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.
A missile is a demonstration of military force. Everyone in the region knows Israel is capable of blowing up a building.
This is a "we've got you hopelessly compromised as an organization" sort of demonstration that's far more humiliating.
For a similar example, see the US response to 9/11 - two decades of war, taking shoes off at airports, etc. - versus the US response to COVID, which killed a 9/11 worth every couple of days, but resulted in a "but I don't wanna wear a mask" response.
> It's easy to sit online and make bold and vague claims like there will be armed escalation in retaliation.
I mean, that's the pretty standard response in this conflict. Permanent tit-for-tat, back-and-forth, for decades/millennia depending on how broadly you count things. For a concrete example, Iran's April strikes.
> What do you think constitutes a major escalation?
Terror attacks on Israeli assets abroad - I'd be keeping embassies/consulates on alert - and rocket strikes against Israel. At least enough to try to save face, although the Iranian strikes offer a "good luck" for that.
Do you think Lebanon will escalate by capturing prisoners? I agree that that could be an escalation given the context and history. That said, I don't know what a path to peace with Hezbollah looks like. It's hard to imagine Israel tolerating it imperfect ceasefire while Hezbollah continues to arm, given how that worked out with Hamas
I think that netanyahu would be very happy to see a de-escalation on the northern border and it would be a big win for his cabinet.
Israel is desperate to provoke?
Hezbollah is bombing Israel since the October 7th attack. 300,000 refugees inside Israel because of this bombing. Who is provoking who ?
How is what you wrote about that Israel is desperate to provoke is related to Gaza ?
Israel is defending itself against Hamas, Hezbollah and other Iranian allies since October 7th 2023.
Why would Israel provoke Hezbollah? What's the point of it ?
We should avoid using the name of the country as a proxy for its current government. The people has nothing to do with this - this is all planned and executed under the auspices of the current prime minister and his associates.
Even though the people largely supports their agenda, an action that targets three people but affects 2,700 people as collateral damage would not pass by their parliament.
We should avoid using the name of the country as a proxy for its current government
I understand your point but synecdoche is the oil on the gears of discourse. This required a lot of people's involvement, from those issuing the orders to technicians at the bottom of the chain of command. It's not Netanyahu's cabinet that did the work of placing explosive charges in thousands of compact devices and then repackaged and shrinkwrapped them.
Obviously once could refer to the 'Netanyahu regime' or some other more specific term, but then someone else would complain that this was a mendacious mischaracterization of the country's political system or suchlike. To the extent that civilians there don't with to be identified with their political leadership or take on the moral responsibility for its decisions, they'd better step up their efforts to topple the government by means of a general strike or some other time-honored method.
I do think we can hold Israel as a country responsible. But what we can't do is blame Jewish or even Israeli people in general. Though I don't see anyone doing this. The current government is always quick to draw the antisemitism card when being criticised but I never see anyone actually doing that.
Why would you assume this targeted three people? I assume the most likely scenario is that the attackers targeted as many Hezbollah members as they could, and were extremely successful at it.
That's a very good point - if the goal was to disable comms and incapacitate as many targets as possible, then collateral damage numbers are much lower.
It's unknown how many were family members of targeted individuals, and whatever the number actually is, it'll be misreported.
Why would the family members of a Hezbollah operative be carrying a pager tuned to Hezbollah's private communications network? A reminder that Hezbollah operates a parallel phone system, and is in many ways more sophisticated and organized than the de jure government of Lebanon, whose military forces Hezbollah outnumbers.
The family member would not necessarily need to be carrying the pager, just near it. Picture a child standing next to adult, pager on hip would be next to the kids head. Pagers are not always worn too, could be on top of a table, etc..
First a style point: I don't think you get very far with things like "the only conclusion we can draw is that I'm right". I know I never sound like it, but the one thing I can confidently state in these kinds of discussions is that nothing is unambiguous. When it comes to conflict in the Middle East, if I have to be potentially wrong about things, so do you!
As I've remarked several times on this thread, the standard I'm using for this attack isn't one in which no innocents (or even innocent children) are harmed or killed. I don't like war and would happily confiscate every firearm in North America, but that standard is one no active military in the world meets. Rather: the "state of the art" in targeted strikes is air-to-ground weaponry, which routinely kills civilian bystanders at ratios far exceeding 1:1.
Here, my guess is that the ratio is something far south of 1:100, making this strike --- I think? --- unprecedented in precision in the last 100 years of warfare. We'll learn more as the day goes on, and if/when I'm wrong, I'll certainly say so.
"Terrorism" has nothing whatsoever to do with my thinking on this. Hezbollah is a large, sophisticated, organized, well-supplied combatant force, a military peer to its neighbors, and it is in open armed conflict with Israel.
We'll see, but I don't think it's very likely that Hezbollah school teachers are carrying Hezbollah pagers. There were a bunch of news stories written about why Hezbollah fighters are carrying pagers. Ordinary Lebanese people, from what I can see (I actually looked up market data here) carry Android phones like everybody else does. And I don't think Hezbollah is handing out pagers to random janitors in Dahieh.
Note Reuters reporting on the concentration of reports of strikes here: it's not uniformly spread across the population of Lebanon.
We will see. But at this point it is ill advised to consider Israel to be in the right. We have seen how they conduct their targeting in Gaza, and we have no reason to believe their targeting practice is any more careful, nor humane in Lebanon.
We have every reason to suspect they had no idea who would be carrying these pagers. That they did consider any Hezbollah member to be a legitimate target, be they senior administrators at a hospital, media workers, politicians, etc.
At the very least they must have known that higher party members (i.e. politicians) would be carrying the pagers, and that they had no idea who was actually close when they detonated, and simply didn’t care if children got hurt.
An army who is on trial for genocide does not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
I think they considered any Hezbollah member carrying one of these pagers to be a legitimate target. Why are senior administrators at hospitals and media workers carrying military command and control equipment?
If it turns out that large numbers of non-military personnel were carrying pagers that blew up, I'll be wrong about this, and I'll say so. My belief that this isn't the case isn't because I have any particular faith in Israel; it's because of the previous reporting about why Hezbollah had people carrying pagers: because it believed Israel was going to target these people through their cellphones. Pagers suck! I think people are carrying these things (or were; nobody's carrying any pagers anymore!) because they have to.
I don't know what "benefit of the doubt" means in this situation. Israel and Hezbollah are at war. War is ruthless.
Anyways all this is to say: Hezbollah is a military peer to Israel (I mean, I think Israel would win, but it wouldn't be easy). "Terrorism" has nothing to do with this. The conflict to me is fundamentally amoral, bilaterally, in a way that isn't the case with Gaza. Israel doesn't occupy Lebanon or control Hezbollah's supply lines. These are two opposing armies doing what armies do during hostilities.
I don't see how an attack launched by one hostile military force against combatants of another, where both forces are in declared open combat, can possibly be described as "state-sponsored terrorism".
Again: all the available reporting suggests strongly that Israel wasn't simply targeting every pager in Lebanon. These were specific pagers procured by Hezbollah for military operations, something widely reported months before this attack.
Even if it targeted only military personnel, they were targeted going about their daily activities, putting their families and others who might, as we saw, just be shopping near them, at risk.
I think this is the reason booby trapping consumer devices which resemble those in use by civilians is an explicit war crime.
You can't guarantee the explode as intended. It is gonna be very difficult for Lebanon to find all of the unexploded devices and secure them. Very likely one of those booby traps will find their way to a thrift store in the next few years and unexpectedly explode when handled by innocent hands.
It is a stretch to call a pager a military equipment and the use of one a “military operation”.
No, Israel rigged consumer electronics used by people during their civilian lives off the battlefield as they posed no threat to anybody. There is no definition of terrorism which doesn’t encapsulate this act.
And no, this act is not justified even if every targeted victim of this attack was a Hezbollah member. As I said before, there are more members of this organization than fighters and generals.
No, that's not what the reporting says. Hezbollah operates its own military networks for these things, procures these pagers specifically for military purchases, and issues them to Hezbollah fighters.
"Off the battlefield" doesn't mean anything here: if they're members of the armed wing of Hezbollah, they are black-letter IHL combatants whether or not they're actively engaged in combat, the same way everybody aboard a naval vessel is a combatant if you sink it, including the cook.
Put it this way: if it turns out that these pagers were widely used by non-military personnel, like school teachers, I'll absolutely say I was wrong, and that this attack was probably hard to justify. If reporting firms up that these pagers exclusively carried by military personnel, does that change things for you?
One of the casualties was the child of an MP. That is not military. So we know of at least one instance of a non-military member being targeted, and their kid killed.
Israel has consistently lied about the military nature of their targets in Gaza. I see no reason to believe they behave any differently in Lebanon.
Also, even if they were all military—which they probably weren’t—they were still going about their civilian lives far away from the battlefield, as they posed no threat to anybody.
Now that some time has passed we know a little more about the victims. Including a press conference by Lebanon’s Minister of Health Firass Abiad. There have been 12 recorded deaths so far. Of those were 4 medical workers, one 8 year old girl, and one 11 year old boy. The press conference noted that many of those carrying the pagers were civilians. And made special mention of the toll this scale of an attack had on their medical system.
The best interpretation for Israel here is that they conducted a terrorist attack in a civilian against an armed group during their civilian lives, inflicting at least some civilian casualties. But we know how Israel conducts it self in Gaza and elsewhere in Palestine, and we have every reason to expect their intentions were far more nefarious.
The answer is no. The nature of the attack does not make it OK even if it turns out that only military personnel had these pagers. It is not OK for Israel to weaponize consumer electronics which are widely used in a civilian area, even if the users at the time are most likely military personnel.
But this question is irrelevant because this is very unlikely to be the case. The victims seem to be many civilians.
Since when did naming a country for their military action signify the opinion or inclination of the majority of civic population? When newspapers report on "country A did X" it almost always means their government did X. So I'm not sure what point you're trying to make
It is some sort of dehumanization. Since it got into fashion, I've noticed some colleges started to refer to companies in China as 'China'. Like as if they are dealing with Xi when procuring washers.
You are lumping together a population that doesn't necessarily agree with the actions. It creates negative attitudes towards citizens of that country (or people who look like citizens of that country).
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 !
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.