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.
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.
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.
...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.