The Mossad famously used an exploding cell phone to kill the Hamas bomb maker known as "the Engineer." Quite a story, including a lot of social engineering to get him to use this cell phone. At the times cell phones were huge, analog, and were not so widespread. Pretty sure it even was using an Israeli cell network.

I'm sure the Mossad consider this latest operation a complete success, but I just can't see it helping anything to help the situation which is rapidly deteriorating.

Supply-chain interception. Been done forever.

[1]https://arstechnica.com/tech-p... [arstechnica.com]

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa-upgrade-factory-show-cisco-router-getting-implant/

There isn't anything new or novel - going back centuries - about this type of attack vector

Agree about Netanyahu. He's no better than Hamas. I can assure you that Hezbollah leaders definitely will take the bait. As will Iran. Which is unfortunate for everyone, especially children in the region. Hamas can argue they do things for the freedom of fellow Palestinians although clearly untrue. However Hezbollah is just about power, ego, and money, and Palestinians are just tools in their war they have been waging for Iran with Israel for decades. Things are deteriorating pretty rapidly.

What planet are you from? Hezbollah has been shelling Israel with rockets and UAVs on a daily basis since October 8th 2024. Tens of thousands of Israelis have been displaced from their homes and are currently refugees. Until today there has been no major Israeli retaliation for these attacks, even though each of them was a casus belli, an unprovoked attack originating from a neighboring sovereign country. Israel can't be expected to sit idly and turn the other cheek forever, stop trying to turn this into some petty political game.

Being attacked by Israel is a political necessity for Hezbollah, with a similar situation for Netanyahu. Why would they kill the goose that lays the golden eggs by not occasionally attacking each other?

Their fax machines are still working, maybe.

Hezbollah uses them because cell phones are too easily hacked.

The pager protocol is plain text and readable with a $10 RTL-SDR dongle. [1]https://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sd... [rtl-sdr.com]

Although some use encryption now due to hospitals and medical privacy.

[1] https://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-tutorial-pocsag-pager-decoding/

The videos don't look like li-ion battery fires though. They look like high explosive of some kind. There's no big shower of sparks or a fireball. That's almost certainly a supply chain attack.

If only Israel put as much brain power into making peace.

Once the distribution of the device is intercepted (compromised person high up) it wouldn't be difficult to change the board out for one that handles special messages. This could be confirmed easily once the pager numbers are checked with the cellular network operators.

In essence, it is a step up from hacking a casio f91's alarm function to C4, just this time, primitive tech activated over cellular network.

Pretty obviously a small amount of explosives was placed in the casing of the pagers. There's nothing difficult to believe about this.

Lousy splitters

Actually, it feels a lot like an episode of Mission: Impossible .

Something this crazy was never meant to be done twice. Just like the time they snuck in malware in the Iranian nuclear facility that was off the internet. War will start any time now.

More likely, this was the mission objective from the start and Mossad had extracted all resources of value before sending the message to detonate.

Batteries don't explode. They smoke and then turn into a fireball. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oieH2wwDGzo

Your first hypothesis is ridiculous. 2700 people were injured, meaning over a thousand of these pagers exploded nearly simultaneously. The odds of that happening spontaneously are infinitesimal (translation for you: itty bitty eentsy weentsy).

Less relevantly, as someone else said, lithium batteries just burn very hot, but not very quickly. That is far different than the type of explosions that cause serious injuries due to blast/shrapnel, which is what happened here.

You need to be more careful analysing the

Or its a false flag. Hezbollah does not have to admit any serious security failure; like how did Israeli plant bombs on/near our people. All you got to do is drive some ambulances around and say some sophisticated attack that would have had to been initially staged well before the current hostilities killed some of your people.

Makes the enemy look nasty in the court of public opinion without putting much egg on your face.

This could be just an accident with a faulty/poorly designed product, with all the users turning them on at more-or-less the same time. (Occam's Razor would probably argue for that.)

Jesus fucking christ. It makes my head hurt to imagine somebody could type out those words and think .. "yes, I should communicate this with other people"

Well, I'm so glad so many of you provided such a clear response (and in the process demonstrated such outstanding social graces, too.)

A faulty / poorly designed product where hundreds all explode at the exact same time after receiving a specifically crafted signal, where none have previously exploded ever?

Seriously?

Watching the videos, it is clearly a real explosion, not a battery overheating. My guess is the pagers were built with a self-destruct mechanism and it was triggered, either accidentally or by hackers.

The latest from the BBC is that the pagers had been packed with about 20g of high explosives. Hezbollah uses (as of today used to use?) pagers to communicate because cell phones are too easily hacked. This is going to have a huge impact on Hezbollah. Their communications are severely disrupted, many of their senior leaders are in the hospital, and leaders outside of Lebanon are now exposed. If you're Israel, it's a great move. If you're trying to get the Trump assassination out of the news, it's also a good move.

Hezbollah decided to switch to low tech pager because IDF was targeting their members with cell calls. All of these pagers appears to be a newer batch of 'secured' shipment. Iranian ambassador to Lebanon and 2 of his bodyguards were also injured since Iranian Revolutionary Guards is the one sponsoring Hezbollah.

> Who the hell is even using pages in this day? The only people that have them are hospitals due to cell interference.

I think you'll find that hospitals aren't actually the only users. I've worked in places where pagers are permitted but not phones because it is much easier to prove that a pager isn't accidentally or deliberately transmitting everything it hears to people who shouldn't be hearing it!

Of course, that could possibly be defeated by a supply chain attack (rather like what happened here).

Looking at the videos, they clearly had been intercepted in the supply chain and had C4 added to them.

They exploded. Explosives were put inside them. 8 people died. "Exploding" lithium batteries don't kill people on the spot from explosive force. They set fire to things very quickly and people die if they cannot escape the smoke or fire. But nobody dies from a battery "exploding" - they die when explosives explode.

This just goes to show you that EVERY message you send does NOT need to end with "911".

(those old enough to have carried pagers know what I'm talking about).

When you are lacking in certainty, use Bayesian inference.

Has Mossad done similar infiltration operations before?

Are they particularly motivated over the last year or so to do something like this?

Thousands of simultaneous personnel-debilitating explosions is not a random accident.

So some adversary intelligence agency did it.

The candidate list is short: Mossad and CIA. Which is more motivated? Which is more likely able to infiltrate the supply chain of Hezbollah via a sizable existing undercover agent force?

IKR? I am so hard right now. But they're not, since their dicks were blown off.

If you work for the disinformation division of Israeli Intelligence, you're doing a shitty job of it.

So you probably just do it on a volunteer basis.

We need to find a way to communicate with them, get it through to them that their best interest isn't trying to mess up our stuff. Now, I realize this is a tall order . . . if you don't feel up to the task, feel free to admit it. It's no shame to be unable to rise above the average, but in matters of this import please try to listen and learn.