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.
if planting explosives in electronic devices and blowing them up in civilian areas killing and wounding indiscriminately is fine and in fact great, what's wrong with putting explosives in cars in Tel Aviv? Oh right, only genocidal occupiers are allowed to do murderous terrorism
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.
How was this pulled off? Here are the theories
From CNN's Christian Edwards
Experts have shared two competing theories as to how hundreds of pagers could have exploded simultaneously.
One theory is that there was a cybersecurity breach, causing the pagers’ lithium batteries to overheat and detonate.
Another is that this was a “supply chain attack,” where the pagers were tampered with during the manufacturing and shipping process.
David Kennedy, a former US National Security Agency intelligence analyst, told CNN that the explosions seen in videos shared online appear to be “too large for this to be a remote and direct hack that would overload the pager and cause a lithium battery explosion.”
Kennedy said he found the second theory to be more plausible.
“It’s more likely that Israel had human operatives… in Hezbollah… The pagers would have been implanted with explosives and likely only to detonate when a certain message was received,” he said.
“The complexity needed to pull this off is incredible. It would have required many different intelligence components and execution. Human intelligence (HUMINT) would be the main method used to pull this off, along with intercepting the supply chain in order to make modifications to the pagers,” he added.