Israel Planted Explosives in Pagers Sold to Hezbollah, Officials Say
Israel Planted Explosives in Pagers Sold to Hezbollah, Officials Say
Small amounts of explosive were implanted in beepers that Hezbollah had ordered from a Taiwanese company, according to American and other officials briefed on the operation.
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.
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.
Imagine if everyone's phone exploded to execute like 10 guys.
Edit: The take aways here are
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Israel is a terrorist nation, that views civilian casualties as bonus points
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any country who imports their electronics instead of making their own is susceptible to this kind of tampering.
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The press is covering a terror attack like its some kind of new video game
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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.
Who is a terrorist state exactly?
Both?
I mean I'm no fan of Israel, but Hezbollah ain't exactly the Red Cross.
with Israel clearly having the greater outreach, destructive power and perhaps even less self regulation than Hezbollah as it seems.
It also isn't a state.
Both but one is supported by the USA so they get unlimited free passes
Both USA and Israel
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:
Speaking to Israeli troops on Wednesday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said, “We are at the start of a new phase in the war — it requires courage, determination and perseverance.” He made no mention of the exploding devices but praised the work of Israel’s army and security agencies, saying “the results are very impressive.”
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
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.
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.
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.
It's worth noting that Hezbollah members aren't just militant fighters. There are also social services and Parliamentary members
Hezbollah organizes and maintains an extensive social development program and runs hospitals, news services, educational facilities, and encouragement of Nikah mut'ah. One of its established institutions, Jihad Al Binna's Reconstruction Campaign, is responsible for numerous economic and infrastructure development projects in Lebanon. Hezbollah controls the Martyr's Institute (Al-Shahid Social Association)
Hezbollah holds 14 of the 128 seats in the Parliament of Lebanon and is a member of the Resistance and Development Bloc. According to Daniel L. Byman, it is "the most powerful single political movement in Lebanon." Hezbollah, along with the Amal Movement, represents most of Lebanese Shi'a. Unlike Amal, Hezbollah has not disarmed. Hezbollah participates in the Parliament of Lebanon.
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.
I mean the people carrying the pagers were likely with Hezbollah, but the 2750 people injured? Yeah no.
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.
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.
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.
Yup, catch fire, definitely. But one exothermic reaction is not like another. :)
Pagers. 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
I have not seen a doctor with a pager in a long time
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.
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.
This is Israel's version of de-escalating an escalating conflict. Disgusting animals.
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)
I wonder how many pager carriers were on planes at the time?
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.
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.
Thar makes a lot more sense than the headlines claiming that the pagers were "hacked" by some remote exploit.
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?
He also needs to stay in power to keep himself out of prison. Sound like someone you know?
Canada's record for war crimes added to the Geneva Convention?
what?
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.
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
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.
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
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