Israel Planted Explosives in Pagers Sold to Hezbollah, Officials Say
nytimes.com
Israel carried out its operation against Hezbollah on Tuesday by hiding explosive material within a new batch of Taiwanese-made pagers imported into Lebanon, according to American and other officials briefed on the operation.
The pagers, which Hezbollah had ordered from Gold Apollo in Taiwan, had been tampered with before they reached Lebanon, according to some of the officials. Most were the company’s AP924 model, though three other Gold Apollo models were also included in the shipment.
The explosive material, as little as one to two ounces, was implanted next to the battery in each pager, two of the officials said. A switch was also embedded that could be triggered remotely to detonate the explosives.
So...
They're just casually admitting to another war crime?
Against someone I don't even think they're officially at war against?
When there are zero consequences for war crimes, the "rules based" law and order we virtue signal is completely meaningless.
They're not at war with Hezbollah, so it's just terrorism really.
Tell Israel:
https://apnews.com/article/lebanon-israel-exploding-pagers-hezbollah-syria-ce6af3c2e6de0a0dddfae48634278288
I swear it's got to be to drag the middle east into a massive war to maybe trigger some sort of clause that forces the US to go to war for Israel or end up with massive penalties. It's the only thing that makes sense that isn't just, "For the Evilulz"
And I swear to fuck if the US was actually stupid enough to enter a deal that forces them to go to war and send troops if the entire Middle East turns on Israel...
I mean, bibi seems to have the US by the short and curlies. I have no doubt that if things got spicy enough the US would gladly send boots on the ground to die for Israel's actions. I could even imagine bibi saying "oh we're so hurt, you guys do this, and we will stay back to defend our territory" while some poor schmuck from winsconsin gets exploded by an ied.
Not that Israel needs an excuse to commit a war crimes on any day that ends in Y, but I don't believe this is a violation of the Geneva convention.
It was a mass targeted assassination campaign against an opposition military force structure. I'm not saying it's not a crime, just that I don't believe it's a war crime.
But I'm open to the very real possibility that I am wrong about that. So if I am, can you point me to the article(s) it's in violation of?
I genuinely would like to fill that gap in my knowledge, if it exists.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiscriminate_attack
Even if they could somehow prove every single person in possession of those pagers was a combatant, those people were just everywhere spread out in society.
Imagine sitting on a bus and the person next to you you've never seen before explodes, and you do too
Those are rooted in actions like bombardments of civilian areas e.g. Dresden, Gaza, etc.
Just because an action has collateral damage, does not make it indiscriminate.
Again, it's not like Israel isn't already committing war crimes every day, I'm just not clear if this is one of them.
For example, when the Ukrainian's assassinated the propagandist in St Petersburg at the cafe, there was collateral damage. Still doesn't make it a war crime.
I am not comparing the morality of Ukraine to israel, I'm just giving you relevant example from recent history
It's definitely indiscriminate. They chose to use explosives that will cause large amounts of collateral damage. Even if the idea itself is fine, the 2750 injuries are 100% on them.
I haven't seen reports of significant collateral damage. I'm sure there was at least some, but that's different from large amounts of collateral damage. To be considered indiscriminate, I think it would need to have either used larger charges with a bigger blast radius or distribute the pagers more widely in the hopes that Hezbollah agents got them along with the public. From my understanding, which may be flawed, neither of those conditions are true, so while there almost certainly was collateral damage, I don't currently think it was widespread enough to consider the attack indiscriminate. If you have a source to contradict me, I'm open to reading it.
Fuck Israel's rampant genocidal war crimes, but I don't think this counts as one.
Admittedly I can't find the civilian injury numbers (I don't think they're out yet), but I found this:
At least, they were indiscriminate enough that the EU foreign policy chief found it appropriate to call them indiscriminate, which makes sense given that they were at least strong enough to kill or injure the guy sitting next to you on the bus if you're carrying a pager.
Also from here:
Given that 12 have died so far (9 at the time of the article), I'd expect more than 2 to be Hezbollah fighters before I call the attack discriminate. Now while there is a chance they're more discriminate than this information implies, I doubt they got enough Hezbollah combatants or combat-adjacent members to qualify as valid military action.
Hmmm you may be right. We'll have to see how the numbers shake out to be sure either way, but I'll concede it at least sounds plausible the collateral damage is unacceptably high.
Large collateral damage is a percentage.
An attack that targets and harms mostly combatants with little collateral damage is not indiscriminate. I'm curious what the ratio of combatants to noncombatants is before arguing whether this attack was a war crime.
pagers are small enough that its likely a number of people were injured by pagers that had like fallen out of somebody's pocket.
From the article,
So in other words, they're denying it officially. Just as they deny possessing nuclear arms.
Do they recognize Hezbollah as a country? Can't officially be at war with someone you don't recognize - those are just termed "police actions." An oxymoron if I've ever heard one.
I'm as critical of Israel as any reasonable person but that's like the one thing they did recently that was actually a (at least somewhat) targeted attack against their enemies.
Calling that a war crime unnecessarily and dangerously dilutes the term. Leveling cities and starving the fleeing population is a war crime and a crime against humanity. Intentionally shooting civilians, children, aid workers, and journalists is a war crime. How about we focus on those, it's not like there's a shortage of israeli war crimes to report on.
EDIT: Apparently Lebanon reports 2800 injured and 12 dead from these attacks... How many fucking explosive pagers were involved? I doubt a significant percentage of those were Hezbollah, which would make that a war crime. The callous inefficiency of IDF operations will never cease to amaze me.
Why would you think only valid military targets were next to these?
Why are you still believing the IDFs first reports when the vast majority of the time they're lying?
That's... not a war crime is. I don't want to be the guy who justifies the death of civilians, because each one is a tragedy, but unfortunately in war there is such a thing as greater evils.
Now that's fair. And of course we can as well point out that their whole war is self-inflicted to start with so there's not much legitimacy to any of their acts of war, even the less illegal ones.
This is terrorism and a violation of International humanitarian law. It's not a war crime because Lebanon and Israel are not at war, yet Israel just attacked civilians in public, including health workers, and even officials in Parliament. Lebanese civilians are people like anyone else, yet this isn't treated like the mass terrorist attack it is in most Western Media.
Their defense minister literally just said it was a war...
https://apnews.com/article/lebanon-israel-exploding-pagers-hezbollah-syria-ce6af3c2e6de0a0dddfae48634278288
They're desperately trying to start wars to drag the US in while Biden is still in office.
If an all out war happens, there is 100% chance Biden dives into it.
Kamala there's a slight chance she does the right thing, and trump's price to go against Russia's allies will be ridiculously high.
So they want Biden to be the one to react.
State sponsored terrorism.
Not even "sponsored", just state terrorism.
This makes more sense than them being able to remotely overload a battery to make it explode.
Overloaded Li-Ion batteries don't reliably explode. I would have expected them to place the explosive inside an oversized battery pouch along with a heating element in series with the battery. A microcontroller on the board could go short-circuit upon receiving a certain message, making a large current flow through the heating element and triggering the explosive.
Yup, catch fire, definitely. But one exothermic reaction is not like another. :)
https://www.kgw.com/article/life/lithium-ion-batteries-spark-two-separate-fires-portland/283-dd7e2ee3-9e04-4587-9cbd-6afc7c32a378
The violence of a Li-ion explosion is loosely correlated to the battery's state of charge, so near flat batteries would just pop and fizzle. That would be a very unpredictable and inefficient strategy.
Yeah, that part really confused me, especially since I found it hard to believe that a battery that small could do any real damage. Maybe blow a hole in the guy's leg, but that wouldn't be enough to take out the guy.
Testicles are an impactful target.
Good point, but I would still think you would want to be more sure of killing the target.
You could tell Israel did it by the wanton disregard of civilian casualties and the lack of a global governmental backlash against the act.
What I'm surprised is that were able to get them to believe the propaganda that pagers would be a much more secure communication medium.
The articles keep repeating "Hezbollah", but the target of the attack appears to have been the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon.
Much like the US bombing of an Iraqi airfield to kill the Iranian diplomatic delegation to Baghdad, this appears to be an entirely illegal and recklessly deployed assassination plot aimed at one guy. The thousands of injuries and the eight dead (at least two being children under the age of 11) are just collateral damage the IDF has once again blanket-tagged as "Evil Muslim Militants".
That article doesn't really indicate that one person was the target, nor does making 3000 pagers or whatever they were into bombs. I find it more likely that the Iranian delegation representative was just meeting with Hezbollah at the time or received one of their pagers to stay in communication. Nothing in the articles you link suggests this was done just to target them, just that they were affected.
They are anything but. Somebody with a laptop and a $20 USB SDR stick can see every piece of text flying though the air.
They might be in regards to emanation.
It’s funny how confident comments like these are without really thinking it though.
Hezbollah is over that-a-way, buddy.
Go ahead, explain yourself then, since you seem to think I'm some sort of idiot. Because I have actually done this. And no vague psuedointellectual nonsense, technical details please. Frequencies, protocols, software, that sort of thing. Let's hear your experience in the field.
My brother in christ, you are still missing the point.
So you pick up a message that reads "867-5309" and the receiver picks up their landline and calls.
So you have a phone number now. One that you probably already had given the organization we're talking about. If the call is staying landline and within the boundaries of their country, you aren't picking up shit with your SDR. You need to have a physical tap somewhere.
They swapped cell phones which send and receive for pagers that receive only. Think for 2 seconds what that means for tracking. To say nothing of also losing the fucking microphone, camera, GPS...
There's a reason pagers are allowed into SCIFs where phones and other devices which send are not.
There's more to security than your experience picking up unencrypted shit with an SDR.
I appreciate your explanation. Thank you. The point was, I'd have liked to see a comment like that from the start instead of the snarkiness. I tend to get irritated when people just insult each other going "nuh-uh" without any substance. Nobody learns shit that way. If somebody is wrong, just correct them.
I brought up emanations in my first reply…
I even couched it with a "might be" because I'm aware there's lots I don't know.
It wasn't that you may be wrong. It was your overconfidence and hyper-fixation on one type of security.
with all respect, i think if you reread the original comment you might find it reads in a less vindictive tone than you originally read it in. text can be notoriously bad at conveying the difference between a generalized chuckle and a targeted insult, especially when the reader has experience or passion in the topic.
How do we know these were actual terrorists and not just random people that bought a pager?
They've classified infants as Hamas terrorists before so I'm a bit skeptical.
The splodey ones all came from the same batches that were bought by Hezbolla-linked companies and distributed by them to hezbolla members. They didnt just 'upgrade' every pager made by gold apollo. Only batches destined for Hez.
Of course, theres undoubtedly a lot of people who ended up with one of the booby trapped batch, who are just regular doctors, nurses, workers, etc, and theres no certainty that the person who was issued the pager was holding it at the time. Could have been their kid, or wife, or whatever, so the attack was still not very discriminate.
They literally killed a child in this attack.
Wasn't the child killed by being near a pager? I don't think it belonged to the child.
Does it matter? A child died.
In the context of:
Yes, it matters. Because it suggests it wasn't a random person that bought a pager.
In the context of the morality of the situation, no, it doesn't matter. It was not a moral act.
I mean the people carrying the pagers were likely with Hezbollah, but the 2750 people injured? Yeah no.
It's worth noting that Hezbollah members aren't just militant fighters. There are also social services and Parliamentary members
One can reasonably assume they studied the communications for a few weeks to figure out who's who, and then sent the detonate code to a certain list of pager numbers.
No, I don't think we can assume that at this point.
Israel is truly disgusting and abhorrent.
This is Israel's version of de-escalating an escalating conflict. Disgusting animals.
i just can’t wait for all of irans proxies to start investing resources into replicating such a successful strategy. i have the utmost respect for judaism but israel is a serious problem and they are no where near ready to stop swinging their dicks around.
Israel has a lot of computer knowledge. Maybe they think that it's like a value in computer memory. Keep adding to it and eventually it'll be zero again. (Or go negative)
Imagine if everyone's phone exploded to execute like 10 guys.
Edit: The take aways here are
Israel is a terrorist nation, that views civilian casualties as bonus points
any country who imports their electronics instead of making their own is susceptible to this kind of tampering.
The press is covering a terror attack like its some kind of new video game
All the unexploded ordinance can be delivered to Hezbollah as a gift. If the rumor is true that this was triggered because they became aware of the bombs, there will likely be many israelis killed by these explosives in the near future.
Who is a terrorist state exactly?
Both?
I mean I'm no fan of Israel, but Hezbollah ain't exactly the Red Cross.
It also isn't a state.
with Israel clearly having the greater outreach, destructive power and perhaps even less self regulation than Hezbollah as it seems.
And, frankly, this is one of the least morally concerning things Israel has (presumably) done. The pagers were targeted specifically because they were used almost exclusively by Hezbollah.
Dude they injured thousands of people and killed children and health care workers. This is 100% terrorism. I guess it's a better than the active genocide they're doing though, so it's a low bar.
They were not exclusively used by Hezbollah.
Also, you're equating a government with it's militant wing.
Is it proper to call an Israeli Doctor a member of IDF? That is what you are doing.
Hospital administrators (A government position for non insane countries) are Hezbollah.
Yeah that's a fair point wrt non-militant roles, my assumption was that they were primarily used in the military since their purpose was to avoid the issues with mobile networks being used to track them.
But we don't know exactly how the devices were distributed, so you're right that there were potentially a large number of non-military Hezbollah staff.
They've been doing the same for Hamas. Hospital administrator? Hamas. And so Israel bombs out their apartment killing them and their entire family. You know, back when there were apartments.
Same for police.
That one is what gives away Israels genocidal intent. Getting rid of police gets rid of the first line of defense against civil disorder, and the people most likely to do stuff like distribute food and supplies.
Police very rarely end up fighting as militantsin occupied countries, too. Unless you fire them en masse, which occupying countries shouldn't do, if they're smart.
Edit: We do know multiple EMT teams and doctors were hit by the beepers.
probably more civilians than the targeted number of Hezbollah militant members died, orders of magnitude more wounded, crippled etc. success?
Both but one is supported by the USA so they get unlimited free passes
Both USA and Israel
Thar makes a lot more sense than the headlines claiming that the pagers were "hacked" by some remote exploit.
I wonder how many pager carriers were on planes at the time?
Depending on what airports they tried to go through they likely would have been caught. Even garbage security theater like the TSA catches concealed explosives fairly well.
Could you imagine going through security and then getting arrested for trying to carry explosives onto a plane?
I feel like it would be pretty quickly determined that you are the "victim" in that scenario. I have actually carried explosives through a TSA checkpoint before though; it was the BEST LAYOVER EVER. They came to the lounge I was in asking for volunteers to train the dogs and then handed me a backpack with semtex in it and put me in line. The dog found me, I told him he was a GOOD BOY and got to throw his kong for him and rub his belly. 45/10, would layover again.
That happen to a person in our group in Australia, but with cocaine. We were waiting to collect our baggage before customs. The officers told them to put it in thier waistline and see if the dog would sniff it out. Pups was sucessful and got some pets. He didn't have a Kong tho.
I assume they use the cell phone network these days, so any in flight probably weren't able to receive the signal. On board but not at elevation is a pretty small window, so the number could be as small as zero.
That's not an actual limitation of cell signal, it's entirely regulatory.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phones_on_aircraft
Cell phones get a surprising amount of viable service on flights. If you don't turn your cell radio off you can absolutely get text messages.
What is Israel trying to do, beat Canada's record for war crimes added to the Geneva Convention?
Or are they trying to piss off the Middle East enough to get them all to bomb them all at once so they can demand the US send in troops to protect them, dragging the world ever closer to WWIII because their sociopathic leader wants to genocide a people to get real estate?
what?
Canada in WWII basically invented a bunch of entirely new warcrimes
There's a reason Nazi Germany was terrified of Canadians and convinced they were demons sent from hell itself
EDIT: Got which world war wrong. Nazi Germany feared Canada because of what Canada did in WWI
Link or source, please. This sounds intriguing.
Whoops, got which world war wrong. It was world war one
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/the-forgotten-ferocity-of-canadas-soldiers-in-the-great-war (I know, ew, National Post)
https://www.cbc.ca/history/SECTIONSE1EP12CH1LE.html (holy shit CBC update this part of your site. This one is more to back it up in that even with pride behind it, it kind of has an underlying tone of... Holding back)
It's hard to find direct proper sources since it seems we've buried that part of our history some and Google sucks ass these days, but I'll edit in more as I find them
EDIT: https://web.viu.ca/davies/H355H.Cda.WWI/Cook.PoliticsOfSurrender.pdf (university site)
First link is behind a paywall, second link doesn't have anything about war crimes, third link is an academic paper talking about surrendering germans and how they were often killed by Canadian forces. It notes that killing of surrendering forces was an all participants type thing not entirely specific to Canada though. Even notes that Britain was particularly bad about surrendering enemies due to fake surrenders in the South African War just a decade or so before.
I've just read a book about Somme, and it's absolutely true for that battle that surrendered enemies were killed for mere convenience - so they wouldn't have to take them back and feed them. I read this of the British in particular, but that's who the book was about, so.
The first link wasn’t behind a paywall and talks exactly about what OP mentioned, actually it’s a horrible read and while apparently everyone (Germans, French, British, …) was just busy fighting a war they didn’t really care about, Canadians were on a mission to slaughter Germans for whatever reason.
What is a "canada"?
I believe it's a goose.
Aahh, that makes sense.
Not op - as far as I can tell they weren't particularly warcrimey for WW2.
They killed a bunch of German POWs during the invasion of Sicily and killed 20 civilians while burning down a town for a supposed civilian killing a commander (turned out it was an enemy combatant).
Both deeply abhorrent but not "inventing new crimes"
Yeah, I got which world war mixed up. Been a while since I looked into it
He also needs to stay in power to keep himself out of prison. Sound like someone you know?
two kids died in these explosions with much many more wounded.
well guess what we call groups that kill civilians with bombs?
Reminds me of the time Mossad sent letter bombs against Palestinians living abroad.
https://youtu.be/gS5cDF0IC_Y
Reading reddit and seeing everyone trying to justify this nonsense is frighting.
I agree, but they probably could've worded it better. The pagers were meant for Hezbollah but that doesn't mean they exclusively went to Hezbollah.
So true. Could you imagine being in Hezbollah and not giving your personal Hezbollah-issued one-way pager away to someone else?
It depends a lot on how the pagers are distributed. Is it a batch that was carefully delivered to only Hezbollah members? Is that where all the pagers from that batch went?
It's not like the pagers are stamped with "for Hezbollah only". I'm concerned how they were all distributed.
More like everyone's suddenly
gangstaa 'health worker' when their pager explodesPagers. Can't imagine who the foremost users of pagers would be in 2024.
*cough doctors *cough
I have not seen a doctor with a pager in a long time and I have spent a ton of time in hospitals over the past year. They all have smartwatches now.
Doctors still have pagers. The pager will just have a phone number the doctor needs to call as to not violate patient privacy. Instead of calling the doctor directly, they use a pager to request a call because of the bad service that is common within hospitals. At least that's what I know
Back when cell phones were just starting to get “smart” I knew a few folks that carried both a pager & phone. They lived in rural areas where pager coverage was decent but phone coverage was spotty at best, and non-existent in places.
My friend's a pulminologist and his hospital still uses pagers. They just never bothered to upgrade their 20 year old system to use SMS. And he says he's partial to it, because he's not forced to check his phone every time it rings when 99% of the messages are spam texts anyway.
Is this universal around all of Lebanon or only the hospital you were at? There were reports claiming medical personnel were hit with the pagers.
Did OP mean in Lebanon when they said that doctors in 2024 were the foremost use of pagers?
Since they asked which country I was talking about, I think they just meant it in general.
Most of the hospitals I work at still use pagers.
Oh god. Does your country not have HIPAA laws? Thats a Dystopian Nightmare in the works.
I always take somebody's opinion on HIPAA seriously when they misspell it.
This is the U.S.
Doctors just don't have pagers anymore.
That's not true. Pagers are still in regular use for two reasons:
Hospitals hate upgrading their tech infrastructure, so they'll sit on a 20 year old system until it falls to pieces
Pagers don't get spam texts at the same volume as cell phones, so you can be confident that when your pager rings its serious and not automated solicitations.
Humanity in for an incredibly dark future.
For not using pagers?
For using deviced capable of recording audio and transmitting photos of the environment at all times. Every patient that comes through has all of their vulnerabilities exposed.
I hope hospitals that promote such behavior get sued into the ground.
It’s HIPAA, dumbass.
Why should we all not expect our next Amazon device to be just a friendly brick with an ad on it?
Because, unless you can easily open the thing to see inside, there's enough space in side of all new phones to blow our leg or our faces off apparently.
Now thanks to this, phones don't fly. So hey, you're going to Hawaii? Better ship your phone separately on time so it gets there before you do. You want flights to be safe and not full of these dangerous bricks. Ofcourse, screw the mail man who will have to drive from the Continental United States over to Hawaii. It's a water truck... details details...
Should I buy a new device for my kids and or family or myself? Nope unless the thing is transparent like an iMac.
An iMac is an old model personal computer sold by Apple, where the chassis was mostly translucent with bright colors.
This is crazy that we tolerate such a breach of social trust.
Absolutely impressive stunt by Mossad. Incredible targeting
Target large swathes of civilian populations is incredible targeting?
Only to those that think race/religion is what determines if someone is a legitimate target.
It's like something from Cyberpunk 2077 lol.
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Now this is some grasping at straws journalisim. I would be really interested in reading what really happened.
This was such a cool way to kill bad guys. I hope to read more about how they did this like their Stuxnet virus blew up Iranian centrifuges
Until you account for all the innocent people it hurt.
Involving civilians is bad no matter whose side is doing it.
You misunderstand, they're being sarcastic.
Ed: to be specific they reference the most famous result of unexpected consequences.
The US government created a virus managed stucnet that infested and threw off industrial controllers of a specific brand they knew were used with Iranian centrifuges that enrich nuclear material. Their plan worked and the centrifuges were destroyed.
Later on they found out stuxnet accidently infected a bunch of other controllers, ones that were in hospitals, power plants ect. It ended up being one of the most widespread viruses ever.
Essentially they're saying planting bombs in pagers could never have unexpected consequences. /S
No, they were being serious.
The marvel-brained lib has had a comment removed for justifying Israeli attacks on hospitals and schools.
Which version of lib are you using?
Poe’s Law of the internet. It’s impossible to tell online if someone is sarcastic or insane.
Bro you cannot possibly lack that much critical thinking and still be alive.
Do you think someone who posts something like this is concerned with long term effects of Israel's indiscriminate attacks on civilians?
They have 7 accounts, and they all have similar content removed by mods.
Bro, what other shit they did or didn't do ain't got shit to do with this comment here. You're wrong, accept it and move on.
The other shit they did informs us of they way they think.
I understand why you'd assume they're being sarcastic, but someone who literally believes Israel is killing bad guys isn't going to express sarcasm that way. Those are not the posts of someone concerned with blowback.
No , it can infer character.
It's not going to change objective fact.
Read that statement and go point by point as to why you believe it could only be serious. You'll be left having to say it's probably sarcastic because of its content not it's creators character.
MLK talked about this shit dude.
The way that they pulled off this attack is interesting from a cybersecurity standpoint, but we can't ignore the fact that Israel had no way of knowing who was near the devices when they exploded. They very nature of this attack made it impossible for Israel to know how closely they were targeting the bad guys or how many civilians were nearby.
lol. Bad guys?
Terror organization (Hezbollah) = bad guys.
Sounds about right.
And who are the good guys?
Are you one of the good guys? Oh shit am I?
That's the neat part, there are no good guys.
Hezbollah is a government. Which has a large number of civilian members, including doctors that treat people.
Are the garbage collectors bad guys?