Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon, sources say

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-planted-explosives-hezbollahs-taiwan-made-pagers-say-sources-2024-09-18/

by shmatt • 2 years ago

301 731 2 years ago

reuters.com

anonu• 2 years ago

You would think all devices would be checked ASAP after yesterday's incident.

gherard5555• 2 years ago

If i understood correctly they were rigged with explosive. There is no way that a regular battery would explode like this right ?

tptacek32• 2 years ago

Yes. There's sourcing for the first attack that Israel implanted daughterboards of some sort with small (30g?) amounts of explosive. The battery may have been involved with the triggering, but it wasn't a battery explosion.

goldcd3• 2 years ago

But if you wanted to put 30g of explosive into a device, you wouldn't just want it sat there looking out of place to any curious person with a screw-driver. My guess is that you'd want to put it inside a component like say a LiPo pouch that looks like it belongs there. Half-battery, half-explosive - and maybe hijack the BMS components to also allow it to be triggered.

Modified30192• 2 years ago

Correct. The injuries are comparable or worse to what you get if you try to use a .50 BMG cartridge as a hammer.

Videos show outright detonations (so far with notably little fire), nothing like the fiery deflagrations you see in “battery explodes” videos while someone is doing a repair.

yoavm• 2 years ago

Some reports are saying the Icom-V82 devices were bought by Hezbollah 5 months ago, close to the time yesterday's beeper were purchased. However, the exploding part was the battery, imported to Lebanon only 2 weeks ago.

I wonder if this operation had two sides - implanting something in the devices that will allow remotely triggering the explosion, and then also tampering with the batteries to include explosive material.

tptacek32• 2 years ago

Saying this "further heightened tensions" between Israel and Hezbollah is like saying Jason "further heightened tensions" with the campers at Camp Crystal Lake.

Can you imagine what must be like to be a rank-and-file Hezbollah soldier at this point? What the fuck is going to happen tomorrow? I'd throw away my socks.

miohtama• 2 years ago

I know HN is not a place for political commentary, but why Israel would do it now when everyone tries to make them de-escalate?

redditwhat• 2 years ago

There really isn’t any de-escalation. Hezbollah continues to bomb Northern Israel and the IDF continues to strike back. There are still hundreds of thousands of displaced Israelis who can’t go back to their homes.

tptacek32• 2 years ago

Well, first, there's no de-escalation happening with Hezbollah. Israel, Hezbollah, and Iran are more or less openly at war. We don't talk about it much because the attack failed, but Iran launched a mass drone assault against Israel a few months back. Israel recently exploded Ismael Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, in Tehran. Hezbollah rocket attacks on Northern Israel, which killed half a youth soccer team, have more or less evacuated that whole region. Hezbollah is not Hamas: they are a military peer (a weaker one, but still) to Israel.

Second, the reporting I've seen (incl. "confirmation" from US intelligence sources) is that this was a use-it-or-lose-it situation: that Hezbollah operatives were on the verge of discovering it.

leoqa• 2 years ago

Israel is in their 9/11 moment and is not backing down due to international hand wringing. Ultimately it’s a test of the international institutions and US government support.

ngcazz3• 2 years ago

If there is a pressure to have Israel de-escalate, this must be it.

Zero accountability, forever. This is as grim as it gets.

flyinglizard3• 2 years ago

De-escalation wouldn't solve the problem of an Islamic militia with the declared goal of destroying Israel and the military capabilities somewhere in the world top-20 armies sitting right on Israel's northern border. As far as Israel is concerned, Hezbollah needs to be removed and pushed back away. If this doesn't register with common sense alone, then this view is also backed by UN security council resolution 1701.

sequoia• 2 years ago

Hezbollah has been firing rockets into Israel more or less continuously since October 7, and Israel has been firing back. I believe both countries have had to evacuate border areas, something like 100,000 Israelis living hear Lebanon are internally displaced.

In short, there's a war on. Neither side wants a full blown war but Israel doesn't want to let Hezbollah muster a larger assault, so they're doing what they can to cripple Hezbollah and disrupt their operations.

De-escalation is a goal that takes cooperation from both parties (or in this case, from Israel and the various Iranian proxies attacking them). Telling one party to "de-escalate" while the other party continues attacking is just farting in the wind.

vksixyb2• 2 years ago

Israel has been pressing the escalation as hard as they can. They've had people in positions of power saying it's literally ok to rape Palestinians in prison.

There's zero interest in de escalation there.

fortran774• 2 years ago

Hezbollah has been firing missiles non-stop at Israel since 10/7. 60,000 Israelis had to relocate from the North. This is not an escalation.

easyThrowaway• 2 years ago

Because the current Israeli leadership are using external conflict to avoid facing criminal charges from internal political issues. Netanyahu was on the verge of being ousted before the 7 October attacks.

If the conflict stops, the current cabinet will be forced to face their own party, the opposition and the rest of their country.

nielsbot2• 2 years ago

The escalation is the point. Continuing war keeps Netanyahu and his right-wing cabinet in power. It may also draw the US into the conflict, which would, among other side effects, hurt the Dems chances of winning the presidency in November. (Netanyahu and friends prefer Trump over Harris.)

hnpolicestate2• 2 years ago

Remember the "end of history"? How times have changed.

morwanger• 2 years ago

The “End of history” was just a euphemism for western comfort and insulation from the rest of the world. A number of comments here can demonstrate that. There’s simply not enough proximity to death and destruction for these people to feel like it’s anything more than entertainment or an interesting topic of discussion.

The end of history will be over when we all recognize that this could just as easily be an operation against the Cartel or the Boogaloo Boys or whoever the fuck, with Feds blowing up pagers in a Whole Foods in LA instead of a market in Lebanon. Oh, but that could never happen here.

steventhedev2• 2 years ago

Please note that this is distinct from yesterday's incident - these are for a different set of communication devices - from what I can see, they went off at 16:58 local time - notably 2 minutes prior to Nasrallah's planned speech on the first incident.

tptacek32• 2 years ago

Apparently, these are ICOM devices --- you have in your head maybe like a police walkie talkie from the 80s, but these things are smaller than flip-phones, a little smaller than the palm of your hand.

wl• 2 years ago

Icom is a Japanese company. They make radios, including police walkie talkies (land mobile radios). The pictures I've seen look like bog-standard land mobile radios. Not particularly small, and larger than most flip phones.

The radio in question: https://rigpix.com/icom/icv82.htm

technics256• 2 years ago

A second day!

I can't believe the full up and down owning of the communications supply chain.

Makes Hezbollah look like a clown show.

empath752• 2 years ago

I mean just from a pure opsec perspective, you'd think they'd have popped them open to look right?

Zironic8• 2 years ago

Now we don't yet know which radios exactly these are. But more likely then not, wouldn't these be from the exact same supply chain attack and maybe even come in the same shipment?

tptacek32• 2 years ago

I'm looking at pictures on my MidEast Twitter TL, with legit reporters RT'ing them, of palm-sized slim ICOM radios.

realo• 2 years ago

Thousands of civilians injured... very few Hezbollah dead.

Makes Israel look like a terrorist organization, IMHO.

flyinglizard3• 2 years ago

Why would civilians have in their possession tactical communication devices of a military organization?

empath752• 2 years ago

You can't take Lebanon's report on who the injured were at face value. I've not doubt that innocent people were injured by this, but it's not _thousands_ of innocent people.

tromp• 2 years ago

Israel's bombing of Gaza made them look like a terrorist organization. I believe the majority of deaths and a significant fraction of injured in this attack are in fact Hezbollah members.

ineedasername10• 2 years ago

There has been no statement or indication that the thousands of people injured were comprised in any significant proportion of civilians. Given that these pagers were purchased by Hezbollah directly and videos of their explosions show a minimal blast radius it is premature and, depending on motives, propagandistic to claim that the thousands of people injured were civilians.

ineedasername10• 2 years ago

There has been no statement or indication that the thousands of people injured were comprised in any significant proportion of civilians. Given that these pagers-- reportedly 5000 of them-- were purchased by Hezbollah directly and videos of their explosions show a minimal blast radius it is premature and, depending on motives, propagandistic to claim that the thousands of people injured were civilians.

dralley6• 2 years ago

Thousands of civilians

You have absolutely nothing on which to base the claim that these were civilians and not Hezbollah members.

raxxorraxor8• 2 years ago

I doubt you would have been happy either way, but I think your statements about the injuries is also unsubstantiated.

datameta5• 2 years ago

If it walks like terrorism, and quacks like terrorism...

I struggle to understand how they're imagining they're obviating the optics of this, unless they don't care what the dissenting population in Israel thinks (or the world for that matter) until "it is done".

golergka4• 2 years ago

Can you explain how ultra targeted, small explosive charges quack terrorism? I have been reading comments like this yesterday, and I'm completely bewildered as to how any sane person could come to this conclusion.

Did you consider the US operation to take down Bin Laden an act of terrorism too?

darknavi• 2 years ago

ultra targeted

How positive are we that by standards didn't get the same batch of devices?

datameta5• 2 years ago

Can you imagine being in a supermarket and detonations go off dropping people? At least 8 children have died in the pager attack.

The US did not detonate personal devices using a supply-chain infiltration, I am specifically talking about this tactic. If you feel the need to bring another conflict into this, you don't think you have an argument to stand on. Imagine this was Hezbollah detonating hundreds or thousands of devices in Israel?

scottiebarnes• 2 years ago

To be ultra targeted you actually have to know where your target is when your bomb goes off. When you detonate thousands at once, you're simply accepting the civilian casualty risk.

brodouevencode• 2 years ago

Symmetrical warfare is still the preferred method of response. I think this qualifies as such.

Jordanpomeroy• 2 years ago

I have to admit that, as a hack, the amount of planning, technical integration, and apparently flawless execution must have required an awesome amount of effort by very intelligent people.

As a human being though, this is revolting. A new avenue of mass destruction. I sure hope I am never around someone a Mossad-like organization wants to kill.

Qem2• 2 years ago

The original pager attack was triggered in the anniversary of World War II hero Folke Bernadotte assassination by Zionists, on September 17. See https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-...

I wonder if this was meaningful choice, or just a coincidence.

Modified30192• 2 years ago

Most likely coincidence. From what I’ve read, Israel had to pull the trigger on the pagers early because some people (whom they were monitoring) had gotten suspicious that something was up.

morkalork• 2 years ago

I wonder what tipped them off? The battery wasn't lasting as long? One accidentally went off early and they were investigating? A leak?

yieldcrv2• 2 years ago

That was Tuesday’s speculation

It looks more likely to just be a demoralizing psyop, expose a couple thousand Hezbollah members based on hospital records and to the Lebanese public, disrupt communications and attack south Lebanon

xenospn3• 2 years ago

Confidence for sure. I grew up in Israel and never heard of this anniversary.

Qem2• 2 years ago

He was assassinated one day after publishing his peace plan: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernadotte_plan

hedgehog• 2 years ago

Countries often scrub their history books of things they're not proud of. I grew up in the US and not once was the 1921 Tulsa massacre covered in school.

dredmorbius3• 2 years ago

I strongly suspect the birthday paradox is making an emergence.

You'd be hard-pressed to find a day of the year without some plausible significance.

vksixyb2• 2 years ago

These sorts of attacks are going to hurt a lot of innocent people. How do they control the munitions and ensure they limit civilian casualties? (I suspect they do not.)

It also seems to be lionized in the media as something "impressive" and not "contemptible". I'm not saying it cannot be both! It could be contemptible and impressive, but the media seems comfortable just being impressed.

If North Korea or Iran or Russia pulled this off against another military, would we all still be here discussing only the technical parts of the attack? I suspect not. Maybe I'm wrong, but I suspect there'd be a lot more condemnation.

borski12• 2 years ago

Yes. If North Korea or Russia pulled this off we would all be suitably impressed. This is an impressive feat, as targeted as it gets (you could have been standing right next to one of these and walked away, as shown in many of the videos online), and while we would certainly retaliate, the very next step would be studying how it happened.

fortran774• 2 years ago

Rockets launched by Hezbolla into Israel hurt a lot of innocent people.

TiredOfLife3• 2 years ago

The explosives were in devices whose only functionality and purpose is communication between terrorists and their leadership. With No civilian functionality. With tiny amount of explosives.

pvaldes4• 2 years ago

The explosives were in devices whose only functionality and purpose is communication between terrorists and their leadership. With No civilian functionality

Those devices are used still extensively by Hospitals, ambulances and first aid teams. The red cross use walkies. The firefighters and police also. They pose several advantages over the phone net, specially when managing sensible information from victims private life that you still have to custody and protect from internet. Nobody wants to talk on whasap about "somebody is being raped somewhere and we are on route to help, tell the other units that join us there".

They still work after earthquakes or on wildfires, and common people use it extensively on places without phone coverage like mountainous areas or fisheries. None of those people are terrorists.

But this does not matter, because the brands will stop making and selling this products to everybody. The risk as a company to became collateral damage in this new operations is too high.

paulnpace• 2 years ago

I see a lot of comments here that seem to imply there is knowledge that victims were exclusively members of Hezbollah.

TacticalCoder• 2 years ago

I see a lot of comments here that seem to imply there is knowledge that victims were exclusively members of Hezbollah.

Well a great many here also believe that raping and killing 1200 young civilians who were enjoying a music at a festival is an act of "resistance". I don't know about you but to me these civilians weren't Mossad agents.

War is messy: if you don't want to find out, don't fuck around. For example begin by not firing missile on another country.

And I see a lot of people who are fucking around at the moment, including in the EU and the US, thinking there shall never be any reaction.

They can keep fucking around: at some point they'll find out.

tptacek32• 2 years ago

Yes, consider all the Hezbollah school teachers carrying Hezbollah ICOM walkie-talkies.

dtornabene8• 2 years ago

You realize these went off in supermarkets, right? In hospitals? In homes where children were near by? There has already been reporting on at least two dead children.

invalidname3• 2 years ago

These were devices purchased by Hezbollah for their internal communications. There are cell phones in Lebanon and they are cheap, people use these devices to avoid Israeli tracking. Otherwise you would use a cell phone. Explosions were very localized so in terms of civilian casualties this was probably very low.

bbatha2• 2 years ago

That's true but doesn't really respond there are three levels to consider regarding this and whether Israel truly did minimize civilian casualties.

1. Were the pagers/radios distributed to only Hezbollah members or was Hezbollah the main purchaser of the lots? Plenty of professions (doctors) still use pagers.

2. Did Hezbollah distribute these only to militants or did members of its civil service receive these as well? Keep in mind that Hezbollah is a legitimate political party in Lebanon and provides social services and operates hospitals. They have plenty of members and leaders who have never personally lifted a finger to harm Israel.

3. Did Israel verify that these devices were in the hands of Hezbollah members at the time of detonation and that those members were isolated to minimize collateral damage? The answer to this is clearly no, the logistics are simply impossible to track who is holding 3000+ passive devices. And we've seen reports of civilian causalities including a dead child.

zardo• 2 years ago

I mean obviously not, even if the radios were exclusively in possession of Hezbollah fighters or apparatchiks, they don't live in isolation. They go to coffee shops and restaurants and have dinner with their families.

ineedasername10• 2 years ago

I have not seen that implication anywhere and most reporting cites 1 or 2 killed children. On the other hand, 5000 (per reports) of these pagers were purchased by Hezbollah because they were afraid cell phones could be implanted with bombs (there's precedent) and so the users would be predominantly Hezbollah members.

Despite this, there are a few persistent comments here that thousands of civilians were injured. That statement seems near to willfully wrong or intended to be misleading given the circumstances and lack of any more specific information about the people injured.

kotaKat2• 2 years ago

At this point someone needs to run an SDR and start capturing as much RF spectrum as possible, especially on any communications device that has a 'selective calling' feature.

The pagers could have been set off with a page sent to a 'group' capcode in a hidden slot with a unique beep pattern that a little tiny MCU picked up and set off the detonator.

Radios -- same thing. Possibly a group calling feature of a signalling system was used with a "secret" group hidden away in the radio programming?

tamimio7• 2 years ago

Unless they were previously timed with in internal clock (unlikely), that should be one of the things they should do.

itissid• 2 years ago

#TIL: “Cap Code” stands for Channel Access Protocol code, which is the unique ID code assigned to a particular pager.

Scoundreller3• 2 years ago

especially on any communications device that has a 'selective calling' feature.

I wonder if it’s even dumber than that. Entirely separate from the paging network and tuned to listen for a pulse at a specific RF frequency and then blow up.

Also gives the ability to target certain geographic areas.

But even if listening to pager spectrum, the paging network is incredibly insecure. Anyone could send out fake pages with the right RF setup (e.g. from a drone).

__m• 2 years ago

To what end? Capturing it would mean you are already too late

clueless2• 2 years ago

so how does one verify that the battery in their iphone doesn't contain explosives?

tptacek32• 2 years ago

The supply chain for an iPhone is much stronger than for a Gold Alpha pager, and it's likely that the same thing will end up being true of these ICOM radios: they'll turn out to be designed and branded by ICOM, but actually manufactured and distributed by some random Eastern European outfit that paid to use ICOM as a skinsuit. That would never happen with an Apple device.

rmbyrro• 2 years ago

The supply chain for an iPhone is much stronger

Probably not strong enough to make it unreachable by a sophisticated agency like the Mossad.

ianburrell2• 2 years ago

It is likely that they were authentic Icom devices. My understanding is that it is common for commercial radios to be programmed by distributor. Or Gold Alpha gave a good deal on pagers and radios and then were intercepted from warehouse.

I don't think Icom would ever put name on generic radio, they make all their radios in Japan. It is like Toyota putting name on another car.

tamimio7• 2 years ago

Replace it.

itishappy• 2 years ago

As I understand, Hezbollah reactively replacing their phones was the exact thing that made yesterday's attack possible.

shmatt• 2 years ago

As long as it doesn’t say “made in Hungary”

And on a more serious note. Hizbolla is a blacklisted terrorist org, they can’t just order stuff from regular factories. Buying from an anonymous white label factory in Hungary with no address and little information is probably pretty normal from them - because anyone doing business with them in the EU will go to jail

As long as you’re not buying electronics from shady factories with no known owners you’ll be fine

tamimio7• 2 years ago

As long as you’re not buying electronics from shady factories with no known owners you’ll be fine

For now and to our knowledge so far.

fortran774• 2 years ago

Exactly. The EU designates Hezbolla as a terrorist group. It is illegal for EU to sell to them.

beeboobaa32• 2 years ago

Israel has shown us (again) that we cannot trust any device whose full supply chain hasn't been properly audited. Which you can't really do at this scale.

So yeah, literally anything you buy can apparently just be stuffed full of explosives waiting to kill you and anyone near you.

hersko3• 2 years ago

Yes. Explosives can be placed in any device that has a small cavity. This has always been true....

vlovich123• 2 years ago

The mechanism of action is unclear at this time. I’ve seen it written that the explosives were part of PCBs with electronics that mimicked the original.

colechristensen5• 2 years ago

It was an addon board with explosives on it which was attached to the existing normal circuit board.

WJW• 2 years ago

Imagine if the Russians managed to do something like this in the US...

colechristensen5• 2 years ago

X-Ray image compared to known X-Ray of the exact same model

Bomb sniffing dog or chemical test of surfaces

tptacek32• 2 years ago

Allegedly hidden well enough that a casual X-ray of the pager wouldn't have revealed it.

TiredOfLife3• 2 years ago

Don't be a part of a terrorist organization and if you are - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bring_your_own_device

rasz2• 2 years ago

Start with "do I work for Terrorist organization?"

this_user• 2 years ago

Well, are you a member of a terrorist group? If no, then odds are that nobody is going to go through the trouble of adding explosives to your phone's battery.

In this case the people responsible must have discovered where these terrorists were buying their devices. Since basically no one except for them was buying large quantities of these, they were easy to target.

mrguyorama4• 2 years ago

Have you angered Mossad? If no, you are almost certainly fine. If yes, you are already dead.

James Mickens explained this clearly a decade ago.

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf

You cannot answer any security questions without a threat model. Are you worried about your neighbor putting a bomb in your phone? Mossad isn't putting bombs in random phones.

lxchase• 2 years ago

Anyone know how these devices may have been triggered that would be different from pagers? I imagine these radios would have to be modified to listen to multiple channels in case a radio was on a different channel than planned.

elfbargpt2• 2 years ago

For both attacks, I've been seeing stories of a plane, the "EC-130H Compass Call" flying in the area. It's supposedly an electronic intelligence aircraft that hasn't been seen in the sky for about a year. I don't know much more than that though

petra• 2 years ago

It's possible to send the trigger message on every channel.

isoprophlex• 2 years ago

An entire integrated explosive device + detonator + radio circuit that leeches off the host device's power supply, that you activate by blasting an area with some out-of-band signal on a frequency that propagates far and wide?

Takes some upfront work but you don't have to mess with the device, any firmware that might leave traces, and the comms network itself. You just fly a big antenna nearby and everything goes boom.

ineedasername10• 2 years ago

If the Israelis are as careful as they were with Stuxnet there might be a permanent kill switch baked into the implementation to prevent being triggered in the future. Without an initiating event, the type of explosive believed to be used here is very stable with respect to normal kinetic shocks or heat.

mrtksn6• 2 years ago

Ha, maybe this will be the turning point for international corporations becoming national-only? Or maybe make the big brands like Apple/Samsung the only trusted device manufacturers and completely wipe out the small ones?

No iPhones exploded so far but I wouldn't be surprised if the paranoia takes over everywhere and local supply chains and local producers become a thing. "Foreign social media platforms" was already a concern but this is "foreign hardware is booby trapped as you can see". Another nail for the globalized world, united humanity, citizens of the world etc. If a big brand has a supply chain is infiltrated too, then its all over.

Also, are those people blind? Don't they see that booby trapping large number of devices rhymes with poisoning the well? It wouldn't help with antisemitism but that's another discussion.

Zironic8• 2 years ago

Yeah, I can't say I'm a big fan of this massive scale booby trapping devices all over civilian society and I suspect most nation stats are not very happy about this either. The EU is probably not going to be happy at all about Israel using an EU flagged company to do it either.

This is going to create a lot of distrust in the international supply chain.

tptacek32• 2 years ago

These aren't civilian devices.

showerst• 2 years ago

This is going to create a lot of distrust in the international supply chain.

Is it? If your threat model includes Mossad (or really any nation state) then you shouldn't have trusted those devices in the first place. Even if you didn't have "tiny explosives" on your bingo card, certainly bugs (hardware or software) should've been on there.

Given that those pagers are commonly used by doctors and none of them have been reported to explode, I think we can guess that it was targeted to the batches delivered directly to Hezbollah.

steventhedev2• 2 years ago

I can imagine the EU is far more interested in an EU flagged company doing business with Hezbollah who are a designated terrorist organization and subject to sanctions.

If there's one thing you learn quick in fintech - it's you absolutely do not fuck with sanctions.

mrtksn6• 2 years ago

Exactly it’s one thing to target operatives it’s another thing to target large number of people when they’re among the civilians.

Phone exploding in a market, doesn’t make it OK if the owner of the phone is a militant.

With that logic the Hamas terrorist attack last year isn’t a terrorist attack because many of the victims served in the IDF, which illegally occupies their territory.

This is getting ridiculous. Israel will loose the last drops of good will, which is a shame considering how much they achieved to do on that barely habitable piece of land. It breaks my heart.

caeril• 2 years ago

The EU is probably not going to be happy

Happiness is irrelevant, especially when it comes to geopolitics.

In the US, criticism of Israel is antagonistic to our Judeo-Christian values.

In the EU, criticism of Israel is tantamount to the rise of a Fourth Reich.

Germany, in particular, is scared shitless of this accusation, and will accept any and all actions by Israel. This is a country who can do no wrong, and will get away with whatever they feel like.

This is going to create a lot of distrust in the international supply chain.

This reminds me of people who were legitimately shocked to learn about the Snowden disclosures. If you don't already know the supply chain is thoroughly poisoned, and has been for decades, there is no helping you.

exe3410• 2 years ago

Don't they see that booby trapping large number of devices rhymes with poisoning the well? It wouldn't help with antisemitism but that's another discussion.

could you expand on what you mean here? I don't understand either the argument or the conclusion. thanks!

mrtksn6• 2 years ago

Well poisoning is an antisemitic talking point, its used as an excuse to target Jewish people by claiming that Jews are secretly poisoning the well from who their people during water.

dmicah• 2 years ago

I think the variety of consumer electronics is too large to be limited to only a few large manufacturers.

miki1232112• 2 years ago

I'm pretty sure you could run an entire household on nothing but Samsung at this point.

Phone? Check. Watch? Check. TV? check. Washer? Dryer? Fridge? Dishwasher? All there. Laptop? Well, they at least used to make those, not sure if they still do.

tamimio7• 2 years ago

I think the results of these that people or even businesses let alone governments will double check anything that was manufactured by their allies, will probably boost the Chinese and Korean markets in the future.

DevX101• 2 years ago

If they have the capacity to intercept the supply chain, they almost certainly have been implanting listening devices in electronics of all sorts. If you're not in Hezbollah or Hamas you probably don't need to worry about getting blown up by your phone, but if you've got a large platform and been very critical of Israel, it wouldn't be a huge stretch to imagine that you might get personally targeted by communication interception.

VertanaNinjai• 2 years ago

Not so sure you need anything to do with Hezbollah to be afraid. One example of many.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/02/israel-opt-ne...

nebula8804• 2 years ago

Israel maintains public lists of people criticizing Israel (if you publicly apologize to them and renounce your views you can be removed) so I wouldn't be surprised that they are also maintaining a large network of interception. Maybe even using multiple avenues to collect data like buying from data brokers.

[1] https://canarymission.org/

kjkjadksj4• 2 years ago

Nothing new even happened. Agencies like CIA and NSA are able to intercept equipment and replace with bugged equipment with no change to ship time to you already. Most military or intelligence services are aware of this possibility and take steps to ensure their hardware is not compromised. I guess hezzbolah was obviously not, likewise with the internet community also surprised by this.

creer2• 2 years ago

make the big brands like Apple/Samsung the only trusted device manufacturers and completely wipe out the small ones?

It's not a question of manufacturing but one of intercepting devices in the transit / shipping network. The brands most likely have nothing to do with it except allowing repair manuals to fall into the wrong hands - which they can't prevent even if they wanted to.

salex89• 2 years ago

It's probably much more interesting to see what else is happening while everyone is paying attention on communication devices and tending wounded.

CapricornNoble4• 2 years ago

Israel is moving an additional division of troops into the Northern Command, probably preparing ground operations to commence shortly:

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/new-wave-blasts-rock-...

themingus2• 2 years ago

I'll be curious about what details emerge concerning connections between the hand-held radios and the pagers. Any overlap in the manufacturers? Were the radios new/recently replaced like the pagers? How was the explosive triggered?

janmo3• 2 years ago

If the mossad was able to plant explosives without being caught, I wouldn't be surprised if they also planted bugs (indiscriminately) in many electronic devices delivered to Lebanon such as TVs, computers, phones etc...

Similar to the spy chips implants within the Supermicro server motherboards.

CamperBob2• 2 years ago

The Supermicro story was never proven to be anything but bullshit, though. The more you looked into it, the less it added up.

janmo3• 2 years ago

True, probably the NSA wanted to smear the Chinese when in fact they are the ones implanting bugs in hardware.

MPSimmons2• 2 years ago

Yes, the supply chain is very clearly compromised.

How much of it is an excellent question. It's remarkable that apparently (?) none of the devices went off prematurely and tipped off the targets. That implies a higher degree of QA than you'd expect from a more ramshackle organization.

janmo3• 2 years ago

I guess from now on they will fly it in directly from China.

newspaper111• 2 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if this went well beyond Lebanon. It's time to start really scrutinizing our tech supply chain. I won't use any Israeli tech going forward.

lm28469• 2 years ago

These things weren't made in Israel nor by Israeli companies.

If a state wants you dead you're cooked anyways

Eliezer2• 2 years ago

They didn't compromise anything that looked Israeli, and targeted other companies.

almogo2• 2 years ago

Based on your comment history that's not surprising at all. I suppose you already know that just about every large corporation in the world has offices in/business with Israel?

runarberg4• 2 years ago

Not just Lebanon. We should all be afraid, and assume any consumer device or software that has transited through Israel or countries hosting agents from Israel, to be compromised and potentially dangerous.

mig392• 2 years ago

Supermicro never happened. Zero evidence. The reporters and the paper (Bloomberg?) have never retracted it, which is a reflection of their crappy reporting.

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/02/12/bloomberg-big-c...

perryizgr8• 2 years ago

Until a few hours ago there was "zero evidence" that thousands of pagers and walkie talkies had been tampered to explode via a remote command.

fortran774• 2 years ago

I've seen photos posted on X and Telegram (of course I can't verify) of what look like Baofeng and Icom UHF hand-helds that have detonated. Not sure how they can get them to all blow up in unison--these aren't devices that can receive a digital message--as they apparently did at a funeral today.

ivan_gammel5• 2 years ago

They could receive a radio broadcast.

MPSimmons2• 2 years ago

Given apparently(?) none of them detonated prematurely, the arming device would need to be content aware so that a normal transmission didn't set them off randomly and warn the rest of the targets that the devices were compromised.

danparsonson• 2 years ago

If one can modify a device to incorporate an explosive, then it's surely possible to add another receiver of some kind too.

carterparks• 2 years ago

They can detect analog tones for functions like CTCSS.

solardev• 2 years ago

Those radios do decode some digital messages, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squelch#DCS for managing group convos (squelching others on the same channel who aren't part of the same group). There's also ANI identifiers and repeater codes, for example. So there's definitely firmware/software to work with SOME digital stuff onboard.

But I also think a lot of radios look like Baofengs, or are whitelabeled Baofengs, so who knows...

Besides, if Israel or whoever can modify the supply chain, they can add whatever receivers/chips they want into it alongside the explosives. Or just some sort of analog radio detonator/trigger.

doodlebugging2• 2 years ago

Back in the day working on land seismic crews our blasting was handled by radio signal transmitted from the observer doghouse to the blaster at the shot-hole. You could hear on the radio when the recording crew began shooting for the day's production. There was a tone that triggered the shot while the blaster was connected to the blasting cap on the down-hole charge.

If someone placed explosives in a radio device I'm sure it would be quite easy to detonate them on command with a signal tone.

tamimio7• 2 years ago

Probably after the pagers yesterday, these Icom walkie-talkies were going to be discovered soon, leading to this subsequent trigger. Regardless, this is probably the first big worldwide event to bring the spotlight on supply chain attacks, and finally when we -nerds- talk about the possibility of bugging devices before delivering them or worse, detonating them remotely, it isn’t some sci-fi or conspiracy theory anymore.

trallnag3• 2 years ago

Very impressive. A months long operation culminating in an early new year's eve celebration with a bunch of firecrackers. I guess it's time to go back to pigeons

mmastrac3• 2 years ago

I guess they are taking a victory lap around yesterday's major embarrassment. I never thought that you could dismantle a terrorist organization so surgically by just booby-trapping comms devices.

This will certainly be made into a blockbuster movie in ten years.

I'll re-iterate my previous comment on this matter: this is an impressive supply-chain hack with absolutely oversized results, and you gotta hand it to them for pulling it off.

I think this will go down as being significantly more impressive than Stuxnet.

tptacek32• 2 years ago

It's not a victory lap; this operation by itself is one of the largest and most intricate operations Israeli intelligence has ever executed, and would have been planned months in advance. Repeating from elsewhere on the thread: the reporting is that this is happening now because Hezbollah was on the verge of discovering the operation. I think it's likely both sets of devices came from the same manufacturer or distributor.

mmastrac3• 2 years ago

I agree -- "victory lap" is just a figure of speech. Yesterday's results were probably far outsized impact on their own, and today's are (apologies for another figure of speech) "icing on the cake".

I would imagine that they've been feeding these booby-trapped devices to the supply chain for at least a few months and showing that multiple devices are potentially bombs is just an even more powerful psychological victory. What devices can they even trust now? Will they need to go back to sneakernet?

bri3k• 2 years ago

Agree. If one device was booby-trapped the first thing I would be doing is disassembling all my others devices for the same.

racl1012• 2 years ago

Ten Years? Netflix is probably having a meeting about it tomorrow.

ilbeeper• 2 years ago

"Netflix subscribed to Israel" became a common meme during the eventful last year.

rossant• 2 years ago

Tomorrow? Contracts have probably been signed, casting has begun. /s

ivan_gammel5• 2 years ago

It doesn’t look very surgical to me given the civilian casualties and general disregard of what can happen to innocent people. If anything this looks more like a state-sponsored terrorist attack than covert ops with collateral damage.

xenospn3• 2 years ago

Anything more surgical than this is actual surgery.

gruez4• 2 years ago

Agreed. Stuxnet was "surgical". Causing hundreds of explosions in proximity of civilians is not.

spondylosaurus2• 2 years ago

And very possibly in violation of the Geneva Convention's prohibition of "indiscriminate" attacks:

   Rule 12. Indiscriminate attacks are those:
   (a) which are not directed at a specific military objective;
   (b) which employ a method or means of combat which cannot be directed at a specific military objective; or
   (c) which employ a method or means of combat the effects of which cannot be limited as required by international humanitarian law; and consequently, in each such case, are of a nature to strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction.

borski12• 2 years ago

It is targeted, by definition. Every pager was owned by a Hezbollah member or was about to be. Same with the walkies.

That there was collateral damage is unfortunate, but Israel was definitely not indiscriminately targeting civilians, which is what would make it terrorism.

This was a surgical strike that happened to have some unfortunate collateral damage. Well within the accepted rules of war.

ineedasername10• 2 years ago

Actual combat and conventional attacks on a guerilla force embedded in an urban civilian population is far more catastrophic and less surgical than the risk of being inside the ~0.5m lethal radius of these pagers.

It's a horrific attack with awful innocent deaths at the same time that any conventional attack that achieved the same impact on Hezbollah would have been even worse for those around them.

raxxorraxor8• 2 years ago

Do you have an example of a weapon of war that is more surgical? I think this is the typical Israel criticism that is devoid of any realistic basic to be honest.

bell-cot• 2 years ago

No, definitely not a victory lap. Having completely blown cover on the explosive new feature they added to the pagers, the timer was ticking on Hezbollah checking all their other gadgets for similar extras. It was "use it or lose it".

olalonde• 2 years ago

This will certainly be made into a blockbuster movie in ten years.

If this didn't happen in real life, I would think that the scenario was too far-fetched and unrealistic. That's some seriously impressive attack.

meepmorp3• 2 years ago

Unlike reality, fiction needs to be believable.

frankie_t2• 2 years ago

Do we know the percentage of the total devices used by Hezbollah that got attacked? I guess even if all of them were destroyed, it hardly does any dismantling. But I would expect this operation to open a window of possibility to do some other actions.

ineedasername10• 2 years ago

Independent estimates peg Hezbollah membership in Lebanon to a wide range, 20k to 50k. Reporting says the pager shipment was 5000 units and so far ~3000 known targets. Figure some devices broke, hadn't been activated yet, didn't trigger correctly, etc. Figure not every member needed or had a pager, call it 50% to be safe but it might be reasonable to think only the equivalent of a team leader would have one. Either way this is a significant fraction of their contact capabilities.

themingus2• 2 years ago

lukan6• 2 years ago

I assume it was the same factory, that made the explosive containing batteries.

And then those batteries "just" had to be swapped with the intercepted original ones. Still requires effort, but less than building pagers and walki talkies for this purpose.

knlam• 2 years ago

In the other thread, HN said Israel can only pull this trick only once and they just did it the second time

dudisubekti• 2 years ago

I mean, it has been only one day after the last attack. It's still part of the same attack plan IMO.

I really doubt Israel can pull this off again next month or year. Hezbollah (and Lebanon) will switch all their electronics to Chinese supply chain or something, and double check it.

moffkalast• 2 years ago

Tomorrow: "Hezbollah laptops explode across Lebanon, sources say"

goldcd3• 2 years ago

That's got to be a reason why the attacks are staggered.

Separating them definitely increased the chances that somebody would check their radios - but taking out the pagers drove people to the radios. Now taking out the radios is making people worry what else might be compromised. Your enemy refusing to use their communication equipment is a definite win.

The pagers and radios were supposedly due to the worry that the phone system was compromised - but I'm guessing more people will be using it tomorrow.

frankie_t2• 2 years ago

I guess it could still be considered the same one, just the continuation of it. I was kind of expecting a ground invasion after such havoc in communications has been wrecked. I guess if the "electronic" attack is still going on, maybe something else will still proceed...

jessriedel• 2 years ago

But the point of the argument was that Hezbollah would immediately never trust their electronic devices going forward until they could secure their supply chain. The argument didn’t depend on the semantics between same and distinct attacks.

One can argue that there is some temporary remaining vulnerability for Hezbollah members who either didn’t hear about the first attack or had some insanely urgent need to communicate (and this vulnerability wouldn’t exist once they secure the supply chain). But I think the much simpler story is that these attacks aren’t possible only once; supply chain security is a continuum, and people will continue to balance risk of repeat attacks against the costs of security.

anigbrowl18• 2 years ago

I think you could still expect the ground invasion, possibly the day after tomorrow or early next week.

ineedasername10• 2 years ago

I'd be eyeballing for anything that could still function with a couple cm^3 carved out & filled with HE. Next come the potatoes.

1oooqooq• 2 years ago

I guess we now know what intelligence org had the know how for supply chain attacks we we're thinking impossible a few years ago... Thank god they are our allies. :)

hdivider2• 2 years ago

Except not in NATO, Five Eyes, or even a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. In real terms, they're definitely among the more problematic allies. Compared with Germany, UK, France, Australia, Canada, etc.

trallnag3• 2 years ago

This is a blatant lie. For example, as part of operation Rubikon Germany and the US spied on Spain, a NATO ally, among other targets. It's commonplace to spy on each other.

rozap2• 2 years ago

Israel is not really an ally. They routinely spy on the US, and according the the CIA, spy on us as aggressively as the Chinese and Russians do. During the Cold war, they used intel as a bargaining chip and passed classified material to the Soviets. Their nuclear program was started primarily with stolen radioactive material that they exfiltrated from the US. These stories go on and on and on, and they're just the ones we know about. Jonathan Pollard was hardly the only spy, but it was the most high profile.

It's naive to call them an ally. It's an extremely complicated relationship, made more toxic by the extreme power that AIPAC holds over our politicians. Every president since LBJ has been duped, outwitted and embarrassed by Israel. Frenemy would be more accurate.

temac• 2 years ago

The USA spies all the time on everybody so by your own def they should be not really an ally of anybody.

mschuster912• 2 years ago

The primary reason why Israel is widely considered an ally is their extensive intel network across Arabia and possibly half of Africa. No one matches the Mossad and the semi-private private intel industry of Israel in terms of capabilities.

Another reason is that Israel is a relatively stable, Western aligned democracy in a sea of dictatorships, kingdoms, fiefdoms and failed states... which are all organized in OPEC. The US needs a powerful Israel as a check-and-balance against OPEC - a credible threat that if OPEC ever repeats another Oil Crisis, they'll get putsched away.

They routinely spy on the US, and according the the CIA, spy on us as aggressively as the Chinese and Russians do.

So what, I'm German, y'all spied on Schröder and Merkel as well, and it's only thanks to Snowden we actually know of that.

trallnag3• 2 years ago

Don't all agencies spy on each other? Few years the BND (Germany) collaborated with the CIA (America) to spy on other nations

WrongAssumption• 2 years ago

Good thing the US doesn’t spy on allies. What hypocrites they would be!

drawkward2• 2 years ago

Israel is only Israel's ally.

rdtsc• 2 years ago

The only way we'd find out how they did it is if some pagers didn't explode and at least one would get into the hands of someone willing to do a public tear-down.

In this video, we'll be cutting the explosive battery. Hit the like and subscribe buttons, and let us know what kind of explosive you think this is in the comments. Also, don't try this at home kids, we're what you'd call "professionals".

e12e• 2 years ago

It seems overwhelmingly likely that this can be figured out by detecting traces of explosives - or lack of traces - on the fragments from a few of the devices?

BobaFloutist• 2 years ago

If it was a US intelligence agency, we could just wait 20-50 years and ask politely and they'd probably tell us how. Say what you will about US intelligence agencies (and there's a LOT to say), but I always did kind of like that feature.

kjkjadksj4• 2 years ago

Except sometimes the document they give you is three words unredacted

dredmorbius3• 2 years ago

Listening to BBC News headlines earlier today, this seems to be exactly what's occurring. Multiple devices did not explode, and are being investigated by multiple parties. I cannot find a specific story detailing this presently.

There's some discussion of the mechanics of the modifications in this TEMPCO story, though how the information was ascertained isn't clear:

[S]enior Lebanese source said the devices had been modified by Israel's spy service "at the production level."

"The Mossad injected a board inside of the device that has explosive material that receives a code. It's very hard to detect it through any means. Even with any device or scanner," the source said.

<https://en.tempo.co/read/1917697/israel-planted-explosives-i...>

Presumably not by like-and-subscribe seeking YouTubers, however.

Edit: World Service broadcast, analysis note at ~52s: <https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w172zgf8tw4nqq5>

ramses0• 2 years ago

Next level "exploding capacitors" ... :-/

RufusJacksons• 2 years ago

I vote for Bigclive doing the teardown. Or maybe AVE…

JodieBenitez• 2 years ago

Impressive... but any collateral victim ?

obnauticus• 2 years ago

Looks like an ICOM IC-V82.

https://batteriesamerica.com/collections/icom-ic-v8-ic-v82-i...

minkles15• 2 years ago

Well that solves the eternal rivalry between ICOM and Yaesu.

synack• 2 years ago

Yaesu radio explodes when I throw it at the wall because the UI is so frustrating.

jhallenworld• 2 years ago

I'm impressed that Hezbollah was not using Baofeng.

elfbargpt2• 2 years ago

I imagine there has to be hundreds of unexploded devices in Lebanon. I would expect to see some of those surface over the next few weeks, or someone get stopped at an airport with one

guytv• 2 years ago

while blowing up a one-way comm device might make sense to intel agencies and countries, I am curious about the decision to blow up hand-helds instead of listening in on them undetected.

coffeebeqn2• 2 years ago

It is a little odd. I feel like Mossad didn’t do this just for fun? I can only guess what they’re trying to achieve

crystalmeph• 2 years ago

Demoralization of the enemy. Every single Hezbollah member is now paranoid that every single surface they touch is either listening to them or trying to kill them.

wood_spirit• 2 years ago

Day one, blow up the pagers. Everyone stops using pagers.

Day two, blow up the backup device that Hezbollah had fallen back to using.

Perhaps on day three, now that Hezbollah has no effective communication and coordination and might even fall back to mobile phones, start ground ops?

anthk• 2 years ago

Day 4, Hezbollah uses pen/papers disguised as recipes shared between women with token words and procedures.

abracadaniel2• 2 years ago

Reportedly, these were in use for a few months. Maybe they got what they wanted, and used that to identify which devices to blow.

skc• 2 years ago

Imagine the paranoia that must be flooding Hezbollah right now. You can't function without your electronics...but you can't trust them at all now.

You don't even know how many or which of your gadgets have been compromised to spy on you and for how long.

Massive, massive L.

0cf8612b2e1e2• 2 years ago

The actual body count could be zero and it would still be devastating.

I could even believe the supply chain infiltration was fake and radios were manually replaced day of the attack with a crude timer. Anything to give the appearance of omnipotence.

kklisura• 2 years ago

On the other hand: isn't risk to this enormous? What if they just abandon all electronics and conduct their _business_ "off grid"? Good luck tracking that down...

cooper_ganglia• 2 years ago

Unfortunately for them, pigeons fly slower than radio waves.

robertlagrant4• 2 years ago

If that were better or as good, they'd already be doing it. It's pretty obvious that would massively disrupt them.

doodlebugging2• 2 years ago

I'm probably wrong but I think I remember that part of the reason the Oct 7 attacks worked so well was due to Hamas' avoiding known signals intelligence gathering operations by using hand-carried notes and keeping it all low-tech. They planned and trained in the open but never let it slip on commonly monitored media that they were about to do anything.

That was Hamas, not Hezbollah so maybe the latter didn't learn the lesson and left themselves open to this type of attack or retribution, depending on your individual perspective.

This may push things back to pencil and paper and sneaker-nets. It'll probably be a brief adaptation though since the temptation of technology is very real.

newspaper111• 2 years ago

Massive, massive L for Israel. No one in their right mind is going to use Israeli tech or products going forward. They just devastated their own economy.

Eliezer2• 2 years ago

These weren't Israeli products. If I were Mossad, I'd compromise anything except an Israeli or Jewish-owned product.

atemerev2• 2 years ago

Depends on which side you are on.

pvaldes4• 2 years ago

replace all the batteries right now? remove it from every one of your devices and wait some hours to see if other devices explode?

Arch485• 2 years ago

I'm genuinely curious: how is this not considered terrorism on Israel's part? (or is it considered terrorism?)

From a tactical standpoint, this is very similar, and the only big difference I see is that this is technologically more advanced/more complex than just planting a bomb or something.

If it's not terrorism, what is the differentiating factor(s)?

*side note: I'm quite sure other western countries have used tactics that I would call terrorism as well. This isn't meant to be a callout or anti-anything post. I'm genuinely curious where the line is drawn.

karaterobot• 2 years ago

If terrorism is violence against non-combatants to further political goals, this isn't terrorism.

kstenerud• 2 years ago

It's not terrorism when you're on the winning side. That's how it's always been.

hilux2• 2 years ago

That's literally true, and I don't mean that in a snarky way. Everyone who ever had a history class should know this.

I'm disappointed that this thread has devolved into an angry and pointless political debate, when it could instead have been a cool technical exploration of how Mossad pulled it off. Come on, Hacker News!

coffeebeqn2• 2 years ago

Wikipedia:

Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of violence against non-combatants

kelipso2• 2 years ago

To me it just looks like rhetoric, an us vs. them type deal. Call something terrorism so that you can justify using any kind of violence against them basically.

robertlagrant4• 2 years ago

Not really. Not all violence is terrorism. Not all bad things are terrorism either. But terrorism is always bad. Ukrainians killing Russian soldiers isn't terrorism. Hezbollah trying to kill Israeli civilians is terrorism.

tradertef• 2 years ago

Completely agree. Similar things are happening in Egypt, Turkey and other places..

ericmcer2• 2 years ago

It isn't rhetoric... It is a specific combat strategy that small nations employ against huge ones. By targeting non-combatants and creating "terror" you can break the will of a larger nation.

If the USA in 2001 could have waved a magic wand that killed all the Taliban and didn't touch a hair on any non-combatants head they would have waved it and called it a day.

minkles15• 2 years ago

Considering Hezbollah is a designated terrorist organisation in many countries, this probably should be considered an anti-terrorist operation. The targets are enemy combatants.

Also notably, it clearly did not intentionally target civilians, although there may be civilian casualties which is uncharacteristic of a terrorist attack.

guerrilla• 2 years ago

Two wrongs don't make a right.

rowanseymour2• 2 years ago

I assume by "many countries" you mean the US and its allies? Is that it then? Your definition of "terrorist" is whoever the West designates a terrorist? Ergo Nelson Mandela was a terrorist.

tptacek32• 2 years ago

Hezbollah is a military peer of Israel and the two are openly at war.

stetrain5• 2 years ago

The definition of terrorism is controversial and political, so there isn't a hard answer.

But I think a general distinction is the targeting of combatants vs civilians.

There is a difference between infiltrating military or para-military organizations or operations and intentionally targeting mass casualties of civilians for attention.

rtsil3• 2 years ago

I don't know about that. When Al Quaeda attacked the USS Cole, a purely military vessel without a single civilian casualty, the US administration and the entire US military called it an act of terrorrism.

rowanseymour2• 2 years ago

Hezbollah is the government in southern Lebanon so when you throw around "combatant" you're including a lot of civil servants, doctors, teachers etc.

lupusreal5• 2 years ago

But I think a general distinction is the targeting of combatants vs civilians

When Afghans took up arms against occupying American soldiers, they were routinely called terrorists in American press and media.

When Muslims fight America or Israel, they are called terrorists. When the situation is reversed, that label isn't applied.

numpad02• 2 years ago

The entire US is going to freak out if a platoon of KGB soldiers flew into US and killed hundreds of bad guys. How objectively bad the "victims" might have been isn't going to matter.

You can't just walk across a recognized international border and do the "right" thing without a consent, regardless of how right or wrong it had been. That's an act of war, technically.

bpodgursky• 2 years ago

Modern war obviously doesn't follow all the rules the Geneva convention assumed (Hezbollah militants don't wear their insignia and IDs) but in practice it seems fairly effectively targeted given the casualty breakdown so it'd be a hard case to make.

omginternets• 2 years ago

The argument is that the IDF is targeting enemy combatants, and not deliberately targeting civilians (unlike, e.g. Hamas). The existence of non-combatant casualties alone does not imply terrorism.

newspaper111• 2 years ago

The IDF has killed orders of magnitude more civilians than Hamas.

anigbrowl18• 2 years ago

not deliberately targeting civilians (unlike, e.g. Hamas)

This is not as simple as it looks. Hamas does indeed target civilians, but what really put the wind up Israel on October 7 was that they successfully overran 2 military bases and mounted a serious attack on a third, although that was repelled. Per Israeli media, the government there had significant prior warning (months or maybe as much as a year) but dismissed the intelligence in the belief that Hamas lacked the military capability and was just LARPing.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 2 years ago

The difference is the target. Targeting non-combatants would make it terrorism. Hezbollah aren't non-combatants.

pdyc• 2 years ago

i am wondering what is state doing with parallel non state actor hezbollah? how is the lebanan state allowing non state actor to wage wars with foreign nations on its behalf?

dtquad3• 2 years ago

It's an intentional construct that benefits Hezbollah and Iran. Their Iranian funding has made them bigger and stronger than most nation-state armies but they can continue pretending to be a civilian Lebanese NGO with a strong political lobby in Brussels and Paris.

lukan6• 2 years ago

Simple, it has no power to stop them. So allowing is not the right word here, accepting what they cannot change is more fitting.

yuvalr12• 2 years ago

One reason might be this is directly targeting Hezbolla personnel, and does minimal collateral damage.

pdabbadabba2• 2 years ago

I think it should not be considered terrorism to the extent that the attack targeted legitimate military targets during a time of war — broadly speaking, combatants and other parts of the organization that affect its ability to wage war. Terrorism, at least least in my view, is an attack that either intentionally targets civilians or is truly indiscriminate, and is aimed at producing political cha age by causing fear.

By those definitions, I think this is clearly not terrorism. (Though we might learn more information about who was targeted that could change this assessment.) Admittedly, my definitions only imperfectly track the way the word is used in the west, but I think that's only due to frequent misuse of the term for political ends.

I would worry about a definition of terrorism that creates an incentive to avoid this type of warfare in favor of dropping bombs.

113• 2 years ago

legitimate military targets during a time of war

Israel and Lebanon are not at war.

abalone• 2 years ago

According to the LA Times these devices are “not usually used by fighters, but by ambulance and civil defense crews and administrators affiliated with Hezbollah. The devices are unrestricted and can be sold to anyone, and as such are used by other organizations in areas of poor signal.” [1]

There is no question if an enemy set off hundreds of bombs in American ambulances we would recognize it as a mass terrorist attack.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2024-09-18/second...

DSingularity• 2 years ago

It’s obviously a terrorism strike.

gorjusborg2• 2 years ago

I don't see how anyone can claim that the remote detonation of explosive devices hidden inside everyday devices can be called an operation against 'legitimate military targets'.

There's no way to know that 4000 devices are going to only harm their 'owner'.

Call it whatever you want, but these attacks are not responsible nor 'in the right'. This sort of tactic is reckless and evil.

dtquad3• 2 years ago

The militant/civilian fatality ratio was 11/2 yesterday.

legitster2• 2 years ago

From Wikipedia:

"Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of violence against non-combatants to achieve political or ideological aims. The term is used in this regard primarily to refer to intentional violence during peacetime or in the context of war against non-combatants."

There's a lot of disagreement about the international definition of terrorism, but most seem to agree that it is specifically violence against non-combatants and outside the context of a declared military action.

hackerlight• 2 years ago

You should start by outlining the definition of terrorism, but by that point it would be obvious it isn't terrorism and such a post would have been unnecessary.

afavour• 2 years ago

Terrorism targets civilian populations. This operation, as described, targets Hezbollah militants.

That feels like an oversimplification to me. Some of those devices have surely injured civilians. I think the question is how many. Broadly it's the same question that's plagued Israel's actions since last October: there will always be civilian casualties as a result of military action, but how many is too many?

newspaper111• 2 years ago

If a bomb blew up next to me in a grocery store, even if I wasn't injured, I'd consider myself "targeted" and that the people who exploded it were my enemy. Imagine that actually happening while you were at Safeway.

alex00• 2 years ago

It is terrorism. If Reuters is not calling it terrorism, it does not make it not terrorism.

nradov2• 2 years ago

The US Federal government uses the following definition:

the term "terrorism" means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents

https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=(title:22%20section:...

rtsil3• 2 years ago

And yet the same Federal government called the attack against USS Cole "terrorism" and its perpetrators "terrorists", and implemented a range of "anti-terrorism" measures in the Navy after that. And it was a military target, and all the victims were military.

So really, terrorism is what people say is terrorism.

seydor3• 2 years ago

I think it is considered terrorism. Whoever did it, nobody would say that this attack makes military sense, lebanon is not at war, and civilians have died. But since IDF didn't do it, we ll never know who the terrorists are.

yuvalr12• 2 years ago

Unfortunately, you are seriously uninformed. Israel and Hezbolla are in active war for more than 11 months now.

On a side note, I think people should strive to be more humble when they talk about issues they don't understand, or understand very little.

ericmcer2• 2 years ago

It would be terrorism if they celebrated the civilian casualties and wished there were more.

If they could have executed this without a single civilian injury they definitely would have. I guess intent is what makes it terrorism vs war in my mind.

balthigor2• 2 years ago

Yes, they've shown such concern for civilian casualties up to the present time. Enormous, crushing, exploding, shooting deadly concern.

CapricornNoble4• 2 years ago

If they could have executed this without a single civilian injury they definitely would have.

Why do you think that?

Look at what the leadership of the Israel government is saying when they aren't placating western audiences / media outlets:

Cabinet Member May Golan: "Proud of the ruins of Gaza" ( https://www.palestinechronicle.com/i-am-proud-of-the-ruins-o... )

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich: Starving 2 million Gazans to death is right and moral but the world won't let us ( https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-08-05/ty-article/is... )

Minister of National Security Ben Gvir: We should tear down the Al-Aqsa Mosque and build a synagogue in its place ( https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240826-israel-minist... )

onemoresoop2• 2 years ago

On each side they think the others are the terrorists but the fact is that they're terrorizing each other and have lots of non-military casualties. I think of them as terrorists on both sides.

ang_cire5• 2 years ago

Terrorism is just a label to describe attacks by people that powerful governments don't like. If you have enough military power, you're a legitimate government conducting a war (even if you're lobbing hundreds of missiles and drones into civilian targets like Russia is). If not, you're a terrorist org or government.

bamboozled2• 2 years ago

[flagged]

bodhiandphysics• 2 years ago

The security council defines terrorism as "…criminal acts, including against civilians, committed with the intent to cause death or serious bodily injury, or taking of hostages, with the purpose to provoke a state of terror in the general public or in a group of persons or particular persons, intimidate a population or compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act, which constitute offences within the scope of and as defined in the international conventions and protocols relating to terrorism…"

the crucial lines is "provoe a state of terror in the general public." That is to say, terrorism uses arbitrary violence in order to cause fear and panic leading to political goals. By contrast, the targets of this attack were directly against the personnel and leadership of a militarized organization currently in a shooting war with israel. The goal is not to instill terror in a population, but to directly target the capabilities of a military organization.

Note that doesn't mean its not a war crime (I don't think it is but...)! It could still be a war crime for all sorts of reasons... it just means it's not terrorism.

sofixa2• 2 years ago

the crucial lines is "provoe a state of terror in the general public." That is to say, terrorism uses arbitrary violence in order to cause fear and panic leading to political goals. By contrast, the targets of this attack were directly against the personnel and leadership of a militarized organization currently in a shooting war with israel. The goal is not to instill terror in a population, but to directly target the capabilities of a military organization.

Doesn't have to be arbitrary, and a highly precise targeted attack killing high commanders can still instill fear in the general population - if the most guarded guys can be killed, nobody is safe.

bawolff4• 2 years ago

If it's not terrorism, what is the differentiating factor(s)?

Typically the differentiating factor is who the victims are and what the goal of the operation are - terrorists = victims are primarily civilian and the operation has negligible military benefit. Not terrorists = the targets are military. If there is collateral damage then it is not excessive (or not intended to be; intent matters) in relation to the military objective.

All this is subjective of course, and politics are involved, but that is what the difference is usually given as.

In this particular case - i would say it would be terrorism if it was random people's radios & pagers, but not terrorism if it was pagers/radios bought for military purpose that were primarily owned by soldiers. Initial reports suggest it is the latter, but i imagine more details will appear in time to better make that determination.

maronato2• 2 years ago

"Terrorism" is one of the most useful terms for dehumanizing and delegitimizing a group's actions. It's only a useful term insofar as it's applied only to the enemy.

Mental gymnastics will be in full force here and in the media/politics to recategorize it.

I have no doubt a headline saying "Israeli politicians' hand-held radios explode, killing three, one day after pager blasts" would receive very different responses in this thread.

maronato2• 2 years ago

And yes, politicians here is correct since

Hezbollah is a Lebanese Shia Islamist _political party_ and paramilitary group

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezbollah

za3faran2• 2 years ago

If you saw how many standing ovations Mileikowsky got last month in his speech the US congress, I think it is very clear.

YeGoblynQueenne• 2 years ago

I'm not convinced this was a terror attack and I think Israel is within its rights to target Hezbollah, but here's a question:

If the assailant and target were reversed, would Western media hesitate at all to call it terrorism?

Or, forget Hezbollah and Israel. If ISIS had detonated thousands of explosive devices all over, e.g., the UK injuring and killing hundreds of UK military personnel and some civilians, would that not immediately be condemned as an act of terror, by everyone in the entire world, East and West? And rightly so?

If the designation of "terror" or "not terror" depends on who's attacking and whom they are targeting, then there's not much point in talking about terror or not terror at all.

longbrass• 2 years ago

If the IDF were to detonate the rockets Hezbollah uses to explode before launch would this be different? What about gps devices or range finders?

Without a doubt it’s asymmetrical… and the common binary is military/terror but I fear this is a distinction left to the last century.

The loss of children is always unacceptable, but Hezbollah has a history of courting child soldiers… so skepticism is not unwarranted.

https://www.refworld.org/reference/annualreport/cscoal/2008/...

LincolnedList• 2 years ago

It depends. If ISIS does it to scare the UK into a political decision because it has no way of matching its military in the battlefield (e.g to push out UK forces in Iraq) its a Terror attack in nature.

If it is actually done to degrade the capabilities of the UK military so ISIS could use its fighters to chase them out of Iraq, or maybe, conquer a part of England - its an act of war and is actually worse from a UK POV. Calling it a terror attack would be silly.

People are biased to treat wars as better then terror because wars have rules and often involve good people trying to defend their country. But from a country's POV a terror organization is usually way less dangerous than a competent enemy military attacking.

Terror is usually done because someone lacks military competence and is willing to play dirty to even the playing field.

The establishment is so aggressive in condemning terrorism, because its easier to deal aggressively with a small terrorist organization before it becomes an established military and carves its own autonomous place on the world stage.

ISIS is a good example, it used a lot of terror tactics, but its goal was to create a country.

SergeAx• 2 years ago

Terrorism, by definition, is directed against civilians. Hezbollah militants are not civilians. Hezbollah is recognized as a terrorist organization by US, EU, Canada and League of Arab States among others. The declared goal of Hezbollah is to fight US and Israel.

Pagers and radios are used for their communication. That means that it is a military equipment.

jaredklewis• 2 years ago

I'm genuinely curious where the line is drawn.

I'm the opposite, in that I think it is incredibly uninteresting to obsess over semantics and try to neatly sort everything into a terrorism or non-terrorism box.

Definitions are generally not universal and are inherently inexact. The definition will simply be stretched by the interpreting party to put things they do not morally approve of into the terrorism box and things they do approve of in the non-terrorism box.

So I think it makes more sense to just skip that step and instead directly consider whether something is morally justified or not and to provide arguments of why or why not.

hnpolicestate2• 2 years ago

"If it's not terrorism, what is the differentiating factor(s)?" The power structure in charge of labeling.

What's the old saying? "One mans terrorist is another man's freedom fighter".

deepfriedchokes• 2 years ago

Terrorism is a matter of perspective. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.

Maybe we should all just try to treat others the way we want to be treated? That’s pretty much what that hippy Jewish philosopher guy said back in the day.

dpc_01234• 2 years ago

It's terrorism if "they" are doing it, and not if "we" are doing it. That's actually the real practical definition used by everyone all over the world.

JumpCrisscross• 2 years ago

how is this not considered terrorism on Israel's part?

Terrorism is variously defined [1]. People are debating whether this was "random or indiscriminate nature" relative to other terrorist attacks. But relative to any wartime strike on an enemy capital, it's been highly precise.

The reason it's open to intepretation is we don't know Israel's motivation. Is it to mark Hezbollah members? A prelude to a strategic strike? If so, it's not terrorism. If it's to scare Hezbollah and the Lebanese, on the other hand, it does start to look like terrorism.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_terrorism

stuaxo• 2 years ago

Indeed, it's against the Geneva Convention, and a 12 year old girl was hurt.

TheAlchemist• 2 years ago

First - from the 'technical' point of view - I can't wait to read books / documentaries about how it was all prepared etc. Fascinating.

I can't really wrap my head around it neither, is it terrorism or not ?

On one hand it sure is - we don't know if it was the main goal, but it sure did instil fear and terror. Even in people that have nothing to do with the region.

On the other hand, it's pretty much as targeted as it gets. From what we know, the explosives were really small, installed in devices specifically used by their targets. I have hard time imagining any other way one could eliminate or incapacitate thousands of legimitate (in their view at least) targets without firing a single bullet and with so few other casualties (and yes, of course even a single one is too much).

skynr• 2 years ago

My opinion - it is fully intended to invoke terror and destabilise the target community. Thus it is a terrorist act whether or not it falls under the rules of engagement of the perpetrator.

hersko3• 2 years ago

Wouldn't every offensive action in modern war fall into that category? Airstrikes, artillery, ground troops etc..

shepherdjerred• 2 years ago

Isn’t Israel targeting militants or those associated with a terrorist organization?

I mean, maybe it meets the technical definition of terrorism, but at a certain point all military conflict becomes terrorism and the term becomes meaningless.

drivingmenuts• 2 years ago

They’re not terrorists because they’re on a side we support. At worst, we might consider them rebels, though that’s usually reserved for people in this hemisphere.

MxK234• 2 years ago

It's not terrorism, as Israel is targeting their enemies during war. Terrorism is targeting uninvolved civilians not during war.

The Hezbollah attack that started this war was an act of terrorism.

The Ukraine placing bombs in cities where the Russians are about to march in is not terrorism.

Having that said: It would be better if the Hezbollah could be stopped by other less cruel means. But war is ugly. The Hezbollah has started it so Israel has all the right to defend themselves. Even if it's cruel.

rldjbpin• 2 years ago

this is very hard to defend considering the lack of consideration for collateral damage.

however as already pointed out, even this happened in one instance, it all depends on which side you are on. being from a country that fought for its independence, we remember those who did the deed as "freedom fighters". during the time, from the "opressor's" point of view, however, they would have been seen as insurgents.

bitcharmer• 2 years ago

Criticism of Israel here on HN will only earn you down votes and flagging. It's not worth it.

raxxorraxor8• 2 years ago

Hezbollah is a militia, I think the goal of terrorism is to scare a civil population. Of course one mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter. But I would have problems to call Hezbollah anything of that sort.

Hezbollahs goal is to destroy Israel, so I wouldn't call any military action against them terrorism. They have a right to defend themselves and that right does include these tactics.

Dove• 2 years ago

While I don't want to get involved in a political and radioactive topic (and don't intend to participate in an ongoing discussion), it seems to me there is something important to be said here.

To my mind, there are two critical moral differences between war and terrorism. The first is that the soldier attacks those who are fighting him - if not exactly the guilty, at least the active and resistant. The terrorist doesn't care if he attacks the weak and innocent and in fact prefers it. The second is that the object of a soldier's attack is to break the resistance, and he minimizes evil and suffering in pursuit of that goal. The terrorist maximizes it as a point of strategy.

Of course, fighting is sometimes necessary - evil must be resisted or it will dominate the earth. And in a messy real world, fighting often unavoidably hurts the innocent and the uninvolved - or even the involved in unnecessary ways. The desire to do things perfectly has to at some point yield to the need to do something - insisting that only perfect actions be taken is the same as saying no actions can be taken.

So what makes a fighting action moral? There isn't a bright line. At the margins, this is a judgement call. What level of violence, of what sort, is acceptable is something good people will have differing opinions on. But to suggest that the existence of a spectrum and the necessity of exercising judgement erases the categories is to commit the beard fallacy. The fact that we cannot say exactly when stubble becomes a beard does not mean there is no such thing as a beard - it just means the edges of the definition are fuzzy. That's actually normal! Most definitions have fuzzy edges, and have weak meaning on those edges. If one person wants a clean shaven man for some purpose and another wants a bearded man, both may consider a week old shave unacceptable for their purposes. Definitional edges have their interests, but don't necessarily inform how we think about centers.

Most ethics in war and in fighting turn on these ideas of innocence or powerlessness and necessity. Soldiers take prisoners (and treat them well) because taking someone out of the conflict is the honorable goal of war, and causing suffering once that is accomplished is evil. Criminals in prison (should) still have human rights for the same reason. I once heard a federal law enforcement official describe a shootout with a criminal, stating that the criminal was shooting at him and didn't care who else he hit, while the LEO was unwilling to return fire against the backstop of an occupied apartment building because that would be evil.

It does cost something to do things right - you pay for it in the blood of your own soldiers and in your chances of victory. One reason to seek an overwhelming force is to have the luxury of doing things as cleanly as possible. In a more even fight, at higher stakes, necessity may look different. People do take capabilities and circumstances into account when they judge you.

Nonetheless, there is a very big difference between doing the right thing imperfectly or even badly and doing the wrong thing. There are matters of degree between going to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties and accepting more of them. That does not mean intentionally targeting civilians exists on that spectrum. That's crossing an entirely different line.

On a personal level, in a self defense scenario, you can be taking actions to stop a threat or to hurt a person. The first is moral and legal; the second is immoral and illegal. And while you sometimes do the second in the course of doing the first, the minute you are doing it for its own sake, you are over the line. While we may disagree over where exactly the line is, that doesn't mean you can put it anywhere you find convenient. There is a moral truth to the situation.

Every criminal says they're acting in self defense through some twisted line of reasoning. And every terrorist can tell you why their targets are legitimate and their actions necessary. It is entirely possible to argue along such lines and to be wrong. Further down the thread, someone argues that targeting civilians is justified when those civilians vote for the government you are fighting. This is an example of careless moral reasoning that seeks to justify evil - you cannot know who voted how, and we do not kill people for how they vote or we find ourselves in the position of killing huge numbers of people. This is a thin justification for violence as a goal in itself. Likewise, someone argues that targeting the innocent is justifiable in a very asymmetric conflict. Again, this is a very thin justification. It is true that you are judged by the precision of your weapons and the options available to you, but a tenuous relationship to some strategic advantage doesn't justify egregious and pointless violence. At some point, it starts to look like the violence is the point to you and you're just evil.

These lines of argument highlight why I feel the need to respond. This erasing of the line between war and terrorism, which has apparently happened in the minds of a lot of people here, has an effect that is doubly harmful. It has the effect of hampering necessary and legitimate war by miring it in endless criticism and confusion about legitimacy. This is bad - when we fight evil, we need to be able to have intelligent conversations about how to acceptably do it. Overly hampering our capabilities helps evil be a little more dominant - keeps the bad guys a little more in control on the margins. Calling war terrorism commits this evil. But perhaps a worse evil is committed by calling terrorism war - it has the effect of justifying it! There are people in this thread who think that targeting voters and children is okay because they are confused about the concepts of innocence and necessity and in their confusion are incapable of intelligently evaluating reasoning that involves those concepts. It is not a great leap between finding terrorism morally acceptable and being willing to support it.

The ethics and morals of violent conflict - whether writ small between individuals or writ large between nations - have been a topic of discussion for all of civilization. While we don't always agree, a lot of important, intelligent, moral things have been said on the topic - things worth learning. We have concepts like war crime and terrorism for reasons. Contrary to (apparent) popular belief, there are not merely ugly sounds, linguistic weapons wielded for power. They are important and specific ideas, given to us by generations of thinkers, that help us distinguish between good and evil and understand the moral meaning of things. You erase those in your own mind at the risk of supporting and committing atrocities. It is important to know when the price of winning morally obligates you to lose, and when the price of losing morally obligates you to win. The ability to tell the difference comes, not from erasing lines, but learning how they are drawn and why.

gloosx• 2 years ago

If you consider it a terrorism, it is it, and it's up to you to decide.

Most modern countries terrorize people by design, because they can use the 51% illusion to justify any of their actions.

They also use the same illusion to teach you what's terrorism and what's patriotism, and they will for sure try to teach you young — if they don't, it will be kinda hard to distinguish later on

me_me_me2• 2 years ago

The real question I never see being asked is how a country lets a terrorist org operate to such a degree in their country befrore you can assume they are letting them operate.

A terrorist org having their own ammo depo is probably a hint.

Lets then transplant the example to other ground lets say Poland lets a terrorist group operate within its borders and that terrorists org regularly sends rockets over to Germany.

What do you think Germany is suppose to do? Ask Poland to deal with an org that they openly support, and openly allow to attack Germany?

econner• 2 years ago

It makes me wonder how Israel can achieve something like this while simultaneously not being aware of the Oct 7 attacks.

robertlagrant4• 2 years ago

Offence vs defence.

atemerev2• 2 years ago

Preparation. Surprise attacks work… once. Then, you have to wait for a few years when the enemy side lowers their readiness again.

onemoresoop2• 2 years ago

It seems like these attacks happened multiple times in succession, a day apart from eachother. Yesterday pagers exploded, today walkie takies and solar panels. What's next to come?

javagram• 2 years ago

News reports say that Israel had copies of the Oct 7 plans but found it impossible to believe and were convinced hamas didn’t want all out war.

Similar to Pearl Harbor where we also had intelligence of the attack I suppose…

drawkward2• 2 years ago

Netanyahu has long supported Hamas, to his own political ends.

For the downvoters:

‘Buying Quiet’: Inside the Israeli Plan That Propped Up Hamas https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-q...

https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up...

dtquad3• 2 years ago

October 7th happened exactly because Israel was over-focusing on Iranian proxies like Hezbollah and underestimated Hamas.

karmakurtisaani• 2 years ago

Also on the expansion on the West Bank.

bawolff4• 2 years ago

The same way usa can blow up any country in the world but was blindsided by 9/11.

When the element of surprise is involved, the attacker only has to get lucky once,the defender has to be lucky every day.

legitster2• 2 years ago

It's interesting that both targets have been against non-cellular forms of communication.

I suspect for Israel they have advanced ways of intercepting text and calls and (probably) even MITM encrypted communications over cellular networks. And this could just as easily be about seeding fear about using anything besides a cell phone.

seydor3• 2 years ago

They are famous for selling notorious spyware to many governments

minkles15• 2 years ago

[flagged]

runarberg4• 2 years ago

[flagged]

minkles15• 2 years ago

No, it wouldn't. An interpretation of an ideology is not a race and conflating the two is disingenuous.

text04042• 2 years ago

why is terrorism most aligned with Islam? isn't it possible to frame any/every religion as "most likely to commit acts of terrorism" based on subjective interpretations of their tenets?

t0mas882• 2 years ago

Only in recent times, with IS and similar organizations in the middle east. If you look at different historic periods you'd consider the Christians to be violent terrorists, even invading countries and starting lots of wars.

dang3• 2 years ago

You started a hellish flamewar with this, even by the standards of this pretty hellish thread. Please don't do that again. Religious flamewar in particular will get you banned here, regardless of which religion you have a problem with.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41581653.

minkles15• 2 years ago

I certainly didn't intend it turn it into a flamewar. Posting the link was poor judgement on my part. My intent was to outline a particular branch of ideology, not a whole religion.

elpepo• 2 years ago

Does anyone know, assuming this was a radio-triggered signal to detonate the booby trap, what range the originating signal or radio station could have?

I'm curious if this type of remote activation could be achieved with just a single radio tower, or if it would require a network of geographically distributed radio towers to transmit the signal to the affected area. How would isolation conditions, like being inside a building or in a garage, affect it? Also, what kind of radio towers would be needed? Could it be disguised as a regular HAM radio antenna on a building?

lugu• 2 years ago

I would love to know that too. I don't know the frequency the walkie-talkie used: it could anywhere between 136 MHz to 900 MHz. To give you an idea, 135 MHz isn't too far from the FM spectrum. The antenna of your local radio can blast at several miles. If several cities were targeted, then multiple emitting stations were involved.

daemonologist• 2 years ago

Interesting that they chose to carry out this attack in two waves - presumably the thinking was that Hezbollah would assume only the pagers were compromised (single source/shipment) and thus increase their use of other communication devices. I suspect some did the opposite as well though (stopped carrying/using any devices).

GenerocUsername• 2 years ago

GTA V did it first

csense• 2 years ago

Is this making anyone else really nervous about how much of our tech comes from China?

I'm thinking a scenario like this:

- China makes a rule that all cellphones leaving the country must go through an "inspection facility" (where the explosive hardware and the backdoor trigger chip will be installed)

- A year after the next big iPhone release, China sends a huge convoy of warships and troop transports toward Taiwan, telegraphing a major assault

- The US says "Stop!"

- China presses a button and a few thousand iPhones blow up in the US

- China says "That is just a small taste of our capability, we just pressed the small red button. If you tell us to un-hand Taiwan again, we'll press the big red button and un-hand a few million of your citizens"

Now that this kind of attack is frontpage news, every country in the world is by now aware it's possible -- and it appears to be super effective. So it seems entirely reasonable that some countries will start planning to do the same sort of attack against their enemies.

What I'm saying is, now that everyone's become aware this sort of thing is possible and effective, China might realize it has the means, opportunity, and possibly motive to attack the US this way on a large scale.

As I'd very much prefer not to be maimed or killed by my electronics, I hope the US government is actively looking into effective defenses against China or anyone who would try this sort of attack on US soil.

schlick• 2 years ago

I'll just continue my tactic of never buying a new phone

ordinaryradical• 2 years ago

There’s a “live by the sword, die by the sword” reaction that I have to this.

I think we expect better of democracies, which is why these kinds of attacks shock us. But it is interesting that we are unsurprised when Lebanon/Hezbollah uses terror tactics but it quickly becomes a news event when Israel responds in kind.

Ironic because drone bombings like we did in Afghanistan would probably have a much more terrible collateral damage effect but be less newsworthy. But somehow boobytrapping radios and pagers pricks our conscience. Maybe because it feels more personal, intimate, and therefore retributive?

greedylizard• 2 years ago

I wasn’t aware those terrorists organizations had exploded devices in public spaces. Please share your source.

vondur• 2 years ago

Are you kidding? Here's just one of many: 14 FEB 2005 Beirut, Lebanon Suicide bomber detonated a VBIED, assassinates former Lebanese Prime Minister; 22 killed, 231 wounded

rasz2• 2 years ago

Does truck count as a device? Here is a history refresher https://aoav.org.uk/2020/a-short-history-of-suicide-bombings...

danielvf• 2 years ago

Just a few months ago, Hezbollah exploded a rocket in soccer field with children playing, killing 12 children. Doesn't get much more "exploding devices in public spaces" than that.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/11-killed-mostly-children-doze...

alephnerd3• 2 years ago

I wasn’t aware those terrorists organizations had exploded devices in public spaces

They've done much worse.

The UN found Hezbollah (on behalf of the Assad regime) guilty of massacring 700 civilians in Daraya in 2012 [0].

The Daraya Massacre is what ended the prospect of a negotiated end to the Syrian Civil War, and radicalized a significant wave of Sunni FSA fighters to join Jabhat al-Nusra and the then fledgling Daesh.

The same leaders in Hezbollah that Israel has targeted over the past several weeks are the same ones that lead the Daraya Massacre [1] as well as other human right abuses in Syria and Lebanon.

More recently, Hezbollah has been indiscriminately shelling Northern Israel, which itself has lead to incidents like the Madjal Shams attack, which left 12 children dead [2].

Israel absolutely has been indiscriminate in Gaza and Lebanon, but so is every other actor (Hamas, Hezbollah, etc) in this tragedy.

This is war.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/aug/25/t...

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2013/05/25/world/meast/syria-violence/in...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majdal_Shams_attack

snypher• 2 years ago

My conscience was pricked when they killed probably 40,000 people in Palestine, so this extra 3,000 casualties is just more deaths from a terrorist state.

wordofx• 2 years ago

40,000 terrorists.

OutOfHere3• 2 years ago

Targeting solar panels absolutely does hurt conscience.

t0mas882• 2 years ago

I think it's newsworthy because it's such a unique move, almost like it's from a spy novel. Not because 9 people died, that unfortunately happens semi regularly in this conflict.

TiredOfLife3• 2 years ago

I think we expect better of democracies, which is why these kinds of attacks shock us

Israel conducts probably the most precise military action in the history of warfare and people still demand more.

creatonez• 2 years ago

This is easily disprovable.

See pages 10-30 of this report and the associated inline sources - https://www.academia.edu/112967602/Bearing_Witness_to_the_Is...

kjkjadksj4• 2 years ago

When the US wants to guide a remote bomb into a hut in a village, estimations of the potential collateral damage are at least made and considered. This is the issue that the military community has with this attack. It was sloppy basically and none of this sort of assessment was made.

Log_out_• 2 years ago

"The hand that giveth taketh.." feelings. Planing atracks on the fab on a laptop whose core was made in that fab, should make one aware og consequences.

Hezbollah and iran do not seem to have somebody sampling hardware ordered for defects and alterations. Basic military and state ability . You couldn't do such attacks on functional organisations.

madcadmium2• 2 years ago

I wonder how many of their telecom devices like routers, switches, etc. have bombs implanted in their power supplies

madcadmium2• 2 years ago

I wonder how many of their telecom devices like routers, switches, etc. have bombs implanted in their power supplies

OutOfHere3• 2 years ago

War and terrorism aside, for the rest of us, in practical terms, Israel can now never be trusted commercially for its software or hardware. Not only are they backdoored and exploited, but they also blow up and kill the user.

hersko3• 2 years ago

Do you think Israel is just randomly planting bombs in everything it makes? This was clearly a targeted op aimed at Hezbollah.

OutOfHere3• 2 years ago

Yes, I actually do think that Israel is installing backdoors and explosives in 10x more things than they have activated in their current war against Lebanon.

stevenalowe• 2 years ago

I have questions:

- why not a larger charge intended to kill/destroy? restraint? or some technical limitation?

- why now, and twice? seems like a one-shot tactic, so what happened to make now seem like the right time?

icar• 2 years ago

A US forum talking about people they pre-consider terrorists of a country they surely can't pin point in a map. What can go wrong...

negativeonehalf2• 2 years ago

'U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. called for a "full accounting" of the attacks to Congress to determine "whether any US assistance went into the development or deployment of this technology."'

Are there any public records indicating the CIA is capable of pulling off something like this?

I wish the US had been involved, but I seriously doubt it, if only because the opsec requirements are so high. If anyone in Hezbollah had even a whiff of concern that this could happen, the whole operation would have been a bust.

nielsbot2• 2 years ago

Why do you wish the US had been involved? Wouldn't it be better for us to stay clear of this?

nine_k• 2 years ago

Technically this attack is not overly sophisticated. The hard part is knowing right people, long chains of right people, motivation, timing, that kind of thing.

No agency in their right mind will even hint on whether they are capable of doing such things or not. Any whiff of information may put their people in mortal danger. They neither confirm nor deny. The fewer people know the better. The rest of the world learns about such operations by suddenly facing their results.

IG_Semmelweiss2• 2 years ago

For the first time ever since the beginning of conflict (pre-Hezbollah in fact) , native lebanese had been talking opening about partitioning the country into 2, and letting the Hezbollah group have their own fiefdom. This is because Hezbollah is a defacto government in the south.

This was before these surprise IDF attacks - i wonder how the conversation evolves.

lr1970• 2 years ago

Several thousands of "modified" portable communication devices were distributed in Lebanon about half a year ago. I am curios how many of those explosive gadgets the unsuspecting owners were bringing to the airplanes through airport security without explosives being detected? Another proof that the airport security is a theater (at least in the Middle East).

mjiyed• 2 years ago

Let’s put the question other way around If Hezbollah had chance to make similar trigers in Israeli reservists soldiers, and launched same exploding attacks on reservists israeli soldiers while not in homes and not engaged, knowingly all israely reservists are linked to IDF apps for in case call of duty

Should a triger to explode 50000 mobile devices in these hands considered terrorism? In time of engaged war from israeli side!!

Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon, sources say

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