Pagers exploding in the hands of tens of Hezbollah members.

13 comments

1. This is crazy, straight out of a spy film. There is some footage online showing this happening, like a guy just chilling around, and then the pager on his waist goes kaboom in a split second.

2. Holy crap, this is insane! I’m trying to wrap my head around the scale of this – we’re talking *tens* of Hezbollah members or more? Anyone else wondering how they pulled this off? And more importantly, what’s the fallout gonna be?

3. I’m wondering how. I know lithium batteries are pretty reactive, but I’ve never seen them do that. Did these pagers have a little explosive in them?

4. Interesting that these Hezbollah affiliated pagers also found their way onto the Iranian ambassador’s hip. He was also injured in what Iran is calling a “cyberattack”.

5. This is a one-use weapon that Israel have obviously been sitting on for a while. I’m sure they didn’t waste it on a stunt. Why now? Are they invading?

6. I saw a documentary on an Israeli intelligence agency (Sayeret Matkal?) that did this to a bomb makers phone. When the Israeli’s called it to initiate it, it failed. Couple of weeks later it functioned and took out the intended target.

7. Genuinely based. IDF are next level tech wizards

8. Gives a whole new meaning the the phrase “precision targeting” or “precision munitions”

9. Really brings back memories of the Cold War where spy agencies were coming up with all kinds of gadgets to listen to, trick, incapacitate, or kill people without having to send a military unit to do the job.

   Doubtless the numbers provided by Hezbollah are inflated as is tradition.

   I bet the Israeli agency responsible for this are breaking out the champagne and cigars for a job well done.

10. If there was a moment that signaled the start of operations this is it. I wouldn’t be surprised if Israel starting moving forces. Hezbollah leadership is in chaos, injured, or out of communication and their medical facilities are overwhelmed.

11. I have a hard time believing they managed to have enough pressure for the batteries to all explode, what kind of industrial stupid design is that?

    Could a batch have been swapped in a targeted way?

12. Mossad is on a different level, looks like it was straight from a movie. I wonder how they planned this.

13. It’s easy to be impressed by this, and think that it’s “deserved”. But if a thousand phones of US republic party members (or Likud members, or insert anyone else) would blow up, we’d have no problem at all calling this terrorism.

    I do understand that this is more complicated, since Hezbollah (or it’s military wing, depending on who you ask) are a designated terrorist organization, so you could argue that having a pager supplied by them automatically makes you a target.

    But still, using tactics i’d personally associate with terrorism make me feel very uncomfortable at the very least. It raises questions of how involved do you have to be to have such a pager? Was it equivalent to a party membership card?(and is that enough to be a legitimate target?) or did some of them end up in hands of family/friends/whoever needed a pager? how much risk was there of partners or children reading the message rather than the intended target?

    Does being an ambassador and having a way to communicate with a major group in that country automatically imply you support everything they do? In this case it’s kind of obvious that the Iranian ambasador *does* support hezbolah, we don’t need his pager for that. But does it make him a valid target because of it?

    And, in another line of thinking, how much different is exploding someones pager targeting only them, from throwing a drone strike at them, their house, car, and bystanders? Although with drone strikes we know there is individual targeting, and that’s something we really don’t know yet about this. I would definitely feel better about this if it was a handchecked list, rather than “anyone who happens to own a pager produced in this batch supplied to hezbolah.”.

    —

    also, since this is a whole new axis of attack which feels more like a scifi-plot than a real thing, i hope y’all won’t immediately come with downvotes for supposed terrorist sympathies, but rather discuss with me the implications and ethics of this kind of attack. I’m still not sure myself what i should think of this either.