This seems like it would have the potential for a lot of collateral damage due to the possibility that modified pagers might enter general distribution. That is to say, how do they insure that a given shipment of pagers are only going to Hezbollah as opposed to some of them going to people like aid workers?
I suspect that is an intentional side effect against the whole pager network. It is now totally compromised which means they can no longer use passive channels as a communication medium. This effectively shut down their comms structure.
As for aid workers, they mostly use whatever low ball android phones they can get their hands on I know someone who volunteered out there and everyone uses them and Telegram). I don't think that will impact them at all.
Well, now that everyone knows it's feasible to hide a small bomb inside a pager, what's to stop people from checking their pagers for tiny explosives before using them?
Well nothing which is why people are spreading stuff about it being a hack causing the batteries to explode. Which disrupts everything with a network connection and battery. Adds confusion to the situation.
As I said elsewhere this is a one shot attack. They would never be able to pull this off again at this scale.
It's effects might have been intended as much for psychological as lethal results. This specific vector may be a one-and-done tactic but Hezbollah members would be foolhardy not to regard every electronic device that is, at minimum, younger than $pager_age with suspicion. At this point even if it's a wired copper POTS line I'd be asking the intern to take my calls and shout things out from a few rooms away.
You only need to vet what the inside of a pager should look like once, and spread the knowledge around... using them will become more of a hassle, but not entirely impossible.
The tampered pager likely looks nearly identical, and even un-tampered pagers will vary a little bit from manufacturing. It's possible an expert might be able to visually distinguish that a particular strand of wire is the wrong gauge or the soldering pattern suggests it wasn't made on the appropriate machine, but there shouldn't be something obvious.
presumably the only difference between an explosive-laden battery and a normal battery is it's capacity. All else will appear identical. And tearing down the battery to inspect it destroys the battery.
Lot's of pager batteries are the shrink-wrapped cylinders with 2+ cells, so I'm guessing it might be possible to dress up one of those cells as a dummy w/ explosives instead.
Assuming the stock of replaceable batteries is large enough to handle them all being replaced simultaneously, that the replacement batteries are not likewise compromised, and that the battery is indeed the compromised component.
Realistically just replacing the pagers is not only safer but also probably cheaper.
I've used them for DevOps on-call in the last ten years in the US, as a backup to phone-based alerts. It's far too easy to mess up phone DND settings, forget to charge a phone, be outside cell service, or leave a phone in the wrong room. The pager had a long battery life and I clipped it to my pants waistband. I definitely caught pages via the pager that I would have missed over the phone.
If you're worried about the cell network going down, they serve as a backup comms device as well since they use different infrastructure.
Hezbollah is essentially a government entity in much of Lebanon, they totally would. Hezbollah runs schools, hospitals - it's easily the largest social services provider in large swathes of Lebanon. That's why it enjoys so much support, in many ways it was a much more competent alternative to the failed Lebanese government.
People who work in schools in Lebanon carry smartphones like everybody else. Pagers are obsolete. Some doctors may carry them because they work when the cell network is down, but they don't all re-up from Iran all at once. Hezbollah carries pagers because they're one-way devices that are hard to track, which is not a problem a Lebanese school teacher has with his Chinese Android phone.
What makes you think pagers are obsolete? When I worked at a big-three cloud provider (2016) we used them and it was a great fit for on-call requirements. I regularly find I don't have cell service when in large buildings, out in the woods, or even just random spots in US cities. The pager didn't have those issues, and helped us build highly available services. Does Fly use something different for on-call alerts?
A quick search shows the US Government/Army [1] and hospitals use them [2] [3] [4]. I'm not familiar with Lebanese wireless networks, but pagers are certainly still used for these use-cases in the US.
"Residents reported that they used one-way pagers for work-related communication more often than smartphones" (2018)
People still use pagers for specialty purposes, like being on call in disaster zones, or serving as a parallel armed forces in a country with a hostile neighbor who has infiltrated your cell phone network.
I've said this like 5 times on this thread and feel bad for continuing to repeat myself, but: Hezbollah operates its own telecommunications network. The Hezbollah pagers probably do not work on the normal Lebanese telecoms systems. This in addition to the fact that Hezbollah procures pagers for its service members; it does not go to the Cricket Wireless store at the corner of Mousa al Sadr and Kouds and pick them up retail a couple at a time.
Pagers don't use normal telecom systems, and they're not limited to paramilitary organizations. They're very useful in any critical application because they have low infrastructure requirements.
The comment you're replying to explains how they're used routinely in most hospitals in the world for this purpose.
You can't buy pagers off stores on the corner, either. They don't have SIM cards and most of them can't report back to the network, so they need to be pre-configured by the network operator. Just the same way, if you work at a hospital and are issued a pager, it will be issued to you by your employer and you won't be able to pick it up off the street.
In a country with extremely unreliable telecom infrastructure, it's not at all unlikely for an organization to use pagers, especially if it operates emergency services, and they would have to be procured through that organization.
Lebanon has incredibly unreliable cell service. Anyone who needs to receive messages in a timely and reliable fashion would have no choice to have a pager or similar device. That would include many people in schools and most people in a hospital.
> they don't all re-up from Iran all at the same time
Who says anyone does? Hezbollah has 40k fighters, and we have reports of 2000 people being injured, so clearly Hezbollah, military or civilian, didn't "all re-up from Iran all at once", the numbers are more than an order of magnitude off for you to conclude as much.
Reuters has specific shipments and provenance for the pagers attributed now, and also notes that the explosions were concentrated in Hezbollah strongholds (Dahiah, Bekaa, southern Lebanon), lending further evidence that these were not off-the-rack pagers.
No one is saying these were off the rack or that they weren't distributed as part of Hezbollah's operation, so I don't understand how this is relevant.
The point I made is that less than half of Hezbollah is combatant, therefore the possession of a device procured and distributed by Hezbollah cannot be dispositive evidence as most Hezbollah members aren't IHL combatants. The fact the pagers were ordered by Hezbollah doesn't contribute anything in the context of a discussion on civilian Hezbollah members that would need to use pagers.
This is such a strange take. As if CIA operatives and a random teacher at some elementary school just both reach into a box with pagers and pick one because they're both employed by the government.
If the US government was sanctioned to the extent Hezbollah was, someone like an elementary school principal would most likely have to ask a higher-up to provide them with something like a pager, which would likely have been smuggled together with others.
You can buy mobile phones in Lebanon just fine, there's no reason why anyone except active duty members of Hezbollah would get their communication equipment from Hezbollah.
Mobile phone service is horrible in Lebanon and cannot be relied on in any type of emergency.
Also, the whole point of this is that active duty members of Hezbollah includes hospital staff and teachers. Hezbollah's civilian division is about as large as the paramilitary one, if not larger. So it's not possible to confidently state that anyone affected was part of a milita with the information we have right now.
Why would employees of Hezbollah carry Hezbollah communication devices? That doesn't seem like the question you're trying to ask, in which case, what is a 'military' pager and how is it different from a 'civilian' pager? How are you able to tell apart a 'military' pager from a 'civilian' pager with such confidence as to present it as an unquestioned assumption?
I've spent quite some time looking, and I cannot find such a thing as a military pager. The only pagers I can find mentioned in a military setting are no different from the pagers that civilians would use, for example, the use of commercial pagers in US military hospitals.
At the same time, I don't think there's any reason to disbelieve accounts (and video footage) of children among the injured. Unless you're sending operatives with pistols and killing targets individually, I don't think there's a way to do a strike of this scale without killing innocents.
Actually this is probably more accurate than a pistol. Bullets miss and ricochet. Plus other people would fire back, leading to a gun fight and more deaths.
So 1-2 feet away is safe from serious injury resulting from the explosive force itself. Though the probability seems high at least some out of thousands had people standing close enough for worse, or further away and hit with shrapnel.
I’m just commenting on injury though, not making a moral or ethical judgement. That’s not an easy call when an opponent is embedded in a population of non-combatants.
not sure of band allocations around israel, but in the US pagers were long wavelength devices and, as such, could receive signals much further inside buildings than pre-wifi cellular bands could reach. again, band / frequency (wavelength) allocation dependent. but if similar there, pagers might get signals in tunnels whereas cellular bands may not, for one plausible conjecture.
I'll consider that a possibility when it comes from an independent party detailing exactly which processes failed, why, and what remediation is being done beyond sacrificial dismissals. The particular WCK strike you're referring to wasn't even the first one killing WCK workers, just the most high-profile among many others.
[1]
> Yeah, it's really important to situate that attack on the World Central Kitchen in the context of these many other attacks that have occurred since October in Gaza. We've documented incidents of attacks on guest houses, on convoys of aid organizations, including Doctors Without Borders, MSF, the UN institution there UNRWA, the International Rescue Committee, and Medical Aid for Palestinians and another American aid group. And in every single one of these instances, these groups notified the authorities, the Israeli authorities multiple times about the GPS coordinate of the guest house, of the convoy that was moving. When it was convoys, they were taking agreed-upon routes that the Israelis had told them to take. And in every instance, these attacks occurred with zero prior warning to the aid organizations, and we're talking about, you know, 15 aid workers having been killed in these attacks and another including two children, family members, and another 16 injured.
Actions speak much louder than words here. If it quacks like a duck, it's probably not an accident that aid workers following all the proper procedures to make sure they don't get blown up, do get blown up.
They didn't apologize in the Hind Rajab case, they denied they were ever there.
They didn't apologize for the babies at Al-Nasr, they claimed they had to move on suddenly.
They didn't apologize for the vast majority of journalists murdered, just claimed they were Hamas.
Etc, tens of thousands of times.
What might be revealing for you is to look at the cases where they did apologize:
They apologized for shooting three of their own hostages dead in cold blood as they called out in Hebrew waving a white flag: turns out there was audio of that about to leak. No consequences for anyone involved though.
They apologized for the World Food Kitchen workers killed, after initial denials. There was undeniable evidence of that one too. Zero consequences.
They apologized for sniping Aysenur Ezgi - after it turned out she was an American citizen. They still claimed it was an accident, during stones being thrown (a lie). They still haven't reached out to a single witness during their 'investigation'. Zero consequences.
First, you're changing the subject. I never said Israel didn't commit any crimes - of course it did. I just said that Israel doesn't explicitly target aid workers. In the case of the Kitchen Aid workers that you linked to, not only Israel apologized, the chief of the army fired two very high commanders and punished a few others. Not sure why you're saying there was "zero consequences".
I'm also not sure why you mention the killing of 3 Israeli hostages, "in cold blood". Do you mean that Israel explicitly targeted them too? The fact that in this situation, unlike with the aid workers, no one was fired, only speaks to say that there's an understanding that mistakes happen even when these mistakes are killing Israelis.
With regards to hurting Palestinians, the list of Israeli soldiers that were trialed and punished for hurting Palestinians is too long to list here. The list of Palestinian freedom fighters that were trialed (forget about punished) for hurting Israelis is... well, [].
> I just said that Israel doesn't explicitly target aid workers
But they do. Aid workers have been killed in "unprecedented" "record numbers". Same with journalists, and children, and...
> With regards to hurting Palestinians, the list of Israeli soldiers that were trialed and punished for hurting Palestinians is too long to list here
Israelis rioted for the right of prison guards to anally gang rape abductees held without trial to the point of hospitalization. They gave one of the rapists (the one caught on CCTV) national attention and praise.
You're trying to defend the indefensible, after 11 months of daily atrocity. Not a good choice.
> But they do. Aid workers have been killed in "unprecedented" "record numbers". Same with journalists, and children, and...
This does not mean they are targeted. It could mean that Israel isn't careful enough, it could mean they are operating in a more dangerous situation than usually, it could mean that a higher percentage of them is also involved in non-aid related activities. Just assuming that because they were killed it means they were targeted is ridiculous. I'll give you an example: On October 7th Hamas killed a record number of Thai people in any other conflict in the middle east. Does Hamas explicitly target Thai people?
> Israelis rioted for the right of prison guards to anally gang rape abductees held without trial to the point of hospitalization. They gave one of the rapists (the one caught on CCTV) national attention and praise.
Yeah, a few hundreds of Israelis rioted for them. You know how much that is out of a population of almost 10M? And if you don't mind, the point wasn't really about "general opinion", but about the fact that systemically in Israel, soldiers hurting Palestinians were and are prosecuted, while something even remotely similar to that has never happened (I'll wait for your link) at the other side. You bringing up a case where the soldiers were detained and facing criminal charges, against some of the Israeli population opinion, proves my point exactly.
That's right. Any evaluation or discussion of this needs to take account of the fact that it makes the perpetrator culpable of an illegal act of war in which the lives of innocent children are disregarded. There are all sorts of "clever" but reprehensible things warring parties could do, but are considered to be beyond the pale. So, this is a stupid action by a reckless, immoral party which will continue to have consequences for all of us -- especially if we don't deal with anything that we control.
Again you are responding to an argument which was explicitly and clearly not made. The comment you are replying to asserts that this is an illegal act of war.
Everything only works by agreement and adherence to rules: some explicit, some considered to be so blindingly obvious to a human that there should be no need to state them.
Some of the rules around warfare involve doing your utmost to avoid collateral damage. In this case the collateral damage involves a ten year old girl.
Please try to respond to the actual arguments instead of a cheap, easy strawman. It helps improve the quality of the site.
This conflict has had a historically very notable property where civilian casualties are so much higher than military casualties as to be clearly anomalous.
According to Israel, it is the same conflict, but if you tally up civilian casualties from previous Israeli-Lebanon conflicts, you'll find a similar rate.
The ratio is at least as high in WW2, but only if you include war crimes and genocides. I think we can agree that WW2 featured notable and anomalous civilian casualties from the first industrial genocides, can't we?
If you look more closely at the data, you'll see that Germany, for example, suffered 3.8 million civilian deaths and 5.5 million military deaths. This was after Germany was completely invaded, thus the fighting reached every city.
The civilian-military death ratio in Gaza is, according to peer-reviewed independent estimates, at least 2:1, and that's if you assume that every male 18-60 is an enemy combatant. If you don't, you find a ratio of at least 4:1, with estimates mostly around 6-9:1. And this data is from before the collapse in infrastructure had time to really drive up the excess death count : https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
These pagers were used by Hizbullah because, unlike mobile phones, they cannot be tracked. The people who had them were certainly not random aid workers, but people in the Hizbullah chain of command. This is also indicated by the statements of Hizbullah itself (which are themself to be questioned and not taken at face value), according to which so far one non-combatant was reported killed and no other non-combatant were reported injured out of a total of 4,000 exploded explosive devices.
The CCTV footage also shows that even in a crowded supermarket, no one was injured apart from the Hizbullah member with the pager.
The same way anyone could make a judgment call before the attack was carried out? We are capable of abstract reasoning about the consequences of our actions.
First: Innocent people can use their phones just fine and have their comms intercepted by the IDF. Only Hezbollah wanted an alternative to hackable phones.
Second: If you distribute to Hezbollah and detonate already months later, it's unlikely many unaffiliated people already have Hezbollah pagers.
As I understand it, people are saying that the most likely way that this was carried out was that a shipment of pagers where intercepted and modified. My concern is that part or all of the shipment might not go to Hezbollah. Perhaps the shipment gets rerouted to somewhere else due to supply chain issues. Perhaps only half of the shipment was intended for Hezbollah. Perhaps a postal worker steals a few and sells them on the black market. Perhaps Hezbollah decides they have more than they needs and does something with the rest. Perhaps part or all of the shipment gets delayed and is sitting in a post office when it goes off.
Basically: warfare via mail bomb seems like it might be irresponsible.
Maybe they don't? But they definitely have their own phone infrastructure, and since the switch to pagers was entirely about opsec, it would be very weird if they were dependent on civilian telecoms infrastructure for them.
No essentially about it. Hezbollah is part of the government, one of many political parties in Lebanon. Just like most of the other major political parties in Lebanon, they maintain their own militia separate from the Lebanese military.
I think this is something that many people may not grasp about Lebanon.
The "There's Your Problem" podcast did an episode on the fertilizer explosion that leveled Beirut's port in 2020. The amount of breakdown that had to occur for that outcome was both astonishing... And utterly predictable given Lebanon's governmental structure, which is barely functional. It's less a government and more a power detente that hard-codes sectarian differences in the culture into the power structure, like trying to build a government out of a band of feuding warlords with no particular underlying agreement amongst the warlords to leave each other alone. Among other things, this makes their foreign policy heterogeneous; a given faction can just wage war without the government's consent, and the government lacks top-level power to do anything about it.
(Ironically, one of the things that minimized the potential damage in the fertilizer blast is that much of the material had been stolen and shipped away before the explosion. Likely by actors with the tacit support of high-level government functionaries looking the other way and refusing to do enforcement).
It would be easy to include a little microcontroller that can check what frequency the pager is set to. This allows you to target specific pager networks (government, military) while leaving pagers that are unlikely to be in use by targets intact for follow-up attacks.
I've seen this before. Your proof is a single person's opinion. Note that it is an opinion, with no evidence or data to back it up. It contains numerous tropes of IDF apologists and is written by a person who has a long history of opposing any investigations into the actions of the military and having generally right wing, militant, pro-European and anti-Muslim views. the letter appeals only to those who want to believe it.
More tragic than funny but it is human nature. Propaganda mills like PragerU exist because they work. People are happy to pick up other people's opinions because it saves them doing the hard work of forming one themselves. Lots of people believe things that are patently false, from religion to pseudo science to flat earth. Just believing something because it aligns with your existing opinions and prejudices doesn't make it true, it makes it confirmation bias.
The source of this shoddy opinion is PragerU, a very well funded and openly right wing, Christian, pro-Israel media outlet. It is literally paid my its wealthy right wing ultra rich donors to publish one sided content that pushes the donors' views for the donors' benefit. It is as far from a neutral objective source as you can get.
Pagers could have certain security options that would interest only a military organization. We don't know at which stage these were intercepted. They could just as easily be targeted to Hezbollah from the beginning of the sale. Advertise something that could be catered to them and once they take the bait go ahead and booby trap them all
I'm not sure why it's being assumed that they detonated all of the pagers. They presumably have unique device IDs / phone numbers that can be tied to individual people. For all we know, they may have just detonated the ones known to be in use by Hezbollah operatives.
Per The Lancet, if you account for excess deaths due to things like willfully imposed mass starvation, denial of medical services due to the destruction of hospitals, and living in tents without cooling due to the destruction of housing, 100,000 people have been killed as a consequence of the IDFs actions.
If you aren't targeting occupied residences with the JDAM (like Israel does through the Where's Daddy? program) then feasibly you could end up with less civilian attrition using the JDAMs. Distributed fragmentation explosives with no fire control system are arguably more dangerous than a direct-attack munition targeting a military installation.
Everyone cares about collateral damage. The thorny part is how much to care... what is the calculus for how much is acceptable? Israel, rightly or wrongly, seems to be comfortable with around a 100:1 ratio.
Gaza has fairly low civilian:combatant death ratios, lower than in most comparable urban wars. It's not hard to calculate them, the information is partly public (published by Hamas and IDF). However, many people chose to believe whatever they want to believe instead of going for the facts, I've seen some people come up with numbers ad hoc that are ten times than what Hamas reports, or they claim IDF has basically not killed any Hamas combatants at all.
This might be true but would be an easier argument to make persuasively if Israel had backed off after it more or less roflstomped the Al Qassam order of battle and virtually the entire Hamas command staff.
I see no reason for Israel to "back off" before the hostages are returned and Hamas surrenders. Like all wars, it will probably end when one of the combatants surrenders. Hopefully this will happen soon.
But if you look at it in terms of civilian casualties, they've gone down massively since the start of the war. Israel "has" backed off in many senses of the word.
The problem is that Israel hasn't left Gaza, because despite your statement that the entire Hamas command staff is dead, it seems very likely that the minute Israel leaves, Hamas regains control of Gaza and starts building up strike capability again. So we're in a semi-holding pattern.
Now, there are good questions about why we're in this holding pattern. Many people (including me) think that it's because Netanyahu isn't trying to actually "win" the war, but prolong it, so this situation is good for him. Hence no steps to leave and set up a Hamas alternative, but also no move to more decisively finish the war either. A holding pattern suits Netanyahu just fine, at the expense first and foremost of the Gazan population, but also of the Israeli population (and also the Israeli economy, reputation, etc).
To clarify, I'm not trying to make any persuasive arguments about this. This is based on my own calculations, and there is generally not enough publicly available information to come to a fully informed verdict. For example, if you take all figures by Hamas, including some of the low number of deaths of their own fighters they reported, the ratio climbs up to 4:1 or more. I doubt anyone can say with certainty what the right figures are (well, perhaps some can provide good estimates, but not publicly).
I'd be interested in knowing how the IDF mandate to destroy Hamas is defined concretely in terms of KIA of enemy combatants but perhaps that hasn't even been decided yet.
You could listen to testimony from those within the IDF:
"the IDF judged it permissible to kill more than 100 civilians in attacks on a top-ranking Hamas officials" ... "We’ve killed people with collateral damage in the high double digits, if not low triple digits" ... "they were authorised to kill up to “20 uninvolved civilians” for a single operative, regardless of their rank, military importance, or age" ... "It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home"
When looking at this we have assess both the theoretical rules of combat and the actual implementation of those and compare them to an ally nation in other active combat zones like the US, UK, NATO forces in various places. No army is good at being ethical, foir want of a better word, but the Israelli government and the IDF seem to fail much more at holding to what most people would consider acceptable standards of behaviour.
I always try to base my judgments on the actual numbers rather than qualitative anecdotal evidence since the latter is relatively worthless (for statistical reasons alone). The problem is also that you can always find some people who support some narrative. Often these people don't know the numbers themselves.
A problem with numbers is that they are very prone to manipulation. Who gets to decide who is a combatant and who is a civilian? The IDF's computer algorithms like Lavender system categorise large numbers of people as enemy combatants without any evidence or visible reasoning. Who's numbers do you use? Do you include indirect deaths as a result of of IDF action? And on and on. Lies damn lies and statistics.
Regardless of number I think people can be judged on their intent, actions & policies they put in place and enforce. That's what we judge people on in courts of law.
Not really? Part of what happened with Gaza and Hamas was that Netanyahu (and governments before his) spent a decade taking Hezbollah more seriously than Hamas (for good reason!). They are geared up for a precise and carefully-executed conflict with Hezbollah in ways they were not with Hamas.
At the same time: 100% reasonable to look at today and say "if you can pull off an attack like this, why the fuck are you still leveling apartment buildings in Gaza, after having permanently crippled Hamas months ago". Like, there's a moral dimension to this! But I don't think that dimension is "feel real bad for Hassan Nasrallah". Play stupid games, &c &c.
The pagers do give Israel a certain veneer of plausible deniability that they wouldn’t otherwise have if they had used more traditional bombing methods.
Literally everybody in the entire world believes Israel is responsible for this. An Mk-82 bomb dropped from a bomber would have more deniability. This was a joke about Israel's tactical signature back when James Mickens included it in a Usenix Security throwaway paragraph back in 2014. There is absolutely no deniability here, unless someone very powerful is deliberately trying to frame Israel (which is not what is happening).
