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43 thoughts on “Headline of the day”

      2. weirdnoise

        Lithium batteries don't detonate. They can burst when overheated, and can burn vigorously when that happens since the electrolytes are highly flammable and the lithium itself can burn. But these aren't burn injuries being reported. The bursting of the battery's jacket isn't going to be energetic enough to cause much if any injury, and it can take quite some time for a battery to overheat to that point.

        1. Crissa

          And it's difficult to get any number of cells to fail simultaneously - and it would require them to be plugged in and charging in a cell-balancing mode to trigger it and even then the actual flare can happen hours later.

          You could overvolt a hundred cells from the same batch and get failure times from within a minute to never.

  3. MF

    Initial claims were that the attackers somehow hacked the pagers to make their batteries blow up. Now it seems clear that this was a supply chain hack - the attacker (presumably Israel) got access to the pagers before they were delivered.

    This is just an amazing feat of sabotage. I am in awe.

    What I do not understand is why Israel did this now. I would have waited until I was ready to launch a major attack against Hezbollah to clear them away from the Israeli border per UN Resolution 1701 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_Resolution_1701) and done this simultaneously to disrupt Hezbollah's defenses.

    1. Ken Rhodes

      What he wrote in paragraph 2. Two sentences, 12 words. Wow! Me too!

      Is there some training school in Israel where we can send our operatives? Sort of like the US Navy Fighter Weapons School ("Top Gun"), but for covert operations. Those Israelis seem to be very good at it.

        1. Steve C

          If you are willing to injure 2800 *members of a terrorist organization* to kill 8, that is fighting terrorism.

          Do you deny that correction?

    3. name99

      This may be just step 1.
      Step 2 today was exploding a bunch of walkie talkies (same MO as the pagers).

      Obviously there's at the very least a psyops dimension to this -- take out two technologies and what's safe? Your laptop? Your TV? Your drones? This is the Middle East so obviously they have basically *nothing* manufactured locally, it's all imports -- and all subject to supply chain intercepts...

      There's also a personnel dimension -- kinda strange that the Iranian Ambassador has a Hezbollah pager, no? Who else, unexpectedly, appears in the casualty lists?

      So you wait a week, followup the leads that these two incidents generate, and then maybe hit a third tech? And THEN attack?

      1. KawSunflower

        Why would it be strange that the Iranian ambassador has a Hezbollah pager, when Iran finances Hezbollah? it is based in Israel, but not part of the larger Muslim community there, which is not majority Shia

        2. name99

          Of course everyone knows the CIA case officer at the embassy. But we're all supposed to pretend that he's just some trade attache.

          Same deal...

  4. Traveller

    I also am impressed...this was really very targeted despite the fact that people will say these were unguided bombs and a war crime...they were very targeted, no one would carry a pager now except for a very specific purpose...so it was targeted and at people it was intended for...people that I allege have chosen war when it was unnecessary...did not need to involve them at all...

    Every time I see a group of Sunni Lebanese warriors screaming and carrying a coffin....I think, Wow, what a target rich environment!

    However, even for a former combat soldier...you kill people and people try to kill you...even with all this, there is something grotesque about this...something terrible beyond just killing people.

    Who doesn't look at a pager when it beeps? With a ten second delay...thousand of young men, (my...what? My enemies? I'm not even Jewish...but not my bother warriors either...madmen to me)...thousands became blind, losing one of both eyes, and or had their faces terribly disfigured...

    Certainly this was a lesson not to become Hezbollah, or even more especially one on the On-Call circuit or captains or commanders or just fighters to be called up...by a deadly beeper.

    Kill him, throw a grenade in his hole, take his arm off with a burst of 5.62mm rounds...but blinding him in this fashion doesn’t sit well with me.

    But understand I consider Sunni Jihadi’s like most religious fanatics to be natural enemies ...as a defender of Israel is this better than trying to bomb a tunnel 25 meters down...with collateral civilian deaths?

    This trickster bombing does kill or maim only fighters...is it better than the devastation in Gaza?

    The moral choices here are very difficult. (For me, for others, probably certainly less so). Damn!

    1. Solar

      This is no different than putting a bomb in a person's car, only with less firepower, since the targetd person could be in close proximity to kids or any other innocent person when Israel launched their terror attack. No one who is defending this attorcity has any moral leg to stand on to ever complain about terrorism. As with their tactics in Gaza, Israel is just making sure that for every terrorrist they kill, they create two more in the future.

      3. Steve C

        Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. The pagers were supplied by that terrorist organization to do the exclusive business of that terrorist organization. If you work for them and put their equipment next to an innocent person, you are to blame when that equipment is destroyed and causes damage to an innocent person.

        When terrorists hide behind innocent people, you have two choices.
        Try to minimize the damage to innocent people, or let the terrorist do whatever they want with no attempt to stop them. At some point, option two is synonymous with suicide.

        Which do you choose for Israel?

        1. Coby Beck

          Hezbollah is not designated a terrorist organization by the UN, so I don't take your first statement as a given.

          Israel has recently declared UNRWA is a terrorist organization. Would you support Israel doing this to them? I expect they will be taking actions of a kind against UNRWA in the near future.

          Name a specific act that leads you to call Hezbollah a terroist organization (I'm not saying there aren't any, I don't know a lot about Hezbollah). Name such an act and let's see if it is something the IDF or Mossad has never done.

          Even in declared hot-wars it is a war crime to kill a soldier not on the battlefield.

          I'm finding it really hard not to consider this Istaeli attack as terrorism, or at least a war crime.

          1. tango

            I truly wonder how you and some of the others above expect Israel to fight Hezbollah, a sworn mortal enemy. What would be okay for the Israelis to do? It's not like Hezbollah puts troops in the field dressed in uniforms for the IDF to fight, you know?

    2. Crissa

      Pagers are super-common in low-income and low-bandwidth regions because they can carry text messages in packet form when phone calls would be prohibitively expensive or impossible.

      If you're willing to hit 2800 people to kill 8, that's terrorism, man, not war.

      1. Steve C

        If you are willing to hit 2800 *members of a terrorist organization" to kill 8, that is fighting terrorism.

        Do you deny that correction?

    3. KawSunflower

      You do understand that, while I believe that more Lebanese Muslims are Sunni than Shia, Bezbollah is a Shia organization, backed by Iran's Shia government?

  5. rick_jones

    I have a recollection that Israel did something involving altering someone’s electric razor. Got to it somehow to implant explosives. My web searching though has been unsuccessful. Perhaps it was part of a movie plot.

  6. DButch

    Just saw an article in Daily Kos - more explosions in Lebanon - mostly walkie-talkies, but some other stuff as well.

    Oh yeah - the pagers were made in Hungary by BAC using a licensed Taiwanese design. Not clear yet about the source of the new explosions.

  7. middleoftheroaddem

    I have never served in the military. However, my brother spent 22 years in the service, with the majority of his time in US Special Forces.

    My brother said me, 'no comment on the ethics, in war you degrade your opposition, this is military brilliant. Very demoralizing for Hezbollah. And yes, if Hezbollah had the ability, certainty they would have initiated this type of attack, or far more violent, on Israel. '

    1. Crissa

      Brilliant to attack civilians in an uninvolved country to get a handful of targets?

      Your brother shouldn't be allowed near any weapons.

      1. Steve C

        Which civilians were attacked? Specifically targeted? How many?

        None. Only the owners of Hezbollah issued pagers were targeted.
        As mentioned above, if a terrorist gives terrorist-issued equipment used for terrorist business to a civilian, the terrorist is the one to blame if the civilian is hurt by that equipment.

        But to be generous, let's count those civilians. How many documented (by a terrorist organization) civilians were killed or injured? 20? 40? 100?
        Compare that to the 3000 terrorists targeted.

        The civilian to combatant ratio is 0.03:1. Show me any historic military operation where that is the case. Especially when the combatants are embedded completely in a civilian environment.

        If you cant show me that, then your argument is worthless.

        And as always, ad hominem attacks or refusing to acknowledge the question means you lost the argument.

  8. The Big Texan

    Seems like kind of a waste, to me. Sure, Israel did a little bit of damage to Hezbollah, but I'm sure Hezbollah can replace people fairly quickly, and now the world is aware that intelligence agencies have infiltrated the supply chain. That seems like a big reveal for fairly little gain.

    1. painedumonde

      It's the experience lost and demoralization that's the killer. Point to point communication might be from leadership to leadership, and so this is almost a decapitation attack. Almost, because runners might be doing the scut work of communicating - and the fear put into any staff member of leadership just went of the chart.

      It's like a lightning strike – it's like God saying I hate and smite these people in particular.

    2. zic

      Any man who had a pager in his pocket might have some problems with his manliness going forward; it's a psyops operation, too, I think. Not just fear, but fear of going after those private body parts.

  9. J. Frank Parnell

    Israel has a long history of using explosive cell phones to assassinate the leaders of terrorist groups, one of the reasons the terrorist groups switched to pagers.

  11. zic

    And here in Maine, fighter jets just flew north, low, flying under radar. I can hear others, off in the distance, rumbling like thunder.

    Something has scrambled them into the air.

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