's declaration of independence.
There has been a UN-brokered ceasefire since the later 2006 war. Minor issues have occurred since then, but October 8 was the first major escalation between the two in almost twenty years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Counci...
> It’s a declaration of war on Lebanon
A few observations:
1. This is an attack against Hezbollah, not Lebanon. The two entities are tightly coupled, but they are not the same.
2. Israel and Hezbollah are already at war. 60,000 Israelis have been displaced because of Hezbollah ongoing rocket and missile attacks. Israel has retaliated in various ways.
TLDR: you can argue that this is an act of war against Hezbollah. But it is not a declaration of war, and it is not against Lebanon.
In Britain, if the mobile phones of 3000 members of the non-governing Conservative Party exploded in their pockets caused by the armed forces of a different state, one could be reasonably assured you just declared open war on Britain.
For a more accurate analogy, imagine if Conservative Party were a terrorist organization with its own military, took direct orders from Iran, had claimed for itself all of Wales, and had been firing thousands of missiles into France without cooperating in any way with either the British government or army.
Then imagine that France predictably shoots back, and takes great care to specifically target members of that terrorist group.
In this more accurate analogy, would you still say that France declared open war on Britain? I would say no - that the terrorist group is the one that declared war; and that France is clearly engaging in acts of war against that terrorist group, which happens to be embedded in a host country, like a parasite.
For a more accurate anology involving Britain, imagine that British secret services decided to detonate pagers belonging to Sinn Fein party members in the territory of the Republic of Ireland.
Yeah I agree with you. It’s also that the situation in the region around Israel is so complex and long-running that there aren’t really appropriate analogies. The two countries are at a state of war that’s fairly obvious regardless of the parties involved. I’m fairly confident Israel given its history in these matters knows what it’s doing and takes actions that will move it toward security and victory, and any potential responses from Hezbolah have been considered and accounted for. One thing that came up for me was if Hezbolah had de-escalated, what would Israel have done with the pagers? It’s clearly a kind of “sleeper” munition, I wonder what the circumstances would have been for them to never use it.
What if the pockets of IRA members had exploded (yes, I know. Say 40 years ago when they were doing their share of bombing)? Does anyone seriously dispute that Hezbollah is a proxy army for Iran?
I think your comparison stops holding wage as,soon as you mention the Conservative Party. They just aren’t the same thing as Hezbollah.
Exactly. Our concept of sovereign states has become outdated by advances in technology. Up until maybe 1990 even second-tier countries could make just about anything indigenously. It might be a little worse and a little more expensive, but still good enough. Today only China and the USA are fully sovereign in terms of having the capability to build the full spectrum of electronic, communications, and military equipment. (We might outsource some of that to save money but the latent capability and capital reserves are there.) Even with nuclear weapons, India, Russia, UK, and France are only partially sovereign. Other countries can barely even pretend anymore, and their freedom of action will continue to evaporate barring some drastic realignment of the geopolitical order.
Because of this, the geopolitical bloc groupings will get stronger. Friend-shoring supply chains will bring allies together and exclude belligerents.
> Today only China and the USA are fully sovereign in terms of having the capability to build the full spectrum of electronic, communications, and military equipment.
Not arguing, but I think China still relies on Russia for jet engines - though it’s making great efforts to become self-sufficient there.
(Edit: high performance / high technology jet engines)
Are those jet engines the only option for China or are they just the best option. Because if you require state of the art tech then everyone still relies on Taiwan (TSMC).
Yes, China has struggled with the metallurgy necessary for advanced turbine engines. They seem to have made significant progress recently.
https://www.twz.com/air/our-best-look-yet-at-chinas-j-20a-fi...
Russia is no longer a reliable supplier. They need all the engines they can make for domestic use, including replacing war losses and building airliners to service domestic routes. Production is down because all the foreign technical experts left.
Good luck living without ASML and rare-earth mines.
The USA has extensive rare earth mineral deposits and mining is expanding.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/12/14/rare-earth...
> Unless you can spin up your own fab
Huh, which fabs does Israel have?
Intel's fabs 28, 28a, and 38 are in Israel. They also do some assembly in Israel.
Tower Semiconductor is based in Israel and runs two fabs there as well.
There's a big difference between spinning up your own fab and unscrewing the back of the pager to see if there's a bomb in it.
> US/EU/Israel isn't perfect, but pretty much as good as it gets.
I imagine China is just as good in pretty much every way.
How does a Bay Area tech site, when Bay Area tech has sooo many individuals who originally came to the USA as students but then couldn't go home due to tiananmen, have this kind of 'enlightened thought' on China, day in and day out?
Too much interaction with falun gong.
Regardless, I'm talking about competency. I don't endorse any particular state, culture, or ideology.
I think the point is that the US and its allies (e.g. Israel) do similar things to what China is criticised for.
I believe the point GP makes is not that China is a good place. More like that we are oblivious to all the points that make our own place pretty bad too.
On one hand, you can claim that it's a well-known propaganda technique (e.g. the soviets using "...And you are lynching negroes" as a rebuttal to anything). But on the other hand, the most satisfying way to avoid that form of propaganda would probably be to fix our own flaws rather than calling whataboutism.
I mean American's seem like about the most 'bring our flaws out into public and deal with them' society I have ever interacted with. Daterape is no longer acceptable. The entire way men treat women has changed in my lifetime. How we respond to domestic violence has completely changed (we don't just ignore it). LGBT+ rights have greatly changed. Race relations have completely changed (they may need work but they are so much better than the 80s where people rampantantly used the N word at work, in social situations).
The average American is much more aware of our issues, not China's. Our own place isn't pretty bad just because we have past history nor ongoing problems. It's a matter of 'what are we doing to change and improve', and are we willing/free to bring up problems that need changing, and does our societies structure allow change? Or does society pound down those nails that dare stick out? Every society is a flawed human constructed stumbled into not intelligently/humanely designed. The American systems is the most dynamic/flexible of all the ones I have been exposed to. There are more liberal ones, but less dynamic and flexible (no free speech laws in the UK which might cause the lack of reflection that you lament). There are more conservative ones that are again less dynamic/flexible.
It’s called propaganda of which HN isn’t immune to
Look - I agree. But at the same time, I've seen what the Bay Area puts out, and their product designers are more concerned with designing the next cigarette than improving anyone's life or ensuring domestic security. The US is currently relying on contractors that are asleep at the wheel.
Plainly speaking, China already took our iPhone manufacturing and our electric car business. They've got the chops, the supply chain and the export network to keep doing that for everything from the JSOW to the Harpoon missile. Unless the US makes a serious effort to invest in domestic R&D, our Bay Area vanguards are going to spend more time jerking off than participating in a healthy defense business.
> China already took our iPhone manufacturing
It may well be coming back over time; from 4 hours ago:
Apple Mobile Processors Are Now Made in America. By TSMC. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41574844
The processors were never made in China. At least not in that China.
Additionally, iPhones were never assembled in America. Enough manufacturing had been offshored to the PRC it just wasn’t even a consideration of any sort until late last decade, and the response from Apple has been to reshore some assembly elsewhere, not bring it into the States.
They didn't "take" it either, Apple offered it.
"over time" is right - if TSMC's roadmap isn't getting the US onto 3nm before 2026, then Apple could buy cheaper/denser silicon from fucking Samsung if they wanted. You know, the fab Apple has avoided for density issues and concerns that they aren't competitive. Taiwan still has the golden goose, and unless Apple's products stop relying on node upgrades (they won't) then we're not going to manufacture the majority of Apple chips in America. We'll be lucky if American fabs yield high enough to make memory controllers, let alone entire SOCs.
"Our" it ain't ours, that's the whole point of not being communist. So who cares where the products come from
It's very easy to say that during peacetime. But you can't depend on adversaries for cheap labor, period. The US federal government, communist or not, just spent billions ensuring that those manufacturing jobs aren't forfeited by our multi-trillion multinationals. Our strict adherence to capitalism is just about pushing us to USSR-collapse levels of market abuse. Our consumers are completely braindead; our manufacturers aren't being given reason to stay by the government; even US agencies like NASA and DARPA are getting outdone by Chinese state-run agencies.
Regardless of how you feel about it, the CHIPS act is a line in the sand the US has just crossed. We are heading back to cold-war style economics, because this is an economic cold war.
Unless you are a slave there, or from Tibet, or say anything wrong.
Can you expand? What makes you think that?
Has China ever blown up thousands of pagers in someone else's country?
No but they run "re-education" internment camps for their own people (estimated up to 1.8M people) in their own country:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps
While I don’t agree with GP, this is a weak argument
> The United States leads the world in total number of people incarcerated, with more than 2 million prisoners nationwide
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_...
It's disingenuous to compare prisons with internment camps.
Why?
Because you go to prison for breaking the law
The US defines what the law is. We've also got bucketloads of people sitting in jails prior to trial for nonviolent crimes.
This doesn't really mean much when those laws include "you're not allowed to expose crimes by government" not to mention drug laws and copyright. At the end it's not any less arbitrary than whatever excuses the chinese government uses to intern those they don't like.
The laws are known a priori.
There are also no laws against exposing crimes by the government. You’re just not allowed to break other laws just because you’re doing so.
People very frequently successfully expose corruption and abuse by governments in the US. It just doesn’t make significant news unless it’s a major national politician, and that happens multiple times a year.
It is known a priori that the laws are so vague that everyone is breaking several. If the government chooses to find out which one you are breaking, you go to prison. If you expose crimes by the government, you may find yourself suddenly being investigated for something unrelated.
That's just the government interring whoever it doesn't like, with extra steps. Or making a law that says "we have to like you" with extra steps.
So again, what's the difference?
Fun fact. There are more people in US prisons than there ever were in Soviet gulags
An interesting fact, though perhaps completely irrelevant since people were sent to the gulags for completely different reasons.
Fun fact. There are more people in the US education system than there ever were in Soviet gulags.
Just as irrelevant.
They also sent you to the gulags fog breaking the law.
No. While there were criminals also in gulags, most of people were there only because someone didn't like them or they happened to be wrong time in wrong place. That's it.
Or because you’re black.
You also go to internment camps for breaking the law. So I repeat: how are they different?
One is a failure of social order, product of greed, evil and stupidity. The other is the largest-scale arbitrary detention of ethnic and religious minorities since World War II.
No, you get sent to internment camps because you’re a prisoner of war or because of some basic property of your being.
The comparison would be the Japanese internment camps the US had in WW2.
There is nothing like that today where citizens are being locked up without breaking any laws.
Not just re-education, genocide: https://newlinesinstitute.org/rules-based-international-orde... (link goes to the source report instead of editorialized versions)
That is a bizarre standard but I would argue China’s fueling the US’s fentanyl crisis is far worse.
No. But does China have a horrible record on human rights and abuses? Yes. Have they been ethnically cleansing the Uyghur population for years now? Yes. Not to mention bullying and threatening all neighbors across the region. Just read about the recent worries over ZMPC cranes. The CCP will and has infiltrated private companies as a vector to spy on other countries. Maybe they haven't blown up pagers like this, but they've done other things that should make anyone skeptical of buying sensitive equipment from them.
Oh wow, a country BULLYING its neighbors. Imagine a country doing that. Luckily, the US never does something like that. Or imposes sanctions on a country half a world away, sanctions which the entire world has to adhere to unless they want to lose US trading all together.
Some of these talking points fall apart upon typing them, let alone posting.
I don't think so, but neither have the US or EU to my recollection.
China is the one major power that doesn't seem to engage in extraterritorial assassinations, so by default I'm more inclined to at least trust that the Chinese state won't ever decide to activate a kill switch against me.
Isn't China the one country that actively sets up their own police forces all over the world? Aren't there numerous Canadians of chinese origin that China has abducted? I see news articles of Canadians being arrested for assisting China in these abductions fairly often lately.
i think you need to be a little more critical of the media you consume
Critical of actual court cases filed by the Canadian government? Are you saying the Canadian court system is pushing an anti-China narrative?
Of course FVEY/CSIS would push anti PRC narrative. PRC's espionage behavior basically translates to "using words", it's so mild vs what others majors are doing that it needs to be characterized as "over seas police stations" to make it seem extra threatening, when it's bottom barrel espionage activity. MSS handlers using words to leverages / intimidate, to convince people to return to PRC on their own accord, i.e they're not abducting anyone let alone extrajudicial assassinate. Like the solution to countering these activities is to say... naw I'm good.
> Isn't China the one country that actively sets up their own police forces all over the world?
The US does the same thing and worse, just look for the very long arm of their FBI and Secret Service when it comes to what they allege to be “cyber-crime”. A decade or so ago I was visiting my company’s ISP one morning when I manage to stumble just as some US federal agents were doing their thing among the server racks. I live in Bucharest, Romania.
No, I'm pretty sure the US does more of that than China.. Or if not "police forces" then just straight-up military presence.
For actual drug dealers, not dissidents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_black_sites
AFAICT, that's mostly propaganda. What makes them "police" centers exactly? They do not have police men in them, don't have jails, no one has been convicted of a crime in relation to them, etc. Not sure what you mean by "abductions" but if you are referring to the Canadians who was arrested on Chinese soil, one of them admitted to espionage and is even suing the Canadian government for involving him against his will.
They are called secret police centres in Canada because of the actions they pose, and the threats they make. They'll threaten to kidnap you and extrajudicially extradite you to China, they'll threaten your relatives in China, they'll force you to stop behaviours considered inappropriate by the CCP, they'll try to recruit you as a spy.
To the Chinese Communist Party, the Han ethnic group belongs to the Chinese State, and everything anyone of this ethnic background does is their business.
Some of the actions you mention would definitely be illegal and yet, no one has been prosecuted nor found guilty. In fact, the concerned centers in Canada are suing the RCMP for defamation. So you are either speculating or spreading propaganda.
But people have been charged by the Canadian government over people that have been taken to China. Referring to actual Canadian court cases that are in regards to actual people taken to China is propaganda because?
Edit: Why am I blocked from replying to the below comment?
I previously asked what you were referring to because I genuinely don't know what you are talking about. Of course I don't believe actual criminal convictions are propaganda, but there have been none in relation to the so-called "police centers".
I mean, it's not like it would be out of character. Calling such accusations propaganda is a bit much.
China forcibly returned nearly 10,000 in overseas crackdown: report
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220119-china-forcibl...
The Disappeared - China’s global kidnapping campaign has gone on for years. It may now be reaching inside U.S. borders.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/29/the-disappeared-china-r...
Thousands of Chinese overseas forced home involuntarily: report
https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Thousands-of-Chinese-overse...
40 Officers of China’s National Police Charged in Transnational Repression Schemes Targeting U.S. Residents
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/40-officers-china-s-national-...
China’s abductions of foreign nationals should carry costs and consequences
https://www.politico.eu/article/chinese-abductions-of-foreig...
So it goes. People have been in Guantanamo Bay for two decades without prosecution or charges.
Not accurate: https://www.state.gov/reports/2022-country-reports-on-human-...
Examples of Extraterritorial killings and abuses listed (edited for more relevant source)
That article pretty clearly says they were assassinations within China of people who no one disputes were actual CIA spies or handlers. So at bare minimum it wasn't extraterritorial, which I understand to be the key differentiation made by GP.
Could you clarify? I see some reports of extraterritorial assaults, as well as harassment (particularly including threats against relatives within Chinese territory), but couldn't find examples of extraterritorial killings, at least with my best attempt at ctrl-f.
I'm sorry, but this is definitely not true. Have you heard about Chinese police overseas or China prosecuting "their" citizens outside of China?
I have. I just haven't heard of them resorting to assassinations. Happy to be proven wrong, but I'll need to see at least one actual example assassination.
Wait til you learn about this place called Tibet.
I don't live in Tibet, or any other place that China might decide to invade and/or claim as its own territory.
Right afterwards, you can learn about the place called Haiti. Or Cuba. Or Venezuela. Or heck, Mexico. Oh, Vietnam. North-Korea. China. Japan. Wait until you learn about Chile. And do not forget to look up the meaning of 'Jakarta is coming'
BTW, before someone screams whataboutism: adjusting your worldview according to facts and applying your moral standards to all countries is not whataboutism. Its a prerequisite to being able to morally condemn any action.
> US/EU/Israel isn't perfect, but pretty much as good as it gets.
EU maybe, but US/Israel are as good as it gets? PRISM? Literally China/Russia are more trustworthy.
> Literally China/Russia are more trustworthy.
Only in the sense that, as a US citizen who has no desire to travel to China or Russia, I don't feel all that worried that either country is going to do anything bad to me directly.
But if I lived in either one of those places... whooooa boy. I'd have to be a different person to not get in trouble. And I wouldn't call myself much of an activist or pot-stirrer, really. I feel bad for people who want to show public dissent of their government in China or Russia but can't (or do, and end up in jail), and for people in marginalized groups that the government doesn't like.
> > Literally China/Russia are more trustworthy. > > Only in the sense that, as a US citizen who has no desire to travel to China or Russia, I don't feel all that worried that either country is going to do anything bad to me directly.
I sort of get this PoV, but on the other hand…
If China had any information about you that was valuable for any purpose whatsoever (trade an intelligence tip to a corrupt businessman in a mafia state?) its government could do so with no legal or political safeguards.
The US government has legal safeguards against this, and would face _massive_ potential political risk for doing so against one of its own citizens.
>The US government has legal safeguards against this, and would face _massive_ potential political risk for doing so against one of its own citizens.
The US government literally steals cash money from its citizens and faces no repercussions whatsoever. If you carry cash with you in the US, you're in absolute danger of having it confiscated by the police as "drug money" and never seeing it again. You can claim the US has "legal safeguards", but until they're actually tested, it's just a supposition.
Local governments do that. I think the US federal government has to follow a different set of more stringent rules.
The federal government has done nothing about these actions by the local governments, so this is a distinction without a difference.
They actually have. The Supreme Court had a recent ruling, congress has passed laws to try and restrict it (to the best that federal rules can affect local state ones). The distinction definitely is important, but if you have an ideological bone to pick, it’s better to ignore it.
The US has a very large voting bloc composed of people who want their state and municipality to be free from restrictions imposed by the federal government. In practice, this leads to many places with a significantly larger amount of actually-experienced tyranny than you get in more uniformly governed countries. Ideally, this is coupled with freedom of movement, so that it's easy to get a job and housing in a state or city with more liberal governance.
If you actually believe that then you are amazingly ignorant about the legal structure of the USA and its dual sovereignty system. You should ask your civics teacher for a refund.
You think China and Russia don't do a hundred times worse to their citizens? The US is far from perfect, but it is drastically better than China and Russia.
Whataboutism. I never claimed they were better (and you're right, they're much worse). But the US is the one that claims to be the world leader in defending freedom and individual liberty. China never made any such claim that I know of.
> If China had any information about you that was valuable for any purpose whatsoever (trade an intelligence tip to a corrupt businessman in a mafia state?) its government could do so with no legal or political safeguards.
You should look up how Israel actively fishes LGBT palestinian people using fake dating site accounts, and threatens to out them in order to force them to contribute intelligence.
The US is clearly not that compromised. But they're not exactly clean either, considering some of the stuff that happened in central America.
Snowden will disagree with you
> Literally China/Russia are more trustworthy
They have no free elections unlike US.
They have no free press unlike US.
They have no independent judiciary unlike US.
They both rank poorly on the corruption index unlike US.
> They have no free elections unlike US.
The US is a two party system with many hereditary politicians. How free do you think your elections really are?
> They have no free press unlike US.
How did the US news report on Snownden, Assange and others the US government does not like? The US press is an oligopoly that does barely any real reporting. Theoretical freeness does little here.
> They have no independent judiciary unlike US.
Which is more than happy to shield the executive from any consequences. Qualified immunity makes this separation meaningless.
> They both rank poorly on the corruption index unlike US.
According to western definitions of corruption that conveniently do not include corporate lobbying, revolving door relationsships between politics and industry, backdoor laws via trade deals and all the other shadyness that has effectively taken over so-called democracies. But sure, pat yourself on the back for being less likely to get out of a speeding ticket by slipping the officer some cash.
How many hereditary politicians do you think there are in the US, and how much power do you think they have?
> Literally China/Russia are more trustworthy.
Why?
The EU? Anyone remember Crypto AG? Switzerland, I guess, but Schengen Area regardless.
Thy was what, 40 years ago? China has their great firewall set up today, never mind their social credit systems, automated CCTV citizen tracking systems, etc. Russia has people accidentally falling out of hospital windows or drinking polonium tea. I don't think this is at all comparable.
Crypto AG was uncovered and folded in 2018.
I checked Wikipedia to learn about the Social Credit System, and according to the article, no such system exists as described. Most assumptions about it seem to be based on misinformation from Western media. Could you clarify what you mean?
Mexico? Anyone remember Guantanamo? The US I guess, but NAFTA regardless...
Guantanamo bay is in Cuba, definitively not part of NAFTA
If they used their own products to do this then yes. If not then no.
Is that what happened?
I mean, CIA had similar blowback in the past for vaccines: https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vacci...
Why not? When was anything Israeli-made involved in any funny business? I mean officially Israeli-made, not... this.
Do you think Hezbollah was buying stuff from Israel, or otherwise using Israeli supply chains?
The modern supply chain is vastly deep. Iran can buy something from (IDK) India which might use software or hardware from Israel. As a further example, unless there's viable phone OS I don't know about, even Hezbollah will be using Android or iOS (and so buying from the US). etc.
I think it's far more likely that Mossad has infiltrated whatever foreign (non-Israeli)
Maybe that is more likely. But I don't think my or your guesses matter so much as public perception. IE, it would change the situation that a given customer may look skeptically at an Israeli software or hardware product. Or they may not given that price and features trumps security and quality for nearly everything these days.
> So this can happen regardless of whether you're using Israeli supply chains or not.
The point is, would allies trust if it were China that pulled this off? Huawei/TikTok were thrown under the bus for way less.
> I think it's far more likely that Mossad has infiltrated whatever foreign (non-Israeli) supply chain they were using.
Yeah. Wasn't there something in the Snowden leaks about the CIA intercepting servers in-transit to install implants on them? I'm sure Israel is doing something similar.
Photos of an NSA “upgrade” factory show Cisco router getting implant https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa...
No wonder the U.S is so worried about Huawei.
Guilty parties often cast the first accusation.
"Thief believes everybody steals"
> "Thief believes everybody steals"
The correct analogy for espionage isn't crime. But even taking that framing, if everyone actually does steal, it doesn't do you any good to be naive and deny reality.
It's a proverb, not an analogy (hence the quotes). Read it like "Just because you do X, doesn't mean that everybody else does X too"
During the cold war, Russia intercepted typewriters and teleprinters going to the US and other embassies and inserted implants in them. https://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/selectric/
And the US CIA ran the "Swiss" firm Crypto AG, which sold cable-encryption (as in telegraphic / telex coms) equipment with pre-installed back-doors:
<https://www.npr.org/2020/03/05/812499752/uncovering-the-cias...>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG>
It was Cisco routers that made the headlines. Not sure of other gear: https://www.engadget.com/2014-05-16-nsa-bugged-cisco-routers...
Yes there was. @48:48 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NFrjHmI35w&t=48m48s
meh, the most probable explanation is that israel infiltrated hezbollah and whoever was in charge of ordering and distributing those devices knowingly distributed the tampered devices.
That guy got a deal and was evacuated with his family before events unfolded. Seems way easier than alternative plans.
It was pointed out to me that you shouldn't overthink it: the most likely thing which happened is Israel had someone inside Hezbollah procurement and used them to take delivery (I'd put much lower odds on this guy being in on the plan, it's doubtful he even knew he was working for Israel directly).
You've got to remember that as internet people, we want everything to have a clever storyline to it. Intelligence services exploit that exact expectation though: the first thing you attack is trust within the organization itself, since it gives you more access, more easily and once people have talked themselves into "supply chain threat" there's a real danger they've ignored "actually the guy signing off on the paperwork is taking a payoff to ignore some delivery irregularities".
I don't see this as a smart move (let alone strategy) in any time frame. As a third-party observer greatly removed from the conflict I used to view Israel as an island under attack from terrorists. Now I'm struggling to see the differences between their activities and blowing up airplanes or launching rockets from schools and hospitals. You can say I'm naive, and why would Israel care about how I feel, but as a country and a people they only exist as long as we're their benefactor, and I don't think I'm alone in how I feel.
> Now I'm struggling to see the differences between their activities and blowing up airplanes or launching rockets from schools and hospitals.
Well, the obvious difference is that blowing up airplanes or launching rockets at residential areas intentionally targets civilians in order to spread a maximum amount of terror among the civilian population while blowing up pagers that were used for coordinating attacks against Israel very specifically targets operatives involved in such activities.
Some of the initial footage shows such a device going off while innocent bystanders remain unharmed. You can't get any more targeted than that.
Yes, such a pager might have ended up in the hands of a non-involved person, but given the facts known so far that's very unlikely, because there's a reason those people were carrying these devices on them: They were afraid of being tracked down by Mossad in the first place.
Many people fail to see this. You can't compare a terrorist attack that intentionally targets civilians with no apparent military target to a legitimate attack on a defined military target that unfortunately results in some collateral damage.
There are many points on this grey line, and we often fail to recognise those in the middle. For example, between your two points is a very significant type of action that this one may well fall under: an attack on a military target that you are fully aware will result in significant collateral damage.
> you are fully aware will result in significant collateral damage.
and the terrorists deliberately place themselves in a position where attacks on them results in massive collateral - aka, they want a human shield.
Many people fail to see this because they have an intact moral core. Conducting a military operation that has a fully predictable rate of civilian casualties is morally equivalent to targeting those civilians.
Israel has utilized a rate of expected civilian to militant casualties in Gaza at the rate of 100:1 [1].
[1] https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
> Conducting a military operation that has a fully predictable rate of civilian casualties is morally equivalent to targeting those civilians.
By that logic only the absolute number of (expected) civilian deaths matters... which can't be right.
If it were true, then exploding a city bus (1 soldier, 10 civilians) would be more moral than striking a military base (1,000 soldiers, 11 civilians.)
It would also suggest a kind of blame-shifting if one side decides to install their missile launchers in the playgrounds of elementary schools or whatever.
You are simply incorrect. “Rate” is a ratio, not an absolute number.
But to your point, Israel’s ratio in Gaza was as high as 100 civilians to 1 soldier in the shopping mall (or more accurately, refugee family shelters).
> “Rate” is a ratio, not an absolute number.
No, you've cut off the crucial second half of the sentence, which says a military operation with known risks of civilian deaths "is morally equivalent to targeting those civilians."
The phrase "those civilians" refers to a countable quantity of them.
Perhaps you meant to write "morally equivalent to targeting that proportion of civilians"?
This isn't pedantry, but what are you arguing?
Assuming that's a plural "you", I would paraphrase the subthread like this:
_________
(1) zer0x4d: "Many people fail to see that morality depends on intent, there is a qualitative difference between deliberate and incidental collateral damage."
(2) abalone: "No, only people suffering from broken moral cores think there's a difference. An attack when they knew a predictable rate of collateral damage is morally the same as deliberately targeting those civilians who died."
(3) Terr_: "It's based on the number of civilians who die? That doesn't make sense. Consider these scenarios, where even though fewer civilians die, the intent/planning of the act makes us judge it as morally worse."
(4) abalone: "Incorrect, I said it was about comparing the two rates of death."
(5) Terr_: "Well, that's not quite what you wrote earlier, is this other version closer to what you meant to convey?"
(6) beedeebeedee: "What is being argued?"
(7) Terr_: [Error: Recursion depth exceeded]
Hi Terr, the "you" was singular (and in reference to you, in particular). You paraphrase the subthread well enough, but your first comment within it misinterpreted what Abalone said.
> > Conducting a military operation that has a fully predictable rate of civilian casualties is morally equivalent to targeting those civilians.
>By that logic only the absolute number of (expected) civilian deaths matters... which can't be right.
Abalone (as well as myself, many others, including the signers of the Geneva Convention) is concerned about the use of force against a civilian population where it is predictable that there will be a high rate of civilian death. Abalone says that is morally equivalent to targeting those civilians and Abalone is correct (it is, in fact, a war crime). It is not necessarily about absolute number of civilian deaths, so your counterexample does not succeed.
I think the argument boils down to "what does it mean to target civilians?"
if 100 die to get 1 soldier, that sounds like targeting civilians. If 1 dies to get 100 soldiers, that sounds like (to me and many others) a successful and targeted attack with minimal collateral damage.
The argument being made sounds like if you know there could be 1 death that you should not target the soldiers and that there is no difference in that case to the 100 civilians to 1 soldier and as such, if any civilian could have been estimated to be collateral damage then no military action should have been made.
I think that is supercilious and discounts reality. Civilians are going to get killed and war is terrible. There is a difference in targeted ratios.
The act of modifying and/or deploying the devices was targeted. That’s it.
Carrying out an explosives attack across a large geographic area that includes public spaces, with no specific intelligence on the location of the devices, or who is within the blast range, is the exact opposite of targeted.
What on earth would be more targeted than compromising pagers that only Hezbollah military is using?
At some point the criticism really gets absurd. There probably was collateral damage, yes. This is what you have to account for if you start wars against another nation. Repeatedly.
Opposite of targeted are the missiles that hit northern Israel.
For these people, there will never be an attack good enough, targeted enough, or proper enough
It's because they're not motivated by fairness but a pre existing idea of who is good or bad
In terms of collateral damage it seems much better than even the most precise missiles, though.
> Some of the initial footage shows such a device going off while innocent bystanders remain unharmed.
This is anecdotal and misleading. There are reports of civilians maimed including the murder of a child. This is entirely plausible due to the indiscriminate nature of these bombs with respect to immediate bystanders.
If an enemy had set off thousands of small bombs in American supermarkets and homes, maiming thousands of whoever was nearby and killing children, we would undoubtedly call it a mass terrorist attack.
2000+ bombs hurting 2000 fighters and one child? I'd argue that almost no war is without collateral damage, but this one action might be uniquely low in the amount of collateral damage done.
> This is anecdotal and misleading
I saw 5 videos and in every case only the person carrying the pager was hurt. Even people less than a foot away weren't harmed. Look at the video on the front page of nytimes.com right now to see what it's like. Highly targeted at Hizbullah soldiers, no bystanders hurt. The exact opposite of "indiscriminate".
You're working yourself up into some righteous anger about this, which is fine, that's your choice. But at least recognise that that's what you're doing. You need a certain narrative to be true so you're twisting facts to suit that.
> no bystanders hurt
This is incorrect. There are reports of maimed civilians and a murdered child.
There is no comprehensive information yet on the ratio of civilians to militants maimed by this attack, and any claims otherwise are propaganda.
Sure, there has been at least one civilian death, and others might be reported later. While we don't have numbers yet, the evidence so far suggests a low ratio of civilian casualties, probably much lower than what's possible using convention warfare against an enemy embedded in a civilian population.
> Eight killed and 2,750 wounded
Such a pager did end up hurting non-involved people, in great quantity.
Incredible, Israel can use tiny bombs in the personal possession of terrorists and they'll still be accused of warcrimes.
Whatever words you're reading when you look at mine might be incredible, what I wrote is almost 3000 wounded in the crossfire, including children.
You're ignoring that and pretending they're accused of something else. Why?
Almost 3000 wounded are not a problem if they're Hezbollah, no? The child is tragic of course, but one dead child when targeting enemy soldiers is more ethical than the dead children in deliberate attacks on civilians, which is what Hezbollah is doing.
Why are you pretending otherwise? Is it the bigotry of low expectations? Arabs/Muslims can act very reasonable and humane too, so there's no reason to measure them with a different yard stick
> Almost 3000 wounded are not a problem if they're Hezbollah, no
They are a problem in both cases. Stop the whataboutism.
Why are you assuming those 2700 people weren't Hezbollah? Who else was carrying the pagers to avoid Israel location tracking?
Anyone who got resold / loaned those devices, those who were next to blast radius of those devices while going with their lives, any relatives who were unfortunate enough of having an hezbollah member in their family.
This is basically just one step above a chemical attack, and can only be excused as "the end justifies the means" by the interested parties.
Why would you use 80s technology that allows you to circumvent Israeli tracking, and get that from Hezbollah if you're not in cahoots with them? People in Lebanon can afford smart phones.
With the people next to the blast radius you have a point, but when targeting guerilla fighters that blend in with civillian populace it's hard to not inadvertantly target innocents too. But a small explosive device that is used by enemy soldiers and kept close to their bodies is the best way to avoid innocent casualties.
Also, Hezbollah hiding between innocents doesn't mean Israel shouldn't defend themselves. If you hide behind civillians you're the one to blame for casualties, not the party that defends against you
I guess you've never been in most of middle east. Pagers, shortwave radios and "80s technology" are still widely deployed among the general population.
Hospitals at least use it extensively still in Europe.
The NSA fights terrorism. Terrorists use encryption to evade the NSA. That does not mean that everyone who uses encryption is a terrorist.
This isn't about pagers generally, this is about a particular batch of 5,000 pagers ordered by Hezbollah. They weren't distributed to random Lebanese citizens.
Where is your evidence for your claim? Doctors and children are among the dead.
Hezbollah employs doctors (heck, it runs hospitals) and Hezbollah personnel (in any of the political, armed, or social services parts of the organization) presumably fairly often live in households with children.
"Doctors and children are among the dead" isn't inconsistent with "this came from an order of devices specifically for Hezbollah" (it does cast doubt on "this was a precisely-targeted attack on Hezbollah combatants", but that's a very different claim.)
We'll need to await more info about the second wave of explosions from other devices, but the first wave was widely reported to be from a specific order of 5,000 pagers for Hezbollah, see e.g. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-planted-exp...
Again, these guys don't go to distributors saying "Hello, we're evil Inc, we want your devices for our nefarious plans!" - they were coming from a batch imported trough local resellers like...basically every other consumer retail channel.
Without taking in consideration that "Hezbollah" as a loosely defined group ranges from conservative politicians and institutions to bona fine terrorists.
These devices were being shipped in equal measure from the guys sending rockets to Israel to the local equivalent of those preppers who like to spend their weekend eavesdropping the police radio waiting for WWIII.
Unfortunately real life is a bit messier than a Tony Scott movie, and we didn't harm 5000 evil terrorists ready to destroy America and Israel from their Cobra underground lair, just a bunch of random people - a few of them genuinely bad guys (how many? thousands? hundreds? less than ten?), and everyone else who may or may have not sympathized with a group that may or may be not considered a terrorist organization, depending on who you ask.
Mainstream sources are saying it was a specific shipment of 5,000 pagers, which Hezbollah ordered from Gold Apollo (a manufacturer, not a local reseller), that was tampered with.
Are you claiming that these sources are wrong, and Hezbollah actually bought them from some retailer who happened to have 5,000 units of tampered inventory?
...God, I hate when smart people pretend to be dumb to make sure facts fit their agenda.
So, you're suggesting instead that a paramilitary group picked up their phone, called a company in Taiwan (I guess there's a taiwanese-arab translating terrorist branch), told them "Hello, I'm Hezbollah, Yes, I need 5000 pagers because...reasons, take my money", nobody batted an eyelid starting from payment processors (I can only imagine they used Bison Dollars from Street Fighter The Movie), to shipping and logistics from several countries.
Then, finally, they made a big long queue of all Hezbollah members and gave each of them one of 5000 pagers, all while saying "remember, never give this extremely common consumer device to no one else for at least five months!"
Instead of, you know, buying them locally from friendly wholesale resellers when new units were needed. (remember, it's radio and pagers we're talking about. Not guns. Not Missiles. It's basically stationery.)
I'm tempted to end this with some snarky conclusion, but I'd say no further comment is really needed.
Per Reuters, "The senior Lebanese security source said the group had ordered 5,000 beepers made by Taiwan-based Gold Apollo, which several sources say were brought into the country in the spring."
I suppose the source could be lying, but what is your alternate theory exactly? Militaries don't tend to procure their communications equipment from the shelves of Radio Shack. Lebanon doesn't have a booming pager market, so it's unlikely that some local distributor just happened to have 5,000+ pagers sitting around.
This was clearly a special order (which doesn't mean no distributor was involved), and Occam's razor suggests that Mossad tampered with that particular order, rather than tampering with random pagers and just hoping that some of them might end up being purchased by Hezbollah later.
"Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah says the group’s leadership was mostly spared during Tuesday’s attack targeting pagers that killed several members in Lebanon as they were using older devices while “new ones were sent elsewhere.”
Interesting, can you share a link for this quote? I can't find it anywhere.
https://edition.cnn.com/world/live-news/lebanon-explosions-h...
Thanks!
> Anyone who got resold / loaned those devices
Aren't the pagers specifically for transmitting Hezbollah instructions / orders?
Why would a Hezbollah member sell/loan such a device to a non-Hezbollah member?
Beacuse it's a pager, and they're rather common in most of Egypt, Turkey and middle east countries for medical support and first-time responders.
I mean, the reason Hezbollah switched to those devices was also because they're readily available in the country.
I'd be extremely, extremely surprised if this was a "targeted" shipment rather than a generic batch that was expected to a certain degree to be bought by hezbollah members.
Prepare to be surprised. Hezbollah ordered 5000 pagers specifically for distribution to only their own terrorists for coordinating group activities.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-planted-exp...
> I'd be extremely, extremely surprised if this was a "targeted" shipment rather than a generic batch that was expected to a certain degree to be bought by hezbollah members.
Why?
Because they're not S.P.E.C.T.R.E. It's a separatist group whose more extreme members resort to terrorism, not much differently than IRA, Basque Nationalists or Bosnian Indipendentists.
Their supply channel is the same as the civilian population, they're not shopping for vibranium from Hydra.
It would be interesting if we could trace the local distributor for those devices and see where they were available at retail, it would probably match the areas in Lebanon where members of hezbollah are commonly located.
> It's a separatist group
Are you talking about Hezbollah? If so, you're really wrong.
Yes I'm assuming not every Lebanese is a terrorist, which seems to be problematic to some. In particular 8-year-old children are probably not.
I'm confused, how do you know the 99% of those wounded aren't Hezbollah operatives?
How many innocents would get harmed during a more conventional military strike against the same group of operatives?
I would be fairly surprised if Hezbollah opsec guidelines didn't say that you must have the pager at you at all times, and make sure it can't be accessed by others.
This is likely the most precise large scale military strike of all time. You can't control for everything - some pagers might have been in the hands of innocent people - but it sure seems like an ideal attack vector.
I know there is a documented case of a non-involved person getting injured, but do you have evidence that this attack was not 99% effective? The attack vector was the device specifically used only by involved people.
A 9 year old child was killed, proving this attack wasn't as targeted as you think. However Israel is happy to accept any amount of collateral damage as long as it doesn't happen to them.
Any child death is tragic, but this is really one of the most targeted strikes in the history of warfare. It is safe to believe that everyone that was given a pager for secret communication by a terrorist group, is associated with such group, probably in a military capacity. Furthermore, videos show that extremely close bystanders are left unhurt.
I think this only goes out to show that criticism towards Israel waging warfare is not really about the way that warfare is fought, but really on the right of Israel to fight at all. As no one in history has achieved a more precise attack in urban setting towards a non-uniformed organization ever.
There is no comprehensive information yet on the ratio of civilians to militants maimed by this attack, and any claims otherwise are propaganda.
If an enemy had exploded small remote controlled bombs in American supermarkets and homes targeting members of the American political parties, the sponsors of terrorism and oppressive dictatorships in many foreign countries, there is no question we would characterize it as a terrorist attack.
It's the kid's fault for associating with terrorists.
> but this is really one of the most targeted strikes in the history of warfare.
You are making that up and quoting yourself. There was not a single fire-control system onboard these pagers; there was no visual designation of the target, and no confirmation that it was being carried by it's owners. The target was broadly designated and not even discriminated on a case-by-case basis. A button was pressed, and consequences including the death of a child are now in play.
Israel has the capability to field targeted strikes on their own using domestic Litening and SPICE munitions (not to say they don't end up targeting civilians anyways). The unforunate bottom line is that this was an indiscriminate and presumptive attack that generally relies on a complete disregard for collateral damage. Innocent bystanders died, ones that would not be targeted by any morally accountable soldier in the command-and-control loop. That means an error was made, in civilized armies.
Your terrorist group is their legitimate government. In Lebanon today their legitimate government was attacked by a terrorist group.
Hamas may be the “legitimate” government of Gaza (or at least the most recently elected one), but Hezbollah is not the legitimate government of Lebanon; it’s a minority party with outsized influence in parts of Lebanon due to its militia and intelligence services.
Mine was a semantic point rather than one picking sides. I don't have a dog in the race.
What is the quantity? Reports are the beepers were purchased directly by Hezbollah for their use.
Found it: multiple reports say 5,000 pagers
Who though? Who, exactly?
They were lucky someone wasn't carrying one on a plane
I wonder if it would endanger the plane. A 20g explosive sitting in the pocket of a person will clearly cause serious injury, but I am unsure if it has penetration power to actually go through the plane body. I am reminded of mythbusters experiments with small amount of explosives to block up doors, but I don't recall how much they needed in the end.
Poking holes in the fuselage of a jetliner isn't going to take down a plane. Consider the cases of a turbine fan blade taking out a window, the case where the MAX door panel blew off, the cases where the cargo door came off, and the 737 "convertible" case. You'd have to take out a large part of the structure to bring it down.
Take a look at all the photos of B-17s taking severe combat damage yet returning home. Jetliners are a lot more redundant today than the B-17s were.
However, if the hole took out the flight controls, or set a fire, then the airplane has a big problem.
In some of the cases you mentioned, there were passenger deaths due to being ejected from the aircraft. I'm on mobile or I'd link exactly which incidents but I remember at least two cases from when I was bored in a lecture and read through most of Wikipedia's "list of deaths in aircraft incidents" list or whatever it's called
Yes, there are passenger deaths from some of those incidents. But the plane wasn't brought down.
>Poking holes in the fuselage of a jetliner isn't going to take down a plane. Consider the cases of
These are all fake news. According to Hollywood, a single bullet from a gun will cause an airplane to break apart in mid-air. You can't honestly expect me to believe Hollywood movies get physics wrong.
Similarly, as soon as a car's wheels leave the ground, it bursts into a fireball according to many TV shows I've seen.
/s
What about the person sitting next to the target?
Naturally the close quarters will results in multiple people being harmed. The question is more about the physics and if the explosives has enough penetrating power to go through the walls of the plane.
The bigger risk to the plane (and passengers) would likely be if the person carrying the explosive was working in the airport and the explosion occurred during a critical moment, like when a pilot is taxiing.
Most of the flight would be out of range and I’m not even sure that explosion would take out a plane. Plus it would probably be powered off because Hezbollah is serious about flight safety.
> I’m not even sure that explosion would take out a plane
I take it you would have no problem being on a plane with one (or even multiple) of these pagers going off then? What kind of argument is this?
I wouldn’t want to be near it anywhere so what’s the difference between a plane and a grocery store?
The comment implied Israel was risking blowing up an entire plane when we were discussing whether it was targeted or not.
Go play in the other room, the grownups are talking.
I was thinking about this, but then it probably wouldn't even get past a security xray scan. Which makes me think, in the 5 or so months these were reported to being in the wild, one never boarded a plane?
Hamas terrorists boarding commercial airplanes? With their secret pagers on them?
Somehow I don't think so.
A pager wouldn’t have been able to connect to any networks at altitude.
From what I can find, the targeted pager-model can receive UHF messages in the 450~470MHz range. That could reach passenger jet cruise altitudes if the transmitter is strong enough.
I think it's safest to assume Hezbollah are using strong transmitters, because they'll want to be able to broadcast across rather large areas and in a way that resists potential jamming.
On the flip side, I'm having a hard time imagining these as threats to an entire airplane, given the tight constraints on how much explosive power can be secretly snuck into a functioning pager.
Penetration of 450-480MHz through the shell of an airplane would, on the ground,require a transmission strength of approximately .4dB/m at a distance of 1 kilometer, which is doable by most measures, but would quickly become unrealistic as the plane gained altitude.
https://pure.tue.nl/ws/files/68269081/560768.pdf
Pagers don’t “connect” to networks.
What do they do, then? Are you implying that connections can only exist as a two way relationship? Are rivers not connected to streams, tributaries, etc?
Receiving data from a network is a connection, no matter how you want to define it.
Yes, I am definitely implying that a connection only exists in a two way relationship. Don't be obtuse.
Don’t be vague then. What do pagers do, if not connect?
The towers resend the message for a while so that they get through - some guy might be in a plane on approach to Beirut right now his pager coming into range as they land ....
Do we know whether or not they embedded gps tracking into the bombs?
I would think they would have that ability, not just to avoid a horrible accident like blowing up a plane, but also to gather valuable tracking intel on a terrorist organization.
My understanding is that pagers are typically radio Rx-only, and that it is not possible to track their location like a cellular device -- which is likely why Hezbollah chose to use them.
Though it would be possible to add this ability when the hardware was intercepted, a transmitting device is also easy to detect.
Two way pagers have been a thing since the 90s. You're limited to replying with a very short alphanumeric message.
That said, pagers don't continuously ping the tower like cell phones do. They can stay receive only until the moment you chose to send a message.
> blowing up airplanes or launching rockets at residential areas intentionally targets civilians in order to spread a maximum amount of terror among the civilian population
Which is exactly what Israel has been doing for decades by
installing an apaitheid regime https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_apartheid
colonizing palestinian land https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli-occupied_territories
kicking hundreds of thousands of people off of their homes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba
putting guns on their head day in day out https://www.msf.org/palestinians-face-harassment-and-violenc...
running on them with tanks while their families must watch https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6385?s=35
destroy the graves in an attempt to dehumanize even more https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_razing_of_cemeteries...
and on and on and on since a time when none of us was even born. Let's not pretend Israel is the good guy here. There are no good guys, and while I don't accept the acts of Hezbollah, what is a colonized people being genocided to do when the world doesn't care about them being denied human rights ?
> running on them with tanks while their families must watch https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6385?s=35
Wow. Just, wow!.
They run a tank over the mother until assassinate her in front of their four children? Really?
I'm speechless. This is an absolutely hideous act
Israel also do bad things. Maybe it flies under the radar of being called terrorism by the west - but look at west banks settlements, jailing kids forever for throwing stones, turning Gaza into something that makes Mad Max look like a dream in the name of self-defence, appartheid conditions in Israel and the occupied territories. Offensives on Gaza before Oct 7 - 2023 was particularly bad, and the general embargo aroudn Gaza that made life pretty rotten before the current war - etc.
Israel do enough operations that ticks the "look we killed soldiers guys!" box and they really like to get media attention on that. Otherwise it is "Hamas was hiding there". Hard to verify - they may be right sometimes, but I bet not all the time based on the the number of deaths and the amount of destruction in Gaza.
> jailing kids forever for throwing stones
This isn't happening. Kids are being jailed for throwing stones, yes. Just like you or I would be jailed if we threw a rock at a cop. But it is not "forever".
> You can't get any more targeted than that.
We can nuke a dictator. It's going to blow up everything within miles, evaporating millions of people, but it can't get any more targeted than that. Deal with it.
Seriously, tho, it's infuriating that a government literally triggered explosion among general public, right in front of innocent eyes. This is an act of terrorism, harming the lives of innocent people who've been largely unrelated to the conflict.
There are 100,000+ northern Israeli's who are refugees inside Israel because Hezbollah is firing hundred of rockets indiscriminately daily at civilian targets, but Israel doing something specifically targeted at higher level Hezbollah operatives makes you feel like Israel is doing exactly the same thing? All while you don't even yet know the reason for the Israeli op (was it to stop an imminent Hezbollah action? Seems odd that this also impacted so many operative in Syria, doesn't it? Why aren't people mentioning that this was larger than Lebanon?)
Why? Why is Hezbollah firing rockets into Israel?
You don't mention Gaza or Palestinians, yet it's right there (and been there for 75+ years).
> Why is Hezbollah firing rockets into Israel?
Hezbollah states that their aims include destroying Israel, instilling a Muslim government in the land, and converting the people to Islam.
They have explicitly said that they will never coexist peacefully.
Yeah but what pissed them off so much? (spoiler: it was Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon)
From the first two sentences on wikipedia
> The 1982 Lebanon War began on 6 June 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon. The invasion followed a series of attacks and counter-attacks between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) operating in southern Lebanon and the Israeli military that had caused civilian casualties on both sides of the border.
You asked "but what pissed them off so much". Maybe it was the PLO operating in Lebanon, not sure.
Nice, using Islam as a scapegoat. Lebanon is a democratic republic that has 43.4% Christian population. If that is their intention, why not focus on their country first rather than attacking Israel?
Lebanon had a civil war along religious lines. There are many Lebanese Christians in the USA that could help you with what seems to be a misunderstanding about the country.
Hezbollah's founders writings at the time are available online, and that they are clear about their goal being the rule of Islam. Their slogan was 'The Islamic Revolution in Lebanon'. They were founded as an Islamic revolutionary group, that is very core to who they are. Highlighting that is hardly 'using Islam as a scapegoat' whatever that means.
You are mentioning a civil war that happened a decade ago that is by no means exclusive to Hezbollah. I couldn't care less what their founders wrote, but, strangely, they care about the rule of Islam in Israel when their president is a Maronite Christian and their party is one of the parliament members. I can agree that they are Iranian proxies for war against Israel, but it's far from installing Islamic rule. I mean they are also responsible for the secular movement that comprised many religious factions [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebanese_Resistance_Brigades
I'm referring to a time when Hezbollah was founded. Kind of important to an organization, it's founding, and it's reason for being founded, don't you think?
You are trying to obfuscate Hezbollah's public statements calling for Islamic rule. Hezbollah wants Islamic rule and Sharia law for Lebanon, they are very clear about this. Currently realities that they have to put up with do not change that. They are also clear all of their actions and philosophy is consistent with and based on Islamic teaching. Again it is not deceptive to point out they are an Islamic organization.
Hezbollah is firing rockets to conduct terrorism on the civilian population living in the area. Are you are OK with terrorism if you feel it's justified?
And you don’t mention Iran
> Why is Hezbollah firing rockets into Israel?
Why, Israel sent them a page and they are merely returning the call, as would be the right thing to do among polite company.
By firing thousands of rockets indiscriminately into civilian areas? That is polite, civil, and worthy of a joke to you?
Well, yesterday’s actions aren’t really gonna fix that situation for those 100,000 Israelis now though are they? It wasn’t designed to make that border region safer overnight because those rockets are going to keep coming even more often now. Hezbolah might even get so pissed off they go all out and rush the border.
It absolutely alleviates the situation. The rockets were going to be fired either way. Now with a few dead, a bunch of wounded, and a communication channel disabled, it's going to be harder to coordinate future rocket attacks.
There are old stories of the Russians planting mines inside children's toys during some of the later cold war conflicts. This is starting to feel a bit like that. Nobody had any way of knowing who was holding those pagers when they sent that packet but they still distributed thousands of munitions throughout the populace and pressed the red button. Now there are probably at least a hundred or so still out there that haven't exploded and are just live UXO sitting in people's desk drawers.
I'd say it's pretty fucked.
It is morally fucked to compare trapping children's toys with trapping the communications devices of soldiers in a war.
Yes. Except there are credible reports of Israel also doing this in the past. "Israeli fighter planes have also attempted to kill children by dropping thousands of booby-trapped toys on Lebanese villages and towns. The Israeli occupying forces have used this method through the years and continue to do so, the most recent example being when booby-trapped toys were dropped on the town of Nabatiyah, killing and injuring children and permanently disfiguring others." https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-180386/ https://www.lorientlejour.com/article/227779/Mariam%252C_res...
So you can guarantee every single pager went to a solider of war? By that logic, soldiers in the Ukraine war also use cellphones and drones so it's A-OKAY to implant bombs in those products too?
These weren’t sold at a Best Buy.
They were purchased by a known terrorist organizations that any westerner would go to jail for having a financial relationship with .
The types of people they deal with to buy anything at all - including black market weapons and machinery - are dubious
The US does these exact same things to infiltrate Mexican cartels
Ok so the US DEA detonates explosives on cartel members.
Your daughter is enjoying a cappuccino at a bistro when a cartel member walks by, the device detonates burning and scarring her face. You’re good with it.
Your oldest son has ordered a deli sandwich and is waiting for his order. He kneels down to tie his shoes. Next to him is a cartel member. The device detonates, destroying his ear drum. You’re good with it.
Your sister is shopping for produce at the market, as she walks past a cartel member to choose an avocado, the device detonates, maiming her left hand. She loses her fingers and is let go from her job as a software engineer. You’re good with it.
Your mom sits down in an empty seat on public transportation. The man next to her is cartel. The device detonates and shrapnel pierces an artery in her leg. She dies. You’re good with it.
Your brother, nephew, and youngest son are walking down the street. You were supposed to pick the kids up at 3pm but had to work late. You asked your brother to walk them home instead. A cartel member is driving a vehicle down the same road. Suddenly the device detonates and they lose control, the vehicle swerves up on the sidewalk striking all three. Your brothers leg is maimed and mangled, before he passes out from pain he watches his son die, trapped beneath the vehicle. Your son is flung into a wall and suffers a severe brain injury, he survives but never walks or talks again. You change his diapers for the next 40 years. You’re good with it.
Your dad is an ER doctor, a man comes in complaining of trouble breathing. As your dad is listening to his lungs, the device detonates, ejecting shrapnel into your father’s face. The man was part of the cartel, if he doesn’t work for them, they will kill his sister. Your father is blinded and can no longer practice medicine. You’re good with it.
Two things: 1) This is war. It's not pretty and it's never not messy.
2) This is precisely why every human, and every leader of humans, should avoid war at all costs. The image of a "clean" war is a myth. Even the Allies in WWII were not immune to this, see the bombing of Dresden[1].
Whatever you think of either side in this, it's clear that neither is doing enough to end this.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden
No, we are not "good with it".
Becouse we don't do "eye for eye" in the West.
Becouse christianity formed our societes like this. With help of Romans...
Becouse we learned about separating religion from power, law, medicine, science, etc. Some tries to get rid of religion completly but that another subject.
And it is absolutely sure US agency would not do such thing on "USA soil".
But down there is a open battle in WW3 - Israel delivered something to Ukraine and next day rockets started falling on them, fired by suicidal ponies.
Compared to carpet bombing and leveling whole cities, we have come a long way
Even if up to 30% of casualties were civilian this would still be quite a surgical strike in my opinion. At 50% I would not say so anymore. Nobody knows yet anyways.
There are acceptable levels of collateral damage.
You can bomb an ordnance storage facility even if there's a hospital right next to it (or, in fact, right not on top of it).
They've made sure the pagers were used by Hezbollah first and foremost, tough shit if few were given to kids to play.
And yes if Ukrainians were able to blow up all drones within say 50km of the front lines on the Russian side they'd be justified to do that, even if some were in civilians' hands.
You've been victim of what's called manufactured consent.
Why hasn't Israel allowed any investigations in Gaza, not showing evidence they're using to obliterate practically all of Palestine now, not allowing foreign journalists in either to document things?
This is just a bunch of non-sequiturs.
It logically fits, you're just avoiding and trying to control the goal posts/scope of what's talked about.
You'd prefer we mostly only talk about Oct. 7th and afterward, right?
No, we sure can go all the way back to 1948 and talk about how Israel gained territory in a series of defensive wars, Palestinians and their Arab allies getting their asses handed back to them every single time.
We'll sure find some occurrences of Israel chasing away Arab civilians early on, but that's beside the point. This attack, and the absolute majority of Israel attacks of the last decades, target enemy combatants, and civilians only ever suffer collaterally. Israel never mounted an attack on civilians, and went very far in reducing civilian casualties when attacking combatants - roof knocking and all that.
Cool, let's go further back than that - but I'll start it off with putting a thought exercise forward to you, with this scenario:
Due to your compassion for the displaced Palestinians, most of which who's homes have been obliterated - if they weren't "killed" themselves,
What % of your assets/land/property that you own will you be willing to give the Palestinian citizens to support them after this atrocity?
Remember, in this scenario you're not being forced to give this - it's out of the goodness of your heart. What percentage would you give?
How about 54% of everything you own?
And so in conclusion, I'm most curious if you will avoid answering because you'll see my point and your answer will out you as a hypocrite?
I'll have followup questions if you're willing to engage and not fearful to engage in discussion.
How could I possibly personally guarantee that?
If your standard for engaging in military action is that they must be able to prove to you personally that their target is really a militant, you are completely delusional.
Well we're up to two children dead
"Israeli fighter planes have also attempted to kill children by dropping thousands of booby-trapped toys on Lebanese villages and towns. The Israeli occupying forces have used this method through the years and continue to do so, the most recent example being when booby-trapped toys were dropped on the town of Nabatiyah, killing and injuring children and permanently disfiguring others." https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-180386/
"Israel orchestrating an attack against the terrorists they're at war with makes me think less of them" is certainly an opinion. A batshit fucking stupid opinion, but you're entitled to it nonetheless.
Please don't vote.
>as a country and a people they only exist as long as we're their benefactor
Why do so many people think this? If the US stopped "giving" them "military aid" which is actually just disney dollars to spend in the US military industrial complex they would be out a small percentage of their defense budget.
> as we're their benefactor, and I don't think I'm alone in how I feel.
It's undoubtedly true the US supports Israel generally, but Israel is more capable of its own.
No one's alone in how they feel.
When you don't treat people who are brutally uncivilized with civility, it isn't long before people forget who the bad guy is and where it all started. If you are a civilized society, you have to treat the uncivil with civility. You have to set an example.
Your perspective is that the Palestinians are brutally uncivilized?
I think it is more telling you made that assumption.
I was trying to bridge a communication gap by offering an interpretion. In truth I don't understand your comment at all, but I never go to stack overflow empty handed for example.
jesus, this is going to make taking electronics on aircraft damned near impossible now.
Surely airport security scanners scan for explosive material
To a point, but it's spot checks at best; a state actor has full access to the wide range of explosive compounds, surely there's some that wouldn't be detected (or that can be handled and packaged in such a way that it doesn't get detected)?
The explosive scanning is the thing where they pull some people out of line and run a wand over you and your gear, then put it into a machine and wait a few seconds for the analysis.
Just like everything else 90s the transparent iMac G3 look is going to be coming back only in the non-ironic prison use for having everything in a clear case (to check for contraband).
This is probably the biggest impact tbh. I wonder if the US public would support these actions if it knew it was going to come back on them with longer TSA lines.
They were never different. They just speak English better than the arabs.
you should really take a rigorous look into the history of early Israel and the ideologies of its founding members like Hertzl and Jabotinsky. They have always been terrorists.
Right now one of the fastest growing companies is the Israel cybersecurity company Wiz, founded by founders and investors from Israel's Unit 8200, their secretive cyber hacking group. Seems to me a massive security risk for any US company to be relying on critical security to a non American founded companies.
I created a throwaway account just for this.
I actually hired, and we later fired, a couple of 'engineers' from Unit 8200. They were technically quite weak, and when Oct. 7 happened, I wasn't surprised at all. If this was the cream of the crop, the defense community should seriously re-evaluate the efficacy of the IDF.
Wiz is the WeWork of cybersecurity. The Israeli tech sector is not that powerful but has lots of investments from the West (US mainly). My experience relates to yours. I think most people have high and unrealistic expectations of people coming from Israel but this usually comes out short.
This might be my ignorance showing, but how do you, as a hiring entity, even verify a candidate has experience in Unit 8200?
Or that these Unit 8200 alumni aren't dismissed "C-players", not good enough for them?
Israel has a mandatory military service, and they have been cultivating technical talent development in their armed forces for a long time. So I would think that the arrow of causality runs the opposite way.
In other words: virtually every Israeli has been in the military, and for the technically competent ones, were likely to be recruited into their offensive intelligence unit. Coupled with a government whose industrial strategy has been to promote business development in this sector, we are in a situation where practically every single founder of an Israeli tech company has a military service background.
Those with (offensive) infosec mindset end up founding infosec focused businesses, knowing that there is readily available investment available for them. As a result, the Venn diagram between the unit members and infosec business founders is likely to show a pretty big overlap.
And if you look at it more broadly, most Israelis served in the army which maintains an occupation which is illegal under international law, that is most countries on the planet deem it illegal. So, when I meet an Israeli, the instant thought that runs through my head would be: did this person participate in the human rights abuses? They might very well not have, but the possibility is there. This is a scary situation for me as well, because I do not want to be discriminating and prejudiced against anyone, but the facts are straight.
I guess it's good that Google's attempt to acquire Wiz fell through.
About half of all Israeli tech workers are from 8200. It's nothing remarkable at all.
> From Israel's perspective, this supply chain attack was undoubtedly a clever move
From The Guardian [1]:
> Eight killed and 2,750 wounded
Was that a clever move if you're killing "only" 8 potential adversaries?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/sep/17/middle-ea...
It looks like a trigger that can only be pulled once.
Thus, choice of the optimal time could be influenced by a lot of things:
- knowledge of other Hezbollah imminent action making comms disruption right now of great importance
- recognition that the vulnerability had been discovered and was about to be remediated
- via other "eyes on" prime targets, knowledge that just one or two top leaders were briefly in especially-vulnerable positions (like sleeping alongside their pagers)
- etc
And, there will be a "long tail" of damage to Hezbollah's usual communications practices & trust in devices/suppliers. Some marginal recruits may even be deterred from joining a battle against an opponent which can carry out this sort of attack – though of course, others may be emboldened.
> And, there will be a "long tail" of damage to Hezbollah's usual communications practices & trust in devices/suppliers.
It appears pager use was a solid choice. Even on full supply chain compromise the amount of explosives fitted couldn't kill even 1% of targets. A cellphone would be packed with much larger payloads able to kill much more people. Their failure was the lack of proper inspection before distribution.
I think the purpose is to terrorize your opponents. Sometimes getting seriously wounded is even worse than getting killed, from the perspective of Hez. Now they need to handle thousands of wounded members, which is much more expensive than dead ones.
Who said the injured are all Hezbollah members? From the above Guardian coverage:
"Among those killed is an eight-year-old girl from Bekka Valley, Abiad said, according to Al Jazeera."
This CCTV footage shows one of the devices exploding in a busy supermarket:
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/dozens-hezbollah-m...
Terrorizing your opponents is one thing, but indiscriminately detonating bombs in public spaces is just plain terrorism.
The busy supermarket saw people standing directly beside the target perplexed and completely unharmed. This was extremely localized.
If the child story is true (which is always in question), presumably they were tragically playing with the pager or the like at precisely that time.
However the footage of the attack is overwhelmingly fighting-age males exclusively. As far as military operations go, that is remarkably targeted.
if someone next to you in a supermarket was wounded from an explosive like the video shows, do you think perplexed and completely unharmed would be a good description for your experience? Maybe we saw different videos, but it's pretty hard to make such a generalized statement from a few seconds of video.
Yes? Clearly the people directly beside the target were physically unharmed and confused about what happened. For all they knew the guy had an e-vape explode or something.
Maybe in the future they'll carry some emotional damage or something, but living in a country de facto in a state of war with a formidable nuclear-power neighbour, while governed by a terrorist organization that indiscriminately fires rockets into civilian areas essentially daily, carries that risk, right? I doubt such an operation was a surprise to anyone.
> if someone next to you in a supermarket was wounded from an explosive
that "someone" is an enemy combatant currently fighting a war
if they were wearing a uniform would you stand next to a soldier during an ongoing war?
if you were a soldier would you hide in a group of civilians?
there's a lot of blame to go around and Israel is far from clean, but the Hezbollah members are clearly also putting people in harms way by using them as a shield against attacks like this
> The busy supermarket saw people standing directly beside the target perplexed and completely unharmed. This was extremely localized.
I saw that video too and I'm happy the bystanders in that case were unharmed but that was 1/2000 (or 5,000?) explosions. I wouldn't necessarily extrapolate the supermarket video to the other several thousand explosions.
indiscriminately? They were all used by Hezbollah operatives by definition. It is the most targeted operation if there ever was one.
Indiscriminate in the sense that bombs have an area of effect beyond the person carrying them, so they couldn't possibly account for collateral damage when firing them all at once, and a conscious decision was made that any unlucky civilians are fair game. Indiscriminate in the same sense as dropping a bunker buster on a residential block because you believe there's a handful of terrorists inside, or nuking two cities to "encourage" a military surrender.
If you believe this tactic was just, then I trust that if Mossad obliterated your child in the process of assassinating an enemy of Israel who happened to be nearby then you would be able to forgive and forget, since it was for the greater good and they tried their best. Even if they were targeting the wrong person, as it sometimes goes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillehammer_affair
Incidentally when they later killed the actual target of that operation they did so by detonating a 100kg car bomb on a public road, also killing 4 civilians and injuring 16 others.
That's not what "indiscriminate" means.
Indiscriminate attacks are those [0]:
(a) which are not directed at a specific military objective;
(b) which employ a method or means of combat which cannot be directed at a specific military objective; or
(c) which employ a method or means of combat the effects of which cannot be limited as required by international humanitarian law;
and consequently, in each such case, are of a nature to strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction.
The fact that the pagers were obtained by Hezbollah to be used for their communications, and consequently could be expected to be exclusively in the possession of combatants means the attack was not indiscriminate.
Causing collateral damage does not make an attack indiscriminate. The standard for permissible collateral damage is that an attack must not cause loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian property, etc. that is excessive in relation to the anticipated concrete and direct military advantage [1].
The fact that it was so specifically targeted, combined with the small size of the explosive charges means collateral damage could be expected to be minor. And the evidence so far suggests that to have been accurate. The death of a single child is tragic, but negligible in comparison to the military advantage gained by thousands of combatants dead or wounded.
[0]: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule12
[1]: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule14
Where in aforementioned international humanitarian law, step (c), is it preordained that one child's collateral death is negligible? See, therein lies the crux of the issue. The definition itself is wise enough that you can't just lawyerese your way through the issue.
In your scientistic rationalization using weaselwords like "expected to be exclusive", "the [subjective] standard for permissible..", "a death is [objectively] negligible", and so on, it is rather the case that your explanation is so laden with prejudiced pseudoreasoning that you are blind to it and unwittingly helping to spread ideological misinformation.
A non "weaselwords" version:
A country has a right to defend its citizens. It can go to war to do so. War is horrible and civilians die.
Your version is called jingoism.
It's funny, everyone on Hacker News at least completed high school in principle. But there's so much brave conservatism that high school education should have infused students with enough critical thinking to make them think about what they're really saying, regardless of how complex or simple their version of words is.
This applies to both sides
"unlucky civilians are fair game" that's been an unfortunate fact of war since, well, war was invented. maybe you should more angry at the people who started the war and put people in harms way, instead of complaining that one of the most precise operations still had unintended civilian consequences.
taking the moral high ground is easy when you are not the one making decisions, and while the lesser of two evils (in your car bomb example) doesn't make sense on a personal level, it does make sense on a macro level
> maybe you should more angry at the people who started the war
How far back are we willing to go for that? Who evicted whom? When? How many times? In what order?
> Indiscriminate in the sense that bombs have an area of effect beyond the person carrying them
AFAICT the stock pager models are ~95 grams, and people are suggesting 3-5g of added explosives. If they used RDX, then 3g would be ~5.5 cubic centimeters, which seems like rather a lot to try to squish into a small pager unless the design also replaced the standard battery with a smaller one to make room.
In contrast, a M67 fragmentation grenade uses ~156 grams of explosives.
Basically I'm saying it sounds like the bombs are small enough that it's not quite fair to call them "indiscriminate", especially if the trigger logic involves a Hezbollah radio network that nobody else would be using.
Literally no war ever has avoided collateral damage. Trying to hold Israel to that standard is absurd and pretty transparently anti-Semitic.
operatives
A lot of people seem to think Hezbollah is purely military in nature because of the 'terrorism' label. The organization was founded to respond to Israel's invasion of Lebanon, and while it is a militant organization it also has seats in the Lebanese parliament, engages in a lot of non-military activities, and does not have simple politics - for example, it has condemned Al Qaeda and ISIS for terroristic attacks.
Labels such as 'terrorists' are as often designed to confuse as to inform. Reductionist categorization makes people easy to manipulate.
An NGO that launches missiles at towns and cities would seem to be the definition of a terrorist organization.
They have an assault rifle in their flag. Make no mistake about their purpose.
Well, Guatemala has (older) rifles in theirs too...
And yet it doesn’t look like an obvious terrorist symbol
I think you are mistaking your emotional reflexes for objective truth. Weapons on flags historically connote a message of 'don't mess with us'. The IDF's logo is a sword and an olive branch, and is more or less the same as the logo of the Haganah...a pre-independence paramilitary organization that was considered terroristic at the time when Palestine was still a British possession, and which killed hundreds of people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haganah
The issue is not that weapons are shown. The issue is that it’s a fist holding an assault rifle. It’s very plainly a call for violent action. And frankly I think it’s kind of stupid to argue otherwise.
Regardless of your opinion of the IDF, their flag is clearly a very different vibe
2 American state flags depict people holding guns as well. I won't mention which two lest it lead to an outbreak of hostilities. And wait until you hear about the symbology of the US flag, or listen to the US national anthem!
More seriously, quite a few other countries have guns on the flag, reflecting a turbulent recent history. As I mentioned, Hezbollah was formed in response to the invasion and occupation of Lebanon just over 40 years ago, which was not a violence-free event. Let's not even get into swords on flags.
There's a tendency among some people to draw their conclusion first and then summon reasons for it afterwards, reasons which often lack consistency. Our violent history is glorious; theirs is deplorable. Consider, for example, the Irish Republican Army; like Hezbollah, it's considered a terrorist organization by US, UK, and many other jurisdictions. But due to the huge number of Irish American people and the subsidence of that political conflict in the last few decades, lots of Americans think the IRA is cool, while reflexively lumping Hezbollah in with other Islamic groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS.
In short, I think things like 'their flag has a gun on it' are the opposite of helpful or insightful.
Americans generally don’t know what the IRA is. Hezbollah is actively involved in anti western terrorism. That is perhaps why Americans think they’re terrorists.
Americans generally don’t know what the IRA is
I think anyone over the age of 30 probably does.
Lets not mention about the many shuriken in the American flag.
Mozambique, too. We should bomb them.
It's even got the bayonet fixed so there's no confusion about their terrorist intentions.
I agree Mozambique has a shitty flag. I don’t think we should bomb them.
Even if Hezbollah made the order, it would be difficult to be confident all would be distributed to operatives as opposed to sold to other civilian users.
It is a dirty (i.e. collateral civilians, maim instead of kill or deter, etc.) tactic and should be the sort of thing banned by Geneva Conventions.
Also, being a martyr on a poster with everyone celebrating you can be an attractive recruitment tool to young men. But seeing the broken beggar without eyes that people pity isn't going to be quite the same enticement to recruit for your terrorism org.
I actually think that an unintended consequence is that Mossad has permanently flagged the vast majority of Hizbullah's followers, an entire generation, on Lebanese soil.
The wound patterns will emerge for the vast majority of victims: arms, hands, eyes and hips ? Time will tell.
The Lebanese army, and the IDF, now suddenly can tell between civilian vs combatant.
I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding but it sounds like you are implying membership of Hezbollah is deep dark shameful secret in Lebanon. The designation of Hezbollah as a "terrorist organization" is great for outside political propaganda, but the actual reality is they are a major and open faction in political life in Lebanon as both paramilitary group and political party - as is my understanding. Basically Sinn Fein/IRA.
Lebanon is very generous. They have their zones, mostly in the South, Bekaa, and a specific part of Beyrouth. It is also true they have a political wing. But they also have covert enforcers outside those zones and that is what everyone else is most fearful of. They have been involved in sectarian killings tit-for-tats, for many years. Most famously, the murder of PM rafik hariri.
So, otside of those Hizbullah zones, its actually not common to see the Hizbullah yellow flags openly displayed. Or a car bumper sticker. It is for good reason. There was a civil war before, and memories run deep.
They're much bigger than the IRA.
Oh sure, Israel is famous for caring about the difference between civilian and combatants.
If I was wounded (or even witnessed this in real life), I would go from civilian to combatant instantly. Israel just attacked a bunch of civilian population centers. This will be seen as a huge strategic mistake, both in terms of new combatants created on the ground and continued loss of good will for Israel abroad.
The only reason IL can do it, is because the general population in Lebanon hates hezbollah, it is basically a proxy control power from IRAN.
Look at this to understand how big part of Lebanon sees Hezbollah https://www.instagram.com/brigitte_gabriel/reel/CyT_RanK1gi/
I think you are missing context. 10 years of civil war and many more decades of animositiy and of strife, are not reversed overnight , even due to an event like this. For example, Israël has lobbed missiles before, and that had its collateral damage, but also didnt change a thing or win new allies to Hizbullah.
Even some druze (historically neutral sectl were kidnapped and killed in the Oct 7th events.
Now, for the 1st time in 100 years, every single rival of hizbullah is able to instantly recognize enemies, in the open.
Obe thing im certain of, Israel has managed to reset the board in its conflict with Hezbollah.
Israel has no support outside of hardcore Zionists. I don't know if you've checked out the global reaction to this terrorist act that Israel just pulled, but they just multiplied the intensity of their enemies (i.e. the rest of humanity) 10X.
I think the simplest explanation here is that pagers are small and light and don't have that much free space inside them, and it's hard to fit enough explosive into them to reliably kill people. The figures I saw was only a few grams of explosive could be fit in them. If you look at the photos and videos that have been coming out today you'll see what the injuries look like; they're not as catastrophic as getting shot with a bullet, or anything close to a real explosive with orders of magnitude more explosive in it like an artillery shell, rocket, aerial bomb, etc.
I would guess Israel would have preferred more lethal pagers, but the required amount of explosive simply didn't fit. So the resulting deaths are from the people who got really unlucky, whereas getting wounded was the modal result.
> I would guess Israel would have preferred more lethal pagers, but the required amount of explosive simply didn't fit.
They would have preferred cellphones.
you're looking at the wrong videos. I saw videos with people's hands blown off, massive holes in their bodies, etc. reportedly something like 15-20gr of Pentaerythritol tetranitrate. Massive wounds.
I suspect it's going to matter a lot where the pager was relative to the person at time of explosion. Someone holding it in a closed fist vs reading it vs in a backpack vs in a pocket could all have very different wound patterns.
there's also going to be a bunch of plastic shrapnel either way. reports were saying that people's eyes were being hit, I think most likely by plastic shrapnel.
The death toll isn't the goal. They're after the 2nd order effects, now there are ~3,000 operatives that are marked by a scar that is relatively distinctive. They also have substantially disrupted their communication protocols and caused psychological damage.
Hezbollah members in Lebanon are not necessarily perceived as bad people - why would the scar be a problem ? Hezbollah claims it’s a resistance movement to Israel, they’re now wearing a scar caused by Israel in a mass coordinated attack, which will further legitimize Hezbollah.
I agree with the disruption of communication protocols and psychological damage though.
I don't get it. Why does Lebanon need to resist Israel? When in recent history has Israel attacked Lebanon or threatened it in any way, except in retaliation or defense against Hezbollah acts?
In the first Lebanon war, Israel invaded Lebanon to strike against PLO. At this time, Hezbollah did not really exist, or was at least small and insignificant. It grew as a force in opposition of Israel's occupation.
If the ruling government of Lebanon allowed the PLO to strike Israel from Lebanese soil, what could they expect Israel to do?
This was in the middle of the Lebanese civil war in 1982 , the Lebanese government had no control over anything.
Furthermore, after the Israeli entered Lebanon in 1982, they didn’t fully leave the country until 2000, which is what caused the founding of hezbollah in 1982, and the perception of hezbollah as a resistance movement since then.
Basically the Lebanese see Israel has having attacked then occupied a part of Lebanon for about 20 years, between 1982 and 2000 - this is recent enough for most people to relate to it.
The Lebanese should then have a good answer to what they expected Israel to do with attacks being launched from Lebanese soil without the Lebanese doing anything about it. I understand, they were in the middle of a civil war, but that doesn't mean Israel has to be OK with attacks happening.
The occupation came as a result of continued attacks. And after Israel left in 2000, more and more attacks happened, culminating in the 2006 war.
The fact remains that if no there were no threats against Israel from Lebanon, there would be nothing for Lebanon to fear from Israel. It's repeatedly sought and made peace with every sovereign country with which is has no ongoing disputes.
(There are, as I understand it, some minor territorial disputes along the border. I'm sure these can be quickly resolved through negotiation, if all parties are serious about it.)
Lebanon has a weak government. I think you could compare it with a house owner who does not have the means to evict uninvited guests, where the guests are much stronger and more powerful than the owner. This is both because the country consists of many ethnic groups and religions, and because it came to host a lot of Palestinian refugees and became base for the HQ of Palestinian resistance. Add on top of this widespread corruption. The situation is pretty dire.
Hezbollah are not Palestinian. They're Shia Lebanese. And they're engaging in warfare against Israel with no provocation.
Israel responds by targeting Hezbollah weapons, assets and militants.
That doesn't explain why the average Sunni Lebanese in Beirut would feel like they need to "resist" Israel.
Hezbollah considers that they must fight Israel following the Gaza war. They’ve stated they won’t stop until the Israelis leave Gaza.
The average Sunni Muslim in Beirut either remembers, or has family who remembers what happened during the (unprovoked by the Lebanese) Israeli invasion and subsequent occupation. Today, most of the Arab world supports Hamas in the Gaza war, considering that the large number of civilians being killed is essentially mass murder. Mix these two informations, and you will find very little trust towards Israelis. Add today’s attacks and things get even worse.
It’s very easy to destroy trust, and very hard to build it. None of this has to be perfectly logical - it’s not how people work.
I didn't say Hezbollah is Palestinian. Just that Lebanon have had to handle a huge amount of palestinian refugees.
Certainly Israel's invasion of Lebanon in the early 80s affected many inhabitants of Lebanon, not just palestinians.
I didn't say that the invasion didn't affect many Lebanese. Only that the Lebanese don't need to "resist" Israel, because it is not a threat to them, so long as they're not attacking it (or are in close proximity to those who are).
Please read some history man. I urge you to do it. Google it.
I actually read quite a bit. Point me towards something specific if you will.
Is it all of Lebanon though? I think Christian and Druze Lebanese don’t like the Hezbollah much anyway. Sure the Shiite south does but no one else.
The scar marks an operative. Israel has a huge amount of video footage, now they work backward and see where that person went, and who they talked to.
This is on target. Tagging collaborators certainly has advantages, not so much for invoking a social glare at home but helping to identify them to intelligence sources, certainly.
I doubt those 2,750 all have minor injuries. That's 2,750 targets, a lot of whom probably now now have missing fingers/hands, a chunk missing from their leg, face injuries.... Aka major injuries from having a small explosion on their belt or int their pocket. It's going to be 2,750 probably major injuries that will take a long time to recover from.
And then they will be 10x more dedicated to revenge. Where they may have sworn to destory Israel before, they weren't yet personally injured. It'a the same cycle of violence.
They're already looking to destroy israel prior to this incident.
So, Israel wants to give them more motivation?
you can't fill a full bag, there is no "more" to conceive of. They are fully convinced already that all Israelis should simply be killed or worse than killed.
Wounded soldiers are often a bigger burden than killed ones. You neee to retrieve them, take care of them, and they may never be fight capable again. They are also a breathing reminder of the costs of war, and at the same time less likely to make others vow revenge.
It surely is because you corrode your target’s trust in technology. They moved from smartphones to pagers, now they’ll have to find even cruder types of communications.
Pagers fine. Even with full supply chain compromise left less than 1% targets dead. Although they need better inspection before distribution.
2k/300M people died on 9/11 and our world has forever changed. 1% is waaaay bigger than that number. Terror spreads.
If you lost half your gut or a kidney or had your stomach punctured you may be alive, but you’re definitely not battle ready. And you may never be again. A device that explodes in such close proximity to a body is more than certain that it will damage some internal organ. All these thousands of Hezbollah militia are forever incapacitated. You didn't kill them, but they can't hurt you in the future if let's say you decide to mount a full scale invasion on Lebanon.
> less than 1% targets dead
By now. The final value will be higher.
Killing is one thing, but wounded soldiers/operatives are a much larger drain on resources than killing.
The wounded people need care, medicine, rehab, therapy, and feeding during their recovery.
This occupies significant resources of your enemy.
I’m not commenting on this specific attack, but talking in general.
TBH Israel does not concern itself about killing bystanders generally and our western press will also laser focus on hezbullah.
It's not clear whether you're asserting Israel does or doesn't care whether it kills civilians, though I think you're saying it doesn't in general try to accomplish this.
Israel's history is decidedly chequered in this regard, and there have been killings, including quite recently of demonstrators / protestors, and within recent years of journalists, by Israeli forces.
But there are also practices such as "roof knocking" in which an initial nonlethal warning is exploded above a building several minutes prior to a much more destructive strike:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roof_knocking>
Video of a roof-knock strike: <https://xcancel.com/AJEnglish/status/1710690655091990644#m>
The explosion seen doesn't significantly damage the building, that occurs in a later strike, shown as the first set of explosions here:
<https://yewtu.be/watch?v=ZFTK9V_mEjI>
(That clip follows with the initial roof-knock.)
And to be clear, much of Israel's subsequent air and artillery assault on the Gaza strip has been far less surgical, with vast numbers of structures destroyed.
By contrast, both Hamas and Hezbollah make extensive use of highly inaccurate missiles (totally unguided in the case of Hamas, guided though low-ish precision generally for Hezbollah) which are effectively aerial mines, striking randomly largely within civilian areas. This reflects both tactics and available means, so again the picture is complex. As I've written in an earlier comment on this thread, most hats are at best grey in these conflicts, rather than clearly white.
Not to get into it here, but i believe the fancy non-lethal warnings is done for the TV audience. There are so many incidents of bombings civilian areas stretching back for decades. And the statistics for the IDF killings of children alone are off the scale.
They are not only not caring about minimizing harm, they are getting away with 11 months of wanton destruction on a daily basis. Just this month, they have dropped mk84 bombs on civilian tents. What are you babbling about?
If their comms are severely disrupted, yes. Even if it wasn't militarily effective, it's still quite a clever attack.
If this were coordinated with a ground attack on Hezbollah, it would be a great way to disrupt any defense right before it needs to offer resistance.
I'm surprised they used it out of such a concept. It is almost heartening, because it suggests no such attack is currently anticipated by Israel.
Or the sabotage was on the verge of being discovered and their options were either to use it at an inopportune time or lose the ability to use it at all.
How do we know this didn't do this but in reverse, being used to disrupt an attack Hezbollah had planned? Edit: People seem to be ignoring the large amount of Syrian operatives this hit as well.
And how many of those wounded are totally unconnected bystanders, who just happened to be standing next to the individual in the grocery store or wherever?
exactly. The most charitable way to look at this is Israel targeted a handful fewer bystanders than a terrorist attack. I can't imagine anyone thinking longer-term strategy thought thought this was a good idea.
Really isn't though. We don't know if there was an imminent action that Israel prevented by doing this? Did Israel do this instead of blowing up apartment blocks to target individuals, in which case this might be a much more limited collateral damage action than other methods might have caused. Without knowing Israel's motives one can't make any sort of judgement not sure why you are leaping to conclusions minus any actual information.
Idk who exactly was hit but losing a hand will definitely hurt ones ability to fight.
The point was probably to reduce accidental casualties. Also, the wounds can be quite severe. Finally, a device like a pager cannot hold a lot of explosive substance in its spare space anyway.
It's the psychology. Every sat phone and laptop is being opened up right now...
Killing isn't always the goal.
The effect of this "action" is the same as a bouncing betty. (I assume) The goal is to incapacitate and use resources.
I'm guessing it was to stop some tentative action on Hezbollahs and the huge number of Syrians that this attack got as wells parts that was about to occur.
500 blinded
> 2,750 wounded
Absolutely insane. Imagine this many Israeli had been wounder by Hammas attack.
Disgusting move from Israel to keep civilian causalities minimum! This is no excuse for 'collateral damage'
Nearly every single one injured was a Hezbollah militant. Regarding militant:civilian rates, this has one of the lowest civilian impacts of any option.
Most modern wars see MORE than 1 civilian death per militant death. This pager bomb was nearly entirely militants.
Israeli war in Gaza is the bloodiest happening right now.
These bombs went off right in front of civilian population with no regards to children or women.
Close to 3000 wounded. Wounded include children losing limbs.
> Wounded include children losing limbs.
That seems like an awful lot of explosive power for something that needs to be secretly added to a functional pocket pager without affecting external dimensions or adding perceptible weight.
Cautious skepticism is warranted, given how profitable some parties would find it to make such claims regardless of whether they are true or not.
This is a one shot attack. They will never be able to do it again. And I don't think most of the world has pissed off Mossad quite as much as Hezbollah. Assuming they even did it!
> "One shot attack"
>> This is the second time israel has done this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash
That is not a supply-chain based attack, so don't think that counts in this context
> They will never be able to do it again.
Only if Hezbollah take steps to avoid it. Presumably they will, but presumably there is a cost, and so Israel will continue to benefit from them having to divert resources to doing that.
As someone else posted, it's not entirely novel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash#Assassination
OP was most likely concerned about Israeli businesses that supply (or ship) non-explosive components/products no longer being trusted.
> In the short term, it's a smart strategy for Israel, but they've likely opened Pandora's box in the process.
Is the short term here a few days or maybe just hours? For the reasons you pointed out and more this is likely a strategic failure for a very short term military gain. The economics you pointed out. Politically this will not help them with any but their most extreme allies while enraging their enemies and giving them the moral high-ground with their peoples and the international community. Militarily this likely did little to actual readiness since the people wearing the pagers were probably mid to upper level people so they will heal and go back to desk jobs they were doing before. So an economic, political and military strategic fail. It would have been far better for Israel had this fizzled out or been found out before it triggered. Plausible deniability would have been easier and international outrage would have been minimal all while the C&C of their enemies would have gotten the intended message that they had deep capabilities that could cause disruption. Instead they actually pulled it off and now they get all the bad consequences with very few good ones. This was a bad idea executed, unfortunately, well.
I'm not at all convinced that's the case, unless it comes out that the targeting was extremely broad (like if Israel was just putting bombs in every pager going into Lebanon rather than targeting a specific shipment going to Hezbollah) I don't think there's really any new risk for other countries.
As if Israil ever cared about civil vs combatants.
From the amount of injured it seems more like a broad attack than a targeted one.
Most likely they knew some of them would go to hezbollah, and that was enough, collateral damage be damned.
I'd disagree - this seems highly targeted. There aren't that many people with pagers but pagers were a specific way for Hezbollah to speak to operatives.
The news reports are saying a lot of explosions happened at hospitals. Considering that pagers are still in common use by Western doctors, I'm wondering if they considered hospital staff to be acceptable casualties.
these weren't random pagers. They intercepted a shipment of thousands of pagers for hezbollah and rigged them with explosives, and set them off likely using hezbollah's own command and control network.
Random doctors in the hospital won't have these.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/pagers-drones-how-...
In July reuters was telling us how hezbollah was using pagers to defeat israel. Israel was smarter than them.
> Random doctors in the hospital won't have these.
To put a slightly finer point on it: Even an uninvolved doctor somehow came to own a booby-trapped pager, they wouldn't be carrying it around every day unless it was configured to listen to the hospital's broadcast network of real medical messages, as opposed to leaving it tuned to Hezbollah High Command or whatever.
Yeah, this is likely government backed, so targeting is most likely.
They had total control of the pagers, sigint and social graph, command and control hierarchy. They knew exactly who was who.
Question is how did Hamas slip by this same highly skilled org?
Slip by? Hamas was funded and propped up by this highly skilled org in order to deligitimize the peace process.
They probably run their numbers and reasoned that more than 75% or something of pagers from a specific batch were used by hezbollah or subjects close to them and decided that it was an acceptable casualty ratio.
"You can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs" approach applied to armed conflicts.
There are tens of thousands of Hezbollah members. If anything, the attack was on a much smaller scale than it could have been. Unfortunately for Israel, not every Hezbollah member had a new pager.
Everyone should be keeping an eye on all their supply chains all the time, Israel-connected or not. Especially for military (or paramilitary) applications.
It reminds me a bit of when after 9/11, some of the reaction in Israel (as well as shock and sympathy) was "Of course we have locked cockpit doors, marshals on planes and other security features on ElAl. We're not barbarians!"
Also, (Hagelin) Crypto AG. Just because it's in Switzerland doesn't mean you shouldn't be paranoid.
The fact that they attacked them via their communication network that was intended to avoid Israeli surveillance, is irregular warfare at its finest.
The main injury inflicted on individuals was psychological - we got into your supply chain this far. Also, your attempts to avoid us failed.
But at an org level? They just disabled the entire comms system, whether through explosions, or by making people scared of explosions.
What's the contingency plan for this in Hezbollah? And will it have credence, given their last grand idea of "let's use pagers to avoid the Israelis" ended with a large number of simultaneous explosions?
It's a very clever attack from a psychological POV.
> The main injury inflicted on individuals was psychological
Have you seen the footage(0) from hospitals? It's likely that hundreds of Hezbollah members lost hands, eyes, etc. That will degrade their military effectiveness significantly, especially the people who were blinded. And remember that Hezbollah is trying(1) to prevent more footage of the attack from getting out, so what we've seen publicly quite likely underplays the full extent of it.
Sure, maybe you could argue that the "main" effect in terms of total numbers was psychological. But we shouldn't understate how many Hezbollah members were directly given life-long injuries that will make them ineffective forever. That's a huge win for Israel.
0) https://x.com/Osint613/status/1836040863195029530 1) https://x.com/Saul_Sadka/status/1836039347210002899
>communication network that was intended to avoid Israeli surveillance
Reuters even covered conversion to pagers two months ago
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/pagers-drones-how-...
> In the short term, it's a smart strategy for Israel, but they've likely opened Pandora's box in the process.
Did they? Supply chain attacks, intercepted parcels, none of this is new - the US, going by the Snowden leaks, has a long history of tampering with parcels in transit, which is why a few of the "libre phone" vendors offer to seal the parcel, the device and all screws in random glitter glue and take photos prior to shipping so that any attempt at tampering in transit is not hideable (there is no known way to recreate a glitter pattern).
For me this whole things, including the previous use of AI backed social graph modelling build from digital surveillance of Palestinians, being use for as targeting intelligence, for drone strikes on people homes and families.. this whole thing chills me to the bone about ever wanting to use a social network, or a always connected mobile device ever again. Israel has taken the Dark Mirror SF speculations about the shifts in power and capability as the instruction manual and we're mostly ignoring the warnings. There nothing stopping this happening to any of us.
This is not the first time Israel has pulled stuff like this. It blew back for a while in their face, but eventually people move on. If Israel recognize this event as existential for them, then anything is allowed including nuclear weapons.
IMO, this gives IL's enemies more excuses to execute more horrible attacks. Considering pagers are civilian products and some of them might actually be delivered to non-Hez civilians, the consequence is pretty dire.
it basically says: we can do whatever we want because we can. Now imagine what the other side is going to reply.
I don't know if you've been following this conflict, but Israel's enemies don't need excuses to attack Israel. They think Israel doesn't have a right to exist, and thus see the very existence of the state of Israel as a provocation that justifies violence against Jews.
Much like Israel sees Palestine and the Palestinians, whom they refer to as a nation full of "human animals."
They've been firing hundreds of rockets, daily, into Israeli territory. You think they need more excuses to do anything?
The other side was already doing everything it could.
Definitely not. Hez has showed footages of UAVs inside of IL so potentially they could do some damage. They can also up their missile attacks. And there are other players such as the Houthis. Maybe they just don't want to do it because they figured it's of no good to them at the moment, but maybe the climate changes in the future and they decide to do it anyway.
This is true of both sides.
Also important to remember is that Israel evacuated the civilian population in the north of the country due to Hezbollah currently indiscriminately shelling/bombing that area for the past months.
they launch those UAVs all the time. multiple times a week, sometimes daily. So they're already trying it, they're just not successful.
Iran/Hezbollah are more known for constantly announcing they're about to do everything they can, and then not doing it. Safer that way.
My concern now is another nation-state actor who manages certain large international supply chains doing this on a broader scale against widespread western targets. Your comment on it being a pandoras box is quite profound.
Somebody in Russia is probably thinking right now "you know, that was quite a clever idea".
That's a real issue. Especially if this escalates to smartphones.
Technical questions:
- Was the explosive in the pager detectable by the normal tests used at airports?
- Who gets to skip those tests? Are all devices carried by airline pilots examined with explosive tests?
- This is selective. Only the addressed devices blow up. That has implications for devices which know too much about their owners.
That's a ridiculous take. No one involved Israel in this supply chain.
Also, there is no country in the world that would refrain from doing the same thing to their enemies, if they could pull it off. (big if)
Meanwhile, you can be sure the U.S. and China are putting back-doors in every device they can manage, and have been doing so for decades.
I’d prefer a device with a Chinese backdoor to a device with Israeli remote explosives any day.
it makes me think the Israeli decision-makers are trying to leave Hezbollah no choice but to escalate into a larger war. I think Hezbollah has been trying to avoid escalation into all out war, responding in limited proportionate ways despite Israel continuing to escalate. (Can you imagine if Hezbollah had detonated thousands of such devices in Israel? I'd be scared of a nuclear response).
But Israeli leaders maybe decided Hezbollah's hesitation to escalate into all out war must mean that such a war must be good for us and bad for them? Let's try to really make em do it, so we can invade Lebanon again? Why Israeli government thinks it wants an invasion of Lebanon right now, I don't know, but it looks like that's where this goes to me and they must know it?
Hezbollah started this war on October 8, and they can stop it by ceasing their attacks.
Israel have no reason to want a war. It's Hezbollah who want to conquer Israeli land. Israel wants nothing from Lebanon.
You’re confusing your terrorist groups.
He’s not referring to the Gazan attacks of October 7, but the Hezbollah rocket attacks that started on October 8 and continue to this day, flouting the 18-year ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah and causing the evacuation of over 95,000 Israelis from northern Israel.
That's right
I wonder why they did it now of all times. This is a card you can only play once.
Israel leadership is probably prepping for some big October surprise timed perfectly just before the US election. Everyone is predicting it so much these days that its not really a surprise but a eventuality at this point.
Or you know, 100,000+ Israelis had to leave their homes in north Israel for nearly 1 year. You also had Druze Arab children slaughtered by Hezbollah. So what options would Israel have here?
> other major producers could replicate this tactic
it's an inefficient tactic that actual terrorists won't employ tbh. Infiltrating manufacturers just to place small explosives isn't terror inducing - and you want the recipient of the explosion to know who it came from for a terrorist attack to be effective.
Israel did it to limit the amount of collateral (instead of shooting a missile or bomb, which would require a much larger radius of damage).
The combatant to civilian casulties in this paper explosion is probably unparalleled in the warfare history. I wish all conflicts would strive to have such a great record.
I may have missed key facts about this operation, but who said Israel is part of the supply chain? Why not just intercept the truck/plane on it's way to delivery and insert the explosives on the fly? This seems much more practical IMO.
Everytime you say Israel you must insert US, just as you must insert Iran every time you mention Palestine. These are who the war is between. Hamas or Hezbollah by itself is nothing and so is a <10 million population fighting several adversaries. And the US will always win in escalation which is exactly what they have aimed to achieve and why Iran never gave a 'proper' response to the assassination of Haniyeh.
Isn’t political isolation a strategy in extremism movements? It encourages some people in the middle to move into your camp, while others who move away can become convenient enemies. So from my understanding, the consequences are possibly considered another benefit for the country’s current government.
> In the short term, it's a smart strategy for Israel, but they've likely opened Pandora's box in the process.
Absolutely. From today on, this type of attack will have to be considered part of the arsenal.
While building thousands of explosive communication devices and swapping a large shipment requires substantial resources and intelligence, the actual "sophistication" of today's attack seems to lie in the fact that the perpetrator managed to specifically target a clandestine adversarial organization.
If you don't care about that last part, I don't think it's completely out of reach for a hypothetical "state sponsored terrorist organization" to have a thousand smart phone explosives shipped into a target market, say the European Union or the United States. Such an attack, if successful, would be devastating.
> Absolutely. From today on, this type of attack will have to be considered part of the arsenal.
I doubt that. It’s way more likely that from today on, every batch of devices used by VIPs will be tested for explosives, thus rendering such attacks moot. Finding such devices would also enable figuring out who your enemy’s operatives are.
This was a one-off.
>replicate this tactic
Permissible behavior normalized in this conflict is going to make future wars pretty ugly.
Israel used letter bombs for a long time to assassinate and terrorize. People didn't stop using the mail because of that, but upgraded their opsec.
Do you really think this supply chain bringing pagers to the Hezbollah actually went through Israel?! Israel has ways of intercepting packages in other ports outside of Israel.
BDS looks better and better with each passing day.
BDS?
Probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycott,_Divestment_and_Sancti... ?
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycott,_Divestment_and_Sanc...
Ah, thanks.
israel wasn't identified as israel, and hizbolla weren't identified of hizbolla
much of the work of a CIA or Mossad agent isn't breaking in to this house or murdering that person. It's working as an executive in a shell company
No one is going to sell a terrorist organization thousands of new beepers. The hizbolla probably also created shell companies. Israel knew their cover and approached them as a foreign seller. Everyone is lying to everyone
In reality the supply chain space is probably full of shell companies from all different terrorist organizations and western countries
Corrections:
1. It's not supply chain attack, it's terrorist attack. 2. It's not a clever move, it's a prevocation move
I think this is an actual "supply chain attack", while the downloading-malware-from-github-automated isn't.
Israelis are not the 1st ones at this.
The CIA did something similar for the better part of 4 decades
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-...
It was just another Opsec failure (or success, depending on your perspective). I dont see israeli hardware devices being any more suspect. Same as china. They were suspect before and they continue to be. 1 is our ally and 1 ins not
It could also act as an ad - Israel is capable of James Bond level stuff, their tech must be great.
It's said those devices were Iranian made. What makes you think Israel has any overt involvement in the supply chain to begin with?
Probably because of Israel's demonstrated infiltration of IRGC operations inside of Iran? Just a guess.
Overt?
Since Haniyeh, yes.
> It's said those devices were Iranian made.
Made, or provided by?
There's also the hit to the reputation of the manufacturers of these devices to consider (even though they were almost certainly intercepted some time after manufacture and modified in transit, or replaced with a different batch that had been ordered by the perpetrator and modified ahead of time for a quick swap). The perpetrator may have been spying on the pager network for some time, and if so then their cover is blown and their information source is gone.
The larger issue is that if shipments of pagers can be intercepted and modified in this manner, then any electronic device can be subjected to other hardware-based attacks - eavesdropping devices, keystroke loggers, etc. What if large numbers of countries with developing tech markets start looking at the suppliers involved the way the USA looks at China's Huawei?
In general this boosts the open-soure model for both software and hardware, so the expected hardware configuration that can be checked visually and with other user-available tools. If any phone, pager, tablet or laptop can be physically hijacked and modified, the user should be allowed access to all the information and tools needed to detect it. This assumes the factory itself is not the bad actor.
Hardware security consultant firms probably have a bright future. Also robots for assistance with inspection.
> What if large numbers of countries with developing tech markets start looking at the suppliers involved the way the USA looks at China's Huawei?
It's well known that the NSA performs supply chain attacks by planting spyware on hardware which goes through the USA. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/12/glenn-greenwal...
Whenever the USA complain about something China is allegedly doing, it's a good bet that they know someone in the USA camp is doing that very thing.
Yeah every company that has a part of their supply chain via Israel must be wondering now if this could be done to their devices.
Israel isn't part of the supply chain for Hezbollah pagers.
*isn't -> wasn't expected to be
...but this does sound like it would make a hilarious Family Guy episode.
Isn't that true of any supply chain that involves foreign states? Usually it's just surveillance, not destructive stuff, but expecting state actors to stay out of things is... naive?
The difference is between theoretical capability & Israel's demonstrated willingness & successful execution of it.
It's pretty reasonable now to think a little harder about "huh, I wonder if our Israeli supplier..." but yesterday it would have been a bit paranoid, not naive, to spend more than a passing moment on the thought if you weren't in a member of the March 8th club, or Iran.
China already infiltrated our supply chain at least once [1]. And then there was Stuxnet. Doesn’t seem like a leap that the Israelis can do the same and worse with their actual (as in shooting engagements) enemies.
1 - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...
Wait, so was the Supermicro attack real? There was a lot of skepticism around it, and nobody was able to confirm it with certainty. Then a few years later Bloomberg unexpectedly doubled down on it, again without proof (if I'm not mistaken). Was there anything new after that? I haven't been following the story since then.
It's naive to think that every country that supplies you with goods and you are at war with would go down a route like this. Is there really a single country you'd expect not to sabotage goods you buy from them if you continuously rain rockets onto their population?
I think the point is that, whatever probability a potential target would have placed on this sort of thing yesterday, those calculations have shifted now. Previously it was more abstract and something of this scale and physical attack would have been little more than a thought experiment. If a news pundit on Fox or CNN last night had been claiming China was doing this with Huawei phones then many people would have looked at it as fear mongering while of course knowing China has in all likelihood setup other supply chain attacks. Today it would sound a lot more likely.
Let's be clear here: it was a terrorist attack. Replace "IsraeL" and "Lebanon" with "iran" and "Israel" and Iran would already have bombed by the US.
Netanyahu is trying to ignite a regional war. It's the only way he stays out of prison. If the genocide in Gaza ends, his government falls and he goes to jail. He wants to drag the US into this regional war.
Do you think that's smart from Israel's perspective? Will that improve that safety of Israeli citizens? Or will it subject them to counterattacks?
Is that smart?
You have zero information about the goal here. There could have been an imminent attack from from Hezbollah that this action by Israel stopped, an attack that could have caused much more collateral damage on both sides of the border than this targeted at Hezbollah op. You literally have nothing to base calling this a terrorist attack on at this point.
> could have been
yeah, we can go a long way with that reasoning.
It's not a terrorist attack unless the primary goal is causing terror. The primary goal here was clearly causing damage to Hamas' command structure by putting a few thousand militants in the hospital, and also literally blowing up their communications network.
I think that they are inspiring terror, but terror against operatives. That's a good goal. Terror against civilians is the problem (according to our modern moral code)
What would you killing 8+ peole and wounding 2800+? Were it any other actor, there would be absolutely no hesitation in calling it a terrorist attack.
You know who uses pagers? Doctors and nurses. Are they legitimate military targets? Let's just say that a Hezbollah or Hamas commander was killed. What's an acceptable civilian dead or wounded count that takes it out of the realm of a terrorist attack? How many is too many?
I'd call it the lowest number of civilians casualties ever for this large scale of an attack on ones military adversaries embedded within an urban environment.
Israel's economy is already in the toilet due to them becoming an International pariah because of the ongoing genocide - this will just make it worse
Israel has the second highest GDP in the middle east[1].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Middle_Eastern_countri...
How big is that compared to the amount of financial support they get?
Actually quite large. Aid is in the single digit billion/year. GDP is 525 billion. So aid is roughly a percentage point or two. That’s it.
In the toilet? They practically run the world tech industry. Practically every GPU, laptop, and phone have a chip or sensor designed in Israel. FAANG companies keep growing their offices. Startup exits are at an all time high even as the war goes on (NVidia recently bought 2 more Israeli startups IIRC)
And good luck finding a Fortune 1000 company that isn’t using Monday or Akeyless or Zscaler or jfrog and I can keep going
Oh and remember Ilya sutskevers new AI company SSI? In their initial announcement they talked about opening with 2 offices, SFBA and Tel Aviv . You really can’t succeed without Israeli talent
You can like or dislike the government, but Israeli techs income and importance constantly grows YoY
I'm still amazed that many US companies willingly force every employee to install zscaler "to improve security and compliance", application which basically passes all inbound and outbound traffic through zscaler edge servers, unencrypted. Who knows who could be listening. And who can control that they aren't.
And yet Intel just cancelled a multi-billon dollar fab upgrade ...
https://www.timesofisrael.com/intel-suspends-planned-15-bill...
Israeli ports are going bankrupt ....
https://www.seatrade-maritime.com/ports-logistics/attacks-on...
Their strategy seems to consciously be showing everyone that they are craziest mf'ers who don't care about any consequences or collateral damage ever.
I agree with you that there some pretty serious global consequences that will come back to bite them too, but, then, they pretty intentionally don't care, that seems to be the whole deal.
I have heard Trump supporters actually suggest that a similar thing is a winning strategy for Trump too. Of course he seems to be an irrational unpredictable guy who doesn't care about the consequences in foreign policy, that's great for the USA, everyone will be scared to cross him because he's so unpredictable!
This is probably the historical lowest civilian casualty count ever for taking out this large a number of adversaries in an urban environment.
Boy you have some reading to do. Look up the program called 'Daddy's Home'.
Same in Gaza, it seems they are willing to kill pretty much anybody (children, journalists, humanitarians, hostages) close to a potential target, regardless of whatever their allies may be thinking. Kind of a "godfather" strategy.
They did show that religious fundamentalism, which attacked their country and abducted their people, has to pay a very high price for their terrorism.
This terrorism will hurt innocents and the winning strategy would have been to just not attack Israel.
As much as Israel likes to spread that narrative, religious fundamentalism had nothing to do with October 7th. And the number of innocents murdered, the amount of destruction wrought, the land stolen by Israel in Gaza since then has completely eclipsed the relative few killed by Hamas. Or are Israeli lives worth more?
Israel left Gaza before, I don't think it will happen again soon. Palestinians will also not work in Israel anymore in the foreseeable future at least.
It is not a question about which lives are worth more. There are a lot of indications that Palestinian lives are worth more in Israel than in Gaza for that matter.
To blame this attack on Israel is quite callous and I don't believe you that you care about any lives in that region. It just doesn't add up, but that is just my opinion.
If it wasn't fundamentalism, what do you think motivated the attacks?
> If it wasn't fundamentalism, what do you think motivated the attacks?
I don't mean to be snarky, but I'm finding it very difficult to take you seriously when you make preposterous comments like "Palestinian lives are worth more in Israel than in Gaza" and "Israel left Gaza before".
Hamas is not a fundamentalist group, and indeed they have frequently called out Islamic extremist groups, such as ISIS, for their murderous behaviour. Probably best we don't discuss ISIS further in the context of Israel though...
I also suspect you know very well the reasons for the October 7th attack, which Hamas have been open about[0]: in essence, it's a battle against:
[0] https://www.palestinechronicle.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/0...[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-rights-gro...
You are making excuses, Hamas is a fundamentalist group.
We can go back into history on who started the conflict, but even then I come back to the persecutions of Jews that fought for their independence and won. The result of that is the state of Israel. A democracy. Flawed, but in another league than comparable nations in that region.
A victory some are not ready to accept but they ultimately have to. Perhaps after they manage this first step there will be hope for a Palestinian state.
And yes, Israel did leave Gaza in 2005. That there were blockades was due to security concerns, which proved to be justified not only after the October attacks.
> Israel is a sick, apartheid regime that must be stopped.
This is a quote by you in another comment. Together with your excused for Hamas your arguments seem obsessive and misdirected.
> Hamas is a fundamentalist group
You've offered no evidence to support this repeated claim, and haven't refuted the evidence to the contrary.
> your arguments seem obsessive and misdirected
Not obsessive, just consistent; I could just as well call you obsessive for your repeated excuses of Israel's destruction of Gaza and their murder, starvation, torture and rape of Palestinians.
You have a very Israeli view on history, and it's obvious neither of us are going to change our standpoint, so I bid you adieu.
How much their charta still is relevant today is in question, but they have direct calls to kill Jews in there. They adapted that from al-Husseini, which stated it exactly like that. That was before the founding of Israel btw.
I don't think I want to indulge in proving Hamas to be an extremist organization any further.
How much their charta still is relevant today is in question, but they have direct calls to kill Jews in there.
Not the 2008 charter. The most anyone can point to is the passage that supposedly calls for the "annihilation" of Israel, but that's very clearly a mistranslation. (The actual phrasing predicts Israel will be "invalidated" by Islam, a lot more like Khrushchev's "We will leave you in the dust").
More lies, and straight out of the Hasbara playbook at that! From the Hamas charter:
"Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity."[0]
[0] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/hamas-2017-document-full
I don't think I want to indulge in proving Israel to be an murderous, colonial, terrorist, apartheid regime any further.
You are making excuses, Israel is a Jewish supremacist state practicing apartheid and ethnic cleansing. Your arguments seem obsessive and misdirected, and whether intentionally or inadvertently acting as if the situation began on October 7th 2023 which it did not.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Thanks. And on top of all that the fact that Israel clearly considered this situation manageable and sustainable. Netanyahu's plan was "managing the conflict", with periodic "mowing of the grass". He didn't see any need to "resolve" the "conflict", and neither did most Israeli citizens, whose lives were not effected by it at all (to the extent they would plan a music festival a mile from Gaza without a second thought).
While Palestinians in both Gaza and West Bank live intolerably. And surrounding countries that promissed not to regularize relations with Israel until the situation were resolved were abandoning Palestinians and regularizing relations anyway (for, among other things, access to Israeli weapons and technology they could use to repress their own and other populations).
This is what motivated the attack, an attempt to find _some_ way to do what other things had not, get Israel to see this as a situation that was not in fact sustainable, that they coudln't just go on like this forever no problem.
I think it is a violation of international law and a war crime to intentionally target or kidnap civilians, which I think happened that day. But it was not "unprovoked", and it does not require resorting to the explanation of "they just like violence" to explain motivation.
No, you don't attack the country and murder festival goers to make that political point. That is a perverse rationalization of what happened.
Certainly I don't do that and don't approve of it. I didn't say I was planning on doing it, or approved of it.
In fact, I specifically said I thought it was a violation of international law and a war crime to intentionally attack or kidnap civilians. So I'm not sure what you are saying "no" to in response to me?
Talking about motivation is different than talking about if we approve of the choices.
Bad immoral choices that are war crimes and violations of international law do not somehow prove that the motivation is "fundamentalism", right? If the question is what was the motivation for the attack, saying the motivation is something other than "fundamentalism" is not to say attacking or kidnapping civilians is ok. You asked, if not fundamentalism, what is the motivation? We told you. Bad immoral choices that are war crimes on Oct 7th also don't erase the prior decades of history, involving many many violations of international law and war crimes. Which are as we described above.
A 10 year old girl died too. They took no precautions to limit damage bystanders even assuming every person with one was a BadGuy™ which makes it terrorism and reprehensible.
I applaud your empathy but I don't think this number of active military adversaries have been taken out in cities with so little civilian casualties ever in history. We should probably be applauding this action over say the standard targeted bombing of the Hezbollah militants homes which is pretty much the previous 'least casualties' method used.
> A 10-year-old girl also died.
The death of that one girl, if it isn't entirely made up for propaganda purposes, is obviously very very tragic, but since almost all pro-Hezbollah commentators are referring to that one specific case that's a pretty clear sign that no other children died. Interestingly I'm now seeing comments where they're making her younger from 10yo to 9yo, now even 8yo. You can ask yourself why people are doing that.
While in their own attacks Hezbollah specifically targets Israeli civilians hoping for children to be among the victims.
> They took no precautions to limit damage to bystanders
The fact that those explosions were small enough to not kill even a single-digit percentage of several thousand targets who carried those pagers in their pockets near vital organs and blood vessels refutes your allegations.
> assuming that every person with a pager was a BadGuy™
These days, even in Lebanon, normal people simply own a cell phone so they can be called. When was the last time you even saw one? They are incredibly rare. The purpose of a pager is to receive (movement) orders and, in the case of Hezbollah, to make tracking more difficult. While it is possible that medical personnel may have used some of these pagers, it is highly unlikely that a new shipment of pagers would not primarily go to Hezbollah's "valuable" command staff, for whom being able to move and operate undetected is the greatest concern. According to Wikipedia, Hezbollah has more than 20,000 full-time fighters, and at 3,000-5,000 devices, this would not have been enough to resupply even a major part of the entire organization, so it is unlikely that any civilian outside the command structure would have received one, even less a random 10yo girl.
Ask yourself again if this is terrorism:
- if the attack was so specifically targeted at military targets
And collateral damage was minimized by:
- using a vector unlikely to be used by innocent civilians
- a sufficiently small explosion not to seriously injure people standing in close proximity to the target as indicated by the many videos floating around
> The death of that one girl is obviously very very tragic, but since almost all pro-Hezbollah commentators are referring to that one specific case, and if that case is even true, that's a pretty clear sign that no other children died. Interestingly I'm now seeing comments where they're making her younger from 10yo, to 9yo, now 8yo in order to exploit the death for propaganda purposes.
She has been consistently identified as either 8 years old or simply a "young girl" from the very first news accounts; I've never seen her given any other age in a news media account. There's probably some confusion in second-hand non-professional-news accounts (like this HN comment thread), confusing her age with other numbers in the same articles (at various times, the total number killed has been reported as 8, 9, 10, or 11 in the same articles identifying her as a particular victim. It is fairly easy to swap her age with the total victim count if you aren't being careful.)
Not even close. Thousands of pocket bombs. Some dead civilians, and a lot of dead terrorists. Not reprehensible but a well-executed op.
How many is some and how many is a lot? Are you confusing dead and injured?
It's not uncommon for perfectly legitimate military operations in urban areas to kill more civilians than enemy soldiers. Managing to only injure a few civilians while seriously wounding hundreds of enemy soldiers in an urban area is a remarkable achievement.
Hezbollah of course is an entirely legitimate military target. They've been indiscriminately raining down missiles on northern Israel for months, forcing tens of thousands of Israeli's to abandon their homes. Israel has every right to put a stop to that, and it would have been perfectly reasonable for them to kill tens of thousands of Lebanese civilians in the process of killing the tens of thousands of Hezbollah members responsible for this.
By definition a blind weapon.
Let’s say for each one of these Hezbollah casualties, you replaced the pager with 4 infantry attacking them. Civilian casualties would be far higher. The fact that they couldn’t “see” the target at the time of detonation is irrelevant.
The videos I’ve seen are of the pagers exploding and someone standing less than a foot away being unscathed. Incredibly sophisticated and precise.
But you will be always riding some unproven assumptions. E.g., even if those pagers had been initially issued to maybe-combatants, they may have diffused to other audiences and uses, since. It may be well that you're just blowing up some teenagers getting messages for where the rave is.
(Also, even if you hit the intended target, it's a summary execution of people you may suspect, but who haven't done anything, yet, and may or may not have become active in any hypothetical future.)
Curious as to your reasoning here, why would a Hezbollah operative give their pager away within a month or 2 of it being issued?
And this is war, you are applying impossible peacetime standards. To put things in perspective, a rocket attack from Hezbollah killed a dozen Israeli kids/teens on a football field in July, with zero Israeli military targets impacted.
It's a pager! Also, there's some evidence for this, as 2 out of 12 killed are children.
And it's not a full-fledged war, yet, as illustrated by the fact that the targets were still in their civilian settings. Generally, this may backfire quite a bit, as in a massuve influx in recruiting. (If the same happened to the US and reservists were blown up by some obscure vector amongst their families and while shopping, what would you expect? Awe and accepting defeat?)
> I can't help but wonder about its long-term consequences.
War is over.
The long-term consequences are that we use our words instead of exothermic reactions to reach livable compromises.
What? You guys like war?
Seriously though. Dynamite didn't do it, nuclear bombs didn't do it, but tiny precision bombs are going to work: just kill all the people who like to fight. QED
"The New York Times reported that Israel hid explosive material in the Taiwan-made Gold Apollo pagers before they were imported to Lebanon, citing American and other officials briefed on the operation. The material was implanted next to the battery with a switch that could be triggered remotely to detonate."
Wild
“Gold Apollo said on Wednesday the pagers that were used in the detonations in Lebanon on Tuesday were not made by it but by a company called BAC which has a licence to use its brand.”
They spun up a whole company
Not surprising. Recall how two Taiwanese companies were implicated when they reportedly had their device driver signing key "stolen", in the creation of Stuxnet.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet#Windows_infection [2] https://youtu.be/Fqk_VUMzY_M?si=H64JCMMCzY-k7Y1K&t=823
Apparently they were branded Gold Apollo but not made by Gold Apollo:
Gold Apollo said on Wednesday the pagers that were used in the detonations in Lebanon on Tuesday were not made by it but by a company called BAC which has a licence to use its brand.
…
The company said in a statement that the AR-924 model was produced and sold by BAC.
"We only provide brand trademark authorization and have no involvement in the design or manufacturing of this product," the statement said.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/gold-apollo-says-i...
They tampered with thousands of devices. Created a whole production run of them and kept it under wraps. Wild indeed.
Did they have Mossad agents doing grunt work on the assembly line? All it takes is one spy working on the assembly line to relay how the malicious pagers look like to make the operation a waste.
That's not even required. I've been a line worker assembling boards for a medical device manufacturer. I did not know what every single component did. The process was created at levels above me.
>citing American and other officials briefed on the operation.
How far should I be reading into the fact that people outside of Israel leaked this info so quickly? Does it mean the US was very unhappy with the attack? I doubt they were happy with not being given a heads up.
It probably just means that they weren't given any advanced warning and don't want any blame for it.
Could be damage control. There were rumors that it was the lithium ion batteries being made to explode. If those rumors were widely believed true, that would damage iPhone and Android and other brands.
The capacity to keep secrets, even at the state level, takes a level of mental maturity that few are capable of. So many are thrilled by the idea of knowing something few other people know to a degree that they paradoxically want to make it something everybody knows. Journalists take advantage of this and collect and share leaky sources amongst each other. The reason for the leaking is most likely just human nature.
That said, the existence of the state of Israel is such a contentious topic that the leakers may have been motivated by politics as well as the above, sure. But I doubt state-level agencies are condoning the leaking here.
> So many are thrilled by the idea of knowing something few other people know to a degree that they paradoxically want to make it something everybody knows
Some people (often due to trauma) have a very different relationship with secrets than you describe. Some people get immense satisfaction from holding secrets, and have no issue keeping it that way. Sometimes those people have other flaws or vices, as often plays out. In my understanding, managing such people is its own meta-game within these professions
I won't disagree with you about some people liking to keep secrets just as much as others like to spill them, but could you give an example of how trauma would cause someone to want to do the former?
That is pretty similar to what has been guessed so far. The posters here speculated that the charge was concealed inside the battery. Also some reports said that the batteries themselves heated up triggering the explosives. does the report mention if this was a physical switch or just some sort of control circuit?
The majority of plastic based high explosives are designed to be very stable, and require both heat and pressure to detonate, so my educated guess is they implanted something along the lines of a blasting cap into the pagers. I’ve seen PETN mentioned, but again, that is designed to be stable.
Plastic explosives are impact and heat stable. It takes an electric charge or blast cap to detonate them based on which compound is being used.
Electrical charge? There are electrically initiated caps, but you can’t place a negative and positive charge into a stick of C4 and expect it to do anything.
So trigger some kind of process to cause the batteries to overheat + detonate the blasting cap after a short delay? I'd be interested to know how it was packaged if it was done in a way that wouldn't look suspicious if someone looked inside the pager. The bomb-in-the- battery theory is a good one.
> So trigger some kind of process to cause the batteries to overheat
Where are you getting this part from? There's no evidence that the batteries were triggered to overheat; indeed doing so would be counter-productive, as it would cause the people holding the devices to know something is wrong and potentially move them farther away from their own body. The pagers exploded suddenly without warning. The only trigger/detonation involved was setting off the high explosive. The battery was uninvolved, only used to make the pager itself work.
>it would cause the people holding the devices to know something is wrong and potentially move them farther away from their own body
Because early reports suggest this is exactly what happened in some cases.
Realistically it wouldn’t require much volume in the battery. For reference, the amount of explosive material in a blasting cap is about the size of an eraser head, and is easily capable of the explosions in the videos.
If we try to do what we are best at here at HN, let’s focus the discussion on the technical aspects of it.
It immediately reminded me of Stuxnet, which also from a technical perspective was quite interesting.
I already wonder if this was anything that was planted in the devices perviously, or if the ones responsible had similar devices, and managed reverse engineer them and craft a payload to them, that could be sent over existing cellular protocols/networks and then, similar to Stuxnet, make the device exagerte some existing functionality to a point where it caused a malfunction? Thoughts on this?
We can't really do much more than speculate right now, but it seems like the most likely answer is that a shipment of pagers was intercepted and implanted with explosives. Israel has done this before to assassinate a prominent bomb maker. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash#Assassination
> most likely answer is that a shipment of pagers was intercepted and implanted with explosives
I agree, there are photos and videos of extensive damage to furniture and injuries that go way beyond what a small lithium battery would NORMALLY do.
Also, all the CCTV footage I've seen indicates explosions and not fire.
It can be explosives planted, However it can be batteries modified to explode instead of burn&outgas. I recall a video of someone losing their lives when their vape battery exploded. IIRC the vape's metal structure acted as a container that enabled pressure build up and eventual sudden release.
There are many stories about vapes exploding, some causing serious damage similar to these:
https://www.gazettelive.co.uk/news/teesside-news/vape-explod...
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/e-cig-vape-pen-explosion/
Kind of makes sense to modify the battery because since they still need a functioning battery anyway and the space is limited.
> It can be explosives planted, but maybe it can be batteries modified to explode instead of burn.
That is not really a thing, from a technical point of view. Changing the chemistry of the battery (assuming that a suitably explosive one exists; these tend not to be developed very far) would just be swapping an explosive and not a modification. Doing something like adding some vessel to build up pressure within the battery sounds impractical (you’d need something very resistant to heat as a battery fire goes above 2000 K), at which point it’s not worth the trouble.
The most likely is either some explosive besides the battery, or something that looks like a battery from the outside, but is actually half explosive on the inside to at least pass superficial inspection.
This kind of damage really does not look like a battery gone wrong. It would have left all sorts of chemical residues and burned very differently.
> The most likely is either some explosive besides the battery, or something that looks like a battery from the outside, but is actually half explosive
That is the most plausible explanation. It can’t be an obvious thing or someone would notice it. If it looks like a plain battery pack, nobody would think of cutting it open.
The explosive here could be perhaps just 8mm x 8mm x 8mm to do the sort of blasts you see in the videos. Thats fairly small, and could easily be hidden in a device.
Inside the battery is perhaps the best hidden, but you'd need to own a bunch of battery manufacturing facilities (expensive). Cheaper would be to simply remove some other component (eg. one of two speakers) and replace it.
Most (pouch-shaped) Li-Ion batteries just look like square shapes packaged in heavy aluminum foil, with some Kapton tape to keep a small PCB with protection circuitry in place. Any determined hobbyist could buy smaller batteries and the packaging materials off AliExpress to make something that looks visually similar but has lots of space left over for explosives.
With cylindrical batteries it's a bit harder, but ultimately they are just a cylinder with pressed-on end caps. You can disassemble them (lots of videos on youtube), change the contents and reassemble them.
It is pretty high effort compared to just sticking the explosives next to the pager's electronics, but I don't think the barrier to entry is actually that high
> packaging materials off AliExpress to make something that looks visually similar but has lots of space left over for explosives.
But this, arguably, would be detectable, through low battery life?
Pagers last for a very long time. Some one-ways can last for over a month. At that point, you probably wouldn't notice it's just over 3 weeks, or maybe think the product is lying in the advertisements and lasts less but not enough to replace the "company provided" one.
> Some one-ways can last for over a month.
More like a year or two off of a single AAA battery.
There are tons of more likely explanations for that, though, with the top of the list being "dang bosses bought low quality pagers".
And if they can make the combined package big enough that the battery life is still acceptable, it's even less likely that someone will pull the pager, notice that they should be getting "great" battery life instead of "just ok", and investigate deeply.
I read elsewhere that Hezbollah recently changed to this pagers to communicate, maybe it those who put the bombs bet on the fact their victims wouldn't have time to realize that the battery have shorter life than advertised
Not impossible they modified the firmware to improve battery life - look how sophisticated Stuxnet was.
I recently discover explosive welding is a thing. It uses PETN packaged as a thin sheet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detasheet
Considering the tech industry of Israel and the bottomless military/security budget, this is very plausible.
Also considering that a plan like that must have taken many months/years start-to-end, this just makes me wonder what else is booby-trapped(?), fridges? laptops? microwave ovens? the next door flat? flower pots?
Stuff like that take the paranoia levels all the way to 11.
a lot of people claim "we will strike fear in the hearts of our enemies".
Israel makes them quietly shit their pants instead.
They did certainly not make them shit their pants, what a childish idea.
They'll cause a big backlash. And the best they have are again suicide bombers in Israeli cities
eh, they were launching rockets into Israel daily, and now they walk with a limp and will freeze every time something beeps. I count that as a win.
no, there won't be suicide bombers in Israel again. they've gotten much better at finding the rats - see original article.
I fail really to see the difference between Hezbollah lunching rockets into Israel and Israel's pager bombs. Except the latter are pretty well targeted.
Frankly I believe that the people complaining pagers wouldn't if Hezbollah had managed to do the same to Israel. They'd celebrate it. So really they're just unhappy that the team they're emotionally invested in is getting shellacked.
There is nothing unique or special about Israel in that respect…
I love that your comment says this kind of striking terror in the enemy is completely unremarkable while the other says no such thing happened!
It’s not unremarkable, or even very common. But lots of countries do this besides Israel (targeted strikes to eliminate targets and remind would-be targets that it’s hard to get out of reach). It’s true that they tend to be on the high-tech side compared to say Iran, and that democracies most of the time at least try to make it look legal.
I disagree with the other post you mention, FWIW.
> Inside the battery is perhaps the best hidden, but you'd need to own a bunch of battery manufacturing facilities (expensive).
Do you?
What stops you from just taking a smaller battery and packing it with some plastic explosive into the typical "battery foil"? I'm sure the IDF is capable of doing that at scale.
Something along these lines is my guess. Focus on the batteries. You can replace individual cells with explosives and cause the remaining cells to overheat to start the explosion.
Most battery packs have integrated power management chips, so you could focus on modifying the battery firmware.
You could have another component send a message to the power management controller to trigger it.
You could also use the power controller's internal current sensor and clock to watch for a device event (power draw from the screen at a certain time or the power profile for a specific set of CPU instructions), giving you means to trigger it without modifying any other part of the device.
> You can replace individual cells with explosives and cause the remaining cells to overheat to start the explosion.
That won't work. You can use C4 and other modern plastic explosives as cooking fuel; they burn nicely. Getting them to explode requires a detonator.
A quick google search reveals multiple battery manufacturing facilities in Israel, including domestic and foreign owned corporations. A special order of batteries seems very plausible.
I don't see someone like Iran or Lebanon being able to do that, but Israel has a great technical know-how and a ton of resources. Making custom batteries, with embedded explosives seems plausible.
The pagers in question is believed to be a dry cell operated model. It could be a rigged AA battery.
...oh no. They must have handed out those USB rechargeable batteries as an upgrade. The bad guys want to be able to charge it, so they would be incentivized to align the charge port with case back and explosives facing the user. Then the battery could be triggered by time since synchronization && backlight current draw && button press beep.
One easy way to conceal the explosive would be to overmold it in a cavity inside the plastic enclosure. This would escape all but the most thorough inspections. And since battery terminals are typically also embedded in the plastic this can provide a clandestine supply of power and signal with something like Dallas protocol to the fuse.
I work in the battery space.
All you have to do is build replacement batteries without the pressure relief vents. You can easily get a Chinese manufacture to do this for a fee and properly some complaining about how stupid it is to do.
Then wrap it in some nichrome wire and have a micro run some power through it. The nichrome wire will overheat the cell really quickly causing the cell to rapidly over pressurize and boom.
Small pouch or prismatic cells that would be used at the size of a pager generally won't burn. And I speak from experience of doing stupid shit to them in the name of testing, nothing like using the nail puller side of a hammer to puncture them, or rigging up a fixture with 3 concrete nail guns to shoot it or well, fun stuff
This wasn't a battery, it doesn't match the damage seen. The evidence has all the hallmarks of a small charge of high-explosive.
Explosions are essentially about extremely rapid expansion of gasses. I don’t see how a battery, even one that is rigged to fail, can explode in an instant. Shorting out, overheating, and ultimately exploding because the battery compartment can no longer contain the expansion has got to be too slow by many orders of magnitude. Your theory makes no sense to me.
Pressure vessels without a pressure-relief system explode once sufficiently pressurized.
Sure, but can you get 1,000 of them to explode simultaneously that way? You'd think there'd be some variation in the time of explosion, at least by tens of minutes or hours, maybe even by days.
Shorting the battery would probably cause an explosion in around one minute. That's close enough to simultaneous.
From https://www.mdpi.com/2313-0105/8/11/201
A puncture causes runaway/explosion in seconds. Overcharging takes 13 minutes. There's not good data on a dead short (because it's unlikely during normal operation), but it's going to be between those on the faster end. From personal experience a shorts cause things to get noticeably hot after about 10 seconds, the graphs show that once you hit 60C things rapidly get worse.
A relay may have been required to hold the short as the battery stops supplying voltage.
The Reuters article said they exploded over an hour
A battery pouch is a terrible pressure vessel under these conditions. It’s designed to bulge and deform to avoid catastrophic failure. It would need to be replaced with some very stiff material that can withstand the first step of thermal runaway. A battery not submitted to mechanical stress (e.g. by being punctured, hit very hard or shot at) is going to get quite hot before expanding.
Batteries aren't pressure vessels though. Pressure vessels are generally decently large; how are you going to get one with significant capacity inside something as small and lightweight as a pager? Just putting in some plain explosives makes a lot more sense.
A battery without pressure relief is definitionally a pressure vessel. How much damage it actually does when it explodes is another question entirely.
It's a very minimal amount of pressure it can withstand, is the point. Certainly nowhere close to lethal explosive pressure. It's not a pressure vessel in the sense of the kind of pressure vessel it takes to make an effective bomb.
It’s the simultaneous timing thats a giveaway for me. Maybe you could have a few batteries explode but 2000 of them? It’s too clean to be just batteries imo.
Possibly hydrogen explosion.
These pagers probably had puch cells - those catch fire violently, but don't explode because the film can't contain much pressure.
Ok well someone's on some TLA's list now.
How do you ensure they all blow up at once?
Modified firmware that triggers on a receipt of a particular message and/or from a particular number?
> Then wrap it in some nichrome wire and have a micro run some power through it.
Presumably some software that triggers this?
I see some reports claiming that the trigger message was “07734 58008” but hard to tell if all these accounts are serious.
My guess would be that not only the battery but also the main board was modified to initiate the action.
edit: why do you think I'm not sure if they are serious? Calculator jokes are not a niche humor :)
> I see some reports claiming that the trigger message was “07734 58008” but hard to tell if all these accounts are serious.
Clearly someone's not being serious.
Good catch. Your 3rd grade, calculator-using self is serving you well.
It's extremely hard to tell if these accounts are, in fact, serious
07734 58008 means "Boobs, hello". That does not seems serious.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=58008
The accounts may be serious (even accurate!) but whoever chose the numbers was not being serious in their choice of number. Or it's quite the coincidence.
I want to see a video of this compared to explosives.
Very interesting, so the battery modification is plausible it seems.
I agree with this theory even though I am not even sure it would require a specific modification like the mentioned heating wire, if you can simply use the existing circuit with some instruction to cause component overheating with the same effect.
Another reason I do not believe it was an explosive is that a clandestine explosive installation would have resulted in far greater damage and included shrapnel. Because why would you not install very high explosives and shrapnel in a shape charge that directed the explosion into the likely body of the wearer if you are taking the risk of intercepting and making a physical modification.
This is also less Stuxnet and more infiltrating insecure systems of vehicles to drive by wire accelerate cars into objects. There have been examples of this
> a clandestine explosive installation would have resulted in far greater damage and included shrapnel
No and not much. The amount of explosion you get is proportional to the amount of explosives used. Small amount of explosives == small explosion.
Shrapnel is specifically engineered into explosive military weapons - it is not an innate property of explosive reactions. If you want a lot of shrapnel you have to design the case to fragment (e.g. grenades) or pack the area around the explosive with the stuff you want to become shrapnel (as with many bombers packing nails and screws and bolts etc., around their bombs). A small explosion in a mostly plastic device will result in a small amount of small pieces of plastic being scattered, which might harm bystanders but is by no means guaranteed or even intended to do so.
It would seem if they're going to all this trouble in the first place to design a substitute case of materials that had good shrapnel effects.
A shape charge would be pointless because you can't guarantee how the device is worn- one news article mentioned most people carry them in their pockets, so a shape charge would be blowing most of the energy away from the target in 50% of the cases.
A shaped charge need not be unidirectional. It could be focuses along an axis, resulting in a two-way explosion that would be more damaging than a symmetrical one. Two copper disks on either side of the charge would constitute a functional two-way shaped charged.
I think the grocery store security video supports the two directions idea. If you watch carefully it looks like a pressure wave away from the target and clearly something takes the target down. Perhaps a pressure wave in the opposite direction too.
With a pager you can be pretty sure the target will be holding it with one hand and looking at the screen. Reports indicate the pagers beeped shortly before they went boom. So if the blast is focused in the plane normal to the screen that would focus it into the hand and face of the target. No idea whether that's actually a good idea or not.
Doing much more damage 50% of the time might be more effective, if an undirected explosion is too weak to kill anyone but a directed (and lucky) one could.
I've seen some videos. Shattered hips, abdominal wounds, hands without fingers. I haven't seen any dead person, just maimed bodies. Mission successful I guess. Oh and one kid.
Why was this dinged?
Is the information wrong?
You are probably right but explosives risk detection, either by the militants or by the airport security if taken to a flight to a country with serious security.
Detection by airport security might probably be avoided using the right type of explosive. I have no real idea about this, but I suspect that any nation-state with enough budget and know-how can manufacture undetectable or very hard-to-detect explosive devices. If the explosive is encapsulated in a sealed airtight container, which is properly "washed" after manufacturing, I guess there's no way to chemically detect the explosive inside. Not sure about how to avoid X-Ray detection but that's generally not the way explosives are actually detected.
And, is the device anyway going to pass through airport security? I guess the owners are not really travelling on commercial airliners.
The scanners only test for the signatures of common chemical structures of explosives, like nitro and nitrate groups, which make up the bulk of mass produced explosives. There are many lesser known chemistries for high explosives that will not be detected by these scanners. Probably the best known example actually used by terrorists are explosives based on peroxide chemistry but there are several others.
A friend of mine who visited Lebanon (and the Hezbollah museum, he gave me a Hezbollah cap by the way) then went to Israel and was subjected to a thorough explosive material search. They basically swiped some kind of broom all over his body (with a focus on genitals) and put it in some device (some kind of spectrometer ?).
This sounds like your regular check for explosives at any other airport in Europe or the US, probably many other places.
These devices apparently were distributed to thousands of operatives. I would imagine that people having those are some of the more elite ones and they probably will travel for business reasons, be it personal business or Hezbollah business. A few who choose to take their pagers with them(i.e. will not be heading straight home after travel, so brings the pager) are huge risk IMHO. Even a single incident may reveal the plot.
I don't know how those detectors at the airports work exactly but they are probably playing cat and mouse game with the people who are into smuggling things and as a result they are probably aware of the more advanced methods like injecting things into the plastic.
This is the reason why I think the explosives were most likely hidden in the batteries. Some explosives have similar enough chemistry that they cannot be told apart from legitimate battery packs by the scanners.
This is a known threat, and this is the reason why some airports do extra checks on some travellers (for example asking them to turn their laptops on, asking them when and where they got the laptop and etc.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_electronics_ban
news reports suggest 1000+ of these devices exploded.
In a country where lots of people would happily crack open the lid of a device to replace the battery or otherwise tinker, the explosives must have been well hidden, not just tucked into the case.
it is my understanding that the devices had been delivered recently
I don’t think they’re saying you’d need to change the chemistry though, they’re saying they could have altered way it was packaged so that when it started burning there was nowhere for the gas to go.
Similar to how firecrackers work. If you take a firecracker apart and light the powder, you’ll get a flash and a lot of smoke, but no bang. The explosion comes from the pressure building up in an enclosure.
Disclaimer: not a chemist. Just a former unwisely curious kid
"If you take a firecracker apart and light the powder, you’ll get a flash and a lot of smoke, but no bang. The explosion comes from the pressure building up in an enclosure."
True. But if you open enough firecrackers and put the powder in a small plastic container you will not get a bang but a buff and a fireball the size of a car.
Disclaimer: I am a chemist and a former very unwisely curious kid
CCTV footage of one of the explosions:
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/dozens-hezbollah-m...
This isn't how lithium batteries fail.
Yeah, this should remove any doubt that there were explosives involved. At the 500 to 1000 mA hour capacity typically used in pagers, even tampering with the battery's venting in an attempt to build up gas pressure would at worst result in a pop and some smoke from the top of the bag.
Blowing a hole in the side of the bag and sending debris for several meters is obviously not plausible with that quantity of lithium.
The explosion in the video does show visible smoke, but there is not a visible flame or fire.
That is what explosives look like. You're thinking 80's movies explosions, made with barrels of gas.
Tom Scott explains it better than I do https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OOWcTV2nEkU
It's about the lack of visible flame, but more about the velocity of the burn, essentially instantaneous at normal camera speeds.
Amir Tsarfati: The updated numbers:
4000 wounded of which 400 in critical conditions
Al Jazeera from a Lebanese security source:
The pagers were brought to Lebanon 5 months ago. They were boobytrapped in advance. Each device contained an explosive weighing no more than 20 grams.
whoever is good/evil aside...
hezbollah got totally owned and look like fools...relying on tech they just took at face value out of the box
To add insult to injury, they specifically used "low tech" pagers in order to avoid Israel attacks.
I had a rechargeable battery explode in my kitchen recently and it was like a small grenade went off. I'll see if I can find the photos but it shattered trim and bits went through a screen on the other side of the room.
So, an "excited" AA (which, I believe is what pagers usually use) could do a surprising amount of damage.
Photo: https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/40...
Urg, I used exactly this brand in the past.
Is an interesting problem. Maybe the experts in the area could help here. I assume that a worn battery near the end of its life is more prone to explode, but I wonder...
Would the dead cells in the battery take part in that; or are just dead and not reactive.
In other words: if a battery has only a 30% remaining alive; or a laptop has a very worn battery, would an hypothetical explosion by overheating be much less severe? or is still so dangerous as new?.
Those are NiMHs, aren't they? WTF? That shouldn't be possible.
Any idea what prompted the explosion?
It looks like 1-way pagers sold in the US are powered by AA or AAA batteries: https://pagersdirect.net/collections/1-way-pagers.
That's not to say that they couldn't have put a lithium AA or AAA battery into the pagers or inserted a modified AA/AAA battery that was a combination of lithium (with greater power density) and explosive.
It's also possible that they have fancier 1-way pagers than I'm aware of.
According to this post, the pagers that exploded had rechargeable batteries. They even used USB-C, so Hezbollah must be using somewhat fancy pagers: https://x.com/BabakTaghvaee1/status/1836082246538629490
I remember reading once that Apollo is pretty much the only name in the game any more for pagers.
Surprising nobody has yet posted the make/model.
Really shows that the HN community and the victims have very little overlap.
Elsewhere here listed as: Gold Apollo Rugged Pager AR924
https://www.google.com/search?q=About+https://www.gapollo.co...
Why did the Hezbollah even leverage beepers in the first place? As in why not just use telegram or signal or some other app of choice?
So that Israel couldn't track their locations via cell networks. Sure you could use Signal or w/e but it's the cell IDs and knowing where people are that was the issue. The pagers do far less, if any, two way communication so it's not likely to give away location data.
Pagers don't have GPS devices embedded in them.
Apps (some more or less than others) represent a target for a nation state to pursue for information, graph analysis, bugging, etc.
Even a dumbphone with the GPS physically removed is going to be a lot easier to target than a one-way pager, since they are always chatting with the cell towers.
Pagers don’t have GPS devices embedded in them - that you know of.
If you can’t control your supply chain then that isn’t guaranteed.
After all, most pagers don’t contain explosive charges either.
Even dumb phones can be tracked by antenna triangulation, and I wouldn't be surprised if Israeli hackers are inside Lebanese phone networks...
GPS is receive only.
Because cellphones transmit, pagers don't.
How do you fit an explosive into a pager and still have the pager work? Like, aren't they already optimized to have everything for inside super tight?
No, a pager is optimized to be a case size that's comfortable for carrying and reading. The electronics could be the size of the smallest wristwatch, which is already dominated by its own form factor requirements, not the PCB + battery + display subcomponents that are scarcely the size of a nickel.
A typical pager is about 60 x 40 x 20mm. Much of this volume requirement is driven by the 16mm diameter 34mm long CR123 battery, a lot of it could be empty.
That battery is a relatively safe lithium primary chemistry, not a rechargeable Lithium polymer pounch or lithium ion cylinder that would risk fire and explode if the overpressure vents were omitted and the BMS corrupted, but the primary lasts for years.
I bet you could use a CR1216 battery (1.6mm thin, 30mAh, instead if 34mm long and 1500mAh) instead and have quite a good deal of spare volume in the battery for an explosive. If you filled the entire pager, that would be even more room, but much more easily detected.
> I bet you could use a CR1216 battery (1.6mm thin, 30mAh, instead if 34mm long and 1500mAh) instead and have quite a good deal of spare volume in the battery for an explosive.
I'd be fascinated if that was the physical vector...
However, tainting a component pre-integration seems a lot more likely than simply packing explosive in the case.
Israel inserts the compromised components upstream in the supply chain, they're duly assembled into pagers, which then make their way to Hezbollah, where they're inspected, look normal, and work normally, and are then distributed.
That would still require a firmware hack to presumably trigger though (incoming message stack to component trigger).
> The electronics could be the size of the smallest wristwatch
Swatch actually used to sell a wristwatch that includes a pager! Battery life was pretty bad though; it came with a keychain accessoire to store a spare CR2032 and a battery swapping tool.
According to the manufacturer the pagers have a nominal battery life of about three months so it's not likely someone would actually notice if this number is cut in half or less.
Those thin coin cells can't output enough currents to replace most use cases. I've once tried to run ESP32 with couple CR2032, the ESP just browns out.
An ESP32 is a power hog meant to be plugged into a wall. Here are the current requirements for the various modes according to [1]:
Even with fancy DTIM beacons, Wifi and Bluetooth IoT devices just have a really power-hungry protocol stack and radio system to run.Compare that to something like an STM32U5 microcontroller [2]:
And probably more importantly, an actual low-power microcontroller can wake from sleep in something like 4 microseconds, do something for a few cycles, and go back to sleep. Pager protocols are designed for this, putting the pager to sleep for sometimes an hour, and the crystal oscillator restarts the battery-powered device moments before the frame arrives, then goes back to sleep. Conversely, booting up the whole protocol stack on the ESP32 and acquiring a connection can take literally 4 seconds.That results in a power consumption ratio on the order of 100,000,000. ESP32s are not efficient.
[1]: https://lastminuteengineers.com/esp32-sleep-modes-power-cons...
[2]: https://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers-microprocessors/stm32...
Because it takes a surprisingly small amount of high explosive to cause the kind of damage shown in the footage we’ve seen so far. All it would take is for the battery to be replaced with a combo package - part battery, part explosive. No need for additional internal space.
Disclosure: my first job was in the Australian Defence Science Technology Organisation, Materials Research Lab, Explosives Instrumentation Group.
I think it makes more sense to think of these as explosive devices manufactured by/for Israel that are just designed to pass as pagers.
If cost per unit isn’t a consideration, I suspect you can shrink the size of the electronic components used in the pager to make room for a 20 gram explosive charge.
Pagers—especially commodity models—aren’t profitable enough to warrant cutting edge tech with the latest advances in microelectronics. Lots of room to improve things if you are making a set of them at a loss.
One possibility is to replace part of the battery. The smaller battery can be designed to lie about its charge, or you can replace with a higher energy-density battery and use the space saved for a detonation system (perhaps even incorporating the battery itself into this) and a small quantity of high explosive, which is pretty stable and safe until detonated. Contrary to popular belief, high explosives are actually relatively safe, and usually even burn safely or are hard to ignite at all in some cases. Package it up into something that looks identical to an unmodified battery. Modify device firmware and battery control circuitry to detonate it on receipt of a specific signal and... boom.
Thinner (less durable, but who cares?) plastic shell to free up space for explosives, but would likely be obvious if someone opened it - which might be a common thing if these were being used as remote triggering devices.
If they were using a AA battery, replace the battery with something that provides you space to work (e.g. put in a AAAA or button cell that would provide appropriate power but lower capacity) because you don't really care if the battery life drops from months to weeks.
I can easily envision a scenario that would preemptively “explain” why the pagers are internally different from past models:
Supplier: “Hey, we’ve got a refreshed model of the pager you wanted to buy in bulk. Interested?”
Buyer: “I don’t know, how do they work?”
Supplier: “Same as the other ones, minus a bit less plastic protection. With the weight savings they’ve added a new hardened receiver that’s supposedly more secure and will keep communications private. Also, they are 50% cheaper per unit…”
Buyer: “Say no more. We’ll take them.”
Pagers, by definition, are likely to be older technology.
The internals could be replaced with modern smaller and lower-power equivalents, requiring a smaller battery, and saving enough space.
(Or maybe somebody just donated a batch of innocent-looking devices to 'the cause', or offered a bargain on some 'extra secure' pagers?)
Can you make the case out of a solid explosive material?
Exactly that. There is a video of a hole blown through a table surface with one. That is not happening with any off the shelf battery technology as is currently being heavily misreported. They were modified with explosives clearly.
Of course there is paranoia being sewn now about hacking and the batteries which is likely part of the ongoing operation as it will disrupt anyone they didn't explicitly target.
I’m not sure which image you are referring to but there are images of lithium battery explosions blowing holes into counters and faces. There are some linked here.
The image is from this video: https://x.com/babaktaghvaee1/status/1836074863032701208?s=12
Not sure a wooden desk is equivalent to porcelain though. Porcelain cracks, just need a lot of pressure in a small spot to make a big break.
That said, .... Really glad I quit smoking anything after seeing the damage a vape did to those poor guys
Ahh so a simple supply chain attack. I was thinking it might have leveraged the built in batteries. But it was always unlikely, especially in a receive-only device.
Still, if you have the capability of such a supply chain attack, I would imagine the rewards of silent surveillance (tracking, audio) would be of much higher value than this kind of attack where 3 out of 1000s targets were killed.
3 killed but thousands inoperative and hospitals flooded - I would expect an immediate armed escalation
Hezbollah has been escalating their armed attacks against Israel for almost an entire year, parallel with the war in Gaza. Every day tens of rockets hit Israel, almost the entire north of Israel is evacuated of civilians.
I realize that this is not widely known, attacks against Israel receive far less attention in the news than do Israeli retaliations.
Do you have a cite? Otherwise I think every study conducted in the last few decades have found that attacks against Israel is over-reported whereas attacks against Palestinians are under-reported. See f.e: https://theconversation.com/bias-hiding-in-plain-sight-decad..., https://theintercept.com/2024/01/09/newspapers-israel-palest..., https://lab.imedd.org/en/dead-versus-killed-a-closer-look-at...
As tends to be the case with this sort of complaint, it absolutely makes the news.
Quick sampling of examples:
https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20240908-hezbollah-f...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/4/hezbollah-fires-reta...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw9y7wqn8j5o
https://apnews.com/article/lebanon-israel-hezbollah-hamas-ro...
It doesn't make a big splash in the news because it tends to be severely ineffectual, but it has been pretty widely and continuously covered.
Yes, there are blurbs about it if you know where to look and are already familiar with the situation. But a small blurb once about Israel being attacked is drowned out by the literally thousands of articles about Israeli actions, which mention time and again every small detail or infringement.
I don't agree; I think you're pushing some vague nonsense media conspiracy here. I haven't been following the war that closely, but I hear about Hezbollah attacks fairly regularly. I'm very critical of Israel right now, but it's not even remotely unknown that they're facing attacks from multiple fronts.
The "news" doesn't even seem to exist anymore. News providers have adapted to the readers only wanting hear their own views supported.
Not only are there specific providers for specific worldviews, but major providers seem to spit out articles catering to every viewpoint. You can find probably find multiple pro Israel and anti Israel articles coming from a single news source on a single day.
So, I dunno maybe we need some kind of cumulative news app to get any kind of meaningful idea of how things are actually leaning. Like an AI summarizing sentiments of the 20,000 articles on Israel in the last week to determine if the news is slanted.
I think you’re basically describing ground.news
They advertise pretty heavily, and I’ma bit skeptical of their ability to make money. but it basically uses AI to summarize stories, and it groups stories from many media outlets, categorizes their bias, and shows the slant of the topic overall.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBfBeo4nI2A
> attacks against Israel receive far less attention in the news than do Israeli retaliations.
this is false
the rockets in northern Israel have been going on for years (as are rocket attacks into Lebanon), so just not much news anymore
> attacks against Israel receive far less attention in the news than do Israeli retaliations.
I think retaliations are pretty fruitless anyway. Both sides have been lobbing missiles at each other for decades. This eye for an eye thing keeps going even though both sides have run out of eyes a long time ago.
Maybe talking might be an idea? Just saying...
Both sides are lobbing missiles at civilians? And responding to an attack on your civilians is fruitless? Maybe evaluate what you are saying.
Yes. Killing more of theirs in response to an attack on yours is fruitless. It just perpetuates the situation. And also, every time you kill one civilian there, their kids become terrorists for life (or at least have a good chance to). Hitting military targets is ok, but just lobbing a few missiles that way in retaliation because they fired some on you last week is really not going to help in any way. It only perpetuates the death and destruction.
Netanyahu seems to be very much against negotiations and keeps blowing the situation up because he doesn't want to 'look weak'. But this does nothing to actually help the Israeli people get safer. The only way they can actually be safe is to sit down and make peace. And of course not to keep taking more and more territory as Israel has been doing (and was even condemned by the UN).
Seriously, this shit has been going on since the founding of Israel. If they keep it up they will never feel safe. Neither side will ever be fully bombed into submission. Remember both Russia and the US tried that in Afghanistan, it didn't work there and it won't work here. All it does is keep the military industrial complex fed and wrecking lives in the process.
Someone has to take the first step and stop retaliating. And make some agreements which are fair to both parties. Then they can both build up a society and have less reason to upset things because they have a thriving society to lose.
I'm not defending Hamas nor Hezbollah. But this has to stop and 'responding' or 'retaliating' isn't going to help.
Only the Gazans charge that Israel kills civilians. The Lebanese understand exactly that Israeli targets Hezbollah. Read any Lebanese newspaper - they blame Hezbollah.
> Only the Gazans charge that Israel kills civilians.
Israel widely acknowledges that they kill civilians - including Israeli hostages emerging from captivity (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/israeli-military-says-it-...).
There's disagreement on how carefully they try to avoid doing it, but even their closest geopolitical ally the US has urged them to do more to prevent civilian casualties.
> Both sides are lobbing missiles at civilians?
Well, one's hitting civilians with missiles, the other's hitting them with rockets.
Their comms and command infra is now hosed and all the operatives concentrated in hospitals. They are dead in the water.
Hezbollah has more than 100,000 fighters, so this would be what, one or two percent injured.
Everyone has cell phones that they can use in addition to the pager, so I don't think it's very accurate to say the communications are hosed either
Hezbollah has been warning its members not to use cell phones because they get targeted by using them too. Seems like the pagers were supposed to be the workaround for that.
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/sya00qlswa
Not having a Hezbollah issued phone is very different from never using a phone.
The idea that Hezbollah members have and had no means of communication other than pagers in a country full of cellphones and landlines is a farce.
Now that their pager-wielding C&C is wiped out, all that cell phone traffic isn't dark anymore.
Two birds with one pager.
Which is dumb, because pagers are just as trackable as phones.
Lots of pagers operate in one-way only mode. Towers transmit messages without expecting acknowledgement a few times, pager is configured to filter out and only alert on messages routed to its ID.
Sure, theoretically one can detect a receive-only radio, but its massively more difficult than detecting something which actively transmits.
Most pagers do, yes. They are also usually unencrypted. And due to the one way nature, even if they are encrypted, PFS (perfect forward security) is impossible. Meaning that if someone captures the encrypted messages they can decrypt them all the way back when the encryption key is obtained.
But the impossibility of any kind of location tracking is definitely a plus of one-way pagers. Not just for terrorists. I'd get one if there were still a network where I live. It'd be really nice to be reachable and not be tracked 24/7 for once.
While the messages are not encrypted, you just have your actual message coded. Have agreed on phrases and what not discussed out of band. Send dummy messages to throw people off and not know what is a real transmission or a dummy one. Is that numbers station just spouting gibberish or communicating with spies?
The market closes at 5, dinner at the hotel, Grandpa will bring home the wine, bring your hat. Charlie 5 Alpha 2 4 7 3 Bravo. Maybe this is just discussing someone's evening, maybe its coordinating a group action.
Many pagers are receive only. The tower has no idea who's listening; it just broadcasts out the messages that it's told to. Pagers are much less trackable than phones.
How does the system know which tower to broadcast from though? Surely a pager message isn't transmitted from every tower everywhere.
> Surely a pager message isn't transmitted from every tower everywhere.
They generally are!
Some systems required the sender to select a geographic region to increase bandwidth efficiency, or alternatively the pager owner to update their coarse-scale location with the operator after moving significant distances.
The latter is what the old Iridium satellite pagers did (do?), for example. (Not sure how the new GDB-based ones work.)
The new Iridium pagers are two-way as far as I've heard. Only the old ones were one-way.
I think the service is finally being decommissioned due to the Iridium Next satellites not supporting it anymore. It has been supported for more than a decade without onboarding new customers though.
> The new Iridium pagers are two-way as far as I've heard.
Apparently that's optional:
> Iridium Burst-enabled devices can be configured as receive-only so that no transmissions are made, a feature valued highly by some customer segments.
(from https://www.iridium.com/services/iridium-burst/)
> I think the service is finally being decommissioned due to the Iridium Next satellites not supporting it anymore.
If that's the case, it would have been inoperable since 2017 – they deorbited the old satellites immediately after confirming deployment of the new ones.
That's exactly how they work, actually. Or at least worked, traditionally. There are assuredly some two-way pagers out there now.
But yeah, you'd usually pay for service in a certain (large) geographic area, and if you wanted to take your pager out of that area while on a trip, or if you moved, you'd have to let the pager company know so they could start broadcasting in the new area.
They might have watched The Wire: you page Alice, and she uses a public phone to call you. Undetectable unless you wire all public phones in the city, or someone is dumb enough to always use the same phone (which is what happens in the series; they eventually switch to burner mobiles).
To be fair, they rotate the burners in the series every 2 weeks and it takes the police more than a week to get up on the new ones.
It was cool to see that it was in fact an opsec fail (the guy buying the phones all over the country got lazy and bought too many from the same shop) to break through that. Pretty realistic. Like most of the wire in fact.
Although one thing in the wire I don't understand. Pagers are really easy to intercept, anyone with a scanner (with discriminator output) can do it and could do it in those times. I did it many times during the days when pagers were still in full swing. I really don't understand why they needed a court order for that (in season 1).
I just assume that ease of interception is tangential to the legal requirement for permission.
Paper mail and landlines are incredibly easy to intercept and tap, but that doesn't make it legal.
> Pretty realistic. Like most of the wire in fact.
The show creator worked for years as a journalist on the crime beat in Baltimore, I expect most of the opsec seen in the series comes from real cases.
> really don't understand why they needed a court order for [wiretapping pagers]
As others said, you need it from a legal perspective rather than a technical one. This is particularly true in the US, where the "fruit of poisonous tree" doctrine is pretty strict: if your evidence was not gathered in the proper manner, it must be discarded and it invalidates any further effort based on it. In specific, wiretapping is illegal even when done by authorities, unless they've been authorized by judges - the relevant US laws were tightened up after it emerged (with Watergate) that president Nixon was eavesdropping on his political rivals.
Apparently not these ones.
It looks like a command structure attack. There’s now 98,000 people with no orders.
That’s what I am thinking. These were not sent to a few thousand random guys, but almost certainly the highest level targets that could be identified.
They recently introduced pagers because they're less trackable than phones. Presumably the ones which have pagers are more important so its probably more impactful than targeting 1 or 2 percent of the regular terrorists.
Cell phones that, if distributed from the organization like the pagers were, could be compromised as well.
The people with the pagers could be the more important people in the organization.
And the 100k number seems quite exaggerated.
I stand corrected and Minkles is right. Hezbollah is defeated.
They have about 100'000 members, and this attack has killed about a dozen, and injured about 2000. Only one recent shipment of pagers was affected. I don't think they are unable to respond.
Concentrated in hospitals? Concentrated. Like, all in one place. Convenient?
How would this be an escalation trigger after a year of missiles and airstrikes with 1000 Hezbollah dead and 100k civilians displaced on each side?
Face saving. It's easier to put a PR spin on something only a few people actually saw. It's going to be hard to convince their rank-and-file this isn't a bit deal and deserving of retribution.
I don't think it takes much to 'flood' a hospital in Lebanon though. They country has been a mess since the big explosion. They barely have power.
Why not both? Location data would be relatively easy to collect and forward, audio not so much (much higher storage and transmission throughput requirements for very low quality source data given the limitations of piezoelectric microphones and the fact that pagers are usually worn on belts).
If you're getting GPS data, collecting people's movements for a month or three probably provides 99% of what you will ever want to know. Once the patterns have been established you're into diminishing returns territory, while the risk of discovery goes up, which would neutralize the value of the explosive attack.
The strategic value of such a perfectly targeted surprise attack is massive, notwithstanding the relatively low fatality rate. Injuries are expensive and often devastating, and the psychological impact is brutal. Logistically, Hezbollah (and many other organizations, militant or not) are going to have to review and/or replace part of their communications tech. That's a massive technical disruption, a significant economic cost, and risks further exposing supply chain information. It's also going to create paranoia about many other electronic devices, poison in the food, and so on.
I'm not sure about the ethics of this. If one were certain that only Hezbollah officers were being targeted then it would be an acceptable kind of asymmetric attack through a novel vector.
However this also seems to have impacted quite a few civilians, and there is a claim (unverified so far) that a hospital just replaced all its pager equipment a couple of weeks ago and would otherwise have been impacted: https://x.com/SuppressedNws/status/1836080190855795092
If this happened in the US pursuant to one of the wars we've been involved in, we'd definitely be calling it terrorism and/or a war crime. It's a big strategic win for the Israelis in the short term but can hurt them two ways in the longer term. Hezbollah and other enemies of Israel will be significantly more motivated retaliate in some equally creative/unpredictable fashion, and non-aligned economic partners of Israel are likely to view Israeli products with renewed skepticism, hurting exports.
It would be a bit rich for us to call this a war crime, since our standard M.O. for targeted strikes --- like everybody else's --- routinely kills innocent civilians in much larger numbers than this.
Ok, so targeted strikes in the US by our enemies that have civilians as collateral damage is OK, is that what you are saying?
The point was that the US government regularly accepts civilian casualties in trageted strikes, so it would be hypocritical for the US government to complain now.
Notably, this doesn't apply to anyone who hasn't supported such strikes in the war against terror.
> this doesn't apply to anyone who hasn't supported such strikes in the war against terror
or to any US ally; the hypocrisy has been around for a long time already
if 20 Mossad agents had been assassinated in Israel _in the same way_, we'd be hearing the story told in a whole different way
20 Mossad agents with 2700 civilians injured, 200 close to death, to include all the details. Many civilians were doctors with pagers.
Edit: my comment is 100% factual and unopinionated. I'm just quoting an NPR report. To downvote this is to be a propaganda agent.
What NPR report says thousands of civilians were injured? None of these do:
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/17/g-s1-23452/hezbollah-pagers-e...
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/17/g-s1-23406/scores-of-hezbolla...
You didn't look and are obviously trying to spread misinformation.
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/17/g-s1-23452/hezbollah-pagers-e...
That's the first link in your own comment. The URL and title mention thousands. Are you a bot?
From your source: "killing at least nine people and wounding around 2,800 across [Lebanon]". That's a total casualty count, and does not distinguish civilian from Hezbollah casualties.
Hezbollah itself claims 100,000 members, by which this would represent ~3% of the total force as targets of the attack.
The devices in question were ordered by, and delivered to, Hezbollah, per an NYTimes report I've just mentioned in another reply to another of your comments.
Wikipedia reports some civillian deaths, "including four healthcare workers and two children" citing NBC News, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and Associated Press:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lebanon_pager_explosions#...>
Given the very many highly motivated eyes on this story, I'm highly confident that if there were credible reports of a higher civilian casualty rate we'd be hearing about it in spades.
It's clear that there was some broader damage, but overall the attack was highly specific to Hezbollah. Arguments that this wasn't a highly-specifically-targeted attack don't pass the credibility test.
Again, I'm not uncritical of Israel, and try to follow the many nuances of the overall situation. I also realise that it's exceptionally difficult to remain dispassionate when its you and yours who are subject to attacks, and in a conflict spanning generations.
It says thousands were injured, not that the thousands injured were civilians. In fact, it’s likely that most casualties were Hezbollah operatives.
From the first link:
“Reports from Lebanon said Hezbollah recently received a new batch of imported pagers, which were being used to share information about possible Israeli drone strikes and other attacks.”
From the second link:
“The Lebanese armed group Hezbollah said the pagers belonged to the group’s officials and blamed Israel for orchestrating what appeared to be an unusual synchronized attack on Hezbollah’s communications system.”
Based on that, and the limited effective range of the blast (as visible in videos and the fact that the injuries are consistent with a pager in a hand or a pocket), it’s likely that the majority of injuries were of Hezbollah personnel.
> Are you a bot?
No.
Please explain to me how exactly Mossad got these pagers into only Hezbollah hands. It was just a shipment of pagers that was interfered with while in transit. There were absolutely non Hezbollah that had these things. Also please explain to me how nearby innocents were protected. That's right, they weren't.
The pagers, which Hezbollah had ordered from Gold Apollo in Taiwan, had been tampered with before they reached Lebanon, according to some of the officials. Most were the company’s AR924 model, though three other Gold Apollo models were also included in the shipment.
<https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/17/world/middleeast/israel-h...>
Ordered by, and delivered to, Hezbollah.
Your comment is unsubstantiated, and I haven't been able to find any source that confirms.
The downvotes seem reasonable to me.
Zero effort comment, you clearly have an agenda.
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/17/g-s1-23452/hezbollah-pagers-e...
The US would call this terrorism if it occurred in the exact same fashion to itself or allies. The hypocrisy is blindingly clear. It's hypocrisy because they don't complain. Your logic is completely backward.
A couple of things on this:
1. It appears that the AUMBC referenced replaced their equipment but that had nothing to do with this and their doctors weren't impacted.
2. Your note of "...other enemies of Israel will be significantly more motivated retaliate in some equally creative/unpredictable fashion..." is strange considering that this is already the norm. Almost all (perhaps all) of the attacks against Israel have been from terrorists targeting civilians.
I think they burned an asset right before the last time they had a window to use it. Maybe even on accident.
Dumb and cruel, could have used it to nearly the same effect by just telling hezbollah.
Given Israel's successful precision targeting of various senior Hezb members in recent months, I wonder if the pagers were initially used as such, but as suspicion mounted, and chances of an overhaul increased, they decided to hit the kill switch while they still could.
Although as as per an WSJ article: "The affected pagers were from a new shipment that the group received in recent days"
The pagers were likely one way with a codebook for the purpose of minimizing tracking and information exposure.
They were probably at the risk of being exposed and pulled the plug before the word spread.
That is indeed a possibility.
It's possible that they expected a higher kill rate. It's also possible that the kill rate will turn out to be higher after the consequences of injuries have time to play out.
> I would imagine the rewards of silent surveillance (tracking, audio) would be of much higher value than this kind of attack where 3 out of 1000s targets were killed.
The reason they were using pagers, as opposed to phones, was to avoid exactly this kind of potential attack.
Pagers are (typically) a broadcast technology, the pager has no transmission capability. A page is broadcast from every tower, it has no idea where the receiver is. A targeted page is done by the receiver filtering out and ignoring pages that it isn't the recipient for (eavesdropping all pages is trivial).
The pager device is simple, it doesn't contain a GPS or have any concept of it's own location. No microphone or audio capability, very little processing capability. And adding such capability with something like a bug would be reasonably apparent to anyone opening one up and inspecting it.
For a supply chain attack.
How did they make sure a large percentage ended up in the hands of the targets? Seems like this could hit a lot of random people, just anybody using pagers. Unless they had way to target certain customers.
I think you're assuming that all pagers of this model were being sent out like this. That's unlikely.
Much more likely is they compromised someone in Hezbollah that was doing the ordering, or the distributor/vendor they ordered from, modified a couple thousand devices and sent them pretty much directly to their enemy, and only their enemy, to distribute among themselves. Then waited a bit, and set them off.
Though what a spectacular way to draw such a program to a close.
I mean that in the sense of spectacle, of gruesome theatricality, not to glorify maiming people.
Fear is a powerful form of communication.
They will now need to change over to a new or backup communication system, with both the changeover and new platform bringing risks.
Most bugs can be easily found out by any competent counterintelligence team.
True but so can explosives. Clearly they were not competent.
Radio signals can be detected of course but it's possible to mitigate that a lot by only doing that at specific times and locations, or on request. And send the data out in batch. Ideally while you have the subject under observation so you know they're not monitoring for signals.
The same way Volkswagen hid their engine manipulation from tests by recognising the test and adjusting parameters.
Well, slightly off topic, but in the case of Volkswagen, everybody knew they (and other car companies) were doing it for at least a decade before the scandal blew up : car magazines were even publishing articles about it !
The level of competence usually correlates with how much in conflict you are not.
There are several sources online claiming the model used is the Gold Apollo Rugged Pager AR924. This pager is made in Taiwan, a country that has close ties with Israel and it's most important ally USA. Just a week ago Taiwan's Foreign Minister Lin Chia-Lung openly emphasized the critical importance of intelligence sharing and technology cooperation with Israel.
It was reported in Turkish news (allegedly via IRGC on X) that pagers are all Motorola branded, and supposedly at least include the Motorola LX-2 model.[1][2] However, the provided image of a Motorola LX-2 is also the first image on the Wikipedia English page for pagers.
There is also a photo circulating of a destroyed pager[3] which has visible writing "Distri: GOLD" and "Model: AP" (or "AR"). This has been matched to the Gold Apollo AR-924 model pager that is manufactured in Taiwan and is not a Motorola pager.[4][5][6][etc][7][8][9]
[1] https://www.turkiyetoday.com/region/this-is-how-israel-targe...
[2] https://i.turkiyetoday.com/image/resize/876x1024/wp-content/...
[3] https://i.turkiyetoday.com/image/resize/1280x1280/wp-content...
[4] https://x.com/JakeGodin/status/1836042111726072229
[5] https://x.com/PaDaGal/status/1836057094211969467
[6] https://x.com/Kahlissee/status/1836102796090953812
[7] https://web.archive.org/web/https://www.gapollo.com.tw/rugge...
[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x50wwGjX2Ao
[9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jzDHm68Wio
Correction after more information has become available:
The Gold Apollo AR-924 model pager is reported to have been manufactured under license by Budapest-based company "BAC Consulting KFT", but the head of this company denies manufacturing the devices and instead described themselves as an intermediary, without providing further information. The Taiwanese company which allowed these devices to be manufactured under license also reported receiving strange remittances from BAC via banking systems in the Middle East (not Hungary).[1]
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/09/18/hungary-en...
"Taiwan has no record of Gold Apollo pages being shipped to Lebanon or the Middle East"
"Gold Apollo founder and chairperson Hsu Ching-kuang told reporters on Wednesday that his firm had signed a contract with a European distributor to use the Gold Apollo brand. Hsu said the distributor, which he did not name, established a relationship with Gold Apollo about three years ago."
https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/lebanon-pagers-attack-he...
That's going to be bad for business....
All the terrorist market suddenly boycotting them, I'm sure they're losing sleep over it.
You are not thinking past the first point. Considering what these people have been doing lately, even if you are currently on their good side, what happens when you’re not or don’t want to serve them anymore? Think places like India and Brazil may be rethinking their supply chains right now?
Any .org should be considering the risk of allowing devices unfettered into onto their businesses premesis which could be used to trigger remote explosions, allies and enemies.
Business for pagers is not going great anyway...
Dennis Duffy finally got a big commercial order and now that customer isn't going to use him again. That's no way to impress Liz Lemon.
Site is down: https://www.gapollo.com.tw/rugged-pager-ar924/
Archived a couple hours ago: https://archive.is/Kw0Pg
95g, USB-C rechargeable up to 85 days of operation, separate control and charging boards, multiple replaceable components for easy maintenance.
Probably lots of ways to free up space, most notably by using a smaller battery but with a few resources you could probably combine the boards and probably not even be obvious ("generation 2, less expensive to produce"). With state-actor level resources new boards would be easy as would something concealed within a LiPo battery.
Time right for a meshtastic pager with a BOM with no bombs.
TIL: pagers still exist.
I wonder, if these devices could be suspect, why don't they order these cheap Chinese GSM modules. You can't hide explosives in those.
Also, afaik all GSM modules broadcast their IMEI numbers over the network. Explosives or not, I'm sure they can all be tracked and triangulated, since they talk to the towers. I don't think these things are secure anyways.
Pagers are truly receive only. A pager is effectively a pocket FM radio fixed to one station, that vibrates when a relevant message was digitally read aloud on the radio.
GSM on the other hand is cellular and bidirectional so triangulation problem applies.
They might not have been GSM but one way POCSAG pagers.
That would make sense, since there's no such thing as a one-way GSM device. GSM towers (cells) need to keep track of which devices are in their vicinity and do smooth handovers to neighboring towers.
I'm not sure how the protocol you mentioned works, but I'd imagine it still needs some info about the whereabouts of the receiver to route the messages to him.
> Kamil Hamad disappeared and it is rumored that he received US$1 million, a fake passport and a visa to the US.
Given the chain of events detailed already sounds like it was ripped from a spy novel, I'm pretty skeptical of this claim.
A Russian helicopter pilot had his family escape Russia, stole a helicopter, fled to Ukraine with it and cashed out on the bounty money offered. Then he was found and assassinated in Spain by the FSB. We are living in interesting times.
> Then he was found and assassinated in Spain by the FSB.
And that only because he seems to have lost his sense of self-preservation and basically lived his life in the open, in a Spanish town full of Russian ex-pats. And scoffed at the idea that he'd be safer in Ukraine.
Apparently the worst mistake was contacting his former girlfriend in Russia:
>Exactly how the killers found him has not been established, though two senior Ukrainian officials said he had reached out to a former girlfriend, still in Russia, and invited her to come see him in Spain.
>“This was a grave mistake,” one of the officials said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/31/world/europe/russian-defe...
Or there's a mole in Ukrainian intelligence who sold him out
Questionable opsec is almost always the culprit. Even all these online black markets, it wasn’t some sophisticated operation to catch them. Many times, they use the same username on another website and now there’s a link. Hell, one of them used to send email verification for their black market using their personal email.
It doesn’t just stop there. A 49ers wide receiver got shot a couple weeks back because he posted on Instagram about buying a Rolex and he was lucky to survive. That’s also questionable opsec.
What is a "49ers wide receiver" ??
https://www.google.com/search?q=49ers+wide+receiver&tbs=imgo...
Please don't use google.
Also, yeah, this came up when I searched (on duckduckgo), but it seemed like the wrong match, since I don't see how it could be related ??
haha got it from ddg gi! ;)
and yes, it's unrelated for sure
This story maybe continues - the killed pilot was allegedly seen alive in Czechia. Though this information is unconfirmed [1].
[1] https://denikn.cz/1510394/cesti-zpravodajci-resili-zda-byl-z...
Didn't he kill his crew mates in the helicopter before or after landing in Ukraine.
Source?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68337794
He was offered $500,000 to do it.
I guess if your only exposure to spying is through spy novels you probably would feel that way? Nothing about this seems out of line to me.
You should check out any of the books written by Ben Macintyre, especially "The Spy and the Traitor". It turns out a lot of spy novels aren't that far off from reality.
That does sound like spy novel stuff but it seems plausible enough? Dude was turned, and he wanted money and an escape to somewhere safe in exchange for cooperation.
Exactly. Snowball's chance anyone could get a series of capacitors and transistor to do too much more than "let the smoke out," even with the largest influx of EM energy. Most batteries give pretty big warnings before they do anything close to explode, making this a pretty obvious 'attack' vector they utilized. I'm also happy to offer political opinions for anyone that wants to hear ;)
Question: assuming there were explosives inside the pager, what would happen if the owner of such device would try to board an airplane?
Given history, given adversary, given all facts known thats practically sure. Usually Mosad doesn't say anything so we won't get much more anytime soon.
There will be few movies and documentaries about this for sure once things calm down a bit. I presume they used pagers instead of phones to not be so easily trackable via google/apple software and hardware?
A pager is passive receiver only. It never transmits. So you can't track it. That allows an operative to get to a secure line or obtain a burner device.
Whoever did this just killed that as an information channel as both the devices and the network are now compromised.
>Whoever did this just killed that as an information channel as both the devices and the network are now compromised.
This is also true for Hezbollah. They must now distrust their own network, equipment and procurement channels. The reshuffling resulting from the casualties will make the organization less effective, at least temporarily, thus delaying any attack plans and allowing moles to rise through the ranks.
That's not been true for well over twenty years.
http://suntelecom.com/images/st900_large.jpg
You might as well be arguing all cell phones are iPhones, because here's a model which is an iPhone. Sure, some are two-way pagers and do transmit, but most aren't.
Loads of pagers are passive, receive-only devices. There's a reason why there's a common distinction between "pager" and "two-way pager".
Looks like they were using Gold AL-A25 / Apollo 929 pagers which are 100% passive.
Funny enough the Apollo pagers website appears to be down.
What if the company itself was a front? That sounds like Mossad's style of planning, much more so than intercepting shipments or something.
Until we know the attack vector, I wouldn't say the network is compromised. Perhaps a specific message was used to detonate, that wouldn't require compromising the network. Perhaps there was a separate radio that wasn't using the pager network at all.
>Whoever did this just killed that as an information channel as both the devices and the network are now compromised.
I'm not sure if thats true, they just need to start cracking open their shipments of pagers and looking for explosives.
It's pretty insane to see remote detonation technology used and implemented in 1996, considering cell phones looked like Nokia bricks and the RF hardware needed to implement this needs to fit in a pretty tight space in the phone.
Well cell phones have been used as detonators for quite some time, right? It's not too much of a stretch.
Its one thing to figure out how to wire the vibrator in a phone into an external explosive activation circuit.
Its a whole other thing to do a supply chain intercept on an entire factory run of pagers, build a difficult to detect explosive into them, get them into the hands of your enemies, and remotely trigger them over infrastructure you don't directly control.
This is an incredible level of execution. And, presumably, the IDF or some attached intelligence agency demonstrating how deeply they own their adversary's networks.
I'm not sure they necessarily need to deeply own their adversary's networks. I'd be impressed if Lebanese pager tech has any serious kind of encryption, for example. And we're already accepting at face value that they sabotaged the devices, so it's possible this was done with a separate RF signal than their own cellular network, even if it is locked down.
But yes, the supply chain sabotaging is certainly impressive.
You probably need firmware and some major component modification, such as a display or battery, but not more than this, to pull it off. So at a minimum, two components, or perhaps one smart component such as a display.
It seems the model was the AP-900, not the AR-924, which used alkaline (ie removable) batteries, so a new theory is an EFP (explosively formed penetrator) manufactured into the device.
It appears the devices do not function on cell phone networks but instead on internal radio networks such as those used within industrial or medical settings.
Best guess is the displays because:
1) there is enough room for the EFP,
2) you could modify the component to trigger itself, meaning it doesn’t need coordination between any other parts of the device
3) there are a lot of injuries to the face reported — with a display you could trip on button push without needing access to the button, when people tend to be looking right at the EFP
4) in the videos the explosions look very directional
If an entire shipment was intercepted and modified, how many other pagers are out there? How many non-targeted persons are walking around with a bomb in their pocket?
There's also plenty of bystanders who are being impacted by an explosion happening in the pocket of the person next to them.
I don't think whoever approved this was worried about innocent people getting hurt.
I watched a video of one of these exploding in the pocket of someone at a grocery store with someone standing directly next to him, so close they were rubbing shoulders, and the bystander was fine. No doubt there were many dozens of civilian casualties, but if the numbers net out the way you'd expect they would (ie: people carrying these pagers, which link to Hezbollah's own communications network --- they run their own phone company --- are overwhelmingly Hezbollah operatives) this is going to pencil out as one of the most surgical attacks of all time.
Every military strike in modern warfare will involve someone in some sense not worrying about innocent people getting hurt. This isn't Agincourt. Wars happen in cities now.
There are too many threads and this is too complicated a topic for a technology forum website so I’m not going to weigh in everywhere.
But you yourself recognize that a) Hezbollah is a de facto government, not just a military or terrorist organization and that b) its folly to do some sort of algebra on casualties in these conflicts and intent is what matters.
It’s hard to come up with a plausible intent for a strike that injured 2700 people, with only the weakest of targeting mechanisms across a population that ranges the gamut of occupations, other than terrorism.
We would certainly view it as such if Hezbollah blew up 2700 phones of the Israeli government and military.
That depends on who the 2700 people are, right? If it's 2700 random people, I agree. If it's 2600 Hezbollah operatives, not so much. If Hezbollah managed to surgically strike 2600 IDF soldiers, injuring and killing an additional 100 bystanders, I promise you I would offer the same analysis.
I'm measuring this against the standard of military operations conducted by western countries, the state of the art of which is Hellfire missiles fired into cars and apartment buildings.
I'm trying to be hedge-y as I write this stuff. We could absolutely learn things that would change my take on this!
One of the most specifically targeted, discriminatory large-scale attacks of all time, and still people complain.
If they didn’t care they would directly level the building.
And yet it took 5 hours for IDF to respond to Hamas breaching their border - where it only takes a maximum of 45 minutes via helicopter to get to any point along the Israel-Palestine border?
Is there any technology possible to help people more seriously see incongruences for what they are, technology to help prevent people from propaganda - or is that primarily simply a systems control issue - education system, information system, etc - that would be party to a censorship-suppression narrative control and distraction apparatus?
Hamas coordinated strikes against Israeli c4i to hinder the IDF response to the invasion. This is trivially verifiable. Not all of Hamas are barely-educated fighters capable of little more than being pointed at innocents and told to kill.
Most sophisticated-best funded military in the world doesn't have automatic alert systems in place, redundancies, etc, eh?
You probably also don't believe that the Hannibal Directive was deployed on Oct. 7th as well, even though Israel is known to have done the same as early as 1986.
P.S. There are IDF intelligence agents who are whistleblowers that say that this had to have been allowed.
I think the planners of the operation weren't your average terrorist: They outmatched the border barriers' design basis threat, they knew the default Israeli response and targeted critical c4i nodes to hinder it, and they had a bit of luck and a lot of audacity. Those added up to a black day for Israel.
How much confirmation bias do you think you're leaning into, in order to not have to swallow the equally, if not more likely case, that the IDF was ordered or purposefully delayed in their response by higher ups?
And about the Hannibal Directive you didn't respond? We can assume too then, since you like assumptions, that they were deployed to kill their own citizens as well - right?
Im assuming you’re saying they were looking for a casus belli. They well might have, but surely the assailants knew this was a likely consequence. Why did they proceed to breach the border if they didn’t want to trigger a war?
You do know this so-called war didn't start on Oct. 7th, right?
This world needs to be mandated to watch all of the actual evidence, and just propaganda by those who mostly control the mainstream-social media channels.
Please elaborate
You can start spending time first studying these:
https://israelpalestinetimeline.org/
https://ifamericansknew.org/
These pagers were 100% a supply chain attack. Intercepted and modified with small explosives embedded in them or swapped the entire shipment out with ones with a small explosives in them.
There is no possibility these explosions are from battery overloads via an exploit or firmware hack.
>or firmware hack.
There's still the question of how the explosive capsule would have been triggered. It couldn't just explode at the first incoming call. There must be more to that.
The microcontrollers inside the pagers probably have a spare GPIO pin, so they'd just have to modify the software and attach the detonating electronics to that gpio pin.
Since i'm supposedly "posting too fast", to answer the post below:
> Just curious, is it possible to program the pins so that it triggers by wireless or satellite command? With that scale I don't think wireless is possible though.
Technically it is, but requires additional electronics and antennas. It's much easier to just use the existing pager network and trigger when some specific message (or pager code) is detected. Paging networks are simple to implement.
It seems pretty plausible that the actual supply chain attack here would have been Israel subbing out whole shipping crates of pagers for sabotaged devices Israel manufactured itself, which would allow for arbitrary complex designs.
Maybe they bought a large quantity of pagers from the same supplier and modified beforehand? I think a few grams of high explosives is good enough.
Just curious, is it possible to program the pins so that it triggers by wireless or satellite command? With that scale I don't think wireless is possible though.
the pager is already wireless. So adding functionality to trigger wirelessly (over the phone network) is trivial. And it can trigger only with a special message.
Yeah you are probably right. I'm an electronics newbie and don't know exactly how pagers work in wireless. I'm going to read some material on it.
Thanks, I wonder how does one do that. I'll probably need to read how pagers work.
My best guess is explosively formed penetrator in the display.
I don’t think wholesale replacement of the pagers was likely to work for a number of reasons.
They had to go one step up the supply chain.
The EFP display could be set to trigger on a certain message, or even the clearing of a certain message, which in devices without said display would do nothing.
The display is most likely to be pointed at the user’s face, or opposed to their waistline (EFPs sort of fire both ways but in one axis.
The battery, if it were a cylinder as would be likely, would fire tangentially, likely not hitting much.
A prismatic battery would make a good place for an EFP but difficult to interface with and likely requires a second compromised component.
Theory: A prismatic battery with an explosive core and an electronic fuse swapped to trigger the explosive instead of disconnect the battery. Firmware change to short the battery. No visible signs of tampering even in iFixit like conditions.
The best evidence we have now suggests that the devices used had removable (AAA) batteries, not built-in batteries.
If I was buying pagers and had previously been hit by intelligence ops I would be buying batteries in random supermarkets.
I'm looking at pager teardowns and there's nothing even close to the volume of the battery in there. Big transistor and the speaker housing.
Which sort of leans back toward the theory that nobody checked the pagers at all.
15g of explosives is sufficient, probably, based on the analysis I’ve seen.
15g of explosives is not very big.
The speaker is another potential home, that is a good point. Big cone and heavy magnetics.
This display weighs 15g, and uses cheap glass and old liquid crystal: https://www.crystalfontz.com/product/cfag12864u3nfhe11-128x6...
Would someone be able to make one that worked but weighed eg five grams, then fill the rest with explosive? Would anyone be able to discern that the back of the glass wasn’t liquid crystal but explosive, especially as they are usually taped over?
What would happen if you walked through airport security with such a device?
Nothing, they aren’t looking for 2”x1” sheets of copper within electronic devices, and presumably the thin layer of explosives would be sealed and washed.
Might be a hardcoded date and time. Does the legit pager messaging network give the time? If not, continually powered digital clocks drift slowly.
> These pagers were 100% a supply chain attack.
What did you base that on though, 100% is pretty confident
Batteries are not magic unknown technology. People who understand their chemistry can confidently say things like that.
Dunning-Kruger effect comes to mind again.
How do you mean? I am trying to understand what you're saying, it seems you mean that people on HN only _think_ they understand how battery technology works saying this is impossible, but in reality they have no idea, and it's trivial to make an explosive device like out of pager batteries?
Reuters is quoting experts, including lithium battery experts, saying that the explosions were inconsistent with an exploding battery:
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/what-we-know-so-fa...
Simple logic and science. Batteries do not cause forceful explosions like we've seen today. These pagers were intercepted and implanted with explosives (or entire load swapped with pre-made malicious ones) and then allowed to continue on to their destination. Thus I can say with 100% confidence that this was a supply chain attack.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/17/world/middleeast/israel-h...
In a surprise to no one except you
Likely, there are many many more of them out there, just did not fall into the dragnet of phone numbers that were set to activate.
How do you judge that likely? It seems just as possible if not more that it was a single lot purchased by Hezbollah for Hezbollah.
I'd guess anybody with a pager in that part of the world dumped theirs as soon as they heard what happened.
I bet lots of people with that model of pager are now ripping them open to check for explosives. If we don't see pictures of unexploded ones, then I'd guess they were all triggered, and the only ones we might see are devices that were turned off at the time.
Agreed. Will be interesting if there is a teardown or not.
> make the device exagerte some existing functionality to a point where it caused a malfunction? Thoughts on this?
I'm actually astounded by the things that must have been in place to make this attack even plausible, let alone viable. At the same time, the ramifications are sobering. Here's where my head is:
- Hezbollah failed to inspect electronics that, if tampered with, could have lead to some kind of intel breach. That or the explosive modifications were indistinguishable from the real thing.
- Operatives knew what pager numbers were in use by Hezbollah, perhaps exclusively to the rest of the population.
From there I have three possible explanations for how this may have been executed:
1. Many shipments of such pagers bound for Hezbollah in Lebanon and other places in the region, were identified, intercepted, modified, and sent on their way with minimal delay. You probably don't get many opportunities like this (how often do you replace a pager?), so this is really quite a hat-trick.
2. Or: there are many more pagers out there with a very dangerous vulnerability on board, with only a special pager sequence that stands between the user and sudden death. This suggests simply infiltrating the manufacturer instead. This also has much more favorable lead times and can leverage the manufacturer's resources to that end.
3. Or: There's a pager manufacturer out there with gob-smackingly bad engineering and software on completely stock units, which operatives simply exploited to (sub)lethal effect.
You don't have to intercept a shipment and tamper at large scale with incredible speed if you're posing as the supplier.
That's what I believe happened. Specially likely if you consider that terrorist orgs are not exactly putting RFPs or doing large orders at legit vendors. That gives you the chance to pose as a helpful supplier that operates on the down low and accepts cash on delivery, etc.
> what pager numbers
This is where it gets confusing. We all remember the pagers running on cellular/2G networks but it seems that nowadays most pagers are HF devices and mostly broadcast receivers. Quite unclear which one are involved.
Good point. I'm kind of a dumb-dumb when it comes to present-day pager tech. I haven't even seen one in decades.
Let me rephrase the question then: if any measure was made to target just the pagers that were in the hands of Hezbollah, how was that accomplished?
So far all I've seen is speculation that a specific shipment was targeted.
I'm pretty sure they weren't cellular pagers as they don't seem to be the norm nowadays.
> We all remember the pagers running on cellular/2G networks
Who does? I'm not aware of pagers running on the GSM network. Maybe they existed, but I don't think they were ever widespread.
You're right. It existed and had a short span of life/fame in some countries but that is all. Most pagers were on their own protocol/frequency. the protocol seems to be mostly the same theses days: POCSAG
Many commenters here also assumed like I did it was some cellular/SIM devices but it wasn't that much widespread.
>I already wonder if this was anything that was planted in the devices perviously
That seems to be the case with almost complete certainty. They said it was a new batch of pagers that the targets/victims/whatever you choose to call them received in the last few months.
>The pagers that detonated were the latest model brought in by Hezbollah in recent months, three security sources said.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/dozens-hezbollah-m...
> If we try to do what we are best at here at HN, let’s focus the discussion on the technical aspects of it.
Technical? Yes it's interesting but you are missing the biggest part here: how do you convince such a huge organization to switch so many devices? This human engineering is the really interesting part here.
Hezbollah has said some time ago they were switching to pagers because Israel can get inside their cell phones.
With a statement like that one wonders if Hezbollah leadership itself has been infiltrated.
Israel has an intelligence agency that's generally recognized to be quite competent. I'm sure it would have taken them approximately 5 minutes to learn from their many spies that a new form of communications is being used.
The IRGC itself has clearly and spectacularly infiltrated; read the details of the Haniyeh attack. So, yeah, at this point I don't think anyone in the IRGC network can trust anybody else. The messaging here is pretty intense.
Theoretically, pagers are simpler devices, meaning it would be much easier in principle to analyse both hardware and software to check for issues, unlike a mainstream phone OS which has a bigger software attack area and can have at least some zero day attacks known to a state level actor like Israel.
Although, if it really was explosive inside the pagers it seems Hezbollah didn't do this.
I mean Israel is behind Pegasus, so it's not exactly a secret that they can get into any cellphone. Israel didn't need to infiltrate Hezbollah, they just needed publicity.
You can also find out what your target is using, find some exploits in it and publicize them, then offer a super good deal on an upgraded model.
If you’ve figured out how to get explosives into pagers, the next question is how do you get your enemy to buy a bunch of new pagers from you.
They have to want new pagers in a hurry.
So you just need to convince them that their phones are all already compromised.
Note that this does not require that their phones actually be compromised.
Exactly. But this buyer is not a regular buyer, he is not getting a tracking number and refreshing some random website to see where it's shipment is. The buyer must have been with the goods from a point before it reached its destinated country. There are so many plays that had to play here in order to orcestrate this. Should make a really good heist movie, just with a different prize at the end.
You find where the pagers are coming from. They probably had a supply chain going to cycle through pagers. 2,700 pagers being replaced regularly is an easy target.
My hunch is that IL intelligence bought some 3,000 - 4,000 pagers of the same models, fixed them with explosives and trigger systems, and swapped them with the package sent to Hez in the middle of transport or (probably) in the Lebanon distribution center.
So they needed to know: which company manufactured those pagers; which models are sent to Hez; when they were in transport and arrived at the distribution center; which packages went to Hez operatives, and much more information.
BTW rumors says the pagers were manufactured by a Taiwanese company, not confirmed though but some of my friends were able to read from the pictures that show what was left of the pagers.
If the footage on Twitter is legit, then there was a small detonation, with a bang, not a burning battery with a 'whoosh' and flames. Which indicates that the internals of the pager had been replaced with something rather more explosive than a lithium battery.
Lithium ion batteries in devices are sandwiched layers enclosed in a kind of 'pouch', right? So what if you manufactured one of these that looked identical to the normal battery, but only had half a battery inside, and the rest of it was plastic explosive. Maybe put a tiny chip in there that, when a particular pattern of current draw happens, fires a detonator. Then, some firmware hack in the device proper that responds to some event and actuates that current draw pattern. It wouldn't even look suspicious if you opened it up.
That's an interesting idea, and it wouldn't even need a firmware hack... a real time clock circuit with a specific date/time to detonate would be simpler and easier to coordinate simultaneous detonation.
Pagers typically ran off regular AA batteries, not Li-Ion stuff.
After seeing some videos of faces and hands that were blown off, it's clear that the tiny batteries could not have caused explosions like this.
Haaretz reports that the devices were purchased only recently - and heated up before detonating. [1]
So, that sounds like indicators for both, either a supply-chain attack or malware targeting the battery.
[1] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-09-17/ty-article-li...
How much stuff is there to fuck with in a standard, untampered-with pager? Seems unlikely this was pure cyber (and some novel battery hack). And if you need supply chain interception to carry out the attack in the first place, why wouldn't you insert explosives? There's a history of these kinds of attacks.
Yeah, agreed. Also agreeing with the sibling posters that the videos that emerge look nothing like batteries catching fire but rather like actual detonations. Nothing an untampered pager should be able to do.
Shaped charge hidden in the battery casing. Sounds like batteries heated up which is consistent with one method that shaped charges could be detonated. No extra wires needed going into the battery (better concealment).
Wouldn't a shaped charge be pointed in a specific direction, and hence could miss depending on the device's position in target's pocket?
This is unlikely to be a shaped charge, there is not enough space. High explosives are inherently directional depending on the geometry of the explosive and point of detonation. As a practical matter of fitting explosives into a pager, I would expect most of the explosion to be directed perpendicular to the face of the pager in both directions. In almost all cases, carrying or using the pager would put the person directly on the main axis.
You might prefer a shaped charge to reduce the likelihood of injuring bystanders and to ensure that what little explosive you can fit in there can kill whoever is using it.
Watching the grocery store security video, I think a multi-directional shaped charge is plausible with pressure evident in two directions. But very hard to draw any conclusions.
Yeah, everyone talking about shaped charges or (micro-) explosively formed penetrators seems to overlook the fact that, compared to just a regular bomb, they'd be less strictly effective for situations where you can't control the alignment of the charge to the target.
Don't overthink it - just a bit of RDX and a detonator does wonders.
Most high explosives need a high impact detonation source. You can literally set C4 on fire and it wont explode. It needs high temperature and pressure. And I do not think the 120F that a "hot" battery could get to reliably could trigger a high explosive in a way that wouldn't accidentally trigger beforehand. The middle east is a warm place.
Compared to Stuxnet it's also a first where this kind of attack was done at scale. Regardless of the particular target it's of course the question whether this is a desirable practice in cyber warfare. For such a new field there are very few ethical guidelines yet, like we do have for more conventional warfare.
Unlike stuxnet, this attack had a lot of non-hezbolah civilian casualties. It’s "targeted" in a sense, but not really much more targeted than a drive-by assassination attempt. Anybody close to these people could have sustained serious injury, and there are reports of children injured and dead. We’ll have to wait for details to emerge.
Politically, this is the sort of action that invites comparison to conventional terrorism. It also begs the question of why Hezbollah or other actors shouldn’t try a similar attack against civilian targets. It’s almost like a chemical or biological attack, which most countries shy away from because it’s so hard to defend against (a big part of why it’s illegal). No country can perfectly safeguard its supply chain from intentional sabotage.
I’m afraid that the entire world is a little bit less safe after this move. Maybe Israel is goading Hezbollah into all-out war, who knows, but this affects all of us.
For a non-infantry massed attack on a military asset, the ratio of military to civilian casualties here is probably going to end up being unprecedented in the history of modern warfare; this will probably end up being an extraordinarily surgical attack by any military standard. Civilians are routinely killed in targeted strikes, because targeted strikes are almost always conducted by air. This attack may end up being distinguished by how few civilians were harmed.
Neither Israel nor Hezbollah is mobilized for all-out war here. Hezbollah is depleted from its disastrous efforts in Syria; Israel is fully committed to combat operations in Gaza. The north of Israel has been evacuated for months because of indiscriminate rocket attacks from Hezbollah. Hezbollah is an arm of the IRGC, which is more or less at open war with Israel. If either side could have launched an all-out assault (or, I mean, a more conventional all-out assault than this one), they would have done so already.
They lost double digit percentages of their fighting forces, with several thousand additional casualties in non-Hezbollah Lebanese military and paramilitary forces. I'm sure they can duct tape drones together or whatnot, but there are reasons Hezbollah has --- quite notably at this point! lots of stories written! --- not escalated in the south even as the conflict between Iran and Israel heats up.
> Hezbollah is depleted from its disastrous efforts in Syria;
There is an awful lot of reporting stating the opposite of this, and I haven't really seen anything credible questioning the fact that Hezbollah has many thousands of missiles and rockets at the ready, along with a sizable number of competent fighters. In fact, the threat from Hezbollah is widely considered one of the largest deterrents Iran has against a direct attack from Israel.
Despite their potential to harm Israel, the group would almost certainly lose an all out war against the IDF. Many if not most of the members would be killed in such a conflict and Lebanon would be plunged into a war zone. So it's easy to see why Hezbollah would be hesitant to get into a full scale war, despite their combat potential.
Since 10/7 a number of top Israeli officials have advocated for a preemptive assault on Hezbollah. So far they have lost the argument but it still could conceivably happen at any time. Eliminating the looming threat and allowing civilians to return to the north are compelling reasons, but the risk of heavy losses and getting bogged down into another quagmire in Lebanon are serious concerns.
The last time Israel and Hezbollah fought, it was a stalemate.
I read the news in Arabic, there are credible reports of an 8 year old girl being killed in this attack. I haven't seen that yet in English language news. That is a horrible price to pay. But it is part of a calculated risk that, as per those same news sources, killed between 10 to 12 Hezbollah operatives and injured 2700 more.
Stuxnet didn't have a lot of civilian casualties (if any?) but it did cause a lot of monetary damage to civilian companies.
However this was of course unintended, the malware was never meant to make it out to the wider world.
It's implausible that any "civilian" company was involved. Pretty much all companies involved in the Iranian infrastructure, especially covert nuclear projects, are directly or indirectly owned by IRGC.
Yes but Stuxnet escaped to the internet and infected a lot of Western companies. This is in fact how we even know about it at all.
That's the damage I'm talking about.
That's a good summary of the dangers of normalizing the actions that previously were the domain of only terrorists. The world works because most countries and people rejected amoral results-based reasoning and considered such actions in the light of another dimension: morality. It's difficult to define, but there was some sort of consensus. How long those agreements, formal and simply normative, will last remains to be seen. I do not look forward to their further erosion.
It does not make a whole lot of sense to distinguish the explosives packed into the warhead of an AGM-114 Hellfire missile from those of an explosive vest or a compromised pager. What distinguishes terrorism from military action is target selection, not weapons choice.
I cannot see any comment in the immediate sub-thread making a distinction between explosives per se?
Certainly to me I don't see the difference between explosives supplied in a missile produced with US tax-subsidies to arms profiteers or explosives produced by someone else. Except that in the first case US voters have some control over the supply -- not much, but some.
The GP comment is clearly talking about the lack of precision or targeting. Here you may have a point if we consider absolute quantities instead of some relative measurement: a US-taxpayer-supplied-with-profits-to-a-private-company Hellfire missile fired into a refugee camp full of women and children might kill 10 obviously-innocent people for 1 presumed-to-be-a-terrorist-without-any-sort-of-trial person; whereas a pager bomb exploding might blow up the we-dont-know-yet-anything-but-he-was-in-Hezbollah and his ten-year old daughter.
If I were a moral simpleton I might argue that the Hellfire missile murders were worse than the pager murders.
But what do I know? After all hundreds of years of protocols and treaties and norms about this sort of thing are probably just old and in need of being re-envisioned by some clever code jockey.
Do you honestly believe that "protocols and treaties" established "hundreds of years" ago have any bearing on modern conflict? Do you have any arguments that would be persuasive to those of us who believe them to be more or less irrelevant since the Franco-Prussian War? I'm an American. We firebombed Dresden and Tokyo, then got up the next day and made breakfast. Pick another major combatant nationality anywhere on the globe, and I'll tell you a similar story.
By the standards of modern warfare, what happened today was probably weirdly humane.
I wonder what modern humane outcome plays out to a tiny nation state surrounded by arabs they're engaged in these kind of hostilities with. It seems this balance depends on large imbalanced external support, which will be called into question more and more as the USA loses global grip.
It was astonishingly humane especially considering how effective it was:
1.) Communication network completely destroyed (anyone with a working pager in Lebanon has thrown it in the garbage).
2.) Most targets, while severely injured and even blinded, are still alive - I'm sure their families prefer this to them being dead.
3.) If you are an enemy of Israel, what can you even do now? You cannot assume your phones or your furniture or even your cat is safe. Any one of these things could detonate and kill or maim you at any time. And you can't trust anyone in your organization either.
I think this attack coupled with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Ismail_Haniye... Haniyeh assassination (in the presumably safest of safe places for him) has re-established Israel and Mossad as absolutely and utterly dominant.
I deplore zionism, but that doesn't change how humane and effective and incredibly precise this attack was. Probably its humane-ness was not particularly on purpose, and was more a side-effect of the constraints they were working with (hiding explosives in a small pager while still maintaining its correct operation), but that doesn't take away from how much better this is for all the casualties compared to, for example, Hamas casualties in Gaza.
The peace of Westfalia established state sovereignity. That is a cornerstone of international relations, and when it is breached it is usually condemned.
> peace of Westfalia established state sovereignity. That is a cornerstone of international relations
The Westphalian treaties gave France, Sweden and later Russia the explicit right to intercede (i.e. invade) to guarantee the Imperial constitution [1]. (Westphalia was concerned with the Holy Roman Empire.)
Westphalian sovereignty is a myth [2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guarantor_of_the_imperial_co...
[2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-organi...
Historically there has never been any such moral consensus in the Middle East. It's been a continuous series of wars, massacres, and terrorism going back millennia — since long before Hezbollah or the modern state of Israel even existed.
You are assuming they didn't try, which is incorrect. Cyber attacks on water filtration plants attacks were done for example.
I feel this is just one more step away from "wild" globalized products and towards supply chain safety.
I've seen multiple videos of the explosions, even people standing directly next to the target were not hurt.
Contrary to what you said, this is pretty much the ultimate in targeted attacks.
Completely disagree. I cannot think of a more successful, large scale, targeted attack in recent memory. The engineering behind this was incredible.
It was successful clearly, not disagreeing with that. So were Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My point was more that this is a truly significant line that has been crossed for the first time by a major military at this scale. People comparing this to isolated assassinations with booby trapped phones, or to wiretapping and other surveillance, are massively downplaying this.
Hezbollah already attacks civilians indiscriminately for one. Second, "won't someone think of the children" is a tired argument. Hate to be that guy - but maybe this will be a lesson on allowing these terrorists to roam your streets. Avoiding civilian death in a warzone is an impossibility. Limiting it is all you can do. Knowing that, this was an absolutely amazing job at target selection. Of all methods of target selection this is probably the most precise you can get with the exception of snipers, AGM-114-R9X, etc. The psychological damage from this attack alone is probably worth more than any other method. Hezbollah will be crippled at least temporarily and likely afraid to use any technology they don't control the supply chain for.
> which most countries shy away from because it’s so hard to defend against
This is not why. It's shied away from because it's extremely difficult to target effectively without causing mass unwanted causalities and the associated killing mechanism is considered cruel and unusual. "Being hard to defend against" is exactly something factored in with weapons. Why would I want to use a weapon that is easy to defend against? If that's the case, the US would march with clubs and bows, you know, "to make things fair".
> If we try to do what we are best at here at HN
People like Einstein and Oppenheimer would disagree. We are humans first and not tech workers, the best we can do is to try prevent humans tragedies unfolding everyday.
My other thought is that these probably came from the Iranian military, and it’s quite possible the Iranian military puts explosives in them so they can remotely detonate one that falls into enemy hands. And that Isreal simply found out about this and managed to figure out how to activate that.
This is reaching. How would this mechanism even work? If the enemy has control of a communications device then (1) they've had it and you didn't know for some time and (2) they already know how it works. There's no benefit to putting a self-destruct mechanism into such a thing, since if you know it's compromised then you just stop messaging it.
The self-destruct is pointless, because you can't even verify that it was successful and you have no actual technology to protect (unlike say, US military drones which self-destruct to protect technological details of their construction - and the US would still prefer to commit a mission to bombing a crash site to be sure if they can).
Basically you answer your own problem: the most likely outcome of a self-destruct mechanism is that it goes off accidentally against your own forces, or gets exploited - while it would deliver no actual benefit to you.
Which is to say: when analyzing an adversaries likely actions you don't start by assuming they're stupid or irrational (which is different from whether or not their overall goals might be stupid or irrational).
Militaries around the world have robust networks to infiltrate supply chains for sabotage. It’s kind of a basic part of the whole intelligence covert and clandestine operations capabilities expected of a “first world” nation.
Israel is one of the better countries at doing this undetected so, no surprises here.
First thing I thought of were the exploding PCs from Die Hard 4. Back then it was such a ridiculous thing, but here we are ;)
Stuxnet had a much lower body count.
If it's basically a remotely controlled IED via a public communication network, then there's nothing technically interesting about that, really.
But the aspect of some supposedly civilized state staging a mass terror attack via a remotely controlled IEDs, putting suddenly thousands of people, many of them civilians (yes, Hezballah are also civilians, because they're a major political party in Lebanon) into hospital, killing ~10, critically infuring ~200, is way more interesting.
You can generate many questions about that aspect. Like the whole why on both strategic and tactical levels? How does this fit with the international law? Why are people kinda chill about this?
Re the response below: No proof of specific targeting of combatants, yet. No proof of any attempt to not affect bystanders, etc. Yet, there are videos of bombs exploding while people are shopping with children around, etc. Pretty much indiscriminate.
Definitely not battery burnings: https://t.me/hamza20300/293409 these are the scale/type of injuries that this caused. (Two children there just in this single scene in one hospital, so beware.)
No, a mass terror attack would indiscriminately target victims. This is almost entirely opposite -- an organization widely recognized as a terrorist group (1) is narrowly targeted.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_designated_terrorist_g...
Also because one would have to weigh the alternative.
Imagine Israel declared an old fashioned war against Lebanon as response to the missile strikes originated from its territory.
I think the number of civilian casualties of a conventional "legal" war would be much much higher than the collateral damage of this operation.
Now, does that make it "right"? To me war is horror and is to avoid at all cost. Is a smaller horror a cost one's willing to pay to avoid a bigger horror? Hard to say. But I think it's still important to at least try to see things in a broader context otherwise we may never understand why people on the ground make the choices they do.
>Hezballah are also civilians, because they're a major political party in Lebanon
That's an interesting take. Are you saying hamas are also civilians because they're the major political party in gaza?
I would argue that Hamas has gone from being an organised terrorist group to being an idea.
Gaza has a very young population growing up with the current war, some (not all) will be radicalized by what they experienced growing up.
hamas is the governing body of gaza, so any government workers would technically be hamas.
don't confuse post office workers for military personnel just cuz they work for the government.
In this case let's just say that I doubt post office workers are first in line to get brand new, secure, one-way pagers from Hezbollah.
it seems like it's a lot more than just pagers at this point.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lebanon_pager_explosion...
Many of them, yes.
yes.
I find it extremely unlikely that this was done with the native capabilities and equipment in the devices. It would be extremely interesting if it were. A far simpler explanation would be explosives implanted en-route.
The more interesting question is whether any sort of remote-detonate capability was involved, or this was just timed explosives.
If you look at something like this [1], then the obvious way to do this is to replace one of the NiMH batteries with a lithium cell providing the full output voltage, and replace the other cell with the explosive payload.
A basic timer set them off, and installation would be straightforward. You could probably even arrange this to not be distinguishable on X-Ray by playing with the structure of the explosive device so it would look like a battery.
Getting a little fancier, setting your timer up so the pager "waits for a page" by current draw (from say, the buzzer motor) would be a way to try and ensure the user was holding it near their face before it went off.
What's missing in the current reporting is whether this was simultaneous, keyed to a page, or what have you.
[1] https://store.jtech.com/jtech-guestcall-pager-nimh-battery-5...
The implications of weaponising a lithium battery, which seems like what was done, are potentially really significant.
Lithium batteries are everywhere, most of them significantly larger than the one in a small pager. This includes secure environments like military/intelligence facilities and aircraft.
Proof that a lithium battery pack can be weaponised as a bomb, in a way that avoids easy detection, should be a significant concern to anyone who tries to maintain the security of those spaces.
For manufactured cells, integrated safety devices would likely preclude such a fault.
People say they have seen cells explode, but don't realize those are probably highly engineered failure modes (the cells are/need to be specifically designed not to explode).
It's why people are burned by consumer product battery fires, and die from fire, but I think death from explosion of consumer products is rarer.
I don’t think there’s anything in a standard pager to cause an explosion large enough to injure ~3000 people. This is almost certainly an explosive added to them at some point.
Has anyone find the FCC ID or manual on the AR924 Rugged pager? CNN mentions that they sold 220,000 units world wide, including the US. And there's nothing about the thing for both FCC and CE.
Having seen some of the aftermath I find it extremely hard to believe this was the result of overloading batteries. It looks like small grenades exploded in their hands. If lithium batteries can indeed explode like this I would suspect no one would ever carry one again after this. They should certainly be illegal to have on planes for example.
There is no way an unaltered pager has enough potential to explode in any way that could be harmful using a software-based exploit. Unless somehow the BMS (even if there was one) allowed you to short the battery with software, which seems really stupid to design into such a system.
It's supply chain attack meets the physical world, and now might be replicated.
I suspect supply-chain attack (probably started some time ago), combined with a pager signal software hack.
I really hope that they didn't figure out a way to make unmodified kit explode, because it would only be a matter of time, before our devices were blowing up everywhere, as folks do it for the lulz.
I agree on both points and it's worth noting the cell phone in everyone's pocket has a lot more battery in it than a pager does.
IF this was truly done to unmodified pagers, then we ALL probably need to reconsider how we use and carry our phones and what the mAh rating on our batteries implies in the context of a similar attack.
> they didn't figure out a way to make unmodified kit explode
I don’t think so no, just observing the aftermath of each shows that it was modified. Also, assuming it was unmodified way, it will go both ways so I doubt it.
> let’s focus the discussion on the technical aspects of it.
The headline chosen here is already biased: "Dozens of _Hezbollah members_ [..]"
Anyone following this closely can see that plenty other title choices could be used. There are headlines that would be credibly neutral, headlines that favor the IDF, and headlines that favor Hezbollah. HN is currently choosing to go with a non-neutral, non-technical headline for this story. Maybe we should make the headline neutral as well before telling the commenters to focus solely on the technicals?
If you don't understand what I'm referring to, look at some of the downvoted and hidden comments here.
Honestly struggling to comprehend how this one isn't neutral.
As far as we know this was a supply-chain attack specifically on military pagers actively used by Hezbollah, and (right now) it looks like most injured are in fact Hezbollah members (which makes sense, since no one else has any reason to carry such a pager). (With some sad and unfortunate exceptions.)
After I posted my comment the title was updated to be a little bit more neutral.
The previous headline was emphasizing a little too strongly the assumption that this attack was against Hezbollah only, and as you mention there are "exceptions", meaning, civilians and non-militants (including children) were killed and injured.
EDIT: in other words, the headline is/was written with the assumption that whoever was attacked was a member of Hezbollah, but this isn't true.
When half the official death toll are children and medical staff, calling this an attack on "Hezbollah" is a clear form of IDF-leaning bias: https://x.com/AssalRad/status/1836428722381164935
we could also talk about the technical aspects of the nazi gas chambers, but maybe its only human if first we condemn this for what it is, a war crime. i for one am sick of the normalization of it
I wonder what Israel did to ensure that only legitimate targets were harmed by the sabotaged pagers.
Would we be surprised if the answer is “nothing”.
Of course we can read anything we want from the silence, as it’s unlike we’re getting any details about it. Anything in the range of “of course they did, we’re talking about a civilized country” to “of course they didn’t, how could they”.
The fact that these pagers were to be used by Hezbollah is what they did.
These pagers were distributed only to Hezbollah members, these were not just standard pagers anyone could buy.
Do you have a reference for that? And does it explain how Israel's assassins were sure none of the pagers weren't resold, nor given away, nor that someone's kid was playing with it?
Hezbollah also has a massive social services wing, operating hospitals, schools, etc. I'd keep that in mind when hitching my wagon to this line of thinking.
Those people aren't getting a secure one-way pager giving them secret messages.
They use a standard phone.
Nothing in the linked article backs up the implication that only members of Helbollah’s militant wing had these.
It did, however, mention that an 8 year old girl was killed by one of them. Which is a foreseeable consequence of widely distributing a bunch of bombs and then detonating them without regard for who’s nearby.
Some sources are saying that some medics have been victims. Pagers are apparently a very useful resource for emergencies/medics (see motorola website).
The pagers were not secure at all also.
Even though I personally doubt this statement, care to explain how that would possibly be enough? If an explosion happens, everyone in range is hit.
"Enough" to meet what criteria? A couple foot blast on handheld device on a military personnel is brain surgery in comparison to typical rockets with accuracy and blast radii measured in double digit meters
Hezbollah operates a parallel telecommunications network. They are not a terrorist group so much as the de facto government of Lebanon and a parallel armed forces. It is unlikely that anyone unaffiliated with Hezbollah could have used these pagers.
like I don't know, someone's spouse or child? Someone standing next to the thing when it's sitting on a night stand?
Small charges (measured in grams) are extremely local and typically highly directional. They have a distinctive signature that is in evidence here. It isn't like a giant bomb going off.
> everyone in range is hit.
The range is tiny. Go watch some videos, for example this one: https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1836037485492629605
People standing directly next to the target are unharmed.
With the size of these explosions, the "range" seems very small.
you realize they exploded, right? potentially as someone's child was nearby. or playing with it. or in the middle of a grocery story.
That's an impressive supply-chain hack. Spend years showing how insecure modern telecom devices are and scare your enemy into going old-school, receive-only. Set up a shell company to sell pagers to your enemy's shell company. Give them devices implanted with a small explosive charge pointed inward, knowing they will be worn around the waist most of the time.
Hack the backend server, send a coordinated page to all the pagers at the same time. You've just injured and identified most of your enemies, incapacitated them, completely broken their communication network and effectively given you weeks of disarray to do whatever you want to further disrupt them.
You have to hand it to them -- it's a clever strategy with minimal casualties outside of your enemy. This is a Stuxnet-level hack that we'll probably never fully understand.
> You have to hand it to them -- it's a clever strategy with minimal casualties outside of your enemy
I agree it’s clever, but there are reports now of thousands wounded. Feels like a lot of collateral risk, if these people who were targeted were out and about (grocery shopping, bank, etc.)
I have no doubt that innocent civilians have been injured. But it's also worth noting that there are thousands of Hezbollah members, so the number alone doesn't necessarily tell us much about the number of civilians injured. (Similar to the casualty figures that come out of Gaza.)
I hate the idea of any innocent civilian being injured. But it might also be instructive to consider the alternative: if Israel wanted to achieve similar results via a conventional war against Hezbollah, it seems virtually guaranteed that far more innocent people would have been injured and killed—not to mention the Israeli civilians on the other side, whose lives also matter.
> if Israel wanted to achieve similar results via a conventional war against Hezbollah, it seems virtually guaranteed that far more innocent people would have been injured and killed
"It's OK that Israel causes excessive amounts of civilian casualties, because in the alternative scenario Israel would also cause excessive amounts of civilian casualties"
I don't find it very persuasive to simply assume that the casualties are "excessive." Whether they are actually excessive is really the whole issue. As of right now, there is no strong evidence that I'm aware of that the injuries from today's attack are "excessive" much less those of a different purely hypothetical attack.
And even then: to judge whether casualties are excessive requires an understanding of the goal to be achieved, which is almost completely absent from this discussion.
I think the problem many people have is that Israel's goals entirely revolve around killing people.
That is: If your goal is to murder someone, and you accidentally kill an innocent bystander in committing that murder, the number of civilians killed is infinitely too high. The number of acceptable total deaths is 0.
I understand this is idealistic. But it's the judgement many will choose to make. For the record, no I don't only think it's bad when Israel murders people.
I don’t understand. It seems clear enough to me that Israel’s goal is to prevent Hezbollah from continuing to launch rockets at Israeli towns in the north. Killing is a means to that end. One may disagree with that choice of means, but I don’t see how you can claim that “Israel’s goals entirely revolve around killing people.”
That being said, you might think that killing is never an appropriate means of achieving anything. If so, fair enough. But I think that’s a tough position to maintain when you are actively under attack.
"Israels goal"
I think Israel consists of quite different people with different goals.
Some of them have the goal, to own all of the land, because they believe it is their religious duty - and some of them are indeed part of the government.
And some of them just want to live in peace.
And on the other side it seems quite similar to me. Probably with a higher percentage of ruthless killers, but desperation tend to make people ruthless.
It really isn't a simple conflict that can be solved with more killing, unless we are talking about genocidal levels of killings.
> It seems clear enough to me that Israel’s goal is to prevent Hezbollah from continuing to launch rockets at Israeli towns in the north. Killing is a means to that end. One may disagree with that choice of means, but I don’t see how you can claim that “Israel’s goals entirely revolve around killing people.”
Well, let me start with the necessary disclaimer: First, I'm not an expert on geopolitics or Israel or the ME. That's probably obvious. It could be that my coarse understanding is just completely wrong, but I think it's a broadly correct picture which is lacking lots of detail.
I also don't know much about the conflict with Hezbollah specifically, but what I see from Israel tells me that the prevention of rocket smay not be their top goal. I also believe that even if it is, killing is a means that I disagree with!
The rhetoric I hear about Hamas (not Hezbollah, so it may be different there, but I suspect it's not substantially so) from the Netanyahu administration is about murder. Protecting Israelis is a means to an end; the end goal is to kill every single member of Hamas (and, reading between the lines, the expulsion of all Palestinians). It's widely reported that many Israelis openly feel Netanyahu is not making meaningful efforts to recover hostages, and I've also understood that significant lapses in Israeli security were what made the Oct 7 attack last year possible. Meanwhile, some of the things Netanyahu says about Hamas and Palestine sounds genocidal, frankly.
Again, could be wrong about all that. Every word on the subject is biased in one way or another. Additionally, I know very little of the situation with Hezbollah, so I'm extrapolating: The prioritization of murder over safety that I see in the war with Hamas demonstrates to me that Israel is not making choices in the utmost interest of safety, generally, if the murder of its enemies is on the table.
Of course, I'll also reiterate that even if all of the above is wrong, their means are unacceptable to me: I don't believe one of the most powerful nations on the planet needs to murder its impoverished neighbors to keep itself safe. It's much easier than diplomatic and nonlethal approaches, yes; but I don't think it's necessary.
Thanks for the thorough explanation. I think there are two things worth adding to your picture that distinguish Hezbollah from Hamas.
The first is that about 60,000 Israelis are currently displaced because they lived in a zone that Hezbollah is targeting with rocket attacks. (Which, FWIW, appear to intentionally target civilians.) Many of them have been living in hotels for nearly a year. Just yesterday, the Israeli cabinet updated its official war goals to include allowing residents to return to their homes in the north. What I hear is that this is now an issue roughly on par with returning the hostages from Gaza in terms of its salience within Israel.
The second is that Hezbollah is far more powerful than Hamas ever was. Unlike Hamas, I think Israel must recognize that elimination of Hezbollah is not a realistic aim.
Appreciate the measured input. Those are both pretty important points and I don't dispute it's a very different situation from the war with Hamas.
Based.
At some point you have to ignore these perspectives because they are wrong. Look into the founding of Hezbollah. It isn't a secret, their stated goals is to expulse Jews. It cannot get much more plain as that.
The positions in this war are not equal.
> The positions in this war are not equal.
Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying. Israel is one of the most powerful nations on Earth, Hezbollah is not even close. I don't think genocide is an appropriate response to the hatred of a much, much weaker enemy.
Hezbollah is a militia and has more manpower and equipment than the Lebanese army. They get high tech supplies from allies like Iran and they have more military power than a lot of the surrounding countries, who also fear them for that reason.
They aren't a civilian force and they are a serious military threat, especially with the backing of Iran.
> I don't think genocide is an appropriate response to the hatred of a much, much weaker enemy.
I'd challenge you to provide a reasonable argument that Israel is committing genocide in Lebanon.
Sorry, I meant that I don't believe they are, but I believe they would if it became opportune. And I'm not aware of any indication otherwise; it can be assumed they would choose against it, but I don't make that assumption.
Genocide is a term generally related to civilians. Hezbollah has been designated a terrorist organization by the USA.
Why isn't it better to cause fewer civilian casualties &/or those of lesser severity than a shooting fight or missile attack?[1] Given the situation has already degenerated to its current state where fighting is the status quo and all options lead to innocent casualties then minimizing those is the horrible "OK" option. Not okay in the sense of desirable, not okay in the sense that things should never have degenerate to this level to begin with, only okay as the less horrible option.
[1] Videos show the explosions highly limited in their ability to cause injuries as bad as a bullet to anyone ever a foot or two away from the explosions, much less than I would expect from anything more conventional.
Israel isn't causing any civilian casualties in South Lebanon. Hezbollah declaring war on Israel by firing rockets onto civilian areas since the 8th of October caused them.
People keep bringing up the same argument about dropping nukes on Japanese cities, and it seems like the world just accepted it.
my family was evacuated due to incessant rocket fire in the golan heights, hezzbollah has been firing indiscriminately since 10/8 do you have any alternative?
Terrorism isn't okay. We should have that standard. Just as violence against in general isn't okay.
I guess the real advantage for Israel here is that they attack in a country they are not at war with without starting a war with that country.
Israel is definitely at war with Hezbollah.
Hezbollah is of course not a country (though they're a proxy for Iran), but they occupy parts of Lebanon, so you can't attack them without attacking Lebanon.
I wonder if people are unaware that Hezbollah and Israel have been shooting rockets at each other for months. There are roughly 1000 deaths in the conflict and hundreds of thousands of civilians evacuated. If we’re talking about harms to civilians, this incident is probably small compared to the war overall.
These are Hezbollah pagers and Hezbollah only exists to terrorize Israel and it is their sole purpose. Of course there is still a danger of collateral risk, but I don't think it can get much more targeted.
"Hezbollah only exists to terrorise Israel and it is their sole purpose." This is a very curious take, what makes you think a group of hundreds of thousands of people, investing so much time, efforts and resources, exposing themselves and their loved ones to fatal risks just to terrorise Israel?
Eh, the history isn't a secret and the reason is that they are religious fundamentalists:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezbollah
> According to Hezbollah's Deputy-General, Naim Qassem, the struggle against Israel is a core belief of Hezbollah and the central rationale of Hezbollah's existence.
I tend to believe their own statement on this matter. Where do you see wiggle room for another argument? Or even to find the argument "curious"? What is curious about it?
Only on HN, “This is curious. Why would people do an irrational thing similar to the irrational things that people have done for the entirety of human existence?”
A mystery indeed.
Looks like Lebanese civilians have indeed been injured/maimed; but it appears cool to some since it is an "impressive supply-chain hack", so let's leave it at that and not call it terrorism.
You could've labeled it terrorism had Lebanon and Israel weren't at war with each other over the past 12 months, and had the people carrying those devices were random uninvolved civilians.
If you were to consider the fact that Hezbollah has been shelling Israeli cities and civilians on a daily basis for the past 12 months (killing many, also children, and driving hundreds of thousands of people out of their homes), with the UN peacekeeping force failing to keep Hezbollah north of the Litani river - then perhaps you would understand that this is likely as close as you can get to a "precision strike" on an enemy you're at war with.
This may in-fact be the most precise military strike on an enemy paramilitary group in the history of modern warfare.
You either have a very unrealistic idea of what a war actually looks like (0% civilians casualties or injuries), or an agenda.
The unfortunate thing is that regardless of politics, this will be seen as further escalation that ratchets up the risk of greater regional conflict. All wars eventually end, its just a question of how long, and how much death (both militarily and civilian) will be endured by everyone in the region. I hope there are diplomatic possibilities to de-escalate, but it seems those windows are closing.
I don't know - it would seem that the wars there don't end, it's just continuous with intermittent slow downs.
Let's just say, I don't believe war is a cover for terrorism against any peoples, be it in the West or East, Arab or Caucasian.
Fair enough, and thanks for being open about this. With this in mind, all I can say is that your original comment is based on 100% emotion and 0% analysis and rationality.
Do you think that any military action with civilian impact constitutes terrorism?
no war has ever been waged without collateral damage.
war waged without collateral damage:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War
At least one innocent farmer just trying to safeguard their farm might have suffered contusions and destruction of property!
"Farmers attempted to herd the emus using trucks, but this proved ineffective; one truck even crashed after hitting an emu"
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Emu-War
do you realize that nurses in hospital, civil servants workers are among people carrying this device? That not all, not even majority of Hizbollah personnel have no military responsibility whatsoever?
There's absolutely no reason for uninvolved, random and peaceful civilians to be carrying a classified wartime-ready pager issued by a paramilitary terrorist organization. If you were carrying the device you're either Hezbollah, or cooperating with them - which makes you a legitimate military target.
Israel has given Lebanon and Hezbollah enough ultimatums to stop the aggressions. This is what happens when diplomacy fails.
> If you were carrying the device you're either Hezbollah, or cooperating with them - which makes you a legitimate military target.
Or you were standing in line next to a guy holding one while waiting to buy groceries. It’s clearly indiscriminate to the collateral damage.
But we already have videos of people standing in very close proximity to the devices being detonated - and not getting hurt. In-fact, many of the people carrying the device in their pockets ended up not sustaining life-threatening injuries.
I'm not saying civilians weren't hurt by this. But I'm also saying that no war has 0% civilian casualties. Those two countries are at war with each other.
I like your lack of proportions.
This war is about Hezbollah and Hamas shelling civilians in Israel. Like hundreds of rockets per night. If, to stop that, it may harm a few civilians who are waiting next to Hezbollah members,
…you would let people keep shelling civilians by hundreds and hundreds of rockets?
How do you choose your actions, do you always support the guys who cause the maximum deaths? How does it work, “indiscriminate damage” is as soon as a person is inconvenienced while they were holding Hezbollah’s grocery bags? Shouldn’t they … distance themselves?
Pun unintended. But it’s a very good question. Shouldn’t they distance themselves from active murderers?
This won't do anything meaningful to reduce civilian deaths. Less than 0.1% of Lebanon injured, and 10x that number now even more enraged. Not meaningfully repeatable either, won't create significant attrition
Stoking the flames of death is all.
This sends a message to Hezbollah and Lebanon. "Last chance to turn around". After 12 months of back-and-forth, and all attempts at diplomacy failing.
Beirut can end up just like Gaza, but Israel has been restraining itself. Not for much longer.
> Israel has been restraining itself. Not for much longer.
If this is what a restrained Israel looks like, the god help us all.
Gaza is not restraint. This pager operation proves that. Gaza is genocide.
The massive disruption of Hezbollah's communication network may cripple them enough to shorten the duration of the conflict, and possibly help turn public sentiment from Lebonese civilians into pressure to find a way to end things. The civilians are the people who on average do not feel strongly enough to fight, and may have large number pissed that a group-- even if they believe in its cause-- has brought violence to their communities through a surprise attack against a more powerful enemy. More than half of the Lebonese population believe there is no military solution to the overall dispute: https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/shadow-h...
> …you would let people keep shelling civilians by hundreds and hundreds of rockets?
I said no such thing though do find it interesting that any questioning of the methods used by one party is interpreted as blanket acceptance of all methods used by the other.
> Pun unintended. But it’s a very good question. Shouldn’t they distance themselves from active murderers?
How could they possibly know? I’ve never been in line for a sandwich and thought to ask if the person in front of me might spontaneously explode.
If they were truly indiscriminate and and indifferent to collateral damage, there are far easier and more effective ways to kill a few dozen people in Lebanon.
The whole complex and contrived attack speaks of tying to minimize collateral damage.
All available evidence suggests there's nothing "classified" or "wartime ready" about these - they were your basic, cheap, totally unencrypted POCSAG/Flex pager. The same as any other pager carried by doctors and all the other people who use them - aside from the hidden explosives, of course.
I doubt that was the case for these specifically hacked and weaponized devices. The operation appears to be ingenious and precisely layered in design. It very specifically targeted a group of people who were first convinced to ditch their mobile devices because they were hackable by Israel. Then the target group was provided the weaponized devices. They were bulk triggered at a specific moment of time. The weaponized device (while certainly lethal in some cases) was seemingly designed to maim and minimize damage beyond the person holding the device. And… perhaps most importantly, they were expected to be kept in a front pocket increasing the likelihood of physically emasculating the target group. It’s the ultimate “you don’t want to fuck with us”.
Its disturbing as hell…but brilliant.
Terrorism definition is independent of whether there is ongoing war or not, lets not divert the subject with simple whataboutism.
We all know what happened, on both sides, including deaths of tens of thousands of civilians including thousands of palestinian children who did fuck nothing to anybody, just were born at bad place at bad time.
What would be enough kill ratio israeli : palestinian civilian, or even better israeli civilian : palestinian kid/baby that would satiate Israeli government to stop the war? Very conservative estimates put deaths of direct US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to around 500k, meaning its 500:3 ratio and factual defeat of US army to withdraw and cut losses. So thats the threshold of civilized western world? Israel already surpassed that long time ago.
They can't and won't win with Hamas and they know it, its exactly same situation as Taliban, ISIS etc. Regroup, strike back, stronger, smarter, better equipped, more motivated. Spiral of death can go on and on till there is nobody standing on neither side.
If I had to choose where the next nuclear detonation happens it would be for me 50:50 Ukraine : Israel, and this is how you get there.
Violence has been probably the biggest driver of innovation for us as a species. I would categorize thousands of weapons as "cool" viewed dispassionately. Aircraft carriers, Fighter Jets, Cruise missiles. They are all definitely cool when viewed from afar.
By that reasoning even Churchill is a terrorist.
Which they would probably agree to. Purists do not care for practical matters such arbitrating what would be the best course of action in order to have the less casualties because for them the only acceptable number of casualties is zero because any war and casualty is immoral.
I have sympathy for this kind of reasoning because it's been mine for a long time. There is something important for the preservation of the self in refusing all kinds of wrong in the world. The problem is that by refusing to engage with the world, they can affect nothing (and probably accept that, everybody should just stop being immoral, that's easy in their mind)
If you include his treatment of subjects of the British Raj, there’s plenty of folks that will agree with that labeling.
Both things can be true
> Hack the backend server, send a coordinated page to all the pagers at the same time.
You likely don’t even need to hack anything if you coordinate based on time. A built in clock would eliminate the need for any external signal and work in a, no pun intended, dead zone.
If the pager itself is hacked, the software could also pretend to receive a page a moment before detonation to maximize the chance the device is held with the receiver in the open.
It most likely just received a code message that triggered the device.
if you physically control the pager I don't even think it's called hacking anymore. you can change the hardware and software willy nilly. put an extra SIM that you control in there, and call it. put a radio receiver. a timer. heck, a dog whistle audio detector, you blow it and they blow up. infinite possibilities.
Pagers don't have SIMs, they are simply programmed with a "Cap Code" which is basically the address of the pager.
Pagers can be programmed with multiple cap codes, and can function differently based on which cap code address receives a message. For instance, a single cap code could be programmed to just vibrate the pager, vs an audible alert.
Pagers are sent out via very high power distributed transmitters as one way transmissions simulcasted transmissions.
The format is typically:
[CAP CODE] - Message
That's literally it.
I mean they probably did hack to some degree the default software/hardware in the pager to get it to do something nonstandard. I doubt they have access to the full source code and build stack of the OG pager, so even just modifying the software running on it to do something different is indeed a hack.
Is the pager thing really recent? Because if this was done before the current war they couldn't have known when they wanted it to explode.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/pagers-drones-how-...
It wasn't time based. Videos show the pager making some kind of signal or message that caused the person holding it to look at it.
That doesn't follow. You could have a timer that causes the pager to vibrate as if it had received a message or an alarm had rung. That would make the attack simpler, in that one wouldn't also have to compromise (or risk leaving traces in) the phone system to activate thousands of pagers.
Pagers just simply have an address (called a Cap Code) to receive messages. It's like a mailbox number. A pager can be programmed with usually up to 4 Cap Codes at a time.
If I was speculating on what happened, I would bet that the pager had 3 Cap Code addresses programmed, the mailbox cap code the owner of the pager expected to have for receiving messages, a cap code that was the same programmed in all the pagers to that functioned normally to received messages, and then the 3rd cap code programmed in all the pagers that when receiving a specific message triggered the explosive.
The folks responsible simply sent a message to the 2nd cap code to get all the pagers to go off, presumably to get the targets to get the pagers out and look at them, and then immediately the trigger message next to the 3rd cap code to detonate the explosive.
I'd imagine a backup timer, with the ability to trigger early if required for strategic or tactical purposes.
I almost surprised this wasn't coordinated with (or saved for) an incursion into Libanon. That seems to be something Israel wants to do, and this would be a great way to disrupt the defense at the most critical moment.
A timer is too risky. The was done months in advance - what if the war was over?
I think this was meant for intelligence gathering - now that they know who the important operatives are, you go backwards using video and see where they went and who they talked to.
Seems easier to install a transmitter and GPS in the supposedly receive-only device. Then it could actually track people and show where they had been. It could store up readings and only transmit while the device was in motion at around walking speed, with signal strength above Y. That means the person was probably outdoors and moving, thus probably ot being swept by bug detectors. Well maybe not any more, now that everyone is thinking that way ;).
Oh I think it's absolutely preparation for an incursion, as are today's follow-up attacks.
I’m saying even that could be time based to ensure it does not depend on the signal being received. Just pretend you got a message and add a delay of a couple seconds.
It could be, but it would be very risky. These pagers would have been distributed months in advance. How could you possibly know the perfect time to set them off?
And since pagers are already receiving remote messages, it doesn't make sense to do it any other way.
> You have to hand it to them
Given the context and peculiar choice of words, this reminds me of a classic @dril tweet
https://x.com/dril/status/831805955402776576?s=46
TBH, I would "hand it to" any group who pulled off this particular attack, even ISIL.
>You've just injured and identified most of your enemies, incapacitated them, completely broken their communication network and effectively given you weeks of disarray to do whatever you want to further disrupt them.
And affected their recruitment. Because of how pagers are worn, a significant number of injuries are going to be genital injuries.
Given, that your primary recruits are young men, that is important.
In that demographic, the young men may actually fear non-lethal genital injuries more than they actually fear death.
> minimal casualties
We'll see about that. Some of the footage indicates the targets were all just out and about in public. I think it's likely there will be collateral damage. I assume it didn't happen since it's not being reported, but what if one of them was on a plane?
I doubt you can receive any signal on the plane. In the airport maybe.
Just Mossad Mossadin’.
FWIW, AP is reporting over 2800 injured, 200 seriously, with only 8 dead.
Seeing some video from one of the hospitals, there's a lot of variety to the injuries. It looks like some people were looking at the pager when it exploded (injury to face and hand), some were wearing it on hip, some in pocket, some probably in an across-the-chest fanny pack.
It would seem this attack has managed to kill some, maim many, tag all, terrorize, and disrupt.
The shell company isn't a strict requirement, and I'd wager less likely. Infiltrating the delivery process would be easier and would instead require knowing about the pager purchase and being able to swap the actual package for an alternative package. Theoretically all of this is possible with some data interception to discover the pager order, a team to construct the exploding pagers, a person to deliver the exploding pagers, and a person to intercept the actual pagers (which could be the same person delivering the exploding pagers).
Someone will eventually spill the beans on how it was done. They always do.
30 years from now, maybe.
It is a well known hack.
> Hack the backend server, send a coordinated page to all the pagers at the same time.
I worked on these before and I don't think you'd need to hack anything at all to send a page. Its just a broadcast. Especially if you had access to the receiver as they seem to have had, I can't imagine they compromised the actual Hezbollah transmission tower.
Yeah I mean it's basically just like mass-sending a spam text, no? All they need to know is the phone numbers of the pagers. Or even just the number range from which the pager numbers were assigned, and then spam the entire range. Spammers have simple enough software that can do all this; it doesn't seem like a sticking point for Mossad.
It Depends... Sure you could spam the pager system triggering them one by one, but because how pagers work you could trigger them all at the same time.
Pagers are basically just a receiver of a One-to-Many network. A pager will receive all pages being broadcast as they are "listen only" devices. As the pagers don't talk back to the service provider the SP doesn't know which transmitter to use, so the SP will broadcast the pages out across their whole network. The circuity/software of the pager will then filter out only the messages intended for that pager out of all the pages it receives. To reach pagers out of range/switched off the SP would just repeat the page for a period of time.
(note: for message privacy you can add encryption to the message but back in the day that didn't happen, and you could just pull clear text out of the air.)
This "receiver only" style of device allowed pagers to be low power and would run for a very long time on a single AAA battery (or even on a watch battery, because they built a pager into a watch! The Timex Beepwear... Oh I so wanted one as a kid!). But it has the benefit that because they are one-way/"listen only" you can't track them because they are not communicating back to the mothership! It would be like trying to track an AM/FM radio in a car.
If you are adding an "add-on board" to the device, you could tap the receiver of the pager and do your own decoding of the pages. So you could have the add-on board trigger on a "certain message for this pager only" but you could also trigger on "a certain message sent to pager serial 1234567890".
If you knew the phone number assigned to the pager with the serial 1234567890 (because you just so happened to have paid for service for that pager by what ever clandestine means you wanted) you could trigger them all with a single phone call from a public phone or a disposable cell phone to a pager not even associated to the target group of devices.
EDIT: Just a note to say 2 way pagers do exist, this type of pager allows the pager to confirm receipt of a page and even send their own pages to other pagers, but I would suspect that the type of pager being used in this case is the one-way type pager because its reported they were using them because they are harder to track.
I dont think you have to hand it to them. I just think that they have to know who the people are. And a code has to be uploaded to the pagers that cause the explosion.
There have been several presentations on this before. It was for old cell phones.
> minimal casualties outside of your enemy.
"Thousands injured." I'm not convinced it was as super-targeted as you claim.
FWIW, Hezbollah has thousands of members.
From Wikipedia [1]:
> Hezbollah does not reveal its armed strength. The Dubai-based Gulf Research Centre estimated in 2006 that Hezbollah's armed wing comprises 1,000 full-time Hezbollah members, along with a further 6,000–10,000 volunteers.[200] According to the Iranian Fars News Agency, Hezbollah has up to 65,000 fighters.[201] In October 2023, Al Jazeera cited Hezbollah expert Nicholas Blanford as estimating that Hezbollah has at least 60,000 fighters, including full-time and reservists, and that it had increased its stockpile of missiles from 14,000 in 2006 to about 150,000.
And this is just the armed portion.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezbollah
Israel probably knows from the number of pagers ordered (and probably from spying on their pages' contents, since if you're going to mount this sophisticated a supply-chain attack to plant bombs in a device, you might as well also plant spyware) just how many active members Hezbollah has [or had, since many of them are now inactive members].
You underestimate how many members Hezbollah has, and also, how unreliable these kinds of initial reports tend to be.
Minimal what? They just indiscriminately bombed anyone near anyone with this branded pager. It's really disgusting to see you marveling at mass civilian destruction or terrorism.
Another example of why outsourcing manufacturing is a national security concern, and how the absolute free market can lead "winners" to harm themselves by chasing "success" at all costs.
Arguably, it's off-topic, though I agree with the point. Lebanon has been struck by poverty, and as a result, they might have far fewer choices when it comes to providers in general. Manufacturing within Lebanon or trading with neighboring countries might not be affordable for them.
It’s important to take a step back before generalizing an economic or political statement that may not be applicable in other contexts. There are little chances that the supply chain in Lebanon is in the same state as Europe countries' ones, for instance. Thus, this is not another example.
Just because something is not affordable doesn't mean its affordable alternative is a viable option, especially when information asymmetries caused by foreign manufacture obscure plastic explosives in the devices or whatever triggered these.
It is the same attitude. "Outsourcing is the only way we can be competitive" / "Buying these cheap pagers is the only way we can afford it"
Do you think manufacturing pagers in Lebanon is a viable alternative?
The idea of the majority of manufacturing being external to a country is a little under 100 years old, yet people talk as if it is unthinkable.
Unthinkable, or at least not feasible, in the sense of supporting the current level of technological advancement and average quality of life in many countries.
lebanon has an economy that's currently in shambles, and its never been known for its productive capacity. even if they wanted to start making simple comms devices it might rely on infrastructure that they can't invest in, and take tech/capital they have not accumulated
it would be more realistic for them to receive it from the iran but there might be political hurdles to this and it would end up costing the iranians as hezbollah can't be expected to pay much for it
100 years ago Lebanon didn’t have running water and still had slavery. The Middle East hasn’t been a producer of goods, even domestically, since antiquity.
Except for oil, the Middle East produces allot of oil and has for quite some time.
I wouldn’t count it as a good produced though. It’s just a commodity pulled out of the ground and processed elsewhere (largely in the US). It requires no ingenuity or hard work, just the luck of being on top of oil fields due to geographic peculiarity.
Australia: <puppet looking sideways meme>
100 years ago there were no pagers or mobile phones I guess, or any other kind of modern advanced tech.
No, there were engines that were capable of flight, guns capable of rapid fire, television technology and radios.
That was "advanced modern technology" then, and as the passage of time has marched forward, what we consider modern changes - so what's your point?
How many of TVs were there back then? I can tell you that very few in my country, now everybody has a smartphone.
Also I can tell you, no airplanes or TVs were built in my country either. They never were, 100 years ago, 50, 20 or nowadays.
So when you said “The idea of the majority of manufacturing being external to a country” you must have meant the US.
Undoubtedly, this attack has proven that it certainly is, at whatever cost.
Doesn't matter, they could have intercepted a shipment and done the same thing
It does matter if it would have been much more difficult to intercept the shipment that never left Lebanon.
100% this.
This almost reads like science fiction, what an incredible attack from a technical POV. A couple of thoughts:
1. The beepers were compromised and have been for a long time. I don't know how easy it is to exfiltrate data from them if they are receive-only devices. At any rate it shows that Israel is capable of intercepting and manipulating low-tech comms. What's left for Hezbollah to use?
2. The next step is to hack into hospital record systems and get a list of all patients admitted today.
> 1. The beepers were compromised and have been for a long time.
Where did you see this? Sources are saying that Hezbollah recently upgraded their pagers with the American University of Beirut on August 29:
https://x.com/gazanotice/status/1836082218805891360
Why would Israel have the ability to wipe out a good chunk of Hezbollah for years and just sat on it until now?
They are claiming 2750 injuries:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/9/17/dozens-of-hezbollah...
> Hezbollah recently upgraded their pagers with the American University of Beirut
Please do not conflate Hezbollah and AUB.
The claim is that AUB medical school pagers were replaced a week or so ago. This is either pure coincidence, false or fake news to imply that AUB has Israeli operatives, or indeed that the pagers used were compromised and that the USA was aware of the impending attack and did not want to harm AUB medical staff - who probably are mostly not connected with Hezbollah.
Further reading: https://x.com/AUBMC_Official/status/1836086847153320148
> USA was aware of the impending attack
This is the most obvious reading, given that Israel has been indiscriminate about targeting hospitals in Gaza for the past year.
I wasn't thinking years, but months but I didn't know about the recent upgrade. At any rate, if the pagers allowed any data exfiltration they have been collecting that data since whenever the last upgrade was.
The reason for using pagers instead of phones is that they are receivers only, they do not transmit, therefore they cannot be localized.
So no data exfiltration was possible using the pagers. The only purpose of the modified pagers was to maim or kill their possessors, by detonating all of them simultaneously.
Some kinds of receivers can be localized because they convert input frequencies to a standard internal frequency for more convenient processing. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superheterodyne_receiver#Local...
It's how the TV detectors work in countries, such as the UK, that charge a license fee for TVs.
Military radios can't use this common technique because of the risk of detection.
I suspect pagers only receive on 1 or at most a few frequencies. If that's correct, they wouldn't need that technique.
It is still way more difficult to localize a local oscillator (especially one that's trying even slightly to shield itself) than something trying to transmit to a tower a few miles away.
We are talking tiny signals here, modern RF frontends don't leak meaningful amounts of RF, otherwise it would knacker batterylife.
So they missed incapacitating a hospital, which changed to smart phones. Are you sure it was Mossad?
This makes an assumption that Israel cares about making it's list of targets as small as possible. Israel has shown over and over again that it is happy casting a very wide net when labelling people as legitimate targets, using fuzzy machine learning to label large numbers of people without any direct evidence. Israel also has a higher acceptance of the deaths of innocents than any other western aligned & supplied nation, literally happy if dozens or more civilians are killed in order to kill one member of Hamas or Hezbollah. They or their proxies then blame their opponents for the deaths of innocents, ignoring that the accepted rules of war are that civilian deaths should be minimized.
For sources, search for "Israel Lavender system" and pick your media source of choice.
Unfortunately innocent people were also harmed, don’t think a straight list will serve anyone
Honestly I doubt Israel/Mossad doesn’t know who is in Hezbollah, i think this is more of a direct attack (obviously) mixed with scare/terror benefit
I think the value is in knowing the network and cross-reference against it. Innocent bystanders or people who happened to just go to the hospital today will probably fall off during this process. Not to mention that you can filter out by the type of injury to get a more accurate list.
Its quite simple to filter out Hesbolah from those injured. If it is fighting age male, then he is Hesbloah.
Yikes the "list of patients" thing is scariest part of all of this: if they feed that into some monster AI that creates new targets... I can only imagine the diminishing accuracy of who is really deserving of being targets
But that is exactly what modern AI-era big data warfare would look like. By its nature, and by choice, less accuracy / more innocent targets, but oh well
It’s hard to believe none of these beepers have failed before this and the explosives found by a beeper repair person
I heard a story according to which a similar scheme was used in the Algerian war of independence, so these is more retro than scifi. Radio sets were left by the French military for the Algerians to grab. The explosive was hidden in the frame and components, and the trigger was a specific audio frequency. The device looked exactly like a stock military radio set if you disassembled it. So it's not that scifi.
I am for some reason reminded of this classic scene from The Wire [1] where a detective sells a trove of preemptively wiretapped burner cell phones to a drug organization
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDalKxcLQC8
Dark Wire by Joseph Cox came out this earlier in the summer that covers the 2010s version of this with an Android phone company being stood up as a replacement for Blackberries
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59644256-dark-wire
Really good book, I've just finished it a few weeks ago and can recommend it.
The Australian Federal Police and the US FBI launched a similar attack a few years ago where they sold a few thousand phones to underworld figures. The phones had an apparently encrypted and hidden chat app pre-installed on them which was feeding all the messages and data to the police.[0]
[0]: https://www.afp.gov.au/about-us/history/unique-stories/opera...
Also related, but rather a malware attack: Europol/French Police compromising all Encrochat phones in 2020.
For those who don't know, "EncroChat was a Europe-based communications network and service provider that offered modified smartphones allowing encrypted communication among subscribers. It was used primarily by organized crime members to plan criminal activities."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EncroChat
Amir Tsarfati on Telegram: The updated numbers:
4000 wounded of which 400 in critical conditions
Al Jazeera from a Lebanese security source:
The pagers were brought to Lebanon 5 months ago. They were boobytrapped in advance. Each device contained an explosive weighing no more than 20 grams.
Who exactly is Amir Tsarfati and why is this a trusted source for numbers? I can't find anything reliable about him by search engine.
20 grams that's wild. You could only produce these kinds of effects from a 'military grade' explosive like CL-20 or similar.
20 grams of C4 or similar plastic explosive would be more than adequate to produce the effects seen. CL-20 wouldn't be a good choice for this deployment: it's not particularly stable for rough handling even with a good phlegmatizing blend, and tends to decompose at the temps one would expect a pager to be exposed to (hot car, etc).
That's a fair point my knowledge of explosive chemicals only stems from conventional missile-based warheads and propellants. It's very possible a different explosive was used.
C4 would be easily detectable by spectrometers, including at the airports, wouldn’t it?
The word on X is it was Pentaerythritol Tetranitrate (PETN): https://x.com/MattWGraver/status/1836093195240800522 (not me)
per a calculator on unsaferguard.org 20g of RDX
Injury/Fatality to Personnel Range (m) Fatal Distance 0.64 Lung Damage 1.02 Eardrum Rupture 2.63
So apparently, it must be less than 20 g of RDX, and/or a weaker explosive: if the fatal distance was within 0.64 meters, there would be significantly more reported deaths.
And given where pagers are typically kept, future pro-creation of many wounded will be in doubt.
This seems like it would have the potential for a lot of collateral damage due to the possibility that modified pagers might enter general distribution. That is to say, how do they insure that a given shipment of pagers are only going to Hezbollah as opposed to some of them going to people like aid workers?
I suspect that is an intentional side effect against the whole pager network. It is now totally compromised which means they can no longer use passive channels as a communication medium. This effectively shut down their comms structure.
As for aid workers, they mostly use whatever low ball android phones they can get their hands on I know someone who volunteered out there and everyone uses them and Telegram). I don't think that will impact them at all.
Well, now that everyone knows it's feasible to hide a small bomb inside a pager, what's to stop people from checking their pagers for tiny explosives before using them?
Well nothing which is why people are spreading stuff about it being a hack causing the batteries to explode. Which disrupts everything with a network connection and battery. Adds confusion to the situation.
As I said elsewhere this is a one shot attack. They would never be able to pull this off again at this scale.
It's effects might have been intended as much for psychological as lethal results. This specific vector may be a one-and-done tactic but Hezbollah members would be foolhardy not to regard every electronic device that is, at minimum, younger than $pager_age with suspicion. At this point even if it's a wired copper POTS line I'd be asking the intern to take my calls and shout things out from a few rooms away.
Agree on the one shot thing. Makes you wonder if they got what they wanted, and if someone's pulling out their hair over wasting this attack...
Can the average person tell the difference between a pager battery and a bomb professionally made to look like a pager battery?
You only need to vet what the inside of a pager should look like once, and spread the knowledge around... using them will become more of a hassle, but not entirely impossible.
The tampered pager likely looks nearly identical, and even un-tampered pagers will vary a little bit from manufacturing. It's possible an expert might be able to visually distinguish that a particular strand of wire is the wrong gauge or the soldering pattern suggests it wasn't made on the appropriate machine, but there shouldn't be something obvious.
presumably the only difference between an explosive-laden battery and a normal battery is it's capacity. All else will appear identical. And tearing down the battery to inspect it destroys the battery.
Well usually what you do here is start randomly sampling.
Lot's of pager batteries are the shrink-wrapped cylinders with 2+ cells, so I'm guessing it might be possible to dress up one of those cells as a dummy w/ explosives instead.
Probably not but the average person can buy a pager with a replaceable battery and buy a new one over the counter.
Assuming the stock of replaceable batteries is large enough to handle them all being replaced simultaneously, that the replacement batteries are not likewise compromised, and that the battery is indeed the compromised component.
Realistically just replacing the pagers is not only safer but also probably cheaper.
I'm not sure how many bomb techs they have around, but I'd be pretty afraid to personally open something I suspected to have a bomb in it.
Who uses pagers? Aid workers carry phones. The pagers are deliberate opsec move for Hezbollah.
I've used them for DevOps on-call in the last ten years in the US, as a backup to phone-based alerts. It's far too easy to mess up phone DND settings, forget to charge a phone, be outside cell service, or leave a phone in the wrong room. The pager had a long battery life and I clipped it to my pants waistband. I definitely caught pages via the pager that I would have missed over the phone.
If you're worried about the cell network going down, they serve as a backup comms device as well since they use different infrastructure.
Presumably Lebanese DevOps on-call isn't sharing pagers from a shipment to Hezbollah from Iran.
Hezbollah is essentially a government entity in much of Lebanon, they totally would. Hezbollah runs schools, hospitals - it's easily the largest social services provider in large swathes of Lebanon. That's why it enjoys so much support, in many ways it was a much more competent alternative to the failed Lebanese government.
People who work in schools in Lebanon carry smartphones like everybody else. Pagers are obsolete. Some doctors may carry them because they work when the cell network is down, but they don't all re-up from Iran all at once. Hezbollah carries pagers because they're one-way devices that are hard to track, which is not a problem a Lebanese school teacher has with his Chinese Android phone.
What makes you think pagers are obsolete? When I worked at a big-three cloud provider (2016) we used them and it was a great fit for on-call requirements. I regularly find I don't have cell service when in large buildings, out in the woods, or even just random spots in US cities. The pager didn't have those issues, and helped us build highly available services. Does Fly use something different for on-call alerts?
A quick search shows the US Government/Army [1] and hospitals use them [2] [3] [4]. I'm not familiar with Lebanese wireless networks, but pagers are certainly still used for these use-cases in the US.
"Residents reported that they used one-way pagers for work-related communication more often than smartphones" (2018)
[1] https://gov.spok.com/contracts-and-agreements/
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10407125/
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6490267/
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7426134/
People still use pagers for specialty purposes, like being on call in disaster zones, or serving as a parallel armed forces in a country with a hostile neighbor who has infiltrated your cell phone network.
I've said this like 5 times on this thread and feel bad for continuing to repeat myself, but: Hezbollah operates its own telecommunications network. The Hezbollah pagers probably do not work on the normal Lebanese telecoms systems. This in addition to the fact that Hezbollah procures pagers for its service members; it does not go to the Cricket Wireless store at the corner of Mousa al Sadr and Kouds and pick them up retail a couple at a time.
Pagers don't use normal telecom systems, and they're not limited to paramilitary organizations. They're very useful in any critical application because they have low infrastructure requirements.
The comment you're replying to explains how they're used routinely in most hospitals in the world for this purpose.
You can't buy pagers off stores on the corner, either. They don't have SIM cards and most of them can't report back to the network, so they need to be pre-configured by the network operator. Just the same way, if you work at a hospital and are issued a pager, it will be issued to you by your employer and you won't be able to pick it up off the street.
In a country with extremely unreliable telecom infrastructure, it's not at all unlikely for an organization to use pagers, especially if it operates emergency services, and they would have to be procured through that organization.
Right, but if you are mossad, you're not going to spread your bomb pagers far and wide for a number of reasons:
1) its expensive
2) it massive increases the risk of detection
3) in a hospital there is a high chance it'll get triggered. (MRIs, spillages, incinerators.)
Mossad didn't spread them. They sold them to Hezbollah. Hezbollah runs many hospitals in Lebanon.
Lebanon has incredibly unreliable cell service. Anyone who needs to receive messages in a timely and reliable fashion would have no choice to have a pager or similar device. That would include many people in schools and most people in a hospital.
> they don't all re-up from Iran all at the same time
Who says anyone does? Hezbollah has 40k fighters, and we have reports of 2000 people being injured, so clearly Hezbollah, military or civilian, didn't "all re-up from Iran all at once", the numbers are more than an order of magnitude off for you to conclude as much.
Reuters has specific shipments and provenance for the pagers attributed now, and also notes that the explosions were concentrated in Hezbollah strongholds (Dahiah, Bekaa, southern Lebanon), lending further evidence that these were not off-the-rack pagers.
No one is saying these were off the rack or that they weren't distributed as part of Hezbollah's operation, so I don't understand how this is relevant.
The claim is that carrying one of these pagers is dispositive evidence that you are an according-to-IHL combatant.
The point I made is that less than half of Hezbollah is combatant, therefore the possession of a device procured and distributed by Hezbollah cannot be dispositive evidence as most Hezbollah members aren't IHL combatants. The fact the pagers were ordered by Hezbollah doesn't contribute anything in the context of a discussion on civilian Hezbollah members that would need to use pagers.
You're pulling this out of thin air. You do not know this.
This is such a strange take. As if CIA operatives and a random teacher at some elementary school just both reach into a box with pagers and pick one because they're both employed by the government.
If the US government was sanctioned to the extent Hezbollah was, someone like an elementary school principal would most likely have to ask a higher-up to provide them with something like a pager, which would likely have been smuggled together with others.
You can buy mobile phones in Lebanon just fine, there's no reason why anyone except active duty members of Hezbollah would get their communication equipment from Hezbollah.
Mobile phone service is horrible in Lebanon and cannot be relied on in any type of emergency.
Also, the whole point of this is that active duty members of Hezbollah includes hospital staff and teachers. Hezbollah's civilian division is about as large as the paramilitary one, if not larger. So it's not possible to confidently state that anyone affected was part of a milita with the information we have right now.
Why are teachers carrying Hezbollah military pagers?
Why would employees of Hezbollah carry Hezbollah communication devices? That doesn't seem like the question you're trying to ask, in which case, what is a 'military' pager and how is it different from a 'civilian' pager? How are you able to tell apart a 'military' pager from a 'civilian' pager with such confidence as to present it as an unquestioned assumption?
I've spent quite some time looking, and I cannot find such a thing as a military pager. The only pagers I can find mentioned in a military setting are no different from the pagers that civilians would use, for example, the use of commercial pagers in US military hospitals.
Nurses and medical staff, at least in the US.
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/15/1219737658/why-do-doctors-sti...
For collateral, I was thinking more along the lines of non-Hezbollah civilians right next to the target, or perhaps a building set on fire
Here's a video of someone standing right next to the target: https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1836037485492629605
They are unharmed.
At the same time, I don't think there's any reason to disbelieve accounts (and video footage) of children among the injured. Unless you're sending operatives with pistols and killing targets individually, I don't think there's a way to do a strike of this scale without killing innocents.
Actually this is probably more accurate than a pistol. Bullets miss and ricochet. Plus other people would fire back, leading to a gun fight and more deaths.
So 1-2 feet away is safe from serious injury resulting from the explosive force itself. Though the probability seems high at least some out of thousands had people standing close enough for worse, or further away and hit with shrapnel.
I’m just commenting on injury though, not making a moral or ethical judgement. That’s not an easy call when an opponent is embedded in a population of non-combatants.
not sure of band allocations around israel, but in the US pagers were long wavelength devices and, as such, could receive signals much further inside buildings than pre-wifi cellular bands could reach. again, band / frequency (wavelength) allocation dependent. but if similar there, pagers might get signals in tunnels whereas cellular bands may not, for one plausible conjecture.
These pagers were used by Hizbullah because, unlike mobile phones, they cannot be tracked. The people who had them were certainly not random aid workers, but people in the Hizbullah chain of command. This is also indicated by the statements of Hizbullah itself (which are themself to be questioned and not taken at face value), according to which so far one non-combatant was reported killed and no other non-combatant were reported injured out of a total of 4,000 exploded explosive devices. The CCTV footage also shows that even in a crowded supermarket, no one was injured apart from the Hizbullah member with the pager.
They killed an 8 year old girl with this attack. I'm sure there was already a huge amount of collateral damage from 2000+ eyes-off-taret explosions.
First: Innocent people can use their phones just fine and have their comms intercepted by the IDF. Only Hezbollah wanted an alternative to hackable phones.
Second: If you distribute to Hezbollah and detonate already months later, it's unlikely many unaffiliated people already have Hezbollah pagers.
The hit rate indicates the targeting was right.
You can't insure it. It is actual terrorism, pure and simple.
"American University of Beirut withdrew the pagers from the medical staff this morning under the pretext of updating the system".
You can insure anything.
But can you ensure it?
They didn't. Al Jazeera's headline was updated to read "Lebanon’s health minister says 8 killed, 2,750 wounded by exploding pagers."
These are pagers connected to Hizbollah's internal communication network. Why would they be used by the general population?
As I understand it, people are saying that the most likely way that this was carried out was that a shipment of pagers where intercepted and modified. My concern is that part or all of the shipment might not go to Hezbollah. Perhaps the shipment gets rerouted to somewhere else due to supply chain issues. Perhaps only half of the shipment was intended for Hezbollah. Perhaps a postal worker steals a few and sells them on the black market. Perhaps Hezbollah decides they have more than they needs and does something with the rest. Perhaps part or all of the shipment gets delayed and is sitting in a post office when it goes off.
Basically: warfare via mail bomb seems like it might be irresponsible.
These aren't normal retail pagers, like the world uses (or used to use) for pager-duty? And Hezbollah maintains its own network infrastructure?
Yes. Hezbollah is essentially the armed forces of Lebanon (there is an official Lebanese army, but it is smaller than Hezbollah).
You can also think of them as an Iranian army occupying southern Lebanon.
I know what Hezbollah is, I’m surprised they maintain stand-alone pager infrastructure apart from the system in use by the rest of thecpeolle
Maybe they don't? But they definitely have their own phone infrastructure, and since the switch to pagers was entirely about opsec, it would be very weird if they were dependent on civilian telecoms infrastructure for them.
Hezbollah is essentially a governmental organization, they provide healthcare, education, agricultural infrastructure, social services, etc...
No essentially about it. Hezbollah is part of the government, one of many political parties in Lebanon. Just like most of the other major political parties in Lebanon, they maintain their own militia separate from the Lebanese military.
I think this is something that many people may not grasp about Lebanon.
The "There's Your Problem" podcast did an episode on the fertilizer explosion that leveled Beirut's port in 2020. The amount of breakdown that had to occur for that outcome was both astonishing... And utterly predictable given Lebanon's governmental structure, which is barely functional. It's less a government and more a power detente that hard-codes sectarian differences in the culture into the power structure, like trying to build a government out of a band of feuding warlords with no particular underlying agreement amongst the warlords to leave each other alone. Among other things, this makes their foreign policy heterogeneous; a given faction can just wage war without the government's consent, and the government lacks top-level power to do anything about it.
(Ironically, one of the things that minimized the potential damage in the fertilizer blast is that much of the material had been stolen and shipped away before the explosion. Likely by actors with the tacit support of high-level government functionaries looking the other way and refusing to do enforcement).
I read that all other political parties were forced to disband their militia after the civil war, only Hezbollah was allowed to keep their arms.
It would be easy to include a little microcontroller that can check what frequency the pager is set to. This allows you to target specific pager networks (government, military) while leaving pagers that are unlikely to be in use by targets intact for follow-up attacks.
Since when has Israel cared about civilians or aid workers
Since the IDF has been shown to be intentionally cautious in their persecution of this war
Can you confirm that this is sarcasm? If not then it is an incredibly inaccurate statement.
No. See, eg, https://assets.ctfassets.net/qnesrjodfi80/3Eo3mGQdYAYwu22W2w...
I've seen this before. Your proof is a single person's opinion. Note that it is an opinion, with no evidence or data to back it up. It contains numerous tropes of IDF apologists and is written by a person who has a long history of opposing any investigations into the actions of the military and having generally right wing, militant, pro-European and anti-Muslim views. the letter appeals only to those who want to believe it.
Funny that "one person's opinion" happens to be shared by a lot of people though
More tragic than funny but it is human nature. Propaganda mills like PragerU exist because they work. People are happy to pick up other people's opinions because it saves them doing the hard work of forming one themselves. Lots of people believe things that are patently false, from religion to pseudo science to flat earth. Just believing something because it aligns with your existing opinions and prejudices doesn't make it true, it makes it confirmation bias.
The source of this shoddy opinion is PragerU, a very well funded and openly right wing, Christian, pro-Israel media outlet. It is literally paid my its wealthy right wing ultra rich donors to publish one sided content that pushes the donors' views for the donors' benefit. It is as far from a neutral objective source as you can get.
Here's their annual report from last year for a glimpse at their bias: https://downloads.ctfassets.net/qnesrjodfi80/5CKH6Ji47c5yxhv...
Pagers could have certain security options that would interest only a military organization. We don't know at which stage these were intercepted. They could just as easily be targeted to Hezbollah from the beginning of the sale. Advertise something that could be catered to them and once they take the bait go ahead and booby trap them all
I'm not sure why it's being assumed that they detonated all of the pagers. They presumably have unique device IDs / phone numbers that can be tied to individual people. For all we know, they may have just detonated the ones known to be in use by Hezbollah operatives.
This being a hack is improbable in my opinion. If you see the pictures of the aftermath, the damage is too big to be the result of a lithium battery explosion. Moreover the devices exploded at the same time in different locations (won’t happen if they made the battery overheat till explosion) HA probably bought a bad batch with implanted explosives and they set it off now.
There's footage on Twitter showing an actual detonation, with a bang. Not a huge blast (the man falls to the ground injured, but bystanders seemed unharmed). Definitely not the rapid burning 'whoosh' of a battery fire.
> This being a hack is improbable
Your definition of hack differs from mine. This is hack in every sense of the word: supply chain hack, signals hack, and more...
The context clearly explains what OP means. The meaning is that "This is not something that is achieved via simply hacking a normal device remotely. This is something that is achieved via doing something extra to the device first, and maybe then hacking it remotely."
Another thing is that if we begin to use "hack" for every means of attack and unauthorized access, then the word loses its meaning. There is no supply chain hack, but there is a supply chain attack.
A nation state used it's awesome power to steal something that wasn't theirs and then altered it. This is not a hack. It's just brute force.
I tend to agree with you. However it has been said (from wsj article) that "some people felt the pagers heat up and disposed of them".
Pretty much, yeah. The hack was used only to activate it remotely, and in pager systems, it should not be a hard task. But I highly doubt it was only due to battery overheating. I have seen scooter batteries exploding before, and they don’t burst as quickly as this one.
It must be a combination of hardware (put a bomb in it) and software (trigger an explosion when a particular command is received) hack. Triggering an explosion of all devices is needed because if people started hearing about exploding pagers, they'd place their own far away from anything precious to them.
Geez, I thought this kind of hack is the stuff of (bad) action movies.
I wonder if there's a pager that was powered off during the attack and if somebody will dissect how they did it.
Edit: then again maybe the code is as simple as
Warning, under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations in the US civil fines of up to $500k per violation apply to software exports classified as related to munitions or military applications. You may want to consult an attorney before sharing such algorithms on a public forum.
They’re pagers, so it could also be a modification of the firmware to listen for a certain message (could it be as simple as a pocsag network where all of the pagers would get every message and only alert if it’s targeted for them?)
Cheap cell phones have been used as detonators for quite some time.
The detonation signal could also have been completely out of band, like with Yahya Ayyash (as far as I know) which seems like the Occam's Razor answer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash#Assassination
I doubt it has anything to do with the battery, pagers typically use the far more stable (and less energy dense) NiMH composition over a typical lithium one.
Most pagers also aren’t designed incinerate/explode when they receive a signal, so I don’t know if we can make assumptions based on what typical pagers do. Seems a lot easier to short a LiPo battery than conceal a tiny explosive. An explosive can be found, but they’re unlikely to find out that the BMS is bugged to short the battery to ground
A LiPo will burn, aggressively and hot, but they don't explode.
To get a LiPo to explode you'd need to both puncture/rupture it and somehow contain the escaping gasses long enough to build up pressure.
No, I'm as convinced as I can be that this was a supply-chain attack, and used a purpose-built "addition" the pagers in the form of an explosively formed penetrator.
Given that an EFP is usually concave, I'll even go so far as to say I bet it was disguised as part of the speaker assembly.
LiPos used today burn because they have vent slits. Remove the vents and it’s far more likely to explode. In any case, we’ll probably find out in a couple weeks.
It's probably much easier these days to source lithium batteries than NiMH ones.
I saw some videos of explosions, the pagers received some sort of signal or message that made the holder look at the pager.
Most of the injuries were to the hands or eyes. It was a very very weak explosion - even people right next to the person were not harmed, just the person holding the pager.
Hypothetically there could be scenarios where something as simple as control over the right NTP servers could trigger that code, right? I
If it was not a terrorist attack and a war crime but a targeted operation against the militants, why wouldn't Israel claim responsibility for the successful operation?
Israel has had a “no comment” policy for many years. Why? I can think of a few reasons. One is that some operations, if acknowledged by Israel, would trigger a proportionate response by the target, but if not acknowledged would allow the target to save face by downplaying what happened, if neither side actually wants war.
That probably doesn’t apply to this case, but has occurred in the past. And no-comment policies are more effective when applied unconditionally.
If a car bomb went off next to an IDF post killing a bunch of IDF soldiers and one 10-year-old kid, it would be declared a terrorist attack immediately.
If this involved China and Taiwan, North and South Korea, or Russia planting bombs on Ukrainian soldiers, nobody would be debating whether it was a terrorist attack.
It’s certainly a relief when polite society can recognize it that way. So, that ends one discussion but starts another. When foreign intelligence is tasked with, say, breaking laws and moral codes in Lebanon; it lives in the shade because we cannot distinguish it from terrorism or organized crime or a financial scam. It’s been this way for a long time and the debate nowadays is whether or not, on balance, we’re prevailing over evil.
Sometime in the 20th century, hot war killed more combatants than civilians and that’s mostly changed with drastic disproportionality. So, intelligence agencies have been forgiven because they describe themselves as non-combatants killing non-combatants to prevent civilian massacres. This explains a change in ideals mid-century.
What incentive would they have for doing so?
countries i think don't comit acts of war randomly without annoucement or claim. This in itself would be borderline criminal, though i'm not sure if it's an actual thing noted in the geneva conventions. Those do state that any act of war should give an opportunity for retaliation. So in essence this is just as criminal as bombing people using armed drones, because these fighters did not have any opportunity to strike back.
It's not random: Hezbollah and Israel have been fighting for a while[0] and Hezbollah's mission is to eliminate the state of Israel[1]. I'm sure no member of Hezbollah is surprised that Israel would attack them.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Hezbollah_confl...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideology_of_Hezbollah
Let's mention both sides, Israel wants the State of Palestine gone.
I would dispute that but also don't see the relevance to the conflict with Hezbollah.
This is all one conflict, it does not make sense to treat this as an isolated conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. And it is dishonest [1] to portray the conflict as Israel resisting various groups that want Israel removed from the map and not mention that the Israel similarly wants Palestine removed from the map. And I am not sure how one can dispute this as the Israelis themselves say it. When the State of Israel was established, Ben-Gurion was hoping that Israel will eventually encompass all of Mandatory Palestine and today Netanyahu says in no uncertain terms that there is no room for an independent Palestinian state. And the actions in between do not paint a different picture either, whether it is the construction of settlements to further fracture the land or to support of Hamas in order to weaken the PLO.
[1] This is not necessarily an accusation of the commenter I replied to, maybe they just deemed it unnecessary to mention. I think it is worth mentioning to not create a skewed image for people unfamiliar with the conflict, that is why I wrote my comment. However reading it again I have to admit that the wording is far from perfect.
you understand Hezbollah and Hamas are different right? Lebanon is not Palestine and has no interest in Palestine. They are an Iranian proxy. Shows how little you know about the situation before sharing your slanderous views as fact.
Israel invaded Lebanon to fight the PLO and Hezbollah was founded to fight back. They are absolutely part of the wider conflict. And if you read my comment again, you will find that I said none of the things you mentioned.
You're throwing "criminal" around without, I suspect, understanding the laws of warfare. Blowing enemy operatives isn't criminal (even if some civilians get hurt - within reason; here's the ratio of militants to civilians hurt is virtually unheard of, in a positive way). Bombing militants from above, whether by airplane or drone isn't criminal, and nothing in the laws of warfare claims you need to let the enemy an opportunity to strike back.
There is no comprehensive information yet on the ratio of civilians to militants maimed by this attack, and any claims otherwise are propaganda. If an enemy had exploded small remote controlled bombs in American supermarkets and homes there is no question we would characterize it as a terrorist attack.
And my question stands, if this is legitimate warfare, why wouldn't Israel admit it carried out the attack? US does not hide that they eliminated Bin Laden. The answer is pretty obvious here.
Do you believe that the attacks that Israel did claim responsibility for (e.g. attacks in Gaza) are legitimate warfare?
Because that provides international legitimacy for retaliation by Hezbollah, even though everyone knows who did what. Same as the assassination of Ismail Hanyeh in Tehran.
Because it was a terrorist attack and a war crime.
It seems to be just some sensible policy, but maybe also to let frivolous accusations, such as yours, hanging for bit.
At the cashier, one video clip shows a guy paying then he looks at the massage that beeped his Appolo pager, then it exploded, this trigger message is supported further with first responders' statements on large numbers of those treated for impact on eyes.
There was a really dumb but also really entertaining Awkwafina/John Cena movie that I watched recently called Jackpot https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26940324/. At one point in the middle of the movie one of the characters calls a 3 letter agency friend and asks them for a "Phone Strike on his location". There is a mob gathered outside of their room, and within 30 seconds everyone's phone blows up and the protagonists escape. The movie is R rated but obviously it's hollywood so instead of blown off fingers and holes in ribs that we see in Lebanon, its just someone's crotch is aflame, that's about it. But it was the first thing that jumped to me when I heard about it. Go hollywood!
Wait for the "Tesla strike" in San Fran
I love those two, thanks for the movie rec.
I have a working theory that real life 3 letter agency plots make it into Hollywood movies because intelligence agents and script writers hang out at the same bars. Likely a mix of intentionally planting tropes so that when someone claims the government is doing it they look like a conspiracy theorist who watched "The Rock" too many times, and retired folks having one too many whiskies and letting their secrets slip knowing that there's no way to prove it anyhow, and those make it into scripts just because they're good stories
Reminds me of two things:
1. Mossad killed the chief bombmaker of Hamas with an exploding phone in 1996: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash
2. My grandma used to say not to wear my phone on me, especially close to my heart or my balls, because she thought it was dangerous somehow. Turns out she was right!
Yahya Ayyash was a bombmaker for Hamas, not Hezbollah.
True. Mea culpa!
it was not the mossad, it was the shin bet.
It is reasonable to assume a Mossad agent would have pagers as potential way to communicate. Pagers work on separate networks from cell phones and usually do not have the same location tracking.
It is also fair to assume that Mossad would want the ability to remotely destroy an agents pager. If it was captured, etc. So very likely these were already a standard part of their equipment and then distributed to Lebanon.
It is also interesting how fear of cell phone tracking drove them to pagers, which was then exploited in response.
It is different from Stuxnet and a form of terrorism. Same as all the assassinations. They are crossing all of these lines that can be a double edged sword in the long run.
Amazingly enough, the concept of hacking personal communications devices to explode was explored recently in the "phone strike" scene in Jackpot!, an Amazon MGM Studios movie released a month ago.
https://x.com/obdmpod/status/1836087414290284588
And Kingsman: The Secret Service from 2014.
Weren't those surgical implants, though? A bit different, not an innocuous everyday gadget turned deadly. More of a Laputan Machine.
Yeah GP is probably merging two things that happen in the movie. One, the villain (played by Samuel Jackson) implants all of his "inner circle" with exploding implants to guarantee compliance, and late in the movie they are hacked so that the entire group is simultaneously assassinated with a single signal. Two, that same villain gives out free SIM cards to everyone on the planet that can be remotely triggered to throw everyone in range into a homicidal rage. The latter is probably what GP was thinking of, but they misremembered the effect.
This is nothing new. Israel has done attacks like this since the 60s.
They've remotely triggered multiple consumer devices simultaneously?
Why was this flagged? I vouched for it as it would make for an interesting discussion about the security of these devices and how this kind of cyberattack might have happened.
Are smartphones, for example, also vulnerable to it?
I was wondering the same thing.
There might be other explanations than a cyberattack though. The pagers could have been prepared in some way before distribution.
From the videos, it looks like the explosions were quite sudden and remarkably violent for such a small device.
So in addition to people-hunting FPV drones, we now have the equivalent of exploding collars from science fiction movies like Running Man. I don't like where we're heading, but it was probably inevitable that technology would be used this way.
As mentioned in this thread by others, this is not a new attack vector and won’t be the last. The only difference is the scale. And technically speaking, anything can be weaponized.
>Are smartphones, for example, also vulnerable to it?
Yes if Israeli intelligence gets their hands on your smartphone (probably before you buy it) and installs an explosive and a software-hardware back door.
even that is not far fetched. This is a typical supply chain attack.
I never said it was far fetched.
I've seen laptop and phone batteries explode with significant force on YouTube. It's called thermal runaway.
As much as I'd love to believe this couldn't happen without physical tampering, I see no good reason to.
They usuall burst with fire. You'd have to have hardshell battery with no venting, and likely no protection circuit, and a way to cause sustained load on the battery, without the user noticing the heat first. Eh.
A short on a battery with protection circuit installed basically does absolutely nothing to the battery.
I'm yet to see a video with fire and a lot of smoke at minimum.
> Why was this flagged?
Anything any particularly motivated group dislikes here gets flagged; always been this way. Thanks for vouching.
> Are smartphones, for example, also vulnerable to it?
I also would love an answer to this question. Up until 12 minutes ago, I would never have thought _blowing up_ hundreds of pagers simultaneously was a realistic scenario.
If anyone can make sense of how this actually worked I'd be grateful. If it can be done to pagers, it seems likely that it can be done to other networked lithium devices: phones, tablets, laptops, smart watches, cameras, drones, medical devices, toys, and even electric vehicles.
Lest anyone tries to deny this happened: There's video of two separate cases on the nowinpalestine Instagram page.
"Political" (including geopolitical) posts on here lead to an enormous amount of anger and noise and I fully get why they're verboten. In this case it's actually a fascinating issue that has a lot of crossovers with the domain of this site, but invariably the conversation would get overwhelmed with geopolitical noise instead of just focusing on the technical aspects.
98% sure these were booby trapped with plastic explosives or similar, meaning it’s a supply chain attack more than a cyber attack. LiPos exploding would be more sizzle and less instant boom, you can’t just hack your way through thermal runaway without all the smoke and building temperature first.
I am just out of the gate, but the videos show sharp percussive explosions and no lithium evidence. So C4 or RDX in the devices on a 'mod board' with the explosive disguised as a big capacitor or something. It had to be put into the devices. In order to justify an operation like this the explosions had to be near-simultaneous so the mod board had to have its own clock, which would be as accurate as the crystal in the clock circuit provides, maybe drift of +/- a few seconds since installation.
The broadcast pager network does not offer this level of time precision for a detonation message so as ugly as it sounds, I believe at the moment that 9/17/2024@3:30pm (or whatever) was preloaded into the 'mod boards'.
Perhaps the 'mod board' had the capability for the future time to be set with a broadcast message, but that introduces such complexity! It requires the page system itself to be compromised. The victims' paranoia served them badly in this case, a recent warning about cell devices and a lower tech 'solution' is rolled out and they would only trust one source, so all you'd have to do was get an explody batch into the supply chain with (reasonable) assurance that only Hezbollah members would get them.
In the coming days I'd look for clues in: The simultaneity of the explosions with times to the second // were any duds found and disassembled? // is there a separate radio receiver on the mod board (to set future detonation time) // when did the 'rollout' of the devices begin? // How many pager carrying non-members were injured and what were the circumstances ('medics' being one group) // Will suspicious broadcasts be discovered from logs or logged radio intercepts?
Given the people we are dealing with (I mean both sides) I am thinking that the operation avoided ANY covert channels at all and was a simple date-time bomb.
The subject is unfortunately likely to start a flamewar. I still think this should be on the front page because the technology and scope of this attack is unheard of if true. Israel somehow managed to weaponise hezbolla pagers by sending a message that caused them to explode. (Edit: i see the link i submitted has made it to the front page so it seems the moderators won't kill the story)
Dupes also get flagged, like in this case. This submission got [dupe] added as a prefix to he title.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41567573
> The affected pagers were from a new shipment .. in recent days
> some people felt the pagers heat up and disposed of them
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/hundreds-of-hezbollah-...
The reports right now are that these were ordinary pagers and that some sort of software attack overloaded the batteries and caused them to explode.
But I work lithium batteries. I've overloaded lithium batteries before and let them explode for safety testing. The videos released of these things exploding on people doesn't look anything like what I would expect, especially not from something as small as a pager battery. You would need to seal lithium batteries in a metal tube or something to cause that kind of explosion.
I highly suspect that this was a supply chain attack, and that there's a high explosive charge hidden in these things, with some sort of radio backdoor that allows them to be detonated by whoever controls these things.
> The reports right now ...
Propaganda is running at 400% on both sides, I wouldn't trust anything, especially not "we just hacked pagers and made them explode via software"
Yeah, I'm getting the same energy from that claim as this: https://dtrap-blog.acm.org/2019/09/04/hackers-can-turn-your-...
Seems old pagers were replaced last month at the American University of Beirut. It may or may not have to do with this operation, but the timing seems very suspect. Those devices may have been tampered with explosives at some point before being distributed to the victims.
https://x.com/gazanotice/status/1836082218805891360
https://x.com/AUBMC_Official/status/1836086847153320148
probably unrelated, lebanon is a big place
It’s a very small place
Looking at pictures of mangled devices, it would seem to confirm that they were Motorola Gold Apollo pagers. In which case they just used standard alkaline batteries which would rule out a malware targeting the battery, and confirm it was a supply chain attack with planted explosives.
Israel has done this in the past by supplying parts to Iran for printers that would explode https://apnews.com/article/iran-israel-ballistic-missile-sab...
I also seem to recall them using modified cell phones to blow up militants or use them to triangulate their location. I can't seem to find the article(s) about this, unfortunately.
I'm a long way from Lebanon, but carry two pagers for Emergency Services (one per service). One used to be an Apollo Gold but now it isn't. From what I've read these were modified pagers, but I still rang one manager for reassurance. We need a strong statement for all the emergency responders and medical staff that still use these things that it's not going to happen to you.
Israel drone struck Jose Andres' food truck program this year.
Between these acts of war between stupid, angry countries, there needs to be not just guarantees for aid workers, but broad international condemnation of tactics that violate the Geneva Convention and related principles. And those principles are long overdue for high-tech drone strikes, robotics and electronics warfare.
So either this was planned long enough ago to replace a large number of devices over time, or communication about a larger order has been provided to the enemy and fulfilled without suspicion. Either way, that sounds like a crazy infiltration effort.
Also, we can assume that anything sent to those pagers so far has been forwarded to Israel and now that channel is burned, right?
It wouldn't be a first
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash
> Shin Bet agents gave him a cell phone and told him it was bugged so they could listen in on his conversations.[17] They did not tell him that it also contained 15 grams of RDX explosive
Cell phones were much bigger in 1996. You would have a hard time with that with phones today, but pagers are still viable.
Replace half the battery with c4, you really don't need much to injure someone in direct contact with a modern explosive
https://youtu.be/OOWcTV2nEkU?feature=shared
https://youtu.be/LrUY8QbEcpM?feature=shared
I imagine technological progress has been made in the field of explosives as well. I guess the volume and weight can very very small when you can determine that the phone is being held at the head and the explosion can partially be directed to it. Maybe it's even possible to leverage the energy within the battery?
newer reports saying 1000s not 100s
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/sep/17/middle-ea...
> More than 1,000 people, including Hezbollah fighters and medics
The CNN title implies that only Hezbollah members were targeted were reality seems different. It's crazy a country is capable of doing a "special security operation" on civilians of another country without any international sanctions.
If it was targeting pagers used for Hezbollah's internal communication then it would be justified, no?
If it was targeting pagers used for Hezbollah's military wing then yeah, kind of justified. But Hezbollah is bigger than that, and seems this attack targeted the whole organization, not just the one that is commonly designed a terrorist organization.
I guess for an American comparison it's a bit like attacking all republicans for the actions of the Proud Boys or any other militia.
The Republican party is not literally at war with Israel. Hezbollah is.
I think you might want to open a newspaper, Israel was at war with Lebanon back in 2006. 2024's war is with Palestine/Hamas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Hezbollah_confl...
No one serious disputes that Hezbollah opened a new conflict with Israel in 2023. This is occurring simultaneously with the Hamas-initiated conflict.
> it would be justified, no?
It's never justified to trigger explosives when you have no idea where said explosives are.
What if the dude if hugging is kid/wife/mom ?
What if he's picking up his kids from school, visiting the local food market, &c.
What if he's driving and end up crashing in a bunch of people walking on the sidewalk
That sounds nice, but by that logic no bomb would ever be fired. Under international law collateral damage must not be excessive, but it is permitted. If it was unacceptable, evil armies would do what they want and good armies would never fire a shot.
When you drop a bomb you at least know where it's going, here you have no idea.
Look at what's going on in Ukraine, if you can't tell a good from a bad shit you have to get your eyes checked. Hitting a column of tank isn't the same as targeting a civilian building
Wars are always bad and there will always be war crimes on all sides, it doesn't mean that everything is equal
In WW2 20% of US bombs fell within 1000 feet of their target, which were often in densely populated areas. Its only modern technology that lets us know where its really going
> In WW2 20% of US bombs fell within 1000 feet of their target, which were often in densely populated areas. Its only modern technology that lets us know where its really going
Is this supposed to be a gotcha ?
WW2 is the reason we updated the Geneva conventions to protect civilians lol
Somebody shared videos: https://x.com/warfareanalysis/status/1836041245996584983/vid... Looks like bystanders are fine.
> What if the dude if hugging is kid/wife/mom ?
Then they also die/get injured. Being in close contact with a terrorist is a dangerous pass-time, and armies targeting foreign threats need to accept some level of collateral damage. In this case, we have thousands of injured terrorists, with hundreds dead, and an additional fraction of those numbers being non-military targets (civilians). It's certainly unfortunate and unpleasant, but this is an excellent ratio.
Let’s assume you accurately determine which thousand pagers are going to which people, and that you accurately determine which thousand are Evil Hezbollah Members and definitely not someone’s cousin or whatever.
Regardless of these (tenuous) assumptions, if you detonate a thousand small bombs, it seems fair to also assume that some of them might not be on the bodies of their intended targets, but rather outside on the counter by the shower or over by the car keys or something.
So no, I’d say this is a pretty tough sort of operation to justify.
It's war. Much worse things have been happening in this war already (e.g. Hezbollah explicitly targeting Israeli residential areas and killing civilians). By contrast this action seems much more targeted and justifiable.
If your bar for taking action is "there can't even be a chance of hurting a civilian", then your army can't do anything, and your entire civilian populace is slaughtered when it's taken over by the enemy intent on destroying your country.
Would it be moral to make people who work in israeli army explode even when not in uniform?
Yes, they are belligerents in a battle.
I am more pro-Israel in these conflicts, but you are a military target or you aren't, you don’t leave the military when you remove the uniform, only when you agree to leave the military.
In fact it is a common tactic of Hamas, when it is discovered they have passionately murdered civilians, that they immediately claim that it was an IDF soldier. Such as the case with Shanni Louk
I admire the clarity of your moral compass. But consequently if that is ok, then targeting reservists is also ok, right? And since almost everyone in Israel is a reservist there are really no civilians in Israel only military targets, right? So, Hamas an Hezbollah blindly firing rockets are actually striking military targets with surgical precision
The problem for your “argument” comes when you apply the harsh light of actual fact to it. Israel has 169,500 active personnel and 465,000 reservists. This represents 6.6% of their population. Furthermore, those age 18-40 can be called up in a national emergency just as most countries can call up a draft. This is not the same as reservists and still represents a fraction of the population.
Attempting to pass off as fact that everyone in Israel is a reservist and are therefore legitimate targets is simple disinformation. You already knew that, though. But hey - you had a point to make, right?
I probably haven't used the right term, I thought reservists are people who went through military service. This article (with obvious agenda) https://www.jpost.com/opinion/the-myth-of-compulsory-militar... says that the enlistment rate plummeted from 75% to 50%.
This more recent (and accurate?) article based on actual numbers puts it at 69%: https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/politics-and-diplomacy/art...
So, >every other person in Israel has gone through military service. If you compare that to "collateral damage" when killing Hamas' terrorists, shooting rocets blindly is more accurate
Gets muddy with conscripts.
Gets decidedly less muddy with volunteers and officers.
That's a weird question. It's war. There's no morality involved. But if your question is "is it within the norms of war to strike service members when they're not in uniform", then the answer is emphatically "yes".
> It's war. There's no morality involved.
There's a little.
That's why countries make agreements such as the Genocide Convention, Geneva Conventions, etc. There are (meant to be) strict consequences for breaking these rules. (I noticed you change your wording from 'rules' to 'morality' - still wrong.) Breaking these rules is why we have the concept of 'war crimes'.
The word 'war' also implies two armies battling, rather than an invasion following occupation. In any case, the Geneva Conventions apply in all armed conflicts.
Since the Geneva convention still exists*, no, it is not "within the norms of war to strike service members when they're not in uniform". See Protocol I.
Targeting off-duty or non-uniformed service members violates both international law and the core moral principles of warfare, as outlined by the Geneva Conventions and other international agreements. Denying this isn't just factually wrong, it's deeply immoral.
* Along with the Principle of Distinction, Proportionality, Non-Combatant Immunity and Civilian Impact, etc.
This is likely to settle out as one of the most surgical non-infantry attacks in the history of modern warfare, and because Israel is involved, 20% of the commentary is about how the people who set it in motion belong in the Hague. Think about what that says to people weighing the (correct!) claims that Israel has committed widespread war crimes in its occupation of Gaza.
None of that changes the facts stated, or makes any substantial argument as to how this doesn't constitute a war crime.
> This is likely to settle out as one of the most surgical non-infantry attacks in the history of modern warfare,
No, it isn't. There's already reports of murdered children, and people as far away as Syria getting injured. The Iranian ambassador to Beirut was reportedly injured, meaning this could precipitate nuclear war.
> because Israel is involved, 20% of the commentary is about how the people who set it in motion belong in the Hague
No, it isn't. You're literally the only person mentioning the Hague in the whole thread.
But yes, they do. That's where war crimes are prosecuted, and this is a war crime (see above), even if 'just' one of many thousands.
> Think about what that says to people weighing the (correct!) claims that Israel has committed widespread war crimes in its occupation of Gaza.
Huh??
Explain to me, please, how more targeted war crimes excuse completely untargeted war crimes, and war crimes targeted at journalists, aid workers, health workers, teachers, children, families, little old ladies in churches, premature babies, etc.
What you're doing here is establishing yourself as someone who believes a weirdly, ahistorically, spectacularly surgical attack on Hezbollah fighters is a "war crime". Which is fine, but people are going to point that out when you call other things a war crime, and you might care about that, because in those other instances you might actually be right (if it's Israel you're talking about, it's very likely you will be right), and the extra credibility might be helpful.
What I'm saying is that you're setting yourself up to be dismissed as someone who believes "a war crime is when Israel does war".
If the Geneva Conventions (among other agreements) which you're so determined to ignore didn't exist, then you may have been right.
But, they do, and you're wrong.
You're also moving goalposts. Are you still standing by your statement that war has no rules/morality?
> you're setting yourself up to be dismissed as someone who believes "a war crime is when Israel does war".
Israel set themselves up for that belief, not me.
By doing war crimes. A lot of them. Like this one.
Consider, if you would, that this effort to move the Overton Window on what constitutes war crimes is severely misguided. And you really ought to stop.
I am very comfortable disagreeing with all of this and leaving it at that.
> No, it isn't. There's already reports of murdered children, and people as far away as Syria getting injured. The Iranian ambassador to Beirut was reportedly injured, meaning this could precipitate nuclear war.
Why would Israel fire nuclear weapons at Lebanon and Iran, two non-nuclear states?
Why don't you hold Hamas to these same standards?
edit: Also, can you cite anything to back this claim?
> Targeting off-duty or non-uniformed service members violates both international law and the core moral principles of warfare, as outlined by the Geneva Conventions and other international agreements.
I don't mean just it's in one of the articles of the Geneva Convention I mean where you're making your inference more specifically.
And Hezbollah? Firing rockets at civilian targets is at least as much a violation of that as firing pagers at off-duty personnel is.
I would argue that this attack is more targeted than firing rockets over the border into civilian population
If you make it acceptable to have these style of attacks, then they’re going to be replicated against your own government and people.
Hezbollah is already willing to shoot rockets at civilian targets; an attack like this is much more carefully-targeted than their average strike.
I think the ship has sailed on how far attacks will escalate in this region.
Hezbollah would nuke Israel if they could. You think they're above pager bombs? They just cant execute
Hezbollah are a paramilitary group at best, not civilians. And they are designated terrorists in many countries.
Hezbollah is a political organization with a paramilitary wing. The wing is designated as a terrorist group in many countries, the organization as a whole is designated as a terrorist group by not as many countries. France or EU as a whole, for example, consider Hezbollah a political organization and only the paramilitary arm as the terrorist group.
Seems like a harbrining of war, if the pager network was compromised, thus burns the compromised network and also harms a lot of people.
Most major newspapers in Israel are saying that Netanyahu wants an invasion of Southern Lebanon:
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/bje3pjv60
https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/article-820399
https://www.timesofisrael.com/top-general-said-pushing-for-g...
Lebanon has been shooting rockets at Israel for a while now. They already are at war. It's just Israel is very strategic about its steps.
> Lebanon has been shooting rockets at Israel for a while now.
Correction: Israel and Lebanon have been firing across the border for a while. More Israeli attacks on Lebanon than the other way around and more Lebanese dead too.
Details:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/6/27/mapping-7400-cross-...
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/800/cpsprodpb/bfa9/live/320f24...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cv2gj544x65o
And lots more details here:
"Between 21 October 2023 and 20 February 2024 the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) recorded an estimated 7,948 incidents of artillery fire from the south of the Blue Line (from Israel to Lebanon) and 978 incidents of artillery fire from the north side (from Lebanon to Israel)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel–Hezbollah_conflict_(202...
The question is who started shooting rockets at the territory of the other. I would be surprised if it was Israel.
The answer isn't straight forward. 1980s invasion of Lebanon by Israel and it's withdrawal in 2000 was what made Hezbollah into the force that it is today.
The conflict has been simmering for decades
The answer is pretty straight forward in the sense that the current round of war was initiated (proudly) by Hezbollah, and that while if Hezbollah stops shooting Israel would have no business with Lebanon, if Israel stops shooting into Lebanon Hezbollah has no intention of stopping too. Hezbollah wants to destroy Israel (they say that, not me), while Israel has no desire to destroy Lebanon. Hinting at some kind of symmetry here seems weird.
Israel invading into Lebanon in the late 1970 was a response to an attack originating there [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastal_Road_massacre#Israeli_...
> the current round of war
Israel has been attacking Hezbollah non-stop in Syria for the last decade[0]. "The current round of war" is quite literally just Hezbollah firing back.
It's strange to me how Israel is able to fly sorties around the entire region and it's not considered an escalation, but the moment that we see responses it turns into the other side being the aggressor.
> while Israel has no desire to destroy Lebanon
The Israeli Dahiya doctrine[1] is literally based on the idea of destroying as much of Lebanon as possible to screw with Hezbollah's support and morale.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Israel_conflict_d...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahiya_doctrine
Even the spokesperson of Hezbollah wouldn't say that the current round of war is "literally just Hezbollah firing back". If you're joking then I'm sorry for not catching it, but if not - Hezbollah announced that it's attacking Israel in support of Hamas's attack on Israel.
As for your second point, you're pointing to an Israeli strategy of fighting Hezbollah by pressuring Lebanese citizens against it. This has nothing to do with having the demolition of Lebanon as a goal.
Edit: I also recommend you read the Hebrew version of the Dahiya doctrine wikipage. As the doctrine is Israeli and in Hebrew originally, it explains it in much greater details. The doctrine has nothing to do with destroying Lebanon.
That doctrine has worked. 2006 to 2023 is the longest period of time without conflicts on this scale since before 1970. Until 2006 there were significant showdowns at most every 5 or 6 years.
The doctrine also is targeting infrastructure for the purpose of denying it to Hezbollah, which is utilizing it to support their fighting. Otherwise, per the wikipedia link on this doctrine, the doctrine has reduction of civilian casualties baked-in:
"in the first stage targets were attacked which formed an immediate threat, and in the second stage the population was evacuated for its protection, and only after the evacuation of the population were Hezbollah targets attacked more broadly."
> The doctrine also is targeting infrastructure for the purpose of denying it to Hezbollah
It also describes the infrastructure as literally every single Shiite city. I hope for all of us that Iran or similar doesn't apply this doctrine to Israel.
Well of course it does. Otherwise, more than 60k people from the north of Israel wouldn't need to leave their towns since October.
Hezbollah didn't exist in 1970s. It was founded in 1982
Like the famous quote said "We make peace with our enemies, not our friends" (I can't recall the source) - what is lacking here is diplomacy.
To repeat - Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1980s was the catalyst for Hezbollah's rise. While they curbed PLO they created a more formidable adversary.
First, I forgot an 's there - I meant 1970s. Second, unfortunately for Lebanon, Hezbollah wasn't the only terrorist organization growing in it [0]. "The proximate cause of the Israeli invasion was the Coastal Road massacre that took place near Tel Aviv on 11 March 1978"
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_South_Lebanon_conflict
Hezbollah was founded in 1982. With benefit of hindsight we can see that while Israel's Lebanon Invasion in 1980s was successful in curbing the PLO who perpetrated the massacre, they created a more formidable adversary in form of Hezbollah.
Hezbollah is somewhat of the successor organization of the most militant wings of groups like the PLO and Fatah, so I think it is relevant to speak of Hezbollah as in some sense existing in a nascent form prior to its founding
> Hinting at some kind of symmetry here seems weird.
Both sides (Israeli state, and Hezbollah) want to destroy each other. It's a simple symmetry. Conflating the military force with the territory and civilians living on it only obfuscates this.
> Both sides (Israeli state, and Hezbollah) want to destroy each other.
Have Hezbollah lay down their arms and convert their organization to peaceful gardeners and Israel has no interest in destroying them.
Have Israel lay down their arms and focus on peaceful gardening and few Israeli Jews will survive.
Such Symmetry. Enlightened Reddit really is something else.
> Have Israel lay down their arms and focus on peaceful gardening and few Israeli Jews will survive.
That's because the entire notion of Israel as a concept is predicated on it being under constant existential threats.
If Hezbollah goes away, then nothing changes in Lebanon: Lebanese identity isn't based on armed resistance. Israeli identity, however, has nothing else going for it besides armed conflict.
If conflicts were to go away, so would Israel. Israeli Jews would just be absorbed into whatever local culture they're in, just as they were prior to the formation of Israel (and just like they are outside of Israel). The remaining ones would be the ones engaging in armed conflict -- just as the original groups like Irgun and Lehi were.
What are you even talking about? Israel is a country with a population of 9 million people. Do you think if the conflicts stop, this population would just disappear or something?
Whatever the "Jewish identity" was in 1948, Israel now has more than 70 years of existence, giving it an independent identity from just "Judaism".
Sure, what is that identity? Is there uniquely Israeli cuisine, dances, anything? What is the Israeli identity outside of an existential threat on Jews?
My most favorite food in the world is an Israeli dish - you should try it if you haven't already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabich
We used to do a lot of Israeli Folk Dancing when I was a teenager: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_folk_dance
What else would you like to know?
Quoting from your sources:
> The idea of the sabich sandwich was most likely created in Iraq
Yeah, it's about as Israeli as chicken schnitzel. It's just a regular Iraqi eggplant sandwich.
> Israeli folk dances were created as way of helping to create a new Israeli culture in the land of Israel
At least the developers of that folk dance appreciate the fact that there was (and still is) a distinct lack of any sort of national culture and have to _develop it_. Even still, from your source, these newly developed dances haven't reached any level of mainstream success save for the Horah which is Southern/Eastern European.
Note the original comment: "Israeli Jews would just be absorbed into whatever local culture they're in, just as they were prior to the formation of Israel."
> Yeah, it's about as Israeli as chicken schnitzel. It's just a regular Iraqi eggplant sandwich.
Ask any Iraqi if they know what a Sabich is, they'll say no. Show them a picture, they'll say they have never seen it. the "idea" was created in Iraq doesn't mean what you're trying to say it means.
> these newly developed dances haven't reached any level of mainstream success save for the Horah
That's a very funny way to read "In spite of the many changes in the values, dreams, and ways of life of the Israelis, many dances of the 1940s and 1950s remain popular. However, some of these dances are no longer danced. It is hard to specify which dances have fallen out of favour, but the Hora remains common".
But honestly - I think we're done here... It's been a pleasure giving you a taste of our culture. It's unclear to me why you think it's outrages that Israelis want to maintain a majority of Israelis in their country, while every other country does the same, and why you think it's weird that our food is inspired by our neighboring countries, even though that's true in literally every country in the world, and why you think it's a problem that we don't dance exactly like we did in the 50s anymore, even though, I sure hope you don't dance like your grandparents. But cheers! I don't know what country you come from, but I'm getting the impression that manners and respect to others isn't exactly part of the culture there.
> Show them a picture, they'll say they have never seen it
I'm going to write this off as ignorance, given that it's classical Iraqi street food. You can have at at quite literally any Iraqi falafel spot, including in the diaspora. It's the same, through to the amba. The Kuwaitis call it "Mushakal" which just means "mixed", referring to adding everything (falafel, eggplant, cauliflower). But that's just an option, you can go eggplant exclusive.
> It's been a pleasure giving you a taste of our culture
Pleasure is all mine! I've visited multiple times, would visit again just for the turkey shawarma.
> why you think it's outrages that Israelis want to maintain a majority of Israelis in their country
Because Israeli here is being used as a synonym for Jewish, and that's racist. It's not only exclusionary to the non-Jewish Israelis but also sets a clear path forward that even in absolute peace, the Israeli view involves Jewish dominance in culture, population and government.
> even though that's true in literally every country in the world
I don't think the US (or most other developed countries) seek for ethnic or religious dominance. Most horrible countries do, though.
> it's weird that our food is inspired by our neighboring countries, even though that's true in literally every country in the world
Maybe sticking with Iraq, I'd encourage you to look at Persian, Turkish or Arab (i.e Saudi) cuisine and compare it to Iraqi cuisine. It's one thing to suggest there is influence, and it's another thing to carbon copy things and make it your national dish.
> and why you think it's a problem that we don't dance exactly like we did in the 50s anymore
Well given that these dances had all of a 20 year run, I wouldn't exactly call them cultural any more than calling Crank 'Dat by Soulja Boy an American cultural dance.
> I sure hope you don't dance like your grandparents
I do! Most places in the world have cultural dances that are shared and danced with their grandparents. Not too dissimilar from the Horrah :-)
> I don't know what country you come from, but I'm getting the impression that manners and respect to others isn't exactly part of the culture there
Sorry if it comes across as disrespectful, I've tried to be civil.
What are you even talking about? Do you think a country of 9 million that's existed for 70 years doesn't have any unique identity?
There's Israeli writing, Israeli music, Israeli theatre, Israeli dance... some of these are internationally famous. There's Israeli cuisine, a lot of which is based on other cuisines imported from countries that Jews fled from or were kicked out of.
And of course, there's all flavor of Israeli technology and other innovations, from agriculture to food to, of course, software and high tech.
What do you think Israelis are doing on a daily basis, sitting around worrying about existential threats on their life?
> What are you even talking about? Do you think a country of 9 million that's existed for 70 years doesn't have any unique identity?
Yeah. It has no unique national identity. There's a lot of Jewish culture, sure, but I'm hoping we can distinguish Jewish culture from Israeli culture (i.e, Iran is a Muslim country but Iranian culture isn't a subset of Muslim culture).
> There's Israeli cuisine, a lot of which is based on other cuisines imported from countries that Jews fled from or were kicked out of
Agreed. That's the point here.
> What do you think Israelis are doing on a daily basis, sitting around worrying about existential threats on their life?
Israel as a nation, yes. You sort of reaffirmed that by adding "countries that Jews fled from or were kicked out of" in your reply. The existential threat quite literally shapes all of Israeli day-to-day culture. The agriculture, tech and everything else is based on that existential threat.
As I've mentioned elsewhere though, this lack of culture isn't unique to Israel, it's just heavily multiplied due to the population being a collection of diaspora. This might change over the next couple hundred years but it's equally wild to assume that a 70 year old country is somehow going to have anywhere near the same level of culture (and cultural resilience) as undisturbed groups.
> As I've mentioned elsewhere though, this lack of culture isn't unique to Israel, it's just heavily multiplied due to the population being a collection of diaspora. This might change over the next couple hundred years but it's equally wild to assume that a 70 year old country is somehow going to have anywhere near the same level of culture (and cultural resilience) as undisturbed groups.
This statement makes sense - of course Israeli culture, being younger than, say, US culture, is less developed.
But that's not your original claim that I disagreed with, what you originally said was this:
> If conflicts were to go away, so would Israel. Israeli Jews would just be absorbed into whatever local culture they're in, just as they were prior to the formation of Israel (and just like they are outside of Israel)
There's a big difference between saying "the culture isn't quite unique" and implying that without conflicts, Israel would somehow disappear, and Jews would be absorbed into the surrounding culture (of what, Lebanon? Jordan?).
> Yeah. It has no unique national identity. There's a lot of Jewish culture, sure, but I'm hoping we can distinguish Jewish culture from Israeli culture
First of all, 20% of Israel's population isn't Jewish.
Secondly, I think the Israeli culture, even if only focusing on Israeli Jewish culture, is different from, say, American Jewish culture or other Jewish cultures around the world.
> There's a big difference between saying "the culture isn't quite unique" and implying that without conflicts, Israel would somehow disappear, and Jews would be absorbed into the surrounding culture (of what, Lebanon? Jordan?).
I was talking about the national identity. There is frankly no point to Israel's existence, internally and externally, outside of the existential threat. It has no culture outside of the self-fulfilling prophesy of being a Jewish homeland. The culture is literally just foreign influences mixed in with the Jewish faith.
Yes, I strongly believe that without the existential threat that Israel would cease to exist. It's this existential threat that drives the agriculture and tech which is just attempts at self-sufficiency. If Jews didn't have this sentiment, the desire for a nation would fizzle out and the endless conflict with its neighbours would no longer make sense. The oppressive treatment of Palestinians would no longer have any sort of justification. Kosher slaughter and Beetroot kubbeh isn't enough.
> of what, Lebanon? Jordan?
I think you'd find that Jordan and Lebanon, at least in the developed parts, are culturally almost exactly the same. The Mizrahi influence on day-to-day Israeli culture is huge, more than some Israelis probably realize (given another commenter was convinced that Sabich would somehow be foreign to Iraqis).
> First of all, 20% of Israel's population isn't Jewish.
Israel's identity is exclusively Jewish. The extras are just there as tokens non-Jews.
> Secondly, I think the Israeli culture, even if only focusing on Israeli Jewish culture, is different from, say, American Jewish culture or other Jewish cultures around the world.
Agreed, which speaks to the lack of resilience. Compare this with, say, American Lebanese or Australian Lebanese diaspora which you can drop into Lebanon and see no difference.
There's another example of this in that region that's also visible: the existential threat on the Palestinians is what formed their national identity as well. Without that threat which shapes all of their day-to-day lives (including those in the diaspora), they would have just been absorbed into their neighbors too.
> I was talking about the national identity. There is frankly no point to Israel's existence, internally and externally, outside of the existential threat.
What is the "point" of any national identity? What is the point of a French identity? A US identity? A Ukrainian identity?
Maybe all of these places, like Israel, had no culture of their own when they were getting founded, and maybe their initial "reason for being" was some kind of existential threat, but they all developed their own culture. Like every place that has humans living in it for so long.
I really feel like you're arguing something that doesn't make any sense, at all, for any place in the world, least of all a country with a population that has a very old shared religion, traditions, etc.
> If Jews didn't have this sentiment, the desire for a nation would fizzle out and the endless conflict with its neighbours would no longer make sense.
A country that's existed for so long is pretty self sustaining at this point. Multiple generations have been born in Israel. What do you think, they'll wake up one morning and say "oh actually we don't want a country?". Even if they did, where exactly do you imagine they'd go instead?
> The oppressive treatment of Palestinians would no longer have any sort of justification.
The treatment of Palestinians is because of the security threat they pose, at least mostly. If there was no threat any more, that would presumably be because some kind of peace was reached with all neighbors, including the Palestinians. So of course in this hypothetical the interaction with Palestinians will change.
> I think you'd find that Jordan and Lebanon, at least in the developed parts, are culturally almost exactly the same. The Mizrahi influence on day-to-day Israeli culture is huge, more than some Israelis probably realize (given another commenter was convinced that Sabich would somehow be foreign to Iraqis).
I'm sure there's overlaps and similarities, but I would indeed be surprised if it's as close as you make it seem. Sure, there are Mizrachi influences in Israel, but also many other influences. In many ways the country was founded more by Ashkenazi Jews, there's a fairly influential Russian influence, etc.
I think you're letting superficial things like cuisine be the definition of a culture, which is honestly kind of silly; it's a fairly small part of culture.
> Israel's identity is exclusively Jewish. The extras are just there as tokens non-Jews.
First, I don't think referring to a group of people as "extras" or "tokens" is something anyone should do.
Yes, there is definitely an internal question in Israel to what extent it's a Jewish state, and how that fits in with its other self-conceptions, like being a democratic country. But even within the Jewish population, there's a lot of variation, from completely secular and often atheist Jews, to religious Orthodox Jews.
> Agreed, which speaks to the lack of resilience. Compare this with, say, American Lebanese or Australian Lebanese diaspora which you can drop into Lebanon and see no difference.
I don't know about Lebanese, but I don't think this is a good measure of anything. I'm fairly certain you couldn't drop Italian-Americans into Italy with no problem; do you think that means Italy has no culture?
> There's another example of this in that region that's also visible: the existential threat on the Palestinians is what formed their national identity as well. Without that threat which shapes all of their day-to-day lives (including those in the diaspora), they would have just been absorbed into their neighbors too.
I think this is a good example, though I'm not sure I agree with your conclusions.
For one thing, Palestinians could've been absorbed into surrounding countries, if they chose to do so; that's what usually happens to a population in such circumstances (as happened to 10s of millions of people since WW2). I think what makes the Palestinian case unique is partially that the surrounding countries chose not to absorb them, for the most part, and that part of the areas where they live were captured by Israel again.
That all said, I think this example exactly negates your main point - the Palestinians developed a national identity partially because of all of these influences, but that identity exists now, and I don't expect it to disappear!
It is straightforward. There was no conflict there for that past decade plus, Hezbollah started attacking Israel in October to join their Islamic brethren.
I think the answer is fairly straightforward if you limit it to the current round in the conflict
Not to mention that Israel is no longer in Lebanon and Hezbollah can just stop firing rockets and the situation will go back to relative peace.
So sure the history is complicated, but current events are fairly straightfoward, you had relatively peaceful status que until Hezbollah broke it.
Texas sharpshooter fallacy
I mean... yes... if you limit any context by excluding important elements of the context the takeaways will be different.
So given the context, why is Hezbollah not responsible for the current escalation?
Hezbollah was founded to drive Israel out of Lebanon, and Israel is no longer in Lebanon, so not sure how that context makes any difference to who started and is to blame for the current round of escalation.
You are implying that the context that matters is equal to the context where Israel hasn't done anything wrong. If you don't know you're doing that, I don't know what to tell you. Maybe you're used to entertaining a much less observant audience on this topic.
It's pretty simple - tell me why you think it's justified for Lebanon to attack Israel?
You're dancing around the "context" but not actually saying why that context makes it legitimate for Lebanon to attack based on the pre Oct 7th status quo. Sure Lebanon and Israel have some territorial dispute, but it's like 20 sq km, not something you should start a war for.
Lots of neighboring countries have a bloody history, that doesn't mean starting a new war is legitimate, right? Can Poland start firing rockets at Germany because Germany invaded them in the past?
No thanks. You're obviously brainwashed by particular narratives, and have only absorbed one perspective of the facts that you were already emotionally dependent on. Not at all unusual on this topic.
I'm very open to hear different narratives, but seems like you aren't exactly willing to hear or share, so not even sure why you commented from the get go.
This is a discussion board, and in more than happy to discuss the topic, there's no need for personal attacks.
> The question is who started shooting rockets at the territory of the other.
I think you can always go back further. A good overview is this article on the history of Hezbollah-Israel conflict, with links to the various flare-ups:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezbollah–Israel_conflict
What makes sense is going back to the last durable cessation of hostilities, not tracing every event back to the Battle of Jericho.
The question is why did the rocket fire start. The ICJ ruling should tell you why.
Per that wikipedia entry this current conflict began with an attack on Israel. Hezbollah attacked a much more powerful enemy so a statement that stops at "they've both been doing it" does not accurately capture the casus belli:
"Israel and <strikethrough>Lebanon</strikethrough> Hezbollah have been firing across the border since an October 8th strike against Israel in 2023..." etc.
That is a more complete & accurate description.
Artillery != rockets. And importantly artillery from Israel is much more targeted and predictable than unguided rockets. Hezbollah has launched about 14k rockets as of late June: https://www.newsweek.com/chart-shows-increae-hezbollah-rocke...
Just on its face, with Hezbollah launching sometimes hundreds of rockets per day, didn’t you suspect what you posted was misleading?
> if the pager network was compromised, thus burns the compromised network
I wouldn't necessarily call this type of attack a network compromise. All it takes is knowing the target phone numbers and sending a specific message, which is a paging network working exactly as designed. Phone detonated bombs have been a thing for a long time too.
Calling it a hardware supply chain attack seems more accurate.
it does seem like a purely escalatory move. wounding but not killing 1000+ of your deepest adversaries, slow clap... I'm sure Hezbollah will give up now that their pagers are destroyed.
And you thought "Key Escrow" or "Chat Control" was bad!
Future maximum-security states may just require every mobile phone to have an explosive charge pre-installed, with the detonation-codes only available to the authorities, of course.
Then when they detect a device in active use by a [terrorist|child-pornographer|subversive|tax-evader], ka-blewie! Problem solved at the press of a button.
See also: 'Black Mirror' s3e6, 'Hated in the Nation'
Stanislav Lem wrote a short story about a tyrant that made his subjects wear highly enriched uranium earmuffs so that if more than two of them got together they would assemble a critical mass.
https://culture.pl/en/work/uranium-ears-stanislaw-lem
I have a better idea. Every politician has a bomb collar tied to their approval rating. ;)
Italo Calvino wrote a short story about politicians having to sacrifice parts of their bodies in order to hold positions of power, like you'd have to have a hand chopped off to serve one term, a leg to serve another, and so on.
Cookie cutters:
<https://allthetropes.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age>
Maybe a dumb question, but I wonder if this was a software attack or IL was able to modify the physical pagers that are issued during Hezbollah onboarding. If this was a pure software attack, are only pagers susceptible? Or are we unknowingly carrying around bombs in our pocket, waiting for the counterattack?
If the description of "exploding" and "tearing [a] bag to shreds" are accurate then it has to be a physical modification of the pagers, lithium ion batteries don't explode with a lot of force when they go up.
There are CCTV videos purported to show some of the explosions: https://x.com/warfareanalysis/status/1836041245996584983
It is indeed not the kind of explosion I would expect to see from lithium ion. (Those usually are a lot more flame-y at least the ones I have seen so far.). But I'm not an expert.
Definitely looks more high explosive-y than all the lithium battery fires I've ever seen.
There's no way the little battery in a pager has enough energy to do this. This is a 'supply chain attack' by the Israelis. An ingenious one at that.
NB: that's probably backwards. Batteries contain a lot of energy, they just don't release it particularly quickly.
Most explosives have relatively low energy density, however the energy they have is released far faster than with conventional fuels. By unit mass, TNT (or other comparable explosives such as C4, RDX, etc.) have about 1/10th the energy as liquid petroleum fuels (petrol, diesel, kerosene).
Though again most battery technologies also have fairly low energy densities. But those are probably roughly comparable with most mainstream explosives.
TNT has an energy density of 4.184 MJ/kg.
A LiON battery: 0.36–0.875 MJ/kg.
Motorola pagers (a widely used type) seem to typically take a 3.5V 500mAh battery, which if I'm doing my conversions correctly (mAh * V * 3.6) works out to about 23 kilojoule. That would be the energy equivalent of ~5g TNT. A light charge, but one you wouldn't want going off on your hip.
(Note: I've corrected an off-by-an-order-of-1,000 error above, earlier read 23 MJ / 180g TNT. As I said, I'm not entirely certain of my calculations, which are using the Wikipedia energy densities noted and GNU Units.)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density>
Again, batteries won't explode as footage of the presumed Israeli attack on Hezbolla members shows. But they do contain appreciable energy. It would more likely burn rapidly at worst case.
> Motorola pagers (a widely used type) seem to typically take a 3.5V 500mAh battery, which if I'm doing my conversions correctly (mAh * V * 3.6) works out to about 23 MJ.
Batteries should really quote energy, not charge, for this reason. The voltage is not a constant.
But something’s wrong with your math. Even assuming a constant 3.5V, that’s 1.75Wh, and 1Wh is 3600J, so that’s 6300J.
23MJ would drive a car a respectable distance :)
Gasoline has 45 MJ/kg for comparison
so it is a ten times that of TNT. Source: https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/ArthurGolnik.shtml
Also pagers typically use NiMH batteries, not Lithium. So take those estimates down another notch.
Why waste it on a clever show instead of stalking their owners silently?
The "clever show" has caused a mass casualty event of Hezbollah fighters. I would say it was an extremely effective attack.
I think the intent was to disable a bunch of fighters honestly.
Make the pager ring, they grab it, it explodes in their hand disabling them for life and making them useless for the soldier role.
The entire point of using one-way pagers (instead of phones or other two-way communication devices) is that they're effectively impossible to locate.
A supply chain attack could have probably added some sort of beacon, but that might show up on an RF sweep.
Probably because they have been stalking for a while, and this escalation is a precursor to further action. Destroying lines of communication is usually done before military action.
I think the "clever show" was the point. The physical damage may not actually justify the investment here. You need the resultant paranoia and suspicion from Hezbollah or it wasn't worth putting resources into.
They’re likely already stalking their owners via software exploits on their phones
They 100% had a explosive added inside. Batteries cannot explode like that.
Assuming a lithium battery and control over the firmware+power draw, couldn't you theoretically make the battery output more charge than safe, leading to at least overheating and maybe more?
I also find it unlikely this was just a remote attack rather than supply chain, but with little to no details we can only assume for now.
Yes, but compare a phone's much larger lithium battery exploding: https://youtu.be/8nz5ijXcckI?si=jpZOWIs3BIQTvVt2&t=31
With a Hezbollah pager exploding: https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1836037485492629605
Thanks for the videos, obviously something extra was added.
Not really. This is about the worst your can do with a lithium battery in practice https://youtu.be/oieH2wwDGzo and that's a proper short in something way bigger than a pager. They don't explode like these were reported to.
If you put yourself in the position of Hezbollah's IT chief, you get a different picture than this question assumes.
Let's assume you're somewhat competent and aware of supply chain vulnerabilities.
Let's also assume that pagers are not that popular anymore, and you insist on a pager that's completely passive. It can't emit any signals at all, or the Mossad would track it.
So you probably find some supplier of gear to the Iranians and other non-Western countries, and give them your specifications. That supplier is reliable, you think. It probably listens to a signal that Hez and only Hez transmits. It's Security By Obscurity, the choice of naive buyers everywhere.
You certainly don't buy anything off the shelf. Well, we know what's wrong with Security By Obscurity: Mossad only has to decipher one secret.
Honestly just slept on the thing and the story seems even more surreal to me now.
How come they needed to replace their pagers AT ONCE recently? Has there been some great breakthrough in pager technology? I have a 5 year old phone and no desire to replace it for at least a couple years more.
How come everyone had the EXACT same model? Even if the Israelis didn't compromise it, even the most incompetent intelligence agency would notice somebody ordering thousands of an item with an usual order count of zero.
Anyone with a very basic knowledge of supply chain attacks knows you don't buy just one kind of item. If they bought fifty different kinds of pagers, this attack would've been impossible.
I'm sure even in benign cases, placing an order of thousands of items on some niche product causes a lead time of months/weeks. Never mind that the Israelis had to painstakingly modify every single one under the cloak of secrecy. Didn't that raise any flags?
And after they did order thousands of the same item, they didn't bother opening up even a single one?
Honestly I don't think incompetence could explain this, I'm 99% sure Hezbollah is compromised at a high level.
> How come they needed to replace their pagers AT ONCE recently?
Hezbollah recently switched to using only pagers for communication, because they were worried about Israel hacking their phones. It's likely they all bought pagers at the same time because of that, because I doubt any of them would have owned pagers already
I agree with all of your questions. But covert organizations fall victims for this type of vulnerability all the time. Operation Trojan Shield and the ANOM network is one example. Operation Firewall and the ShadowCrew takedown was another. I believe LulzSec was taken down by bad opsec in the internal IRC channel as well. Bin Laden wasn't able to mix up his use of couriers and locations enough to stay hidden forever. It's easy for us to see the mistakes and point out that the criminals should have been more diligent or mixed up their operations more, but that would take more effort than anyone can consistently give over time.
Operational security is really hard and requires constant dedication which most organizations can't keep up over time. Eventually the most professional organizations will slip up and make some of the mistakes you point out above. It's very likely that someone has spies or informants inside organizations such as Hizbollah and Hamas. But this can also have been a lapse in standard operations that was finally detected and exploited by Mossad after actively watching for a long time.
Gives the term "remote code execution" a new meaning.
> The affected pagers were from a new shipment that Hezbollah had received in recent days, according to sources familiar with the matter cited by the Wall Street Journal.
Presumably someone, likely Israel, intercepted them before they got to Hezbollah and added an explosive payload that could be remotely triggered.
Hard to see how a remote exploit could detonate the battery, which was my initial thought.
> Hard to see how a remote exploit could detonate the battery
Especially seeing as pagers typically use more stable NiMH batteries over lithium ones.
> Hard to see how a remote exploit could detonate the battery
If that is the case - we have a problem...
From a legal perspective, are there any regulations on these kinds of attacks? Meaning, are they allowed? Are they considered a war crime or maybe this is still a gray area?
It's not that there is a list of approved ways to attack your enemy. Inventing new ways to take enemy by surprise is absolutely a part of warfare. What's important from legal perspective is the ratio between military effect and collateral damage. In this case so far it seems it was better than if conventional warfare was used.
If the pagers had been equipped with lasers that caused blindness, there is a Geneva Convention protocol going back to 1995[0].
I would like to think that the spirit behind that protocol is that the intent to cause permanent blindness in your opponent should be considered a crime. And not that it's not a crime so long as you don't use a laser to do it.
So you can put me in the camp of "this should be considered a war crime", even if it's not in any books yet.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Certain_Conventi...
If the pager was sent a message that would encourage the soldier to bring the pager to their face, it would certainly fall under an intentionally blinding attack.
It surely must be in violation of international law due to its potentially reckless/indiscriminate nature
Can we have this thread back and make it strictly technical?
No.
The discussion should meander in any direction the votes and scoring allow it to.
If the voting supports it, it is on topic ipso facto.
Not at all, that's why we have moderators. Hacker news is interesting because they stay focused on the right topics. If you let people just talk about whatever they want, you're just gonna get an inferior Reddit. Topic != "Whatever we want to talk about", the topic is very often the technical and technological aspects of a story or article. Talking about politics on HN is definitely "off topic".
Email mods at hn@ycombinator.com if you see a pervasive violation of HN's comment guidelines.
Flagging and voting also help, but for wildly out-of-control threads, direct contact is more reliable.
Love to consider only the technical aspect of terrorist attacks that's what makes this News for Hackers yes.
One aspect here that is not commented on but has long-term security implications:
Assuming these were indeed Hezbollah devices, its likely every single Hezbollah operative now has an identifying wound, possibly a missing limb or wound at the hip level. The wound may be in fact, unmistakable.
What happens later with the lebanese armed forces and with IDF, when they see the ops in the open, its anyone's guess
I might be misinterpreting, but news coverage seems to say that Hezbollah fighters as well as medical personnel were injured. That might mean that the attack was aimed at pagers rather than Hezbollah pagers.
Such lack of precision would be what you'd expect in any kind of operation targeting so many devices.
Those medical personnel may also be members of Hezbollah. Doctors, nurses, and emergency responders can have ideological beliefs. For example, in my country, there are medical personnel with far-right and extremist views, some even holding leadership positions in such ideological organizations.
It is evil to go around blowing up people for what they "might believe".
It's surely possible and or even plausible ideology has infiltrated civic institutions. Still it's quite a stretch to assume any victim of what looks like a supply chain attack is guilty, simply because of the scale of the attack.
Sounds like Israel added plastic explosives to pagers and managed to supply them to Hezbollah. Then, I assume, they triggered only those pagers belonging to known operatives. I'm guessing some did not explode and we'll get to see the device inside and possibly understand the mechanism.
Hmm. I have a couple of politic fiction questions. Lets would imagine that somebody takes a flight with a pager or a second-hand bought phone.
1) How could be sure that there is not a small amount of explosive hidden in their devices or batteries?.
Most devices are sealed. Would the phone smell like something in particular? Would be detected by dogs or x-rays? (I assume that a tiny amount of explosive can be put inside a battery or anything, enough to start a chain reaction with the whole battery while remains hidden to x-rays).
2) What would be the legal path on the defense of this person? just "I didn't knew" does not seem very convincing in a trial. If somebody manipulates a phone are the data stored somewhere?
Rumor that this is the company that manufactures the pagers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Apollo
someone in the US government is probably freaking out about all these iphones and macbooks made in china right now.
Actually, I trust Apple's hardware security enough that I think it is probably impossible for anyone in China (even though they have physical access to the devices) to alter an iPhone or Macbook so that its own electronics can be used to trigger any explosive the attacker might install in the device, so in addition to an explosive, the attacker would need to install his own radio receiver. And the attacker probably won't be able to use the device's electronics to eavesdrop on the device's user, so no ability to tell whether the user is in the group the attacker wants to target unless again the attacker installs his own electronics (including radio transmitter) to do the eavesdropping.
An Iphone should weigh X grams. I think you should be able to detect tampering by weighing it.
I don't whats the margin of error/variance that passes quality control.
> it is probably impossible for anyone in China (even though they have physical access to the devices) to alter an iPhone or Macbook so that its own electronics can be used to trigger any explosive the attacker might install in the device
It would be trivial for a Mossad-level adversary to get around this. The pager explosives were disguised inside the battery, not around it. If you replaced the iPhone's 4500mAh battery with a 3500mAh one containing RDX and a 3G radio, you'd have to be mega-paranoid before you noticed the difference.
This is exactly the sort of hubris modern intelligence agencies rely on in order to exploit your misplaced trust. Apple's hardware security, much like their software security, is mostly predicated on marketing and not the transparent or accountable defense of your device.
You have not refuted the passage you quoted (which I wrote).
Your brain substituted a similar passage that you wanted to write a refutation of.
I didn't say they had to specifically play by your rules. There is nothing that prevents them from avoiding iPhone mainboard hardware entirely to perform this exact same exploit at-scale.
Right, but at that point, Mossad might as well put the explosive and the electronics to receive the signal to detonate in a shoe or or a hamburger or something. The only advantage of putting them in an iPhone is people's tendency to not want to be without their iPhone even when sleeping and keeping it very close to the body.
> If you replaced the iPhone's 4500mAh battery with a 3500mAh one containing RDX and a 3G radio, you'd have to be mega-paranoid before you noticed the difference.
There’s a 0% chance Apple wouldn’t detect that. A huge difference in battery life like that would fail QC and even the weight would have to be very close before it wouldn’t be flagged for inspection. The liability for battery fires means so dude at the factory isn’t just saying “probably fine” and using them anyway.
> Apple's hardware security, much like their software security, is mostly predicated on marketing and not the transparent or accountable defense of your device.
Have you personally audited it, or are we just being asked to accept this because it would support your tribal affinities?
> There’s a 0% chance Apple wouldn’t detect that.
They don't have to. This could be an entirely aftermarket addition, feasibly even with functional battery DRM. I (and probably nobody here) expect Apple to be putting RDX in every iPhone, but it's entirely feasible for a targeted attack.
> are we just being asked to accept this because it would support your tribal affinities?
You are being asked to accept this because the Mossad and Israeli tech industry are the foremost exporters of iPhone hardware and software exploits. We've already seen how Apple vs. the Israeli state goes, and it apparently ends with Israel selling hardware exploits to American law enforcement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellebrite
Evocative of the "power user" scene from Iron Sky[0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXWovt5-wfk
Probably not so much, no.
Some in the US government do tend to project their own bloody-mindedness onto the Chinese, yes
"Israel managed to hack the portable pagers and cause them to explode" sounds like they uploaded firmware to make the device explode. In fact, it was a supply chain infiltration and they modified the devices with explosives inside. It's weird to call it hack.
https://archive.ph/l6dpE
one video: https://x.com/Breaking911/status/1836039436653519209
Was going to ask how common pagers were, but suppose still used by emergency services etc and especially in warzones of questionable cell network reliability
Hezbollah reportedly bans its members from carrying cell phones and has them carry pagers instead:
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/pagers-drones-how-...
That was a mistake. If they'd gone for the thinnest smartphone they could buy, there'd be no chance of anybody hiding a small bomb inside it.
Assuming you aren't joking: Pagers are receive-only, which is why they'd use them in preference to cellphones, which transmit even when just idling to register on cells.
Pagers are receive-only
This has not been true for some time. Pagers attach to a network in the same way a cell phone does. It is true they are more reliable in the receive only sense, as they can receive the broadcast message in the area they last attached to and the acknowledgment is not required to see the message but they do indeed transmit.
Not these pagers
Yes, almost certainly HA was running a POCSAG network.
With a cell phone, the bomb is conveniently express-shipped to you by F-16. Or thoughtfully hand-delivered by the Mossad Postal Service.
Pagers are immune to a number of threats that two-way communications devices enable.
Thats an interesting attack vector on its own. Who does not regularly carry a phone with them these days?
Although, if I was an intelligence agency or police force, I’d definitely give pagers a second look, right? Like they have uses but somebody picking a pager over a cellphone is doing something unusual—maybe something unusual and good, like running an emergency services organization, but still unusual enough to take a second look.
also make it hard to triangulate your location
So no one has a credible source on how and why the exploded? Because the mostly likely answer is they were intercepted and rigged with explosives
As I'm trying to better understand the situation from a technology perspective, I'm curious: has anyone experienced a lithium battery catastrophically failing during use (not charging) and without plenty of warning (ie. gets warm, hot, scalding)?
My experience has been that at worst, they overheat over minutes to hours, and then hiss, smoke, pop, and catch fire.
I guess what I'm wondering is: is it at all plausible that this happened without the use of some amount of added explosives? (edit: I saw a few videos. I cannot imagine a mobile lithium battery is capable of such a sudden and violent explosion)
It's probably going to turn out to be supply chain and explosives.
This is why Chinese made electric cars are a bad idea in America.
But Kudos to Israel for pulling off a surgical strike the likes of which we've never seen before.
> This is why Chinese made electric cars are a bad idea in America.
You mean Teslas?
Kudos to pulling off state-sponsored terrorism that killed many innocent civilians, including doctors and nurses who relied on the same pagers?
This is like celebrating the 9/11 hijackers for the "creative hack" of using a box cutter.
https://x.com/WachtelDan/status/1836038754756145515
Footage from the hospital
Let's assume that the battery in the pager is replaced with half C4 half battery. AA battery weighs about 20-25g, so 12.5g C4 total. 12.5g of C4 has roughly 84,000J of energy. For comparison, a 62 grain 5.56 NATO round has about 1,700 J of kinetic energy. The C4 is undirected, so the target is getting a fraction of the impact, but that much C4 detonating near your body is going to do some serious damage.
So, if the method was to substitute the batteries for ones containing explosives, then how were they triggered simultaneously?
Wouldn't this also require some additional HW/SW in the pagers to trigger the devices? Otherwise, if it was just battery terminals connecting to the battery, how would a remote signal trigger them?
Or maybe it's as simple as the adulterated batteries containing timers and thus not needing external triggering?
timer?
Aside from the death and injury, what concerns me about this is why now?
There is little doubt in my mind that the Prime Minister of Israel is highly motivated to engage in a wider war and drag the US along.
This mass bombing could well be in preparation for imminent further action - such as an invasion of Lebanon. Regardless, the escalation this represents is extremely concerning.
On the other hand, one could view this a show of force to try and scare Hezbollah away from further escalation
UN Security Council Resolution 1566 outlines what is considered as terrorism:
"criminal acts, including against civilians, committed with the intent to cause death or serious bodily injury, or taking of hostages, with the purpose to provoke a state of terror in the general public or in a group of persons or particular persons, intimidate a population or compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act."
If their purpose was really about scaring Hezbollah away, this attack can be labelled as terrorism. I'm pretty sure politicians have different ideas there.
Ah words hardly mean anything these days. It very clearly is terrorism but you won't ever hear any politician in the west calling it that.
Yeah, true. It's either terrorism or borderline-terrorism at least. But people still gotta talk if they're not willing to wage another war against each other. We clearly have too many wars going around, so politicians will have to forge up some bullshit excuses.
These were detonations, not batteries gone wild. A few grams of common explosives like PETN could have been dabbed to look like a small component in a pager. An exploding bridge wire (EBW) detonator can be blown by a charge pumped array of small low voltage capacitors charged in parallel, then switched to discharge in series. No booster needed.
I highly doubt that it’s a result of hacking the battery power management. Lithium batteries don’t explode the way I have seen these pagers do so far. They usually smoke or start catching fire before they explode due to overheating, which should’ve given enough time to dispose of them. But what happened is sudden and strong. Definitely, something extra was added and was activated remotely later.
It's just a matter of knowing your battery's power management firmware. You can overload the power control circuits that pagers or smartphones by creating a massive surge (sending signals to the IGBT drivers) that will cause the battery to explode. If the battery is moderately charged, the explosion is devastating. Hacker teams from the notorious Israeli ShinBet know of many bugs of this type.
Other comments here are suggesting it was more likely a real explosive put in as part of a physical supply chain attack. Anyone able to say which is more plausible?
The WSJ report claims that:
> The official said some people felt the pagers heat up and disposed of them before they burst.
Sounds more like a battery explosion, but it's way too early to tell.
It is possible that there was an explosive planted, plus some sort of thermal detonator that was triggered electronically, or even that the battery was used as a thermal detonator to detonate an explosive.
While the Note 7 exploded with quite a bit of force, they never caused injuries like these, and the Note 7 likely had much bigger battery than these pagers had.
We won't know for sure until the devices have been examined.
But how did just that specific software model explode and not the previous ones? Shouldn’t your case apply to all models then?
A question for more knowledgeable users: What CPU does Apollo AP-900 Pager use? I tried to search the Internet but found nothing.
Looks like a hardware supply chain attack: https://goachronicle.com/hezbollah-members-pagers-exploded-i...
>>GoaChronicle through its intelligence network has learned that Israeli intelligence successfully intercepted a shipment of pager batteries that had been ordered from B&H Photo. The order was placed from Lebanon. Acting on a confirmed tip, the intelligence agency seized the shipment and covertly modified the batteries. Small, undetectable explosives known as Kiska 3 were inserted into the battery casings and connected to the battery wires via a discreet chip. The pager model was Rugged Pager AR924 IP67. The operation code word was ‘Below the Belt’.
> B&H Photo
Okay, that pretty much guarantees that somebody at the Goa Chronicle fell hook, line, and sinker for a bit of internet satire.
EDIT:
It would also appear that the good folks at the Goa Chronicle failed to check a Yiddish-English dictionary.
B&H?!?! The giant store in Manhattan famously run by Orthodox Jews? If that's confirmed it's going to be protested into dust pretty soon.
EDIT: I see an addenda to the article that B&H are denying any involvement. We'll see how it plays out. True or not, the rumor will be flying.
If it is confirmed I'd expect it to actually boost B&H's business, as long as B&H didn't actually know of or participate in the tampering with the shipment.
As you note B&H is well known for being run by Orthodox Jews. So why the heck would Hezbollah, an organization that wants to destroy Israel, buy their batteries from B&H?
It suggests that B&H is a really great place to buy things, so much better than the alternatives that even if dealing with Jews goes against your fundamental beliefs it is worth it.
Isn't that a joke? I don't think Hezbollah orders from B&H.
This sounds very likely.
They must really be in desperate need for more conflict to keep their population at bay. For Netanyahu certainly conflicts come at a convenient time. First he tried to swing himself up to dictator like figure, taking away power from judiciary, tens of thousands of people go to protest. Then October 7 happens. Suddenly a war keeps him in power. Now that that has been going on, and hundreds of thousands are on the streets, they are doing many things to provoke another conflict/war. I think if they fail to keep Israel in a war-like state, his days will be over quickly. He knows that, so he tries to escalate. Not that Iran and their allies aren't provoking and escalating either, but for Netanyahu this is all very convenient.
You're forgetting that tens of thousands of Israelis from the north of Israel have been homeless and internally displaced since shortly after October 7th when Hezbollah started indiscriminately targeting Israeli residential neighborhoods in North Israel with rockets, artillery, and ATGMs, killing several civilians. This is not a tenable state of affairs, not militarily, nor politically. Israel is going to address it one way or another, one day or another, and perhaps they're starting now.
So in one sense you're right that it's to keep their population at bay -- because their population is absolutely fed up with the situation in North Israel and how people have been homeless for nearly a year now and a huge swath of the northern part of the country, will billions of dollars in real estate in total, is uninhabitable. And if this government can't provide security for its citizens, which is the most important thing a government can do by the way, then it will be replaced with one that can.
The opposite is probably more true. By the admission of some of Netanyahu's own command staff, the only reason the IDF is still committed in Gaza is to keep Netanyahu in power; as soon as Gaza is resolved, he's likely to be ousted (and then to face criminal charges). Israel cannot stay fully engaged in Gaza and open up a conventional military front in southern Lebanon. If we're using this kind of logic --- message board logic, let's be clear --- today's action harms Netanyahu's immediate interests, by hastening the point at which the IDF will substantially withdraw from Gaza.
I'm pretty sure that if the IDF is committed in Lebanon it's no different from Gaza, as far as the ousting process is concerned.
Do you have a source for that command staff admission?
There are still hostages in Gaza. Until they're either released or proven dead I would guess Gaza would still be counted as "unresolved".
Yup, Netanyahu is certainly taking advantage of the situation to secure his position, at the cost of innocent lives and the expense of the United States. As long as Israel remains committed to its purely-Jewish-state ideal, the conflict will continue, draining more money from US taxpayers.
I think this is the case of both sides knew about each other's plan all along and yet Oct 7 happened. What could be the reason for both sides to execute it. Just to find out what happens?
Like George Carlin said, “you don’t need a formal conspiracy when interests converge”
There are other governments who also benefit from war in the region that most likely have a hand in encouraging, directly or indirectly, for continued conflict.
Unfortunately Netanyahu has gained and lost the prime minister position multiple times without wars. He's just somewhat popular. Between his first government in 1995 and today, people forget there were prime ministers Sharon, Olmert, Barak, Lapid, Bennet, just 18 months before 10/07 his opposition was in power. Did they not have any part of ignoring the preperations?
Even if he would have lost his position if 10/07 never happened, history has shown he always ends up back in leadership due to a million+ voters for his own party, and millions of votes for other religious and right wing parties.
People can rightfully hate them all they want, but he has the votes, and Israel doesn't have a limit on the number of times you can be prime minister
This is only half joking but the only "solution" to the Netanyahu problem is to replace the voters
What a dystopian time to be alive.
Next thing we got Teslas driving off a cliff or AirPods exploding in peoples ears.
The hunter drones are not far off. Probably with similar explosives.
The videos I've seen definitely look like it was more than a battery explosion - very high energy...
Wondering if the pagers were intercepted and implanted with heat-sensitive explosive?
The NSA has planted custom chips/firmware inside cisco routers after intercepting them - it's not a large jump to go to explosives inside pagers.
The reason you are asked to prove your laptop can boot at airport security is that batteries and bombs have similar densities.
It would be pretty straight forward to rig a pager to run off of one battery while the other is an explosive charge made to look like the actual battery.
So how do you think that airport security will adjust to the widespread knowledge that you can hide an explosive alongside the battery?
Especially now that it is abundantly clear that a pager's batteries are large enough to be replaced by quite an effective bomb. And cell phones are a fair amount larger than pagers.
It seems the pager bombs only killed the users. But they also harmed a lot of people around them.
They have other ways to detect explosives.
I've had my stuff tested for explosives, and it did not involve turning anything on.
Threat model: The Mossad doing Mossad things with your [change "email address" with "anything"]
Solution:
- Magical amulets?
- Fake your own death, move into a submarine?
- YOU'RE STILL GONNA BE MOSSAD'ED UPON
I think that's it.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/08/mickens_on_se...
Full read here https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf
I wonder if this is possible in devices that actually use a small asic to handle all aspects of battery control. They're even more complex than a BMS, for instance macbook batteries have had these for around 20 years [0]. They're even common in vapes and vape batteries. I have to wonder if these asics can be bypassed with malware?
Seems like the cells in these pagers were massively over-discharged and then allowed to be over charged? Potentially a capacitor used to drive the vibration motor was then used to cause the battery to catastrophically explode?
0 - https://squidgeefish.com/projects/a1175-battery-hacking/
I'd love a technical write up on how this is possible. Is it RF based or the battery being exploited?
"Intelligence agency intercepts batch of pagers and swaps out the internals" seems the most likely.
If the footage on Twitter is legit, there was something more explosive than a battery inside those pagers.
Israel infiltrated the supply chain and inserted a bomb into the device configured to be detonated 3 seconds after a specific message is received. Then they waited x months and sent the page.
Seems like the israeli knew who these devices were addressed for, intercepted them and added explosives.
This is going to be an interesting one... definitely someone (not a lot of guessing who) modified the pagers somewhere in the supply chain...
As with exploding drones, this will become a thing in other countries too, either as a part of organized crime or general terrorism.
Another working theory is that it could just be an opportunistic cyber attack - compromising lithium batteries. Though some of the videos coming out look like a bigger explosion that just a battery going off: https://www.reddit.com/r/lebanon/comments/1fizgag/ha_member_...
Nah, batteries don't explode like that... heat, burst of fire somewhere, sure... full on explosion, no way. This was done somewhere in the supply chain, devices were replaced, explosives were added.
And israel will wonder why suddenly even more lebanonis want to fight them after.
Gold Apollo, the company whose brand was on the devices says they did not manufacture them, they only licensed their brand to BAC, a Hungarian company. Well, I'm sure income from licensing fees in their accounting books say differently. You profit from it, you should pay for it. Any other way to see this will allow this type of vulnerability to spread and the buck will stop nowhere.
Why would devices made in Hungary be labelled "made in Taiwan"?
It reminds me of the movie Law Abiding Citizen.
Check it out if you haven't already: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1197624/
I searched 'pager batteries' on Amazon and most are NiMH, not lithium.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lebanon_pager_explosions
Footage of explosions: https://x.com/cherylwroteit/status/1836041510233444404
From the hospital (NSFW): https://x.com/nexta_tv/status/1836052147646955935
I am very surprised Hezbollah didn't think of supply chain security and didn't do the most cursor inspection of these devices. The post mortem would be very interesting on this one.
Obvious #1 Question - did Mossad manage to feed Hezbollah a huge number of weaponized pagers - or are there pagers which could be rooted in such a way that the stock hardware can "detonate"?
For standard pager I can only imagine perhaps some way to short the battery, but that sounds unlikely even as I write it.
Yep. Though maybe with really-low-quality (safety-wise) batteries, and the description "detonate" being 99.9% journalistic hype...maybe?
Well, James Mickens sure called this one.
Could you explain for the uninitiated?
"""
In the real world, threat models are much simpler (see Figure 1). Basically, you’re either dealing with Mossad or not-Mossad. If your adversary is not-Mossad, then you’ll probably be fine if you pick a good pass-word and don’t respond to emails from ChEaPestPAiNPi11s@virus-basket.biz.ru. If your adversary is the Mossad, YOU’RE GONNA DIE AND THERE’S NOTHING THAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. The Mossad is not intimidated by the fact that you employ https://. If the Mossad wants your data, they’re going to use a drone to replace your cellphone with a piece of uranium that’s shaped like a cellphone, and when you die of tumors filled with tumors, they’re going to hold a press conference and say “It wasn’t us” as they wear t-shirts that say “IT WAS DEFINITELY US,” and then they’re going to buy all of your stuff at your estate sale so that they can directly look at the photos of your vacation instead of reading your insipid emails about them.
"""
Pretty wild that this mentions a mobile device supply chain attack explicitly.
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf
this is the funniest thing I've read in a long time. Everyone should go read it now!
The rest of his articles are also hilarious. Every time I come across them again, I make sure to re-read a few. Here's a collection of his articles: https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens
Here's my favorite: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thenightwatc...
Nah, it's like how the existence of Star Trek influences future development of technology. Did Mickens call it, or did the Mossad get the idea from Mickens?
Ah yes, the Mossad / Non Mossad threat model :). Classic.
Tangentially related - Hezbollah used pagers because they could not trust mobiles. One reason is that mobile basebands are locked down: if they weren't, it's quite possible that by now someone would have implemented a baseband firmware which preserves opsec, that could be used on (rooted) phones . That is probably one of the reasons why governments are hostile to modifiable radio firmware.
It's surprising that Mossad arranged a massive destruction of communication technology without it being the precursor to a major military operation. Very curious why they chose this moment to execute an operation they clearly had ready to go for months.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-09-18/ty-article-li...
"use it or lose it" moment, allegedly.
How do you intercept so many beepers ?
- you have to know they have been ordered
- you have to know when they are sent (from Europe)
- you have to intercept them (in which country ?)
- to modify them
- to put them back in the delivery (so you have ties with the shipping company)
- without nobody noticing
So Israel was likely not alone, or they have agents in many places...
I don't think they intercepted. Think they just bought the pagers, prepared them and sold them directly to Hezbollah in one big batch.
Don't pagers just used AA or AAA batteries ?
This hack is the best argument against network-connected electric vehicles that there is. Imagine the same, but with tens of thousands of Teslas.
I don't think it would be quite the same as in explosive ordinance put into a device but it is very similar in that a mass hack could use the navigation system to target pedestrians and calculate the speed required to plow through them without losing control to maximize victim count. All that would be required in another remote hack as has been demonstrated on live highways in the past [1] combined with some form of AI or gaming engine. A mitigating control could be more bollards near sidewalks and more hydraulic bollards on intersections that have a lot of foot traffic to confine the hacks to smaller blast zones. This won't protect the occupants but maybe drive by wire car manufacturers could start adding a "oh crap" manual handle to physically disengage power and apply some type of physical friction brake.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZVYTJarPFs [video][2 mins]
A parking garage full of electric vehicles properly compromised (at least some of them) would be very ... energetic. Burning lithium batteries aren't precisely explosive, but they are still very angry. It is plausible that you could destroy a building with a chain reaction of battery fires. That is one of the safety concerns I think might not yet be fully accounted for (what happens when a bunch of electric cars are in a full closed lot and one of them starts on fire).
Any of the smart plugs or other devices plugged directly into the grid could be intentionally compromised to start a house fire. Millions of homes simultaneously catching fire would be catastrophic. Apartment buildings where a fire starts in 10%+ of the units.
This is a strong statement that probably isn’t true. The power transformers in those devices usually aren’t controlled and the things which are controlled will only sometimes be able to start fires. No doubt that some “smart” devices will have vulnerabilities that could cause fire, but just because there’s an available controller does not mean there’s an avenue to set fire to a device.
In short, unless a device is profoundly poorly designed, there’s no way to blink an LED so incorrectly that it starts a fire. (And many smart devices really aren’t doing much more than that)
Homes have surge protectors though that are out of band of the smart plugs.
The greater concern is lithium batteries catching fire while they are being charged. NYC seems to have a problem with dubious e-bikes already. If a few hundred or thousand battery controllers become compromised and the battery pack is charged with too much current it's like the bat bomb on testosterone.
> maybe drive by wire car manufacturers could start adding a "oh crap" manual handle to physically disengage power and apply some type of physical friction brake
It depends on the manufacturer, but I think this is already the case with Tesla cars? The brake specifically isn't drive-by-wire, it's an electrically assisted hydraulic brake - so even if a malicious actor could get the car to not do the assist part anymore, you can still stop by pressing the pedal hard.
I feel like bollards and other form of separating roads from pedestrians are unviable on the large scale. I hope manufacturers start focusing more on sandboxing any internet-connected parts of their software and leaving the whole car-driving part inaccessible from any of that.
Not one backdoor? not even for the blues?
It's almost certainly 15 grams of RDX.
Yes, some kind of Semtex or C-4 would fit the application
It's worth noting that RDX requires a detonator. This requires more space in the device.
Not to mention phones, laptops, tables, smart watches, medical devices, children's toys, etc.
That's exactly why the "software hack" doesn't make any sense
No battery powered gadget as ever exploded like that ever
That's a battery explosion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KR7_xwQbYp0
That's a bomb: https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1836037485492629605
I haven't seen images of the damage, but the difference in damage between an exploding lithium ion battery and 10-15 grams of RDX explosives is going to be "night and day", as they say.
Edit: OK, I've seen some videos. Looks like much less than 10-15g of RDX levels of explosions.
Are pagers allowed on airplanes? Most modern digital devices also carry a sealed Lithium ion pack....
Weren't these people mostly emergency responders? Like doctors and EMTs? And yes, killed several, but also injured thousands? I'm a little concerned by the vocabulary used in the op title.
Hezbollah started encouraging its operatives to switch to pagers months ago, out of fear that Israel would compromise or had compromised their cell phones.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/pagers-drones-how-...
It seems likely that a significant number of the thousands injured were Hezbollah militants. How significant? We’ll have to wait for the numbers.
I haven’t seen any indication that the exploding pagers were held by emergency responders in a significant quantity. Do you have a source for that?
A lot of what I have been following is from here[1] and mentions: - "Today's attacks exposed many members at various levels. While the group says many of those injured are medical staff or administrative personnel and not fighters..." as well as - "Then we started seeing CCTV from inside shops and supermarkets of these small explosions targeting people doing their groceries or paying at the checkout.
Then for hours on end [we heard] the wail of sirens. The internal security forces were asking people to get off the streets because traffic was overwhelming the city."
And from my understanding of that region's geopolitics, isn't Hezbollah a political party? So this is like reading about a nation state blanket bombing targets that are of members of the Republican party right?
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cwyl9048gx8t
I just noticed my use of 'mostly' which unintentionally is doing more heavy lifting than it should. I was incorrect to use that word, but the point remains.
Does republican party has a military wing that shoots rockets into Mexico every day?
Yeah if course it was all journalists kids pregnant doctors. Not Hezbollah members carrying Hezbollah pagers /s
Question: what's the possibility of doing this with non-tampered with modern mobile phones?
Many phones today have a 5000mah battery, which I'm assuming could be triggered to overheat via a malicious app or webpage. Imagine this being used on a grand scale.
It's not easy. Lithium-ion batteries are designed to withstand heat without presenting an immediate or non-obvious threat to the user. The easiest way to cause a pyrotechnic discharge is to penetrate the battery itself, and even that isn't terribly explosive (here's a laptop battery "exploding": https://youtu.be/oieH2wwDGzo )
If someone did try heating up your phone to implement such an attack, you would feel it burning through your denim pockets long before it hits 210f. Futhermore, both phone SOCs and battery firmwares tend to implement emergency shutoff contingencies for when the phone overheats. Without prior tampering, nothing will really behave like it does in this attack. It is 100% a supply-chain threat.
I seriously doubt there is any way at all for software to trigger a dead short, and even if you did, the path would burn out quickly and the hardware only BMS part would cut power due to the massive voltage drop.
OK you just have to prevent it on OS level tbab. So the battery temperature doesn't go higher than a certain level.
There must be a bit of tradecraft involved.
How did Mossad ensure these particular pagers were bought? Who was the salesperson that (presumably) gave Hezbollah a good deal on them?
Part of the context is that they use a different communication network which is probably why they were targeted in that specific way...
Overcharging batteries would be the hack....not suggesting someone do this but said strategy works with both acid based and lithium batteries...
Would the explosives in these pagers have been caught by something like TSA? I could imagine that at please *some* of the owners had to have flown with them.
Were they caught? If not, why not?
Hezbollah is considered a terrorist organization by most countries that also have airport security. I really doubt the people with these pagers would go anywhere near a TSA checkpoint.
Breaks my heart to see high tech used to create mayhem rather than improve the world
Question for those with more knowledge on these devices: how can they detonate? The batteries?
This article [1] has an image of the pager and a video supposedly showing one exploding in the bag of some guy while shopping groceries. From that I would suspect a supply chain attack integrating some explosive, that seems way too violent for just an exploding battery or anything else you would usually find in that kind of device.
[1] https://realrepublic.com/encrypted-hezbollah-pagers-simultan...
The batteries are the only major energy storage device there to breach.
Clearly Israel has found a software vulnerability that lets them overload some otherwise minimally used processor and overheat the batteries. Above ~140f lithium ion cells go into thermal runaway.
It seems like they actually installed small bombs in the devices.
How is it so clear to you?
I was discounting the possibility that Mossad was in control of global supplychains with sufficient intensity and recklessness to hide semtex and a detonator in an entire brand of consumer electronics, in its urgency to provide retroactive justification for every antisemitic conspiracy theory out there and ignite war with the entire Middle East.
The only thing in a pager that SHOULD BE THERE with enough energy to 'explode' on demand, is a lithium ion battery. Which is evidently, given further reports, not what happened here.
they had to have had some extra components added: batteries won't pop like that, they haven't that much energy.
It could be they had a way to warm up the batteries until these explode
8 year old girl was dead there, not only hezbollah members uses it, hospitals uses it too
If it's a child sitting on the lap with her father, and her father is related to Hezbollah (and as such carrying a pager), this stuff could happen, I think.
All in all horrible to be honest ...
Apparently a message was sent to the pagers right before exploding. I saw in a couple videos where the victim looked down at their hip and angled it to see the screen. It makes sense as a trick to ensure the target is close by when it goes off, but a kid could just as easily pick it up off a table after hearing it buzz.
Is there a pager model sophisticated enough to accept remote firmware updates (or whatever condition for a software exploit) but lacking a battery protection IC? Otherwise wouldn't sabotage elsewhere in the chain be more likely?
It was most likely a supply chain attack integrating explosives into the pagers, this article [1] says the affected devices were from a recent shipment. The explosions are way too violent for malfunctioning batteries.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/hundreds-of-hezbollah-...
What's the probability that the pagers were also bugged to allow Mossad to listen in? Pretty high, I would guess.
The pagers were for a POCSAG network, they don't have to bug the pagers to listen in.
If one thing taught from this James Bond movie act, is that you should never say never.
I was thinking more of the underlying encryption being compromised.
What encryption? It’s POCSAG
The title is egregiously bad
Email suggested improvements to mods at hn@ycombinator.com
I meant the article headline, sorry
HN permits (and encourages) title edits in certain cases, within certain parameters:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40734840>
Again: email suggestions to mods.
(Probably too late to matter in this case, but keep in mind in future.)
How do you go from "dozens" in the headline to "several" in the opening paragraph, while respecting yourself as journalistic writer?
This is a pretty amazing exploit by the attackers. Either they had access to the pagers during shipment and installed malware or had access to RCE on the devices.
They could have seen it while fixing a pager... Or those things work so well, never break...
Fantastically executed. One-off trick, but what a brilliant one.
It was surprising tbh. Someone said on the news that they tried to control the short circuit and increase the voltage which made batteries explode??
Ok so they have incapacitated a large swath of the organisations leadership. Are they planning to roll in now ?
New fear unlocked!!! I will no longer look at my phone the same way!
There will be better experts here, but it is correct that batteries cannot explode like this, right?
Given the amount of foreign EVs already in this country, let's hope not.
This is terrorism. Israel is not an island defending from terrorist, they are the ones spreading terror. What they did to their neighbouring countries could be happen to others. Can we stop praising this as clever and impressive attack and start holding Israel accountable!?
It's the very opposite.
It's the most precise targeting of enemy combatants ever. Hezbollah (and effectively Lebanon) started a war on Israel on Oct 8th in solidarity with Hamas' attacks on Israel (before Israel has even responded really) and has continued indiscriminate attacks against Israeli civilians since resulting in more than 100,000 internally displaced people in Israel. Many dead and injured. Most recently children in a soccer match.
Israel has repeatedly demanded Hezbollah stop attacking it and warned it of grave consequences. This is consequences.
The only "neighbouring countries" of other countries that have something to worry about are those that start wars against their neighbours.
I hope people discuss using more precise terms. UN Security Council Resolution 1566 outlines what is generally considered as terrorism:
"criminal acts, including against civilians, committed with the intent to cause death or serious bodily injury, or taking of hostages, with the purpose to provoke a state of terror in the general public or in a group of persons or particular persons, intimidate a population or compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act."
Physically the attack was likely well targeted. It was shipped very recently, so it's likely only few of those beepers made into the public market.
However, the attack happened right in the middle of general population far away from the theater of war. This obviously intimidates and mentally damages innocent people living their normal lives. So it can be considered as a form of terrorism.
No government, especially those of developed countries, should be allowed to inflict harms on individuals, living in peace, in any form, whether physical or mental.
>No government, especially those of developed countries, should be allowed to inflict harms on individuals, living in peace, in any form, whether physical or mental.
That's why they targeted members of Hezbollah (a terrorist organization) and not children playing football like Hezbollah does.
Yeah, but, again, it was a large scale attack right in the middle of general population. It wouldn't be problematic if this attack was targeting few key members, but thousands certainly intimidate normal people unnecessarily.
Hezbollah is at war with Israel. The targets are combatants, not civilians.
Their neighbouring country whose southern region is run by a designated terrorist organisation? The same org that has been indiscriminately launching rockets at civilians towns for a year straight? Oh yeah Israel is definitely the terrorist you’re right XD
> Former Israeli officials have openly acknowledged Israel's role in providing funding and assistance to Hamas as a means of undermining secular Palestinian factions such as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, who served as the Israeli military governor in Gaza during the early 1980s, admitted to providing financial assistance to Mujama Al-Islamiya, the precursor of Hamas, on the instruction of the Israeli authorities.
> in 1998, it was revealed that Netanyahu suggested Turkey to support Hamas. Netanyahu said "Hamas also has bank accounts for aid in banks, we help them too, you [Turkey] can help too."
> In an interview with Politico in 2023, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that "In the last 15 years, Israel did everything to downgrade the Palestinian Authority and to boost Hamas." He continued saying "Gaza was on the brink of collapse because they had no resources, they had no money, and the PA refused to give Hamas any money. Bibi saved them. Bibi made a deal with Qatar and they started to move millions and millions of dollars to Gaza."
Israel is surprised that the terrorists they funded do terrorist things?
The obvious conclusion is that they WANTED Hamas to do those terrorist things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_support_for_Hamas
If this can happen then there no way the TSA and other groups would be able to detect it.
Crazy. I wonder if they were used for tracking until they were found out, at which point BOOM
This may be the first widely reported deadly hack of a connected device. Wild times we live in.
Why were they even using pagers? Aren't all messages in cleartext?
POCSAG is an ideal for broadcasting low-sensitivity push notifications, like "report to your local commanding officer by 15:00 today". These messages don't need encryption, just a reliable way to reach militants without revealing their location.
That is some wild and scary stuff.
A technically amazing but otherwise terrifying act.
A possible explanation of how it happened: https://www.lbcgroup.tv/news/lebanon-news/796406/understandi...
not unprecedented https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash#Assassination
That one was a bomb, today's attack was by heating the lithium battery.
nobody knows what happened today.
This blowing while you are fueling up your car.... hmmm
Did the pagers all receive the same text message before they exploded?
Title really should say "pagers", not "devices".
That’s a lot of injured and very angry very freshly motivated terrorists…and not a lot of dead ones.
Not convinced this is a net win for Israel
Israel loses if it kills it's enemies. That's your logic? Reminds me of Trudeau "if you kill your enemies, they win".
>Israel loses if it kills it's enemies. That's your logic?
huh? No not at all
Saying that those 2k+ injured Hammas are going to spend time recovering and when they're back they're going to be even more motivated to harm Israel.
Would have been better to do nothing. Or to kill them. But nothing in between.
It's also going to be devastating to the Israeli economy. Who would possibly use Israeli tech now?
wow, if anyone suggested this supply chain attack as a possibility then everyone would brush it off
The expected collateral damage here seems severe even for Israel. It makes me wonder if there was a coding error where a subset of the devices were supposed to explode but they all did by mistake…
I wonder why they did this, thus revealing that they compromised a lot of devices and losing that capability, instead of quietly continuing to monitor them and using their location to perform attacks via other means if needed.
Maybe they hope the psychological effect is a big deterrent?
Nothing in that particular report says anything about the pagers exploding individually. It may of been a box, labelled as containing pagers, delivered to a group of people and detonated in one location.
There are videos on twitter and NY Times article explains more
Pagers people had on their pants exploded
Many questions remain, but, also, one: If Mossad had the capability to pull off such a complex supply chain fiesta here, could they not as certainly hack the firmware to intercept all traffic? (Now that Hezbollah is alledged to be using them to communicate?)
Maybe they did, and - at this point - decided that detonating them was preferable to having the asset - and whatever information it was yielding ...
... which is worrying.-
PS. There's talk of this being a "use it or lose it" kind of scenario, with the pagers being close to compromised.-
My guess is they infiltrated the pager supply putting the bombs in all pagers and triggered them with Hezbollah's own encoded message system so only the guilty parties would be effected.
Seems more likely their explosive implant used a separate RF trigger -- makes the whole thing much simpler for them, less detectable. They could run a plane or drone overhead to send the radio initiate message.
Looked like 5-10g (maybe up to 20g?) of explosive, NOT battery. I think you could fit the whole package inside an AA battery, along with an AAAA battery, so you could do something crazy there, or just replace a rechargeable battery pack with something of smaller battery capacity containing the explosive, some electronics, etc. Or just use spare volume inside the case and hope no one does gross physical inspection.
It's trivial to sniff a data line to the LCD and look for a specific message(I regrettably had to do this in the late 90's to fix a bug using an additional Z8 microcontroller). That said, it would be more work than inserting a separate module with its own message reception logic.
Market data suggests that Lebanon is completely saturated with smart phones, like everywhere else in the developed world, so it seems likely that there are only "guilty" pagers (certainly in this shipment, but more likely in the region).
Many doctors all over the world still use pagers.
You think Iran ships 2000 pagers to doctors in Lebanon all at once?
I only provided a reasonable caveat to your suggestion that anyone in Lebanon with a pager can be assumed "guilty".
I used the word "guilty" (in quotes) because the parent comment did.
Though not ones supplied by a terror group, connected to their private network.
(This is an assumption, I'm neither a doctor nor a terrorist).
It was a cyberattack from Israel some rumours say.
This is like Anom but with explosives
Certainly lot cheaper than a missile or two.
Mossad said - "Explain to me why it is more noble to kill 10,000 men in battle than a dozen at dinner."
Primary news suggests its an Israeli cyberattack
I doubt it's just a cyberattack, the videos of the explosions indicate small explosives rather than batteries.
Don't think we'll know exactly what happened until Israel tells the world or an independent investigation concludes but so far my impression is there was a supply chain infiltration and thousands of pagers with explosives have been distributed to Hezbollah.
Cyberattack or supply chain attack? Who uses pagers? So a supply chain attack could have been the cause.
could be both
Someone must have watched Knock Off from 1998
Sucks to be them, why they even use pagers is laughable, unencrypted or encrypted. Cell infrastructure is easily traceable.
I just feel sorry for the innocent lives involved in all of this, no one deserves to be caught up in either side of the conflict.
> Sucks to be them, why they even use pagers is laughable, unencrypted or encrypted. Cell infrastructure is easily traceable.
That's the point why they're using pagers: pagers are passive only. A cellphone can guide a rocket to its target, a pager just listens and cannot be used to guide a rocket, to act as a listening bug or confirm someone's presence (or absence).
Interesting, never knew this. Do modern pagers transmit any RF at all?
There's two-way pagers which transmit, but receive only pagers can be broadcast reception only; there's no check-in / message acknowledgement, although messages may be rebroadcast to help ensure reception in case of bad signal conditions.
You'd probably get some small amount of RF emissions though, most receivers radiate something as a result of using superheterodyne signal processing.
Thousands now were injured. This is a massive scale (terrorist) attack
Do we really know that these were explosives or lithium ion batteries on their own can be this dangerous?
Does anyone have a footage?
https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1836037485492629605
Revolting to see the replies cheering for the "wailing terrorist" who was just restocking produce.
Neither of those videos show somebody restocking produce getting hurt.
A gram of c4 will do it?
here is how they did it (supposedly):
https://x.com/Osint613/status/1836111109742354507
cool downvote - why lol
I read somewhere that these were likely Motorola devices. Does that mean they are complicit in adding explosives to their pagers (wtf?) or is Mossad conducting supply chain attacks on such a massive scale? How do they ensure only the right pagers explode? Or did they randomly blow up a bunch of innocent pager users?
This must clearly be a violation of international law.
Wild that the US media is reporting this as some mysterious, awe inspiring tactic.
Guessing they compromised the devices with a firmware backdoor, perhaps to remotely trigger an exploit that heats up the devices battery to dangerous levels once a signal is received. Paranoid about this happening with my vape mod with two 18650 cells
More likely this has nothing to do with the batteries and this batch of pagers was physically intercepted and rigged with actual explosives. A very concrete example of a supply chain attack.
Could be true but that requires a lot more steps. Need the materiel to be implanted, delivered to targets, then have a software payload execute, instead of just the last step. However, most battery packs for pagers im seeing are 650 mAh which isn't much energy at all. Two 18650s have almost ten times as much capacity, and they don't explode.
That's enough to vaporise about 100 g of water according my back of the envelope calculations. Overkill? Or is modified for an entirely different purpose?
If that is not terrorism I do not know what is...
any indication which brand(s) of pagers were in use?
I saw a speculation on r/lebanon:
https://www.gapollo.com.tw/rugged-pager-ar924/
I can't find the link now, but it was based on an image of the back of burned pager.
Edit: wayback machine link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240529091558/https://www.gapol...
It does look like this one, the page doesn’t open so J assume it’s the page.
The latest versions just exploded; not sure about the brands though
The ones that had explosives put into them.
The market for 3d X-Ray scanners and population surveillance is about to explode.
How long will it take to make a movie about this?
Apartheid Israel really are terrorists. This was representative of that, killing 2 children in the process. There could be 186,000 deaths since October in their current Genocide of the Palestinians. No wonder Hamas and Hezbollah exist, the same way uMkhonto we Sizwe existed in Apartheid South Africa. They need to be sanctioned and their leaders put in a court of the ICC.
How did they know who was using the modified pagers?
How did they know they were only Hezbollah people?
Are there inocent people walking around with modifed explosive devices strapped to their waists? To their kids waists?
This seems potentially extremely reckless.
>Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon
why is the title so bland? It fails spectacularly at communicating the scale of the event. They went with a dog bites man headline instead.
Imagine what they could do with the battery in an electric car..
thankfully the security on vehicles is so good that a hack like this would be impossible eh?
It's very easy to imagine what they'd do with the battery in an electric car. They would do the same thing they did to the pager: put a bomb in it. You cannot "detonate" a lithium ion battery with remote code execution unless you have tampered with the components surrounding it.
It's not so much about the security on vehicles and more about the practical limits. Thermal runaway is only going to happen if you manage to disable the battery's shutoff safeguard (which is usually replicated in hardware and firmware). Unlike phones, you can't really heat up the CPU and force the battery to take the heat. You would have to manipulate the drivetrain in a way that unnaturally damaged the hardware, something a driver would notice almost immediately.
Getting the conditions right for a software-based exploit is a circus act compared to installing a plastic explosive and remote detonator outside the battery stowage.
This is a great article going over why the settler colonial apartheid genocidal state of Israel engages in such operations:
https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09...
Cant help but be reminded of that james mickens article about the mossad vs not mossad threat model https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf where he joking says that mossad will replace your cellphone with a blick of uranium (as a joke to imply you shouldnt worry about nation state actor type threats when building a stupid web app that nobody cares about, because its impossible)
one of the best things I have read this week. thanks
If you like that, i highly reccomend his talk on ai risks. https://youtu.be/ajGX7odA87k?si=-NMySaJzBdx5wlf2 . Half serious talk half stand up commedy routine.
How is this possible? Are they overclocking the MPUs and just heating the batteries to the point of explosion?
These appear to be actual explosions, not battery combustion (there's footage on Twitter of at least one of them going off, it's a detonation rather than intense burning)
Definitely some non-standard internals in those devices...
Can you share a link to the Twitter post? If it's graphic, please mention so.
One (graphic) example: https://twitter.com/GlobalWObserver/status/18360589108615294...
Surely just supply chain infiltration and regular explosives no?
Agreed, the story mentions that the exploded models were all the latest ones purchased in recent months
Wouldn't this be too easy to detect -- for example tripping airport security (or other X-ray security systems, govt. buildings etc).
Well if you have personnel who regularly carry weapons and/or explosives maybe those checks don't apply...but anyway this is mere speculation.
I think a state actor would be able to make an explosive look like a battery on x-ray.
We live in a world where iPhones get shipped directly from China. I know this is pretty much conspiratorial but if China wanted to hack a bunch of iPhones in the hands of government officials, there’s nothing to stop them. This episode made me realize how loose security is around supply chains.
Now this is hacker news!
I find it hard to believe that people are seriously considering the cybersecurity angle in this situation. Yes, there may be some extremely rare and unlikely scenarios where you could hack into a device and cause the attached lithium-ion battery to overheat and combust. However, it’s important to understand that lithium-ion batteries don’t actually explode—they combust gradually over the span of a few seconds to minutes. Even if they did explode, which they don’t, we’re talking about something with the energy equivalent of a single AAA battery, not a large and powerful EV cell. Given these facts, it’s far more plausible that those pagers were intercepted and deliberately implanted with explosives, rather than being manipulated through hacking.
Is it some device like this one?
https://cat-uxo.com/explosive-hazards/ied/pager-bomb-rcied
It's disgusting that humans can invent such devices.
Honestly, at this point, I see absolutely zero difference, from a moral perspective, between the Israeli government and their enemies.
Both are as bad as each other and have been implicated in many war crimes and human rights abuses, however Israel has more firepower and can inflict much more damage (E.g. demolish an entire apartment block, killing hundreds of innocent people from the air).
The last thing any country should consider doing is arming or funding either side, that will be like throwing fuel on a fire. Taking sides in what is essentially a regional ethnic conflict between extremists on both sides is not a good idea.
Again, not condoning or justifying the actions of either side or taking any sides here - they are both as bad as each other.
I do and the latest war completely reaffirmed my perspective. The little spot that allegedly tries to genocide everyone around them while their enemies have that as the stated goals in their respective charters. It is the reason for the existence of Hezbollah even. Why not believe them?
The positions aren't equal, in fact they are worlds apart and Israel treats enemy civilians better than the terror regimes they do live under despite facing constant wars of aggression by said nations.
If someone broke into your house, took over most of it and killed your family member while the police said it was perfectly fine, how would you respond? Just live and let live? Probably not.
We can argue who killed more or was more justified to do it, but that isn't progress. The latest issue is the attack on Israel. There is no equivalence and no justification for that.
The latest issue is an attack on Israel? Are you referring to Oct 7?
Oct 7 had a 71-72% civilian casualty. Project Lavender considered a 90-100% civilian casualty rate to be acceptable and the number of civilians killed vs number of Hama killed far exceeds the ratio on Oct 7.
Israel has systematically destroyed Gaza building by building ruining the lives of millions of people. That is the latest and continuing issue. Ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity.
I see a clear difference. One side still holds hostages, the other does not. One side perpetrated murder, rape and kidnapping, the other did not. Etc.
Israel had 4000 hostages before Oct 7, and more than doubled it since to 10 000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_prisoners_in_Israe...
Rape has been committed by both sides: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/02/israelopt-un...
Are you seriously suggesting, in any way, that blowing up an entire apartment building and all of the innocent civilians inside is not murder?
Israel holds many innocent Palestinian civilians in its prison as its own hostages. These people are held without trial and subjected to rape and other abuses. The difference? Its a state doing it, so to alot of people this somehow makes it ok.
Again, not taking sides here, but both sides are as bad as each other.
Not sure why this was flagged, it's certainly a novel way of striking the enemy, regardless of the political undertones.
Reuters seems to have a bit more details, and is probably a bit less biased than current URL (timesofisrael.com): https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/dozens-hezbollah-m...
What's definitely novel is the scale, perhaps not the tactic, which has been used many times before (speculative assumption being that the devices were tempered with)
It's not especially novel, it's just a lot of similar weapons systems (e.g. cluster bombs, anti personnel landmines) are banned these days.
Intelligence agencies put their bugs within the hardware of electronic devices you order online.
If you believe being the target of an intelligence agency never order anything online. They will put the bug inside, especially if it is an electronic device such as a phone/laptop/TV/coffee machine.
Best solution is to go buy it from a random store and have a good home security system.
Also weigh your electronic devices laptop/phone to check if the weight differs from its original weight, it should not deviate.
> Also weigh your electronic devices laptop/phone to check if the weight differs from its original weight, it should not deviate.
What kind of errors are acceptable here? Or maybe better, how accurate are the measurements given from the manufacturer?
I have a iPhone 12 Mini for example, Apple says (https://support.apple.com/en-us/111877) it should weigh 135 grams. Measuring with a scale of 0.01g precision (which is also calibrated right before) I get 133.5g, so it's ~1.5g off.
Measuring a 50g weight gives me exactly 50g, so the scale is correct, so either the weight of my phone is off, or Apple doesn't give exact weight.
I guess it is better to weigh it just after the purchase from a random store and from there the weight should never change.
Are you in hezbollah as well?
If so, I'd expect my phone to weigh too much rather than too little, because of the added explosives.
What if they replaced the battery with a physically smaller battery to make room for the explosives? If the explosives are less dense than the battery the rigged phone would weigh less than the original.
Where do they do this? Do they pick up the package at the post office distribution center?
In my case they did it at the store where I came to pick it up. That's how I got aware of it.
The espionage agency in question was the french DGSI.
What did they put inside?
At least Eight killed and 2,750 wounded (200 of those in a critical condition) [1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/sep/17/middle-ea...
Good lord that’s a lot of damage from exploding pagers. This is kind of next level stuff here - straight out of a movie.
"These devices don't appear to be designed to be lethal.[..] They are, for the most part, low charge so not packing enough to actually kill somebody.[..] Let's not forget that this comes on the same day that Israel has extended its war aims to including expelling Hezbollah basically from the border." -- BBC's Security Correspondent Frank Gardner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNEb-dY3tRY
I'm not sure if I'm allowed to link to a gory video, but there is commonly circulating video of a pager detonating in a grocery store. There are a few people around the man but only the man appears to be impacted, all bystanders seem OK.
Media is reporting that most casualties are caused by the pager detonating while driving. Obviously because it would impact other drivers that happen to be around the now incapacitated driver.
> Let's not forget that this comes on the same day that Israel has extended its war aims to including expelling Hezbollah basically from the border.
Also in the anniversary of WWII hero Folke Bernadotte assassination by Zionists. See https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-...
Just to put some numbers on that, ToI are presently reporting 9 deaths and 2,800 injuries (those numbers are of course preliminary and very much in flux), which taking the 2nd value as a denominator would be a <1% lethality rate. The BBC's characterisation does seem to be accurate.
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog-september-17-2024/>
While a clever attack it's also highly likely there was collateral damage to nonviolent or noninvolved bystanders.
Already confirmed as there is one 8 year old girl reportedly in the fatalities. This attack will add to the stereotype that Israel attacks indiscriminately.
Is "stereotype" the right word when it accurately describes what's been happening? Amnesty International, the UN, and even the president of the United States have described their attacks as "indiscriminate".
Tbh I only use the word stereotypes because speaking in absolutes here leads to really grimy political discussions with under the guise of semantic or technical discussions. Anyone with eyes can see that Israel acts with protection of the US military and has no reason to be specific with their targets, even while being scolded by that military
Definitely sad when there is collateral damage. But I don't see how it is possible to fight a war with absolutely zero collateral damage - do you? Hezbollah started firing rockets at Israel on Oct 7 before they even responded.
It is better not to fight a war at all, but this is not always an option.
Watch some of the videos, they are remarkably targetted. One man is standing at a checkout line in a grocery store, 2 women near him. He looks at his pager before it explodes. The women around him are unharmed.
If the man is unarmed, I don't think they can be considered a legitimate target. If that is the case, then you could argue all Israelis who have a military background are legitimate targets and that includes most of the population.
The concept of legitimate targets is from the Geneva convention.
> A fundamental premise of the Geneva Conventions has been that to earn the right to protection as military fighters, soldiers must distinguish themselves from civilians by wearing uniforms and carrying their weapons openly
Hezbollah fighters clearly aren’t doing this and this is whether the fundamental argument around how Israel behaves comes from - what is a legitimate target and rules of engagement when the fighting force blends itself into the general populace? For all the criticism, Israel by some accounts does seem to do better than the US in similar circumstances when they were in Iraq and Afghanistan in terms of protecting civilian populations. And for all their criticism (some well deserved some not) they could certainly be even more indiscriminate in their targeting.
> Hezbollah fighters clearly aren’t doing this
What do you mean? I am not in any way supporting Hezbollah but their soldiers are definitely "wearing uniforms and carrying their weapons openly." Hamas and Hezbollah are not the same. Hamas is more decentralized though so that doesn't happen as often in that case. Hezbollah soldiers are also salaried and more properly equipped by Iran/Syria.
The biggest difference between Hezbollah and Hamas is that in Hezbollah's case, their soldiers are more motivated by money rather than ideology. They treat it more like a "professional" job, work for promotions, and dress accordingly. It's a significantly more top-down structure too.
What's the country of Hezbollah? There's clearly not one. It's Lebanon. Hezbollah is a group inside a State not a State.
There are a bunch of very good reasons why groups doing that are outside the law.
Hezbollah has been accused of employing similar tactics of hiding among civilian populations and hiding military equipment in civilian buildings which makes sense both given that Iran is backing both these groups and from a strategic view if you’re fighting a significantly more advanced enemy.
As for ideology vs money, it’s hard to distinguish which motivates them more va Hamas given these movements started from seed money and personnel from the Iranian revolutionary guard.
But certainly hezbollah started indiscriminately shelling Israeli civilian targets and Israel is responding by targeting military personnel and infrastructure. It’s up to the Lebanese government to control Hezbollah (which they cant) and Hezbollah is responsible for collateral civilian casualties that stem from attacking them
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/rjhi11ibu0
https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2024/03/21/idf-hezbollah-stores...
To paraphrase a guy on the 'tube, intelligence officers are seldom armed with more than a ham sandwich but are still legitimate targets.
Link to the video (which AFAICT contains no gore, but is obviously not pleasant):
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/17/world/video/hezbollah-pagers-...
That's just the videos that have been published and the ones that happened to be captured by CCTV. If 1000 devices were indiscriminately detonated, even a 5% collateral damage rate would mean up to 50 innocent people harmed, maimed, or killed. At 15%, 150, and so forth.
That would still make it the least indiscriminate long-range attack in the history of warfare.
Give me another example of a military that injured/incapacitated over 1000 enemy combatants from hundreds of miles away with so few civilian casualties.
It's absurd that this was flagged and pushed off the front page. Either it was a supply chain attack with explosives installed, or this was a hack that caused battery explosion. Either way this is extremely relevant to Hacker News.
@dang
This is true, however I can also accept that a thread on this is going to descend into a shit show.
Hopefully mods wake up soon, I want the technical gory details without the gory convo. If this is legit, it is going to be a fascinating post mortem.
> I want the technical gory details without the gory convo.
One day soon I'll write a eulogy for Hacker News, and this is a great contender for the website's epitaph.
I don't think the Times Of Israel is an unbiased source. This isn't trustworthy reporting.
J*sus. I fully plan to stop going around with my iphone everywhere (until this is fully explained). We could all be 1 glitch (think CrowdStrike) away from getting lithium exploded mysteriously.
The Times of Israel, seriously? Could you have picked a more biased source?
Pager networks are 100% clear text. If you're stupid enough to be using them to coordinate operations in 2024, I feel like you kind of deserve whatever happens to you.
You're telling me nobody in Hezbollah watched The Wire?
You can use cyphertext inside the plaintext. Seems to be what they are doing.
You still have the metadata of sender and receiver. Your whole network is exposed.
Also your message limits are 200 characters and likely highly susceptible to correlation attacks.
Pagers are one-way, not bidirectional like cell networks. That's their whole point. Their HQ can broadcast a message and you won't find out who is the receiver, because pagers don't transmit, only listen.
I never said they were two-way. I said you have the metadata of the sender and the receiver.
The page data contains the receiver/pager address, but remember this is RF. Triangulating source of transmission on a frequency you are actively monitoring is table stakes for nation states.
Once you flag receiver addresses there are techniques to work out who that party is, especially for a nation state sophisticated enough to intercept the supply chain in the first place. Correlating transaction data to people is tedious but doable. Even with receiver addresses only though you can work out how the network works and what cells there are and that's a ton of useful intelligence already.
Also if the "code" being used was in any way breached it could be used to trick receivers into self-identifying.
Israel just skipped all of that effort with "ring ring, boom" though.
sure. But everything over cell network is anyway more or less already exposed on the metadata front so why not go "low tech" ?
And yeah it probably was more a "code" than cyphertext.
Let's be fair. This is probably the communication channel for grunts that command doesn't give a shit about and they're using E2EE apps for command and this for grunts.
Oh yes most definitely. Pagers are usually used this way in all of the other uses anyway (to quickly contact and inform ground actions like in emergency services).
I'm getting tired of everybody saying "supply chain, supply chain":
first, you have no information.
second, it's so non-specific, it's less informative than "they inserted exploding batteries into the supply chain" vs "a container that was unloaded was not actually from the source" which I would say isn't even supply chain, like if I leave a box of dog poop at your door, I haven't tampered with your "supply chain"
maybe this hack started with hearing that they were going to upgrade devices. maybe it this hack started with convincing them to upgrade. maybe Turkey did it. maybe ISIS did it, they hate hezbollah.
it doesn't make you sound more informed to say "supply chain", it makes you sound less.
>second, it's so non-specific, it's less informative than "they inserted exploding batteries into the supply chain" vs "a container that was unloaded was not actually from the source" which I would say isn't even supply chain, like if I leave a box of dog poop at your door, I haven't tampered with your "supply chain"
Almost all of the global commerce happens by contained carried by ship or plane. That someone can take a container full of electronics, tamper with them, and sell them without even the manufacturer noticing has very serious implications. Your phone and your laptop were also inside of a container, and were also handled by dozens of middleman companies. have you ever opened them and check every component? Can you assert you are not carrying a timed bomb in your pocket?
This is really sick and should result in major sanctions against Israel. USA should never give them another penny, take the nukes, and let them wither. They've become pure hate. This is a standard that can't be allowed and Israel must be punished.