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Comment by harimau777 | Hacker News Reader

This seems like it would have the potential for a lot of collateral damage due to the possibility that modified pagers might enter general distribution. That is to say, how do they insure that a given shipment of pagers are only going to Hezbollah as opposed to some of them going to people like aid workers?

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I suspect that is an intentional side effect against the whole pager network. It is now totally compromised which means they can no longer use passive channels as a communication medium. This effectively shut down their comms structure.

As for aid workers, they mostly use whatever low ball android phones they can get their hands on I know someone who volunteered out there and everyone uses them and Telegram). I don't think that will impact them at all.

Well, now that everyone knows it's feasible to hide a small bomb inside a pager, what's to stop people from checking their pagers for tiny explosives before using them?

Well nothing which is why people are spreading stuff about it being a hack causing the batteries to explode. Which disrupts everything with a network connection and battery. Adds confusion to the situation.

As I said elsewhere this is a one shot attack. They would never be able to pull this off again at this scale.

It's effects might have been intended as much for psychological as lethal results. This specific vector may be a one-and-done tactic but Hezbollah members would be foolhardy not to regard every electronic device that is, at minimum, younger than $pager_age with suspicion. At this point even if it's a wired copper POTS line I'd be asking the intern to take my calls and shout things out from a few rooms away.

Agree on the one shot thing. Makes you wonder if they got what they wanted, and if someone's pulling out their hair over wasting this attack...

Can the average person tell the difference between a pager battery and a bomb professionally made to look like a pager battery?

You only need to vet what the inside of a pager should look like once, and spread the knowledge around... using them will become more of a hassle, but not entirely impossible.

The tampered pager likely looks nearly identical, and even un-tampered pagers will vary a little bit from manufacturing. It's possible an expert might be able to visually distinguish that a particular strand of wire is the wrong gauge or the soldering pattern suggests it wasn't made on the appropriate machine, but there shouldn't be something obvious.

presumably the only difference between an explosive-laden battery and a normal battery is it's capacity. All else will appear identical. And tearing down the battery to inspect it destroys the battery.

Well usually what you do here is start randomly sampling.

Lot's of pager batteries are the shrink-wrapped cylinders with 2+ cells, so I'm guessing it might be possible to dress up one of those cells as a dummy w/ explosives instead.

Probably not but the average person can buy a pager with a replaceable battery and buy a new one over the counter.

Assuming the stock of replaceable batteries is large enough to handle them all being replaced simultaneously, that the replacement batteries are not likewise compromised, and that the battery is indeed the compromised component.

Realistically just replacing the pagers is not only safer but also probably cheaper.

I'm not sure how many bomb techs they have around, but I'd be pretty afraid to personally open something I suspected to have a bomb in it.

Who uses pagers? Aid workers carry phones. The pagers are deliberate opsec move for Hezbollah.

I've used them for DevOps on-call in the last ten years in the US, as a backup to phone-based alerts. It's far too easy to mess up phone DND settings, forget to charge a phone, be outside cell service, or leave a phone in the wrong room. The pager had a long battery life and I clipped it to my pants waistband. I definitely caught pages via the pager that I would have missed over the phone.

If you're worried about the cell network going down, they serve as a backup comms device as well since they use different infrastructure.

Presumably Lebanese DevOps on-call isn't sharing pagers from a shipment to Hezbollah from Iran.

Hezbollah is essentially a government entity in much of Lebanon, they totally would. Hezbollah runs schools, hospitals - it's easily the largest social services provider in large swathes of Lebanon. That's why it enjoys so much support, in many ways it was a much more competent alternative to the failed Lebanese government.

People who work in schools in Lebanon carry smartphones like everybody else. Pagers are obsolete. Some doctors may carry them because they work when the cell network is down, but they don't all re-up from Iran all at once. Hezbollah carries pagers because they're one-way devices that are hard to track, which is not a problem a Lebanese school teacher has with his Chinese Android phone.

What makes you think pagers are obsolete? When I worked at a big-three cloud provider (2016) we used them and it was a great fit for on-call requirements. I regularly find I don't have cell service when in large buildings, out in the woods, or even just random spots in US cities. The pager didn't have those issues, and helped us build highly available services. Does Fly use something different for on-call alerts?

A quick search shows the US Government/Army [1] and hospitals use them [2] [3] [4]. I'm not familiar with Lebanese wireless networks, but pagers are certainly still used for these use-cases in the US.

"Residents reported that they used one-way pagers for work-related communication more often than smartphones" (2018)

[1] https://gov.spok.com/contracts-and-agreements/

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10407125/

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6490267/

[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7426134/

People still use pagers for specialty purposes, like being on call in disaster zones, or serving as a parallel armed forces in a country with a hostile neighbor who has infiltrated your cell phone network.

I've said this like 5 times on this thread and feel bad for continuing to repeat myself, but: Hezbollah operates its own telecommunications network. The Hezbollah pagers probably do not work on the normal Lebanese telecoms systems. This in addition to the fact that Hezbollah procures pagers for its service members; it does not go to the Cricket Wireless store at the corner of Mousa al Sadr and Kouds and pick them up retail a couple at a time.

Pagers don't use normal telecom systems, and they're not limited to paramilitary organizations. They're very useful in any critical application because they have low infrastructure requirements.

The comment you're replying to explains how they're used routinely in most hospitals in the world for this purpose.

You can't buy pagers off stores on the corner, either. They don't have SIM cards and most of them can't report back to the network, so they need to be pre-configured by the network operator. Just the same way, if you work at a hospital and are issued a pager, it will be issued to you by your employer and you won't be able to pick it up off the street.

In a country with extremely unreliable telecom infrastructure, it's not at all unlikely for an organization to use pagers, especially if it operates emergency services, and they would have to be procured through that organization.

Right, but if you are mossad, you're not going to spread your bomb pagers far and wide for a number of reasons:

1) its expensive

2) it massive increases the risk of detection

3) in a hospital there is a high chance it'll get triggered. (MRIs, spillages, incinerators.)

Mossad didn't spread them. They sold them to Hezbollah. Hezbollah runs many hospitals in Lebanon.

Lebanon has incredibly unreliable cell service. Anyone who needs to receive messages in a timely and reliable fashion would have no choice to have a pager or similar device. That would include many people in schools and most people in a hospital.

> they don't all re-up from Iran all at the same time

Who says anyone does? Hezbollah has 40k fighters, and we have reports of 2000 people being injured, so clearly Hezbollah, military or civilian, didn't "all re-up from Iran all at once", the numbers are more than an order of magnitude off for you to conclude as much.

Reuters has specific shipments and provenance for the pagers attributed now, and also notes that the explosions were concentrated in Hezbollah strongholds (Dahiah, Bekaa, southern Lebanon), lending further evidence that these were not off-the-rack pagers.

No one is saying these were off the rack or that they weren't distributed as part of Hezbollah's operation, so I don't understand how this is relevant.

The claim is that carrying one of these pagers is dispositive evidence that you are an according-to-IHL combatant.

The point I made is that less than half of Hezbollah is combatant, therefore the possession of a device procured and distributed by Hezbollah cannot be dispositive evidence as most Hezbollah members aren't IHL combatants. The fact the pagers were ordered by Hezbollah doesn't contribute anything in the context of a discussion on civilian Hezbollah members that would need to use pagers.

You're pulling this out of thin air. You do not know this.

This is such a strange take. As if CIA operatives and a random teacher at some elementary school just both reach into a box with pagers and pick one because they're both employed by the government.

If the US government was sanctioned to the extent Hezbollah was, someone like an elementary school principal would most likely have to ask a higher-up to provide them with something like a pager, which would likely have been smuggled together with others.

You can buy mobile phones in Lebanon just fine, there's no reason why anyone except active duty members of Hezbollah would get their communication equipment from Hezbollah.

Mobile phone service is horrible in Lebanon and cannot be relied on in any type of emergency.

Also, the whole point of this is that active duty members of Hezbollah includes hospital staff and teachers. Hezbollah's civilian division is about as large as the paramilitary one, if not larger. So it's not possible to confidently state that anyone affected was part of a milita with the information we have right now.

Why are teachers carrying Hezbollah military pagers?

Why would employees of Hezbollah carry Hezbollah communication devices? That doesn't seem like the question you're trying to ask, in which case, what is a 'military' pager and how is it different from a 'civilian' pager? How are you able to tell apart a 'military' pager from a 'civilian' pager with such confidence as to present it as an unquestioned assumption?

I've spent quite some time looking, and I cannot find such a thing as a military pager. The only pagers I can find mentioned in a military setting are no different from the pagers that civilians would use, for example, the use of commercial pagers in US military hospitals.

Nurses and medical staff, at least in the US.

https://www.npr.org/2023/12/15/1219737658/why-do-doctors-sti...

For collateral, I was thinking more along the lines of non-Hezbollah civilians right next to the target, or perhaps a building set on fire

Here's a video of someone standing right next to the target: https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1836037485492629605

They are unharmed.

At the same time, I don't think there's any reason to disbelieve accounts (and video footage) of children among the injured. Unless you're sending operatives with pistols and killing targets individually, I don't think there's a way to do a strike of this scale without killing innocents.

Actually this is probably more accurate than a pistol. Bullets miss and ricochet. Plus other people would fire back, leading to a gun fight and more deaths.

So 1-2 feet away is safe from serious injury resulting from the explosive force itself. Though the probability seems high at least some out of thousands had people standing close enough for worse, or further away and hit with shrapnel.

I’m just commenting on injury though, not making a moral or ethical judgement. That’s not an easy call when an opponent is embedded in a population of non-combatants.

not sure of band allocations around israel, but in the US pagers were long wavelength devices and, as such, could receive signals much further inside buildings than pre-wifi cellular bands could reach. again, band / frequency (wavelength) allocation dependent. but if similar there, pagers might get signals in tunnels whereas cellular bands may not, for one plausible conjecture.

These pagers were used by Hizbullah because, unlike mobile phones, they cannot be tracked. The people who had them were certainly not random aid workers, but people in the Hizbullah chain of command. This is also indicated by the statements of Hizbullah itself (which are themself to be questioned and not taken at face value), according to which so far one non-combatant was reported killed and no other non-combatant were reported injured out of a total of 4,000 exploded explosive devices. The CCTV footage also shows that even in a crowded supermarket, no one was injured apart from the Hizbullah member with the pager.

They killed an 8 year old girl with this attack. I'm sure there was already a huge amount of collateral damage from 2000+ eyes-off-taret explosions.

You can't insure it. It is actual terrorism, pure and simple.

"American University of Beirut withdrew the pagers from the medical staff this morning under the pretext of updating the system".

You can insure anything.

But can you ensure it?

First: Innocent people can use their phones just fine and have their comms intercepted by the IDF. Only Hezbollah wanted an alternative to hackable phones.

Second: If you distribute to Hezbollah and detonate already months later, it's unlikely many unaffiliated people already have Hezbollah pagers.

The hit rate indicates the targeting was right.

They didn't. Al Jazeera's headline was updated to read "Lebanon’s health minister says 8 killed, 2,750 wounded by exploding pagers."

These are pagers connected to Hizbollah's internal communication network. Why would they be used by the general population?

As I understand it, people are saying that the most likely way that this was carried out was that a shipment of pagers where intercepted and modified. My concern is that part or all of the shipment might not go to Hezbollah. Perhaps the shipment gets rerouted to somewhere else due to supply chain issues. Perhaps only half of the shipment was intended for Hezbollah. Perhaps a postal worker steals a few and sells them on the black market. Perhaps Hezbollah decides they have more than they needs and does something with the rest. Perhaps part or all of the shipment gets delayed and is sitting in a post office when it goes off.

Basically: warfare via mail bomb seems like it might be irresponsible.

These aren't normal retail pagers, like the world uses (or used to use) for pager-duty? And Hezbollah maintains its own network infrastructure?

Yes. Hezbollah is essentially the armed forces of Lebanon (there is an official Lebanese army, but it is smaller than Hezbollah).

You can also think of them as an Iranian army occupying southern Lebanon.

I know what Hezbollah is, I’m surprised they maintain stand-alone pager infrastructure apart from the system in use by the rest of thecpeolle

Maybe they don't? But they definitely have their own phone infrastructure, and since the switch to pagers was entirely about opsec, it would be very weird if they were dependent on civilian telecoms infrastructure for them.

Hezbollah is essentially a governmental organization, they provide healthcare, education, agricultural infrastructure, social services, etc...

No essentially about it. Hezbollah is part of the government, one of many political parties in Lebanon. Just like most of the other major political parties in Lebanon, they maintain their own militia separate from the Lebanese military.

I think this is something that many people may not grasp about Lebanon.

The "There's Your Problem" podcast did an episode on the fertilizer explosion that leveled Beirut's port in 2020. The amount of breakdown that had to occur for that outcome was both astonishing... And utterly predictable given Lebanon's governmental structure, which is barely functional. It's less a government and more a power detente that hard-codes sectarian differences in the culture into the power structure, like trying to build a government out of a band of feuding warlords with no particular underlying agreement amongst the warlords to leave each other alone. Among other things, this makes their foreign policy heterogeneous; a given faction can just wage war without the government's consent, and the government lacks top-level power to do anything about it.

(Ironically, one of the things that minimized the potential damage in the fertilizer blast is that much of the material had been stolen and shipped away before the explosion. Likely by actors with the tacit support of high-level government functionaries looking the other way and refusing to do enforcement).

I read that all other political parties were forced to disband their militia after the civil war, only Hezbollah was allowed to keep their arms.

It would be easy to include a little microcontroller that can check what frequency the pager is set to. This allows you to target specific pager networks (government, military) while leaving pagers that are unlikely to be in use by targets intact for follow-up attacks.

Since when has Israel cared about civilians or aid workers

Since the IDF has been shown to be intentionally cautious in their persecution of this war

Can you confirm that this is sarcasm? If not then it is an incredibly inaccurate statement.

No. See, eg, https://assets.ctfassets.net/qnesrjodfi80/3Eo3mGQdYAYwu22W2w...

I've seen this before. Your proof is a single person's opinion. Note that it is an opinion, with no evidence or data to back it up. It contains numerous tropes of IDF apologists and is written by a person who has a long history of opposing any investigations into the actions of the military and having generally right wing, militant, pro-European and anti-Muslim views. the letter appeals only to those who want to believe it.

Funny that "one person's opinion" happens to be shared by a lot of people though

More tragic than funny but it is human nature. Propaganda mills like PragerU exist because they work. People are happy to pick up other people's opinions because it saves them doing the hard work of forming one themselves. Lots of people believe things that are patently false, from religion to pseudo science to flat earth. Just believing something because it aligns with your existing opinions and prejudices doesn't make it true, it makes it confirmation bias.

The source of this shoddy opinion is PragerU, a very well funded and openly right wing, Christian, pro-Israel media outlet. It is literally paid my its wealthy right wing ultra rich donors to publish one sided content that pushes the donors' views for the donors' benefit. It is as far from a neutral objective source as you can get.

Here's their annual report from last year for a glimpse at their bias: https://downloads.ctfassets.net/qnesrjodfi80/5CKH6Ji47c5yxhv...

Pagers could have certain security options that would interest only a military organization. We don't know at which stage these were intercepted. They could just as easily be targeted to Hezbollah from the beginning of the sale. Advertise something that could be catered to them and once they take the bait go ahead and booby trap them all

I'm not sure why it's being assumed that they detonated all of the pagers. They presumably have unique device IDs / phone numbers that can be tied to individual people. For all we know, they may have just detonated the ones known to be in use by Hezbollah operatives.

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