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Iran’s Ambassador to Lebanon Loses One Eye, Seriously Damages Other in Pager Explosion, New York Times
Mojtaba Amani, according to the publication, is being evacuated to Iran for treatment. It is noted that before the explosion, the pagers emitted a beep, which prompted many to bring the devices to their faces.
The attack was probably carried out by Israeli intelligence services, which planted explosives in about 5,000 pagers, Reuters reports. Of these, about 3,000 exploded. A senior source in Lebanon told the agency that the devices were planted by the Israeli spy service “at the production level.” “The Mossad inserted a circuit board containing explosive material into the device, which receives a code. It is very difficult to detect by any means. Even with any device or scanner,” the source said.
The day before, 4,000 people were injured in Lebanon, 11 of whom were killed as a result of pager explosions. Reuters writes that hundreds of members of the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, including fighters and medics, were seriously injured due to explosions of pagers, which they use for secret communication.
A second wave of explosions today
The scary thing about a supply chain attack is that Hezbollah aren’t idiots. This is basically like buying a “burner phone” (that name will now have different connotations now).
In the movies, people buying burner phones go to a random corner store and buy a random phone off the shelf. That way, even if they’re under surveillance, the cops / CIA / FBI can’t pre-bug the phone because they don’t know which corner store the person’s going to go to, let alone which phone they’ll pick off the shelf.
If you’re an armed group in Israel’s crosshairs, you’re going to take similar precautions when buying thousands of pagers. The safe way to do it would be to slowly and unpredictably get a small sample of ones that are being sold to the general public. If this is true, it could mean that there are tens of thousands of pagers out there that contain explosives that were merely sold as “decoys” in order to try to make Hezbollah feel safe in buying them. In other words, there may be tens of thousands of explosives in pagers that weren’t activated because they weren’t in the hands of Hezbollah when Israel decided to hit the button.