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.