Israel didn’t tamper with Hezbollah’s exploding pagers, it made them: NYT sources — First shipped in 2022, production ramped up after Hezbollah leader denounced the use of cellphones
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-spies-behind-hungarian-firm-that-was-linked-to-exploding-pagers-report/
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Excerpts from [article](https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-spies-behind-hungarian-firm-that-was-linked-to-exploding-pagers-report/) by TOI staff with [NYT](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/world/middleeast/israel-exploding-pagers-hezbollah.html), [NBC](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/taiwan-firm-denies-making-pagers-used-lebanon-explosions-rcna171594), and [Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/components-pagers-used-lebanon-blasts-are-not-taiwan-minister-says-2024-09-20/) updates:
*[…] Citing three unnamed intelligence officers with knowledge of the operation, The New York Times reported that BAC Consulting was part of a front set up by figures in Israeli intelligence.*
*Two other shell companies were also created to help mask the link between BAC and the Israelis, according to the report.*
*The company was listed in Hungary as a limited liability company in May 2022, though a website for BAC Consulting was officially registered almost two years earlier, in October 2020, according to internet domain records.*
*As of April 2021, the company website offered political and business consulting, with the firm changing addresses and expanding its offerings at least three times by 2024, archival research by The Times of Israel showed.*
*According to the New York Times, the company supplied other firms with pagers as well, though only the ones transferred to Hezbollah were fitted with batteries that contained explosive materiel known as PETN.*
*The devices first began to reach Lebanon in 2022, according to the newspaper, with production ramping up as Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah denounced the use of cellphones due to concerns they could be tracked by Israel.*
*As Hezbollah increasingly relied on the explosive-laced devices, Israeli intelligence officers saw them as “buttons” that could be pressed at any time, setting off the explosions that rocked Lebanon Tuesday, according to the Times.*
*[…] A Hungarian government spokesman also said the pagers had never been in Hungary and that BAC Consultants merely acted as an intermediary.*
*“Authorities have confirmed that the company in question is a trading intermediary, with no manufacturing or operational site in Hungary. It has one manager registered at its declared address, and the referenced devices have never been in Hungary,” Zoltán Kovács posted Wednesday on X. He did not say where the pagers were manufactured.*
Trojan pager
So the batteries lasted 2 years?
They really fucked over the Taiwanese company who supplied the hardware then, assume they just licensed it like anyone else maybe could but the resulting product bore the brand of what could be an innocent company from Taiwan.
I swear, a good chunk of Redditors get more frustrated the less civilians Israel kills in an operation…Y’all are weird, but I’m glad you’re speaking up because your responses to this maximally targeted pager/walkie-talkie attack really proves your unreasonably, bias, ignorance, and impossible double-standards toward Israel.
I laughed when the leader of Hezzbollah said he condemned the attacks, like you’re a terrorist group, you don’t get to condemn shit. You’ll suck up your clowns getting blown up and stfu.
What’s unclear to me is how Israel convinced Hezbollah to buy those particular pagers.
People going on about whether it was a good way to target an enemy fail to see what the real purpose of the attack was. In many ways, killing was actually the secondary objective, with the primary objective being to shatter confidence in communications technologies that Hezbollah are unable to source internally.
First step, break trust in modern smart devices. Easily done, smart devices have multiple ways of being compromised and turned into Judas devices. Hezbollah’s response is to go to lower tech solutions like pagers… Pagers blow up, can’t trust pagers either. Go to walkie-talkies… Which also blow up. What’s left? Landline phones? Tin cans and string?
The communication options and ability to source equipment that isn’t potentially compromised is severely impacted. With no ability to communicate easily, the operational effectiveness of Hezbollah is substantially reduced, their ability to adapt to changes in circumstance or disseminate recent or up to date information is drastically reduced, and they become a much easier force to combat and deal with.
In addition, if left with few apparent “safe” communication paths, any one of those could deliberately be left available to serve as a trap, designed from the start to collect information for use by Israel.
Exploding pagers and radios is meant to induce fear and mistrust of the technology. The fact it might kill or maim targets is a useful secondary objective when taking the big picture into account.
Its awfully convenient how many think this is indiscriminate attacks on civilians unlike all the thousands of rockets launched at Israel.
Did they have Boeing contract manufacture?
From the NYT article:
> For the Lebanese, the second wave of explosions was confirmation of the lesson from the day before: They now live in a world in which the most common of communication devices can be transformed into instruments of death.
> One woman, Um Ibrahim, stopped a reporter in the middle of the confusion and begged to use a cellphone to call her children. Her hands shaking, she dialed a number and then screamed a directive:
> “Turn off your phones now!”
What a terrible world to live in.
I speculated this, you can’t just make a random pager explode
Operation Grim Beeper
Reminds me of the FBI producing Anom, the high security cellphone, to wiretap the biggest drug dealers in the world.
Wasnt this the plot of the first kingsmen but instead of exploding them people fight each other?
Reminds of The Wire – when they where able to sell the drug dealers pre-wire tapped cell phones.
I bet the hezbollah got the idea to use pagers by watching The Wire episodes.
So NONE of these guys ever traveled with their pagers through an airport? So do I have to be worried about an untraceable explosive?
An organisation that is dedicated to murdering everyone living beyond the 7th century but which nonetheless uses 20th century tools to do so, can hardly complain when their hypocrisy is made to rebound against them.
I’m really curious how they triggered these.
Since people like to think that international laws are subject to their own “feelings”
> Brian Finucane, a former State Department legal adviser under Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, notes a law of war that prohibits the “use of booby-traps or other devices in the form of harmless portable objects which are specifically designed and constructed to contain explosive material.” Both Israel and Lebanon have agreed to the prohibition, Article 7(2) of Amended Protocol II, which was added to international laws of war in 1996.
> “I think detonating pagers in people’s pockets without any knowledge of where those are, in that moment, is a pretty evident indiscriminate attack,” said Jessica Peake, an international law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. “I think this seems to be quite blatant, both violations of both proportionality and indiscriminate attacks.”
[Source](https://theintercept.com/2024/09/19/israel-pager-walkie-talkie-attack-lebanon-war-crimes/)
From the [UN:](https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/09/exploding-pagers-and-radios-terrifying-violation-international-law-say-un)
> UN human rights experts condemned the malicious manipulation of thousands of electronic pagers and radios to explode simultaneously across Lebanon and Syria **as “terrifying” violations of international law.**
> The attacks reportedly killed at least 32 people and maimed or injured 3,250, including 200 critically. Among the dead are a boy and a girl, as well as medical personnel. Around 500 people suffered severe eye injuries, including a diplomat. Others suffered grave injuries to their faces, hands and bodies.
> “These attacks violate the human right to life, absent any indication that the victims posed an imminent lethal threat to anyone else at the time,” the experts said. “Such attacks require prompt, independent investigation to establish the truth and enable accountability for the crime of murder.
so working as intended?
Did someone already tell them not to turn their pagers on?
So they did a man-in-the-middle atttack as we say in IT, introduced these items into the supply chain.
There goes the Israeli pager and Walkie talkie industrial complex.
Tens of dollars gone!
Oh man. The fact that Hezbollah actually paid for these makes it so much sweeter.
I guess the profit margins must have taken a bit of a hit for all of the additional “no cost” features that Israel built in.
So, it was a win-win for Israel?
They got paid for the pagers and used it as an attack on their enemy?
Israel finally watched The Wire.