At least nine people are dead and around 2,800 injured in Lebanon in an attack targeting the pagers of Hezbollah members, the Lebanese health minister said. Follow our live updates.
This is a terrorist attack by Israel on a massive scale. They blew up countless numbers of people driving, meaning that cars lost control, shopping around children, etc.
Traditionally pagers use either FLEX or POCSAG protocols, both of which are fully unencrypted and have to broadcast everywhere with relatively high power... So safer is maybe a bit of a misnomer... But they also don't transmit anything so in terms of remote listening and location tracking, yes they are safer.
Yeah, in this case I'm guessing they'd just use coded messages when communicating. Ultimately, that's even more effective since those are indistinguishable from regular messages unless you know the special meaning of the words used. So, they're even less likely to attract attention.