Hezbollah blames Israel after deadly pager explosions in Lebanon
Hezbollah blames Israel after deadly pager explosions in Lebanon
Blasts affecting the Iran-backed armed group occur in Beirut and other parts of Lebanon.
Nine people, including a child, have been killed after handheld pagers used by members of the armed group Hezbollah to communicate exploded across Lebanon, the country’s health minister says.
Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon was among 2,800 other people who were wounded by the simultaneous blasts in Beirut and several other regions.
Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, said the pagers belonged “to employees of various Hezbollah units and institutions” and that at least two members were among the dead.
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This already happened with phones, but that was a targeted killing:
At 08:00 on 5 January 1996, Ayyash's father called him and Ayyash answered. Overhead, an Israeli plane picked up their conversation and relayed it to an Israeli command post. When it was confirmed that it was Ayyash on the phone, Shin Bet remotely detonated it, killing him instantly.[3]
Soooooo, Israel passed out pagers loaded with explosives? And people used them?
Well, I'm guessing they concealed them in an extra-large Li-Ion battery and wired a heating element in series inside it, so that shorting the terminals by the circuitry triggered the explosive. Pagers use so little power that the lower capacity would be hard to notice and the heating element's voltage drop would be negligible. I assume the pagers' command & control equipment had backdoors, too.
that would be the simplest explanation, and they did that covertly, perhaps somewhere further up supply chain, yes
I think they've hacked the network and are executing code that overheats the battery and makes it explode
That's what I thought at first too, but that would hardly be an explosion. And you would have plenty of time to get away from it as it heated up.
According to the article:
But a former British Army munitions expert, who asked not to be named, told the BBC the pagers would have likely been packed with between 10g and 20g of military-grade high explosive, hidden inside a fake electronic component.
I don't know what the actual truth of the situation is, but something's fucky. I can't imagine how Israel could plant explosives in those pagers. And overheating batteries would burst into flames rather than literally explode, so that would probably be mentioned somewhere.
Israel's doing lots of fucked up shit lately, but I can't see how this one would be their fault.
Supply chains are vulnerable as hell. There's photos of NSA agents installing backdoors in Cisco network equipment during the shipping to the customer. There's no proof and it will probably take many years before we hear anything conclusive, but it is without a doubt within the capabilities of Israel or one of their allies intelligence agencies to intercept a shipment of pagers and install explosives in them.
Some Hezbollah requisitions guy forgot proper opsec and ordered a new pagers in bulk, which where intercepted and swapped.
Supply chains matter a lot and governments, let alone terrorist organizations, fail to protect them.
US centric, but far too much of policy is "Don't buy Made in China" with no thought beyond that.
For this scenario? My assumption is they ordered from their usual supply sources and nothing was hinky. But Israel (or whoever) compromised a port or fedex center along the way and installed some explosives since the only people buying those pagers were terrorists. And nobody on the hezbollah side even bothered to weigh the packages before handing them out.