Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon
reuters.com
reuters.com
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.
Made, or provided by?
>> This is the second time israel has done this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash
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.
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.
1 - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...
Most likely they knew some of them would go to hezbollah, and that was enough, collateral damage be damned.
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.
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.
Question is how did Hamas slip by this same highly skilled org?
"You can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs" approach applied to armed conflicts.
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.
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.
<https://www.npr.org/2020/03/05/812499752/uncovering-the-cias...>
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.
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.
The point is, would allies trust if it were China that pulled this off? Huawei/TikTok were thrown under the bus for way less.
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.
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.
I buy chinese IP cameras. China cannot block my bank account / employment / communications.
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.
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.
All because China is saying: "Either you submit to us completely voluntarily, or you submit by force, but you will submit"?
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-rt-employees-indicted-cov...
I'm not saying Ukraine is some golden child or whatever but they weren't the aggressor.
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.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/13/media/right-wing-media-influe...
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.
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 medium is the message.
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
and all of a sudden, you're 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.
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.
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.
Hardly a defensible position to blackmail someone from.
I have super powers on both sides, one can influence the policies and politics of my country much stronger than the other[0].
Why would I choose that side, they don't give me more rights and they don't give me any capacity to complain.
Say what? Ok, there is no explicit "right to privacy" anywhere in the US Constitution, but that applies equally to citizens and non-citizens. Whatever is in the Constitution applies to everyone regardless of citizenship, with only a few exceptions. And those exceptions don't have much to do with anything you might refer to as privacy. (They're about whether state governments can mess with you. And were I a non-citizen, it's the states that I would be worried about, given that many of them are actively trying to make things harder for non-citizens.)
Unreasonable search and seizure, in particular, applies to everyone. The courts have repeatedly affirmed this.
Unless you're talking about non-citizens outside US borders, or crossing them? That's much murkier.
I imagine China is just as good in pretty much every way.
> 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_...
Fun fact. There are more people in the US education system than there ever were in Soviet gulags.
Just as irrelevant.
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.
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?
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.
Some of these talking points fall apart upon typing them, let alone posting.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Regardless, I'm talking about competency. I don't endorse any particular state, culture, or ideology.
EU maybe, but US/Israel are as good as it gets? PRISM? Literally China/Russia are more trustworthy.
Why?
Just as bad in what way?
> Also because the US has gone into aggressive conflicts a lot more than those 2 countries put together.
How are you defining aggressive conflicts, and at what point do you start counting?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Huh, which fabs does Israel have?
Tower Semiconductor is based in Israel and runs two fabs there as well.
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.
Edit: Why am I blocked from replying to the below comment?
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...
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.
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.
Examples of Extraterritorial killings and abuses listed (edited for more relevant source)
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)
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.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/12/14/rare-earth...
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.
Just because Slovakia is good at manufacturing cars doesn't mean that car manufacturing is dependent on Slovakia.
It's much easier to spin up your fab tech more so now -- than ever before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Counci...
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.
I think your comparison stops holding wage as,soon as you mention the Conservative Party. They just aren’t the same thing as Hezbollah.
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.
I really hope you are wrong about the conclusion.
Is that what happened?
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".
That guy got a deal and was evacuated with his family before events unfolded. Seems way easier than alternative plans.
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).
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...
The effect of this "action" is the same as a bouncing betty. (I assume) The goal is to incapacitate and use resources.
I agree with the disruption of communication protocols and psychological damage though.
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 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.)
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.
Certainly Israel's invasion of Lebanon in the early 80s affected many inhabitants of Lebanon, not just palestinians.
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.
(94)Chapter: Fighting against the Jews Sahih al-Bukhari 2926 Book 56, Hadith 139
(Part of Sunni Islam)
Actually they were conceived and rose to prominence in direct response to this rather substantial provocation:
"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.
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.
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
How far back are we willing to go for that? Who evicted whom? When? How many times? In what order?
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
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 country has a right to defend its citizens. It can go to war to do so. War is horrible and civilians die.
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.
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.
Regardless of your opinion of the IDF, their flag is clearly a very different vibe
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.
I think anyone over the age of 30 probably does.
It's even got the bayonet fixed so there's no confusion about their terrorist intentions.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
But on the other hand. They needed the pagers to work for half a year or more (and still only about 3k/5k seem to have been active). Think about tech-support-but-evil trying to fix one that a boss dropped and discovering the explosives inside
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.
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.
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.
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.
They would have preferred cellphones.
By now. The final value will be higher.
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.
Look at this to understand how big part of Lebanon sees Hezbollah https://www.instagram.com/brigitte_gabriel/reel/CyT_RanK1gi/
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.
The only people that share borders with Israel matter. That is Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt. 2 of those 4 have firm peace agreements in place, and have converging interests to control their extremist interests. Syria has its own issues and a defacto govt ban on extremists. Lebanon just had its entire terror contingent permanently labeled.
If you notice my statement, 3 of the 4 of israel's borders were more or less under acceptable control. Now, Israel has likely managed to reset the board for the 4th and final border.
Again, time will tell if the long term consequences you envision matter in any way. I contend they dont, in comparison to the gains they just made.
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.
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'
Most modern wars see MORE than 1 civilian death per militant death. This pager bomb was nearly entirely militants.
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.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycott,_Divestment_and_Sanc...
it basically says: we can do whatever we want because we can. Now imagine what the other side is going to reply.
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.
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.
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.
War is over.
The long-term consequences are that we use our words instead of exothermic reactions to reach livable compromises.
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
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
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.
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.
I'd say it's pretty fucked.
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.
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?
You'd prefer we mostly only talk about Oct. 7th and afterward, right?
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.
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.
We both know how Palestinians repaid those who was kind to them- by Lebanon Civil War and Black September. Israel was ready to cede what it won in defensive wars, they got out of Gaza, built infrastructure and invested in businesses to provide jobs.
Palestinians had countless opportunities to make peace and live a better life. They choose war every single time, made Dalal Mughrabi their hero, dug up water pipes and made missiles out of them.
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
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 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.
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.
You don't mention Gaza or Palestinians, yet it's right there (and been there for 75+ years).
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebanese_Resistance_Brigades
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.
> 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.
Why, Israel sent them a page and they are merely returning the call, as would be the right thing to do among polite company.
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.
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.
Though it would be possible to add this ability when the hardware was intercepted, a transmitting device is also easy to detect.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
Receiving data from a network is a connection, no matter how you want to define it.
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.
Somehow I don't think so.
Such a pager did end up hurting non-involved people, in great quantity.
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.
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.
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.
You're ignoring that and pretending they're accused of something else. Why?
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 basically just one step above a chemical attack, and can only be excused as "the end justifies the means" by the interested parties.
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?
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.
Why?
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.
Are you talking about Hezbollah? If so, you're really wrong.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-planted-exp...
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
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.
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?
"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.)
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
They are a problem in both cases. Stop the whataboutism.
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.
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.
It's because they're not motivated by fairness but a pre existing idea of who is good or bad
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.
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 ?
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 has utilized a rate of expected civilian to militant casualties in Gaza at the rate of 100:1 [1].
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.
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"?
_________
(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]
> > 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.
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.
and the terrorists deliberately place themselves in a position where attacks on them results in massive collateral - aka, they want a human shield.
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".
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
It's undoubtedly true the US supports Israel generally, but Israel is more capable of its own.
Please don't vote.
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 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?
yeah, we can go a long way with that reasoning.
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
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 terrorism will hurt innocents and the winning strategy would have been to just not attack Israel.
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?
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]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-rights-gro...
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.
I don't think I want to indulge in proving Hamas to be an extremist organization any further.
"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.
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").
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Middle_Eastern_countri...
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
https://www.timesofisrael.com/intel-suspends-planned-15-bill...
Israeli ports are going bankrupt ....
https://www.seatrade-maritime.com/ports-logistics/attacks-on...
The videos I’ve seen are of the pagers exploding and someone standing less than a foot away being unscathed. Incredibly sophisticated and precise.
(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.)
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.
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?)
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.
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
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.)
But a collateral from targeted attack people lose their mind. Much moral. Very righteous.
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?
Israel have no reason to want a war. It's Hezbollah who want to conquer Israeli land. Israel wants nothing from Lebanon.
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.
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.
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.
1. It's not supply chain attack, it's terrorist attack. 2. It's not a clever move, it's a prevocation move
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.
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.
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.
Permissible behavior normalized in this conflict is going to make future wars pretty ugly.
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.
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
Reuters even covered conversion to pagers two months ago
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/pagers-drones-how-...
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).
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...
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.
> 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.
And it would hardly make sense to make a name for US market based on how it sounds in French.
I don’t think they’ve started including explosives in their product yet.
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.
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".
Most of the time, the default is compatible with what the free-market MBA crowd wants.
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.
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.
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.
The amount of intelligence services that could pull this off if you ordered iphones directly from apple is very very low.
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.
(UPDATED: I really wrote Fishing? LOL)
* 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
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 abbreviation for gram is simply "g". I was a bit confused but at least the link cleared things up.
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.
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 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.
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'.
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.
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.
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]
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 ?
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.
Do you know that 100 is more than 1? Some people get confused by simple arithmetic.
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.
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 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.
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?”
You do know that carpet bombing is a war crime by Geneva Conventions ?
In what way does the pagers attack resemble covering an entire area with a carpet of bombs?
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.
Anyway, 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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...
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.
What's the alternative that doesn't give powerful nations more or less absolute power to push around weaker nations or people?
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.
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.
https://x.com/Frances_Coppola/status/1836331295770632514 / https://ghostarchive.org/archive/QWVJ0
Everything has to be binary, good vs evil, once you pick your side you have to ignore everything that compromises your idyllic vision.
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".
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.
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.
How do you know this ?
That sounds like a canned talking point. Up there with "Most moral army ever".
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).
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.
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.
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.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.
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.
What are you talking about?
What other operation ever conducted do you think even comes close?
Thousands of detonations and a fraction of 1% with any effect off target? What other operation do you think comes even close?
Canned talking point? Try like basic reasoning instead
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.
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.
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 ?
If the US military gives you a laptop, you don't give it to your kids for schoolwork.
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.
... 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.
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.
-> 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?
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.
Man you sure know a lot about hezbollah internal processes... either that or you're full of shit
And how does the US army relate to the hezbollah ?
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.
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
"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.
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.
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'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...
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.
AOC being the most prominent example that comes to mind immediately.
That aside, these definitions were written for a reason, even if they have no appeal to the current victims.
I don't think it could possibly be more targeted. Literally just devices issued by Hezbollah themselves to their own members.
Maybe it wasn't perfect. That seems to be the bar you are setting.
But much closer to perfect than I would have imagined possible. And closer to perfect than I think most people would have imagined. Maybe that is aggravating to people ideologically set against literally anything they might do.
But far superior, and less disruptive to innocent people to tactics used elsewere by Israel. Far far more more targeted and less disruptive to innocent people than the tactics used by Hezbollah themselves.
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 a statecraft term of art used as part of a propaganda campaign. Outside of that is a meaningless term.
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.
I think it can also get less clear when the target is an enemy's infrastructure, industry, or political infrastructure.
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.
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.
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.
Their bombing campaign begs to differ
The army could have burn down the entire strip from the air and leave no person or stone there, in five minutes. That's what I meant by burning down the entire strip. If Hamas had the power to do the same to Israel they would gladly do so, as is evident from the way they use their power and resources.
Saying that it's 'cutting both ways' is evil statement. One side gladly ignores the lives and suffering of it's own people, while the other pay with the lives of soldiers in an effort to minimize the death toll of the same people.
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).
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killings_and_massacres_during_...
One are relatively small scale horrible events within an active full scale war, the other are sadistic attacks aimed at civilians, by crowd that is made of at least half civilians, outside of active war. One is a massacre, the other is a prolonged violence torture and mass raping.
I don't think Israelis are saints, and Israel could and should have acted better in many cases, both for moral reasons and for its own good. I believe a two states solution is the only just and sustainable option, and Israel's share in avoiding it is a terrible mistake. But October 7th wasn't action of people who see the two states solution as a desired state or a viable compromise.
Trying to treat the terrorist attack on Oct. 7 as unprecedented and unique is not only deeply ignorant but incredibly dangerous. It allows you to suspend all normal considerations of decency, which we have seen in the words of Israelis leaders (calling all Palestinians "human animals" and terrorists) and the actions of the IDF (war crimes, murdering civilians, throwing people off buildings, torturing, etc).
Please stop with your apologies for genocide and war crimes. Even Israeli scholars and Holocaust survivors recognize that what Israel is doing now is deeply wrong. Stop
I wish that October 7th was unprecedented. It is not the first pogrom Jews suffered. I'm not aware of a case in the history where Jews behaved like that. If it did occur,it is unexcusable, just like October 7th.
Let's put it in clear terms. I'm an Israeli, humanist and supports a two states solution. You, on the other side, are terror justifying and, I guess, antisemite.
Looking at it from that perspective there is no line between war and terrorism. All wars are terrorism.
Fire bombing Dresden or Tokyo - terrorism, or war?
Nighttime Bombing a factory that produces ball bearings - terrorism, or war?
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.
>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]
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.
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.
Were the pagers military grade? Hungarian company providing military equipment to Hezbollah would be a scandal on its own.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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...
Apollo pagers are everywhere and sold through resellers through out the world, even in the US. Let’s not do Hasbara-style speculation
There is a federal Office of Anti boycott Compliance that any employee of any company can tip off and have the company punished if it's believed they did not give a fair shake to an Israeli supplier or bidder of any kind.
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.
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".
* 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://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.
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.
The timeline of web archive snapshots is strange. No real change or activity for years - then a flurry of changes in 2024.
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.
I'm hopeful that this won't escalate, but I'm very anxious that it will.
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.
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.
Would not surprise me if this turned out to be something like that.
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.
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
Would Toyota or any other car manufacturer sue Arabs et al. for turning their pickups into rolling suicide bombs?
If the owner wants later to trow their Toyota over a cliff is a different problem and not Toyota's business.
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.
(I don’t mean “can the sue me” but “do they have any chance of winning” of course)
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.
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.
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?
But I would grant them that their responsibility for the deaths of these people is limited.
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.
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.
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.
I expect brands to have quality control procedures in place.
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.)
The only cheap goods with maintained brands are things like McDonald's which have recurring relationship with consumers.
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
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?
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.
Suffice to say, when enough pressure can be exerted by a government agency, OEMs are happy to keep their mouth shut.
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.
Wild
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.
Because early reports suggest this is exactly what happened in some cases.
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.
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.
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
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 spun up a whole company
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet#Windows_infection [2] https://youtu.be/Fqk_VUMzY_M?si=H64JCMMCzY-k7Y1K&t=823
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?
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.
That said, .... Really glad I quit smoking anything after seeing the damage a vape did to those poor guys
Given the chain of events detailed already sounds like it was ripped from a spy novel, I'm pretty skeptical of this claim.
He was offered $500,000 to do it.
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.
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.
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 ??
and yes, it's unrelated for sure
>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...
[1] https://denikn.cz/1510394/cesti-zpravodajci-resili-zda-byl-z...
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.
I mean that in the sense of spectacle, of gruesome theatricality, not to glorify maiming people.
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.
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
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).
Paper mail and landlines are incredibly easy to intercept and tap, but that doesn't make it legal.
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.
Sure, theoretically one can detect a receive-only radio, but its massively more difficult than detecting something which actively transmits.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Two birds with one pager.
And the 100k number seems quite exaggerated.
I realize that this is not widely known, attacks against Israel receive far less attention in the news than do Israeli retaliations.
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.
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.
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...
Well, one's hitting civilians with missiles, the other's hitting them with rockets.
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.
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.
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
Although as as per an WSJ article: "The affected pagers were from a new shipment that the group received in recent days"
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.
Notably, 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
Edit: my comment is 100% factual and unopinionated. I'm just quoting an NPR report. To downvote this is to be a propaganda agent.
The downvotes seem reasonable to me.
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...
Dumb and cruel, could have used it to nearly the same effect by just telling hezbollah.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And, is the device anyway going to pass through airport security? I guess the owners are not really travelling on commercial airliners.
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 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.)
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.
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.
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.
Israel makes them quietly shit their pants instead.
They'll cause a big backlash. And the best they have are again suicide bombers in Israeli cities
no, there won't be suicide bombers in Israel again. they've gotten much better at finding the rats - see original article.
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.
I disagree with the other post you mention, FWIW.
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.
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.
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.
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
But this, arguably, would be detectable, through low battery life?
More like a year or two off of a single AAA battery.
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.
...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.
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
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
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.
Presumably some software that triggers this?
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 :)
Clearly someone's not being serious.
Is the information wrong?
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.
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
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
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/dozens-hezbollah-m...
This isn't how lithium batteries fail.
Tom Scott explains it better than I do https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OOWcTV2nEkU
Blowing a hole in the side of the bag and sending debris for several meters is obviously not plausible with that quantity of lithium.
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.
Really shows that the HN community and the victims have very little overlap.
https://www.google.com/search?q=About+https://www.gapollo.co...
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?)
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.
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.”
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'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).
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.
Active mode, 260mA to 790 mA (!)
Modem sleep, 20mA
Light sleep: 0.8 mA
Deep sleep: 10 uA
Hibernate: 2.5 uA
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)
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...
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.
Disclosure: my first job was in the Australian Defence Science Technology Organisation, Materials Research Lab, Explosives Instrumentation Group.
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.
hezbollah got totally owned and look like fools...relying on tech they just took at face value out of the box
Apps (some more or less than others) represent a target for a nation state to pursue for information, graph analysis, bugging, etc.
If you can’t control your supply chain then that isn’t guaranteed.
After all, most pagers don’t contain explosive charges either.
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...
Any idea what prompted the explosion?
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?.
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?
Whoever did this just killed that as an information channel as both the devices and the network are now compromised.
Loads of pagers are passive, receive-only devices. There's a reason why there's a common distinction between "pager" and "two-way pager".
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.
I'm not sure if thats true, they just need to start cracking open their shipments of pagers and looking for explosives.
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.
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...
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...
"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...
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.
But yes, the supply chain sabotaging is certainly impressive.
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
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.
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.
GSM on the other hand is cellular and bidirectional so triangulation problem applies.
I don't think whoever approved this was worried about innocent people getting hurt.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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?
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...
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...
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.
However this was of course unintended, the malware was never meant to make it out to the wider world.
That's the damage I'm talking about.
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.
By the standards of modern warfare, what happened today was probably weirdly humane.
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...
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.
Contrary to what you said, this is pretty much the ultimate in targeted attacks.
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
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.
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.
> 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".
There is no possibility these explosions are from battery overloads via an exploit or firmware hack.
What did you base that on though, 100% is pretty confident
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/what-we-know-so-fa...
In a surprise to no one except you
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.
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.
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.
If I was buying pagers and had previously been hit by intelligence ops I would be buying batteries in random supermarkets.
Which sort of leans back toward the theory that nobody checked the pagers at all.
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?
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.
Although, if it really was explosive inside the pagers it seems Hezbollah didn't do this.
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.
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...
Don't overthink it - just a bit of RDX and a detonator does wonders.
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 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.
They use a standard phone.
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.
The pagers were not secure at all also.
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.)
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_designated_terrorist_g...
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 don't understand people who think Israel is some benevolent entity that just tries to defend itself while causing as little harm and disruption as possible. They murder innocents left and right every day, create havoc in multiple countries at once, terrorize and occupy people for decades, all while playing a victim card constantly.
That's an interesting take. Are you saying hamas are also civilians because they're the major political party in gaza?
don't confuse post office workers for military personnel just cuz they work for the government.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lebanon_pager_explosion...
Gaza has a very young population growing up with the current war, some (not all) will be radicalized by what they experienced growing up.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Israel is one of the better countries at doing this undetected so, no surprises here.
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).
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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?
I'm pretty sure they weren't cellular pagers as they don't seem to be the norm nowadays.
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.
Many commenters here also assumed like I did it was some cellular/SIM devices but it wasn't that much widespread.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
And since pagers are already receiving remote messages, it doesn't make sense to do it any other way.
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.
It would seem this attack has managed to kill some, maim many, tag all, terrorize, and disrupt.
Given the context and peculiar choice of words, this reminds me of a classic @dril tweet
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?
"Thousands injured." I'm not convinced it was as super-targeted as you claim.
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.
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.)
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.
no war has ever been waged without collateral damage.
"Farmers attempted to herd the emus using trucks, but this proved ineffective; one truck even crashed after hitting an emu"
Israel has given Lebanon and Hezbollah enough ultimatums to stop the aggressions. This is what happens when diplomacy fails.
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.
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.
The whole complex and contrived attack speaks of tying to minimize collateral damage.
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?
Stoking the flames of death is all.
Beirut can end up just like Gaza, but Israel has been restraining itself. Not for much longer.
If this is what a restrained Israel looks like, the god help us all.
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.
Its disturbing as hell…but brilliant.
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.
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)
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.
"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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They aren't a civilian force and they are a serious military threat, especially with the backing of Iran.
I'd challenge you to provide a reasonable argument that Israel is committing genocide in Lebanon.
[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.
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.
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?
A mystery indeed.
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.
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.
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.
There have been several presentations on this before. It was for old cell phones.
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
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?
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.
Domestic production of goods such as televisions, radios and even extremely high technology such as tractors has been declining since the 70's.
If you go far enough back (100y or so) then "imported" usually referred to raw materials, spices or very exotic equipment such as furniture - the supply chain and tooling was mostly domestic.
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.
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"
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.
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
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...
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'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.
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
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
For sources, search for "Israel Lavender system" and pick your media source of choice.
[0]: https://www.afp.gov.au/about-us/history/unique-stories/opera...
If you're worried about the cell network going down, they serve as a backup comms device as well since they use different infrastructure.
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/
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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
They are unharmed.
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.
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/15/1219737658/why-do-doctors-sti...
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.
As I said elsewhere this is a one shot attack. They would never be able to pull this off again at this scale.
Realistically just replacing the pagers is not only safer but also probably cheaper.
Basically: warfare via mail bomb seems like it might be irresponsible.
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).
"American University of Beirut withdrew the pagers from the medical staff this morning under the pretext of updating the system".
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.
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...
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.
Injury/Fatality to Personnel Range (m) Fatal Distance 0.64 Lung Damage 1.02 Eardrum Rupture 2.63
Just because someone else might get what is mailed to me or that someone else might pick up what was sent to me doesn't make it "untargeted" - it is highly targeted. But missed.
The Trump attempted assassination was highly targeted and a bystander died.
I feel I have made my case. Can you provide rationale for yours beyond collateral damage? I feel the Trump example trumps that.
Post edit: I also want to acknowledge that you can feel that this is horrible and terrible and all the bad things. We are simply talking about the definition of targeted
Second, what Israel and its enemies are doing is far from the land warfare the laws were written for. Do all Hezbollah soldiers wear uniforms indicating their affiliation and rank? Yeah, I thought so.
Your definition of hack differs from mine. This is hack in every sense of the word: supply chain hack, signals hack, and more...
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.
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
if (currentTime() >= KABOOM_TIME) { goKaboom(); }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.
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.
You’re not targeting pacemakers embedded only in the chest cavities of known Hezbollah militants but devices often left around family and children. Hezbollah is a massive political entity with probably more non-combatants than combatants. The pagers are used by accountants, doctors, civil salarymen, it workers, and others that are not legal targets under IHL.
EDIT:
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/sep/17/middle-ea...
> Among those killed is an eight-year-old girl from Bekka Valley, Abiad said, according to Al Jazeera.
> At least 2,800 people have been wounded, he added, and more than 200 are in critical condition.
I mixed up "nine fatalities" with "eight year old girl" to get "nine year old girl". Mea culpa.
Rockets are fired to the Israeli north for a year now, about a 200k civilians are evacuated for a year now because the rockets are mostly randomly targeted.
a 3 yo Israeli baby is still held hostage by hamas, never meeting the red cross.
Are these war crimes?
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
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Hezbollah_confl...
[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.
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 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.
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!
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.
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"
> some people felt the pagers heat up and disposed of them
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/hundreds-of-hezbollah-...
Are smartphones, for example, also vulnerable to it?
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.
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.
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.
As much as I'd love to believe this couldn't happen without physical tampering, I see no good reason to.
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.
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.
Also, we can assume that anything sent to those pagers so far has been forwarded to Israel and now that channel is burned, right?
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.
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
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/sep/17/middle-ea...
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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,
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 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".
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.
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.
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
Gets decidedly less muddy with volunteers and officers.
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?
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
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.
No one serious disputes that Hezbollah opened a new conflict with Israel in 2023. This is occurring simultaneously with the Hamas-initiated conflict.
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'
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...
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...
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:
The conflict has been simmering for decades
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.
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'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?
This is a discussion board, and in more than happy to discuss the topic, there's no need for personal attacks.
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_...
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 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.
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.
Whatever the "Jewish identity" was in 1948, Israel now has more than 70 years of existence, giving it an independent identity from just "Judaism".
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?
> 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."
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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...
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.
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."
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.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_South_Lebanon_conflict
Just on its face, with Hezbollah launching sometimes hundreds of rockets per day, didn’t you suspect what you posted was misleading?
"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.
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.
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.
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.
With a Hezbollah pager exploding: https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1836037485492629605
Make the pager ring, they grab it, it explodes in their hand disabling them for life and making them useless for the soldier role.
A supply chain attack could have probably added some sort of beacon, but that might show up on an RF sweep.
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.
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 :)
so it is a ten times that of TNT. Source: https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/ArthurGolnik.shtml
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.
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.
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.
If that is the case - we have a problem...
Especially seeing as pagers typically use more stable NiMH batteries over lithium ones.
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.
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.
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
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.
Flagging and voting also help, but for wildly out-of-control threads, direct contact is more reliable.
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.
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...
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
Such lack of precision would be what you'd expect in any kind of operation targeting so many devices.
I don't whats the margin of error/variance that passes quality control.
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.
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
> We've already seen how Apple vs. the Israeli state goes, and it apparently ends with Israel selling hardware exploits to American law enforcement
Well, that used to be true but it’s not anymore:
https://www.404media.co/leaked-docs-show-what-phones-cellebr...
Your brain substituted a similar passage that you wanted to write a refutation of.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/pagers-drones-how-...
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.
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?
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)
Footage from the hospital
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?
But Kudos to Israel for pulling off a surgical strike the likes of which we've never seen before.
This is like celebrating the 9/11 hijackers for the "creative hack" of using a box cutter.
You mean Teslas?
> 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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
>>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’.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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
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.
If the footage on Twitter is legit, there was something more explosive than a battery inside those pagers.
Next thing we got Teslas driving off a cliff or AirPods exploding in peoples ears.
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/
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.
It seems the pager bombs only killed the users. But they also harmed a lot of people around them.
I've had my stuff tested for explosives, and it did not involve turning anything on.
Not every airport does exactly the same thing. Some do multiple things. I don't think it was even implied that all airports are exactly the same. My point was about density of battery and explosive material, and not about these "other ways."
For that matter, the xrays and other visualization scans also show the density similarities between batteries and explosives. And that density was the entirety of my point.
As with exploding drones, this will become a thing in other countries too, either as a part of organized crime or general terrorism.
And israel will wonder why suddenly even more lebanonis want to fight them after.
Check it out if you haven't already: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1197624/
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
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.
Here's my favorite: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thenightwatc...
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.
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
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZVYTJarPFs [video][2 mins]
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)
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.
Edit: OK, I've seen some videos. Looks like much less than 10-15g of RDX levels of explosions.
"use it or lose it" moment, allegedly.
- 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...
Overcharging batteries would be the hack....not suggesting someone do this but said strategy works with both acid based and lithium batteries...
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://realrepublic.com/encrypted-hezbollah-pagers-simultan...
All in all horrible to be honest ...
[1] https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/hundreds-of-hezbollah-...
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.
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?
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?
<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.)
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.
Were they caught? If not, why not?
How did Mossad ensure these particular pagers were bought? Who was the salesperson that (presumably) gave Hezbollah a good deal on them?
Wild that the US media is reporting this as some mysterious, awe inspiring tactic.
> 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.
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.
"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.
That's why they targeted members of Hezbollah (a terrorist organization) and not children playing football like Hezbollah does.
Maybe they hope the psychological effect is a big deterrent?
Pagers people had on their pants exploded
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.
(This is an assumption, I'm neither a doctor nor a terrorist).
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.
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.
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).
You'd probably get some small amount of RF emissions though, most receivers radiate something as a result of using superheterodyne signal processing.
Not convinced this is a net win for Israel
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.
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.-
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_prisoners_in_Israe...
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.
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.
If these things didn't happen, there could have been lasting peace by now. But I expect to see more carnage from both sides for the next 5-10 years at least, until moderate voices on both sides take over and some new agreement can be not only reached, but actually implemented.
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...
thankfully the security on vehicles is so good that a hack like this would be impossible eh?
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.
https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09...
Definitely some non-standard internals in those devices...
https://cat-uxo.com/explosive-hazards/ied/pager-bomb-rcied
It's disgusting that humans can invent such devices.
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...
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.
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.
The espionage agency in question was the french DGSI.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/sep/17/middle-ea...
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.
Also in the anniversary of WWII hero Folke Bernadotte assassination by Zionists. See https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-...
> 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.
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...
There are a bunch of very good reasons why groups doing that are outside the law.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/17/world/video/hezbollah-pagers-...
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 is better not to fight a war at all, but this is not always an option.
One day soon I'll write a eulogy for Hacker News, and this is a great contender for the website's epitaph.
You're telling me nobody in Hezbollah watched The Wire?
Also your message limits are 200 characters and likely highly susceptible to correlation attacks.
And yeah it probably was more a "code" than cyphertext.
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.
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.
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?