Pagers used by hundreds of members of the militant group Hezbollah exploded near simultaneously in Lebanon and Syria on Tuesday, killing at least nine people – including an 8-year-old girl -- and wounding several thousand, officials said. They blamed Israel in what appeared to be a sophisticated, remote attack.
Among those wounded was Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon. The mysterious incident came amid rising tensions between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah, which have exchanged fire across the Israel-Lebanon border since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas that sparked the war in Gaza.
The pagers that exploded had been newly acquired by Hezbollah after the group’s leader ordered members to stop using cell phones, warning they could be tracked by Israeli intelligence. A Hezbollah official told The Associated Press the pagers were a new brand the group had not used before.
That's the sort of spy/sabotage operation of spy thrillers. The Iranian ambassador in lebanon had a Hezbollah exploding pager, which tells something about how tight the Iranians and Hezbollah are. It's going to be fun when Hezbollah hands out new pagers and tries to convince everyone that the new ones are safe.
The Lebanese are squawking about this being a violation of their sovereignity. Seems to me that if your country has a militant group that is run by a foreign power partially occupying your territory, you don't have much ground to complain about sovereignity.
14 comments:
Stuxnet was real cute until the Israel's decided to branch out on their own and it got out into the wild and discovered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet
Personally, I would inspect any new devices that I implemented first. You would've thought Hezbollah would've learned from the sleeper bomb in Iran.
I don't see much correlation between a computer virus and an implanted explosive.
I imagine all of those pagers or ones like it were disposed of post haste.
They just turned the device into a a snake in their pocket. Rather clever.
In the world of CommInt if they go to something that makes messaging
hard to track. Or the the destination of the message then change the
path to one you have had success with before. Cut their options.
Eck!
Unfortunately, I do see Jon’s point. With between hundreds and thousands of impacted devices, and a large number that failed to detonate and have now been inspected by the very terrorists they targets, a new vector of attack has been potentially normalized.
Because there was no way to ensure that only the “targeted group” received, operated/used, or was in possession of the devices, and yet operation was still approved, a dangerous new standard has possibly been put in place. When a State is willing to do this sort of thing, it seems to migrate to the civil sphere in due time. What will it take for a group to recruit a poorly paid worker to add some “special” batteries to the supply chain of a cell phone producer? How about a series of baby monitors? Anything with a battery is a potential vector for an attack like this.
And yet the Israelis have managed to completely cripple Hezbollah’s ability to communicate with its members by any means other than land lines and couriers. Which makes it pretty hard to run an operational military organization in the 21st-century.
1) Cell phones and pagers often get refurbished and resold; there's no way to determine whether all the devices actually were in the hands of terrorists.
2) The pagers went off in doctor's offices and grocery stores, injuring over a thousand innocent people and killing children in the process. This would make it an indiscriminate attack, hence a war crime.
https://x.com/richards1052
3) The Israeli Minister for National Security is convicted Kach terrorist Itahar ben-Gvir. How many injuries and deaths of non-terrorists would be morally acceptable to eliminate Kach, and would Israel's embrace of terrorists mean that any deaths of children would be Israel's fault?
Turn it around.
If these had been dozens, if not hundreds, of small explosions among the hard-Right Jewish settlers who advocate for killing all Palestinians and taking all of the West Bank and Gaza Strip for Greater Israel…
And if, when these explosions happened, an unknown number of innocent Israeli citizens and residents (Arab, Christian and Jew) were injured or killed, including children…
And if a U.S. citizen Jewish Settler Leader was among those injured or killed…
And if an unknown number of other countries aide workers, tourists, etc were injured or killed…
Is this still a good thing?
And it wouldn''t have been a good thing if the Japanese had nuked Los Angeles and San Francisco. Because that's what your argument is, CP88.
War is not a good thing.
Also, if the Israelis had attacked and killed/wounded as many Hezbollah fighters the old-fashioned way, how many more civilians would have been killed? How much of southern Lebanon would now be in ruins?
Would that have been better?
The pagers were ordered from a Mossad front company.
The sleeper charge in Iran is the model.... Would this be a good time to attack Hezbollah? Put another dime in the jukebox? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9jhDwxt22Y
I’m just asking if we want this manner of unrestrained warfare that Bibi has pushed to be the answer going forward, and I know you’re not a Bibi fan. Israel has, in my opinion, forsaken all the high ground they had at the beginning of this battle. It’s like the police these days, the existence of video and the evidence it provides is suggesting a lot of the things the IDF was accused of before was probably true.
Third parties, especially outside the U.S., are pretty unanimous in condemning the killing of civilians that’s been occurring in the Gaza Strip, and I don’t see it helping Israel going forward. I have no idea what the next non-hawkish Israeli government will be able to do to try to rehabilitate their relations within the Arab world in particular, but I’m concerned Bibi’s decisions are very much an existential threat to Israel going forward.
I’d be more impressed if they were also vocal about the Russians striking hospitals and schools, or the Russians and Syrians indiscriminately bombing civilians in Syria. But they don’t seem to be too vocal about any of that sort of thing unless the Israelis are involved.
Fair point, but those I’m referring to have been quite vocal against Russia too. Syria, I can’t directly comment on as it was prior to my time in that particular circle.
I’d be more impressed if the Israeli people kicked Bibi’s ass to the kerb, but that’s not happening it appears.
"also vocal about the Russians striking hospitals and schools"
Let's see. We have people pushing for an arms embargo on Israel and for Netanyahu and company to be charged by the World Court.
The U.S. has already has sanctions and an arms embargo on Russia, and Putin and company have already been charged by the World Court.
It's the same thing with Syria: sanctions and an arms embargo, and arrest warrants for al-Assad and company already exist.
How is asking Israel to be treated the same way as Russia and Syria already are unfair?
It's the same argument I heard in the 1980s: "I'd be more impressed about the anti-South Africa crowd if they were also vocal about the Russians striking hospitals and schools in Afghanistan." The US government wasn't giving arms and protection to the Soviet Union, but it was to an apartheid government.
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