Nine people, including a child, have been killed after handheld pagers used by members of the armed group Hezbollah to communicate exploded across Lebanon, the country’s health minister says.
Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon was among 2,800 other people who were wounded by the simultaneous blasts in Beirut and several other regions.
Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, said the pagers belonged “to employees of various Hezbollah units and institutions” and that at least two members were among the dead.
According to the article:
I don’t know what the actual truth of the situation is, but something’s fucky. I can’t imagine how Israel could plant explosives in those pagers. And overheating batteries would burst into flames rather than literally explode, so that would probably be mentioned somewhere.
Israel’s doing lots of fucked up shit lately, but I can’t see how this one would be their fault.
Some Hezbollah requisitions guy forgot proper opsec and ordered a new pagers in bulk, which where intercepted and swapped.
Supply chains are vulnerable as hell. There’s photos of NSA agents installing backdoors in Cisco network equipment during the shipping to the customer. There’s no proof and it will probably take many years before we hear anything conclusive, but it is without a doubt within the capabilities of Israel or one of their allies intelligence agencies to intercept a shipment of pagers and install explosives in them.
Supply chains matter a lot and governments, let alone terrorist organizations, fail to protect them.
US centric, but far too much of policy is “Don’t buy Made in China” with no thought beyond that.
For this scenario? My assumption is they ordered from their usual supply sources and nothing was hinky. But Israel (or whoever) compromised a port or fedex center along the way and installed some explosives since the only people buying those pagers were terrorists. And nobody on the hezbollah side even bothered to weigh the packages before handing them out.