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Comment by woggy | Hacker News Reader

Curious if the explosives in the pagers would have been detected at airports. Also, imagine if one went off in a plane.

The explosive used was PETN which is very difficult to make and very difficult to detect. You pretty much need a spectroscope.

Generally airports and ports are set up for detecting things like explosives you cooked up yourself or stolen mining equipment or whatever. Military grade explosives are expected to be chemically tagged because they’re for, y’know, legit military use and not terrorism.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_the_Marking_of...

I can’t find anything on whether or not the PETN that Israel used was tagged. If not, it would be yet another layer of irresponsibility. Unexploded ordinance is very real, as the recent news about the WWII era bomb blowing a hole in that airport runway in Japan attests to.

I would have not much faith in that. They only randomly do the swab tests for explosive traces from what I've seen.

Presumably the explosives were well hidden and might not even trigger these scanners.

TSA is famous for not identifying the majority of weapons: https://abcnews.go.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-...

The thing is, these explosives were meant to be hidden. I'm sure the swabbing and scanning would not work because Hezbollah would have access to the same tech.

It's a bit different from other military uses that are more open.

> Hezbollah examined the pagers after they were delivered to Lebanon, starting in 2022, including by travelling through airports with them to ensure they would not trigger alarms, two additional sources told Reuters.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/hezbollah-handed-o...

i find this story very weird. hezbollah is a terrorist organisation. which airports allow terrorists to travel through them with pallets of electronic devices?

I doubt that every member is on a list, and even if they are, there are fake ids. Maybe the airport in Beirut would be cooperative? And it also doesn’t say that they tested every device this way.

Hezbollah has 20,000 fighters, another 20,000 reservists. 97% of all shias, 35% of all sunnis, 25% of Christians in Lebanon support them for various reasons. Hezbollah is the king maker of Lebanon politics: whoever(esp politicians) goes against Hezbollah in Lebanon will get assassinated.

How many of them are on watch lists? Maybe, 100 to 200. Even the people who are on watch lists travel secretly on middle eastern carriers by using aliases.

Gotta imagine if they wanted to detonate during a flight time they could have.

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