None dare call it Terrorism.
Why is it okay for them to bomb Lebanon as well?
Because Arab lives have no value in Israeli society.
Because Arab lives have no value in ~~Israeli~~ western society.
FTFY.
To be fair, Jewish lives also only matters to the west if they are busy murdering brown people.
Damn. This must be one of the most terrifying cyber attacks of all time. Like, Mr. Robot level of breach and execution.
In that show they rig the UPS batteries of server buildings to blow up, this is basically the same idea on a smaller scale.
Either that, or they compromised the manufacturer of the pagers and put small explosive devices in there. Truly legendary and insane.
no way it was just the batteries.
batteries burn but don't detonate with shrapnel
it was altered devices with explosives added.
Yeah they got into the supply route and added c4 to all those pagers. Makes me wonder how many pagers or smartphones have added explosives still.
Shrapnel, no, but Lithium-Ion does explode. Especially on a full charge
They have over-pressure vents and will vent pretty violently and catch fire, but should not explode due to pressure build up.
Probably not. It was almost certainly the case that these pagers were already connected to explosives, probably to be IEDs. All Israel would have had to do is page the pagers to detonate them. I can’t think of any other logical explanation.
I don't think the thousands of pagers built this way really count as "improvised."
That being said, it makes me wonder if this went in any way according to plan - 8 deaths and 2750 injuries is a large scale attack, don't get me wrong. But they've now announced Mossad has compromised the supplier of the pager, which they will undoubtedly audit, and instill new policies on device security. I wouldn't be surprised if that means they discover a lot more compromised electronics, allowing Hezbollah to pinpoint the compromise. Because 2750 survived, you now have 2750 people very interested in finding it.
In all, for 8 deaths, they've made their own work harder.
That being said 2750 injuries could be a large enough number to scare members out of the org.
I heard they recently switched to pagers because cell phones where deemed to be compromised. So I think besides the direct deaths and injuries, this attack also targeted lines of communication and trust in technology as a whole (or anything supplied by your superior even).
Yeah, that's what I read too. It's a smart way to force the weaponized pagers into the hands of your enemies.
Also sort of shows the attack wasn't too sophisticated. Mossad might not even have compromised the cell phones, they just fed bad intelligence to whoever and they had a likely supplier already compromised.
In all - it doesn't look too good for any intelligence personnel in Hezbollah.
Yeah, I've been wondering how the fuck they pulled this off. If it turns out that the only pagers that exploded belonged to Hezbollah members, then that would signal to me that this was done entirely digitally.
I've heard that batteries (can't remember if it was laptop or phone batteries) contain the energy of a small grenade, but getting it to release that energy all at once without physical access is absolutely fucking wild and has serious fucking implications for device security.
EDIT: To avoid spreading misinformation, I'm providing this edit to say that the batteries absolutely were not the cause of the explosion. This was a supply-chain attack. Explosives were inserted into the pagers. The batteries in these pagers cannot be made to explode like this. I was overly excited when I made this comment.
Getting batteries to release energy isn't very difficult, even getting them to release it quickly isn't very difficult. What's difficult is getting them to release it over the course of a few milliseconds. Which is what you would need for an explosion.
If the battery simply dumped all its power over the course of 30 seconds that's basically just a fire that you can run away from.
Also I wouldn't have thought a pager had that much charge, I wouldn't have thought this sort of thing would be possible as they would tend to just go off with a loud bang, assuming you could even get them to release all the energy at once l, which again I wouldn't have thought was possible.
For fairly obvious reasons I don't think we're ever going to find out how this was done.
I am surprised the name of the manufacture is not out. This basically raise privacy concern.
Bibi really wants a war with Hezbollah, doesn't he? I mean you can't call it defending Israels safety anymore when you provoke any and all responses every other month with a missile here, a bomb there and now thousands of bombs everywhere. This is just another measure to keep Netanyahu in a conflict so that he doesn't have to bear the consequences of multiple corruption cases against him and the dissolving of his coalition outside unity cases in a war. Why is Europe and the US still covering for him? What is the rest of Israel doing?
During the last month there were not 1, not 10, not 100 but 807 alerts in Israel for missile attacks. Some of them weren't fired by Hezbollah, and some might have been the same alert in different areas, but that's still about 7 missile PER DAY even if we assume only 1 in 4 alerts was due to an attack by Hezbollah (side note: during the entire war, about 2,000 missile were launched from Lebanon to Israel, that's an average of about 6 per day). In addition to this, there were 452 aircraft intrusion alerts. Most of these attacks are against civilian targets.
Right now, there are about 79 thousand people (around 0.8% of total population) who are still evicted for nearly a year from northern Israel.
And just in case it needs to be said - the first attack was made by Hezbollah (on Oct. 8th) and without any provocation by Israel.
Not only is this a situation no sovereign country can stand, but it's also a violation of the Lebanon-approved UN Security Council's resolution 1701, that was the basis for ending the 2006 Lebanon War. Hell, just having missiles in the area is by itself a violation of the resolution.
Regarding political reasoning - A war in Lebanon is actually bad for Netanyahu. His interest is a slow-burning war so he can prolong the current situation as much as possible (once the war is over, the pubic will demand an election). In fact, that's probably the main reason you had "a missile here and a bomb there" and not an actual war.
A war in Lebanon is actually bad for Netanyahu. His interest is a slow-burning war so he can prolong the current situation as much as possible
The current situation is that he's in a war in Gaza and that is keeping him in office. He can still spin this as "we are fighting against an existential threat". Rocket defence and retaliation strikes aka the slow burning war in Lebanon is not enough for the Israeli society to unite behind Bibi. Only if they seriously attack. And I think Netanyahu wants to provoke such an attack.
Sending thousands of bombs God knows where they land is not a proper defense. It's a huge escalation where Hezbollah will answer. I think the best argument against this strike has been thrown around everywhere: What if Hezbollah made such an attack where 3000 bombs where sent to IDF people. We would talk about a terrorist attack. Why is that different now?
This is definitely one of the most interesting attacks that’s ever happened. It certainly doesn’t look like an accident. If it was indeed Mossad: take a bow, you’ve earned it. That was a pretty slick move. That was probably a difficult op to pull off. Gotta respect the craft, even if you disagree on the method.
I wonder if you wouldve said the same thing about 9/11
9/11 targeted and killed civilians. This attack largely struck Hezbollah militants, who are in open hostilities with Israel. Doing things this way is far better than the seemingly indiscriminate bombing in Gaza.
You know not everyone in Hezbollah is a « militant » right? They have a large political party and civilian governance apparatus. This is terrorism, nothing new to Israel.
Militants specifically use these pagers for security and stealth. Everyone else just uses phones.
It's a brilliant way to target only combatants, and also expose them to their friends and neighbours. This attack is incredibly disruptive with very little collateral damage compared to alternatives.
And yes, it's terrorism, an attack meant to inspire terror and disrupt communication networks with a chilling effect much larger than the actual damage. However it's interesting as unlike most terrorism it does not target civilians.
It's also terrifying to think we are living in a world where a malicious component attack is a legitimate concern. This is one of those moments that change the world - I'm sure every industry is thinking about the danger of their foreign supply chain right now.
Oh so everyone there who had a pager must have been a bad guy. Got it, solid logic. Can't wait for the war to spread further.
And I'm sure Islamic State and the Taliban have non-combatant elements too.
I don't mind Israel defending against militant groups that fire rockets into Israel. I do mind them carpet-bombing civilian populations. This pager-thing seems to have the hallmarks of an operation that manages to cripple Hezbollah with a minimal loss of life and even fairly low civilian casualties. I much prefer Israel do this over the alternatives.
Its not rocket science how they did it. What is the impressive part? Are we really just going to say civilians don't matter? Is it impressive to you because of how many people were hurt?
In no way is it required to respect the craft or the method.
I was about to say, they're fucked in the head, but goddamn that was ingenious.
Israel might be the baddies...
Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, was among those injured by the pager explosions on Tuesday, Iran’s Mehr news agency reported.
Attacking ambassadors is a great way to become an international piriah.
Why did he have the pager tho?
Hezbollah is a legitimate political party in Lebanon, with millions of voters.
It just says he was injured, which could happen if you were in close proximity to someone wearing one of the pagers. News here showed one of the explosions occurring in a grocery store, with plenty of people nearby, for example.
What was ambassador doing with Hezbollah exclusive pager?
Hezbollah exclusive? Were the walkie talkies Hezbollah exclusive? They are just devices with a specific function
Is this a cyberattack, or pre-planted explosives?
My dad used to have one and it runs on single AA bsttery. It will burn if exploded but I doubt will that make "man fell on the groud bleeding." Newer models might use recharable batteries, yet the BMC (logically thinking) should be sperated from the communication part as charging have nothing to do with it. How are you going to use SMS to hack a part of the system which isn't connected?
If it is pre-planted explosives, that's just wet work and nothing to talk about it.
Of course, the attacker can do a supply chain attack (by threating/hacking the manufacture, excluding explosives) as a stage to make the cyberattack possible.
NYT has a link up which it claims has been verified. It is a video of someone at a market who had one of these in their messenger bag. The video shows a decent size explosion, which blew a big hole in the bag and knocked the guy to the ground.
I doubt you could make an explosion that big with a AA battery. They must have planted the stuff in some massive supply chain hack.
Yep, all the electrical engineers who have chimed in say it looks more like explosives.
A battery would get hot and start a fire. It wouldn't instantly explode like this.
Hey @oberstoffensichtlich@feddit.org, you were saying that "these were extremely surgical strikes, people in the vicinity weren't harmed"?
Thousands of people injured, all guilty of something ofc, because Israel would never do an attack which might harm innocents. Right? /S
Editing this again because when this story first broke I had assuming that this was a targeted attack on very specific people. I had also conflated Hezbollah and Hamas - and yes, I do know the difference, I just wasn't paying as close attention between work, personal things, and Lemmy posting and made a mistake. And while I don't support their attack on Hezbollah, I was still impressed with what I had assumed was a very targeted attack. But now as more information comes out, this really looks to be no different that if they had sprinkled land mines around someone's home... sure, it might get that person, but it can also get innocent people as well, and that isn't impressive. In summary, fuck Israel. Fuck Hamas. Fuck Hezbollah.
This goes to show that Israel could have taken out ~~Hezbollah~~ Hamas leadership at any time... there was no need to raze Palestine other than to move people out so that Israelis can move in and rebuilt.
I wonder how they did it. Was the firmware hacked to make the batteries ignite or were separate explosives implanted in each pager?
Almost certainly it was explosives. Mossad very likely designed a functioning pager that contains explosives but looks identical to the original pagers and this is effectively a supply chain attack.
Anyone else confused about how these bombs are actually detonating? Articles say they are detonating via a text message sent 3x in error, theoretically causing either a spark or a "closed circuit" like a different article explained. The article (from al jazeera) says they have to look at the message but there's video of one igniting in a bag.
I'm curious because I think these pagers may actually constitute a public safety risk, similar to how heavily landmined areas risk exploding even decades later on someone unrelated to the initial conflict.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
