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The Large-Scale War in Lebanon May Have Begun
Israel blew up the pagers of hundreds of senior Hezbollah officers, apparently seriously wounding quite a few. Although the method is unorthodox, I imagine this sort of attack on communications would normally be followed up with a large-scale assault.
I hope the effect on Lebanon is as minimal as it can be while Hezbollah is eradicated from amongst them. This sort of extremely targeted attack bodes well. And, of course, I pray for the safety of our soldiers and the residents of our cities – all of whom are in range of Hezbollah rockets.
Stay tuned.
Published in Foreign Policy
Golly.
I have questions:
https://x.com/Osint613/status/1836027223179928059?s=19
I could see the reason why having self destructive capability for comms devices would be considered sensible.
This is wild as I just received an update from WSJ about this very thing. Apparently the terrorists just received a new shipment of pagers so I suspect these pagers did have explosives in them. Would these be considered precision weapons?
I suspect this is similar to the Nantaz explosion. In that case Israel managed to supply the concrete that was itself explosive. I suspect Israel was the actual supplier of these devices.
My guess is they were using custom stupid phones to avoid being tracked.
That is true, which is why I think a big assault is coming. You only get to do this once. I suspect they’ve been listening for a very long time.
Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, was injured on Tuesday when his Hezbollah pager blew up.
The lithium batteries blew up.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/hezbollah-official-israel-behind-coordinated-attack-pagers-lithium-batteries-apparently-exploded/
Wow, what a story. Thanks for posting this.
The estimate is now 1,000 people injured. It was a truly massive attack.
Imagine yourself as a Hezbollah operative. You and all of your colleagues have their pagers blow up. Your morale is not going to be high today. In fact you may want to consider another career choice. It’s not just the physical damage inflicted on the pager owner consider the psychological effect.
The Israelis know who you are, where you are at and can “touch” you whenever they want. You’re going to need some stronger sleeping medication.
Respect.
I don’t know what reporting to trust, but the linked story suggests that, yes, the batteries were made to explode. That would explain why there are no reported fatalities. Presumably Israel either managed to sabotage the manufacturing process and insert a defect, or actually hacked the firmware in the devices and reprogrammed the charging circuit. The first seems more likely to me, but I don’t know.
Here is a Xeet with some video. Totally awesome TBH.
It apparently extended to Syria.
Natanz?
The Arab world has been behind in science and technology since Al Ghazali’s attack on natural philosophy in the eleventh century.
The beeper king of NY weighs in:
Here in Israel they are telling locals to be ready for escalation although there are no changes to guidelines (e.g. if you aren’t in an area with restricted movement or gatherings you can still go about normal life). Two of my kids are trying out for flag football tonight, but I’ve got the car fueled to go get them if I need to.
When you want to reach out and touch a whole bunch of people.
Who would have suspected that Honest Habib’s Mobile Comm & Used Tech Emporium was a subsidiary of Mossad? If you think this is something, wait till the Jews detonate all those electric toothbrushes, TV remotes, and condoms.
I can’t remember which attack it was (and I can’t find it now) but an underground hall at one of Iran’s facilities blew up. Apparently the concrete itself was doped with explosives requiring just a small charge to detonate the whole place.
MuwhaHAHhahahHAH!
Pagers are to alert the carriers that someone wants to contact them. This is prearranged with the possessor of the pager. Perhaps the arrangement is to contact a particular landline, maybe a conference call. The communication is one-way and doesn’t carry much information, thus there isn’t much to be gleaned from interception alone.
It could well be that this may be a preliminary to further action. Hezbollah’s ability to communicate and coordinate is going to be messed up for a bit.
Were I a jihadist, I would certainly be inclined to use the speaker option on my mobile phone for the foreseeable future….
Because pagers don’t transmit, they are not track-able. Any phone, even a dumb phone, is track-able if it is being used. Comm-wise, pagers are a good choice for a terrorist, or a spy.
Lithium batteries like to combust, whether EVs or others. I have seen many laptop batteries from a reputable manufacturer short out, occasional sparks or even flame, sometimes ruining the laptop itself, although I have never seen anyone injured.
Transmitting instructions to cause the battery to overheat until it detonates is elegant, if that is what was done.
The most common symptom of impending failure in a lithium laptop battery is that it will swell in thickness. It might even split open. Mostly I have seen batteries with a large bulge in the back, or occasionally the keyboard would be distorted from beneath.
Toll is now 2,800 injured, 200 seriously, 8 killed (unfortunately including the daughter of one of the terrorists).
A stunning first strike on everybody important enough to have a pager and a stunning strike on their comms.
These were apparently new devices. So I suspect the lithium was compromised in advance. I believe you could, for example, put water cells inside the batteries and have some runaway power request swell the batteries, pop the cells and cause an explosion.
Ah. I didn’t know that. Thanks.
Why did they get new pagers? Because the last strike apparently showed they had compromised comms.
They got duped into an ‘upgrade plan.’
7 killed in Syria in the same attack. If ratios are similar, this would suggest thousands injured.
Line the inside of the pager with Primacord?
Reminds me of Stuxnet.
While I am often impressed by Israeli ingenuity, and while I entirely approve of Israel’s action here, there’s a sobering aspect to this. We are increasingly vulnerable to large-scale cyber-attacks by state and quasi-state actors. Exploding pagers and cell phones are bad, but crashed grids, air traffic control systems, water treatment plants, banking, and health care systems would ultimately be worse.
China, of course, is a major supplier of the technologies on which these systems depend. Thank goodness no one in our government is beholden to China….