Utterly baffling to me but they’ve pulled off an incredible feat. Evidently (which means there’s no evidence except my mate Mike) mossad sent out disinformation that hezbollahs phones were compromised. So they did what anyone would do and ordered a job lot from Thailand which mossad then tampered with. But surely many pagers must be in a store so why hasn’t some warehouse blown sky high? And how did all the explosives get through customs? They’ve just killed their ambassador! And how does the supply chain work? Were they distributed in a day or so? Because given the number of devices surely some would have gone in for repair?
You gotta hand it to Mossad
by 109 Comments
Taiwan not Thailand
You say incredible, I say despicable. I wonder if some double agent was involved in getting them to the people that the Israelis want to kill, maim and disfigure. Children amongst them.
Almost certainly. Too many unknowns.
Last week: “Israel should stop indiscriminate attacks and only go for specific targets.:
This week: “Israel should stop discriminating attacks on specific targets”
This piece of ingenuity is to be applauded, I think. A very specific attack on terrorist targets.
And those terrorists who had their pagers explode in their trouser pockets certainly won’t be emulating Hamas’s enthusiasm for rape any time soon.
Mazel tov!
Not all terrorists … the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon was also injured when his pager exploded … what are the chances of that?
Paging Donald Trump…
Indeed. What would the Iranian ambassador be doing with a pager issued to a terrorist group? ‘Tis a most perplexing mystery.
Hezbollah are designated a terrorist group but are also the de-facto government of vast swathes of Lebanon.
Why wouldn’t an ambassador have the means to contact a political group who mostly control the country they are assigned to?
This was not a case of Israeli intelligence “fooling” Hezbollah into ditching their phones and replacing them with pagers. Mossad has been successful in locating and killing people they want to assassinate by tracking their phones. Hezbollah’s answer to the problem was to order their people to ditch their phones and use pagers that didn’t use GPS technology. They bought a consignment of pagers from a supplier and distributed them.
A very clever tactic by Mossad, but how unlikely it is that they were able to get explosives into a whole consignment of devices with such apparent ease? It’s been speculated that instead of getting explosives into the pagers, they may have developed a virus that can cause a device’s Lithium battery to rapidly overheat and explode. It would be a lot easier to infect the devices with a virus than to physically tamper with a whole batch of them.
If true this is problematic in that almost all electronic devices worldwide use Lithium batteries, so now we are all at risk of someone with access to the virus infecting and blowing our devices up at will.
Scary.
Even scarier if the tech can activate batteries on devices that are turned off.
Scarier still for anyone who flies.
There were several thousand of these devices surely someone was flying … it just gets more fascinating to me
That’s very scary
If you really want to be scared, take a look at every electronic device you own that bears the words “Made in China” and imagine what their secret services could do.
This Israeli action is a wake up call.
Not sure I go along with the lithium battery theory it would heat up before exploding … but what do I know
That was my first thought. Most of the the products I have to sign off contain Lithium Ion batteries, and they can be nasty if they do get pressurised/overheat/crack/exposed to air. But a virus on the processor would have to be really extreme to pull enough current to make the battery hot enough to explode, and heating things up takes a while, so would be difficult to synchronise.
Don’t be alarmed, folks. Your mobile phone battery is not about to explode. There are simple hardware techniques to stop it happening even if it does get too hot. The flaming batteries on that 787 were subject to rapid changes in temperature and pressure.
Focus has settled on when and where pagers were compromised; a senior Lebanese source said the devices had been tampered with by Israel’s spy service at the production level. “Mossad injected a board inside of the device that has explosive material that receives a code. It’s very hard to detect it through any means,” the source said.
Another security source said that up to 3g of explosives were hidden in the pagers and that it had gone “undetected” by Hezbollah for months. Other officials suggested that the explosive was placed next to the battery, alongside a switch that could then be triggered remotely.
Hmm. Iranian Ambassdor has something that targets Hamas?
Maybe too close to Hamas then.
How did it target Hamas? It happened in Lebanon.
He clearly means Hezbollah.
Let’s face it, it’s not hard to get confused.
Thanks
Apart from the fact that Hamas (Sunni) and Hezbollah (Shia) are entirely different organisations and with distinct ideological goals (albeit with overlap) yes it it’s easy.
Yeah, but both begin with H.
Ingenuity. Applauded. Have a word with yourself.
Whatever. I remain pleased that the bad guys have been so impressively clouted.
How certain you are of right and wrong. Impressive.
Personal definitions of right and wrong is kinda what politics is all about, no?
Indeed. Applauding ingenious state funded terrorism, not so much.
It’s the aspect of ingenuity he’s commenting on. The state funded terorrism is your own slant on it. At the end, it’s a war and shit will happen.
No, my slant on it is that applauding this despicable attack for its ingenuity is horrible.
I think our difference is that I don’t see an attack that very specifically targets terrorists as despicable.
Couldn’t agree more
It wasn’t at all specific. Two children were among the victims. If you don’t find that despicable I can’t see us agreeing here. Perhaps we should move on.
A war – and this is a war – without collateral damage is something we can only hope for. It won’t ever happen.
Speaking with specific regard to Gaza, I don’t think the murder of literally thousands of children should ever be considered acceptable collateral damage.
As Pope Francis said last year, “Here we have gone beyond wars. This is not war. This is terrorism”.
@gary: at last something I and the Pope can agree on.
@mc-escher
I’m sure there’s more. Some of his statements regarding women, other religions and homosexuals/homosexuality are far more open-minded than his predecessors. I’d say he’s easily the best Pope of my lifetime. (Mind you, I’d also say that’s an extremely low bar and the Catholic Church should hang its head in shame for some of its policies and political interference).
If your definition of a “discriminating” attack includes detonating thousands of devices when you don’t know where they are or how many people are around them, leading to 3000-odd injuries and the deaths of children, then it might well be time to get a new dictionary.
I can’t quite get my head around the rights and wrongs of it and what the repercussions might be, but I’m amazed by how clever/devious the whole thing is.
The BBC explained tonight how the pager manufacturer said it licensed the work to some firm in Hungary. The Beeb’s man goes to the Hungarian firm’s supposed HQ and finds only what appears to be an accommodation address… The plot thickens.
For 2 days, it’s felt as if the news has been written by Frederick Forsyth, Tom Clancy, etc. And nobody seems to know what might happen next. Clearly, if Israel is at the bottom of this, they have some lateral thinkers in their government or security services who are *really* past worrying what anybody thinks about their country’s behaviour.
There’s a book or film in this
I really have no idea why anybody, anybody, could applaud this latest escapade. Yeah sure, some Hezbollah henchmen were killed who were probably, almost definitely, horrible human beings but describing, for instance, the blowing up of a six year old boy as “collateral damage” is despicable beyond belief. Shame on you, shame.
I’m uncomfortably reminded of the CIA’s exploding cigars.
I suppose the only thing to be said in its favour is that if the Israelis had decided to wreak shock and awe on Hezbollah à la Hamas the ‘collateral damage’ would have been much greater.
@lando-cakes has previously made it clear that he attributes such protestations to nothing more than anti-semitism.
I have not. Why is the hobbyist left so prone to indulging in fantasy?
You wrote in a previous discussion: “As Mrs Merton might have put it, what is it about the world’s only Jewish state that attracts such opposition?”. I assumed this was meant to suggest that anti-semitism is the reason behind such widespread opposition to Israel’s current actions. It was an interesting discussion and as I wrote at the time, I’d be interested to know your thoughts further.
Am I “the hobbyist left”? Surely not. There’s only one of me.
I’ve been brooding over this. Is the “hobbyist left” so called because it’s not the proper Stalinist Left, or because it’s not one of the many shades of Centrism or Rightness?
Ou sont les gauchistes amateurs d’antan?
Presumably members of the hobbyist left spend Mondays to Fridays sucking on the capitalist teat while using their free evenings and weekends to denounce the system and demand its overthrow
I thought perhaps it was a reference to my interest in interior design.
I assumed it was when the dull bloke with the model railway exited the pub and let the talk return to football.
@fentonsteve has a model railway?
Are you suggesting @fentonsteve is dull??
If he did have a model railway, it would sound amazing though….
“It’s a Hornby R1255M Train Set on a HO gauge (I prefer that to OO because the partial friction coefficient was found to degrade above 20kHz on slopes greater than 4% incline. The room is accoustically balanced and the sound effects are put through a Behringer Eurodesk MX9000 24/48 to smooth out high transients and into some Mission…. ”
cont. p94
😘
I think you are confusing me with either Rod Stewart (a fellow Ginger) or (more likely, as a fellow dullster) Pete Waterman.
@Leedsboy
You’re getting your hobbyists mixed up with your Hornbyists
@jaygee Hornbyists are people that get turned on by model railways aren’t they?
You and your one-track mind!
The hobbyist left are those for whom stern resolutions and shouty demonstrations are an end in themselves. Those for whom no meeting is complete without a set of interminable, arse-numbing points of order.
That doesn’t sound like Gary.
Bits of it does. Can’t stand meetings though. Nor demonstrations. Not a fan of sternness. And especially not of shoutiness. Quite like points of order though, I must say, as they give me some idea of how long the interminable, arse-numbing meeting might go on for.
It’s just occurred to me that “points of order” doesn’t mean what I thought it meant. At all. So I’ve now looked it up and I was right: I was wrong. it means “an appeal to the Chair or Speaker for clarification or for a ruling on a matter of procedure”. Who knew?
My not inconsiderable research and reflection on the meaning of such specifically technological terminology has led to greater insight and understanding, due to which I hereby retract my previous post. Feck points of order. Can’t stand them.
All squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares. I hope that helps.
Most helpful, ta. Clarifies your comment, though I still don’t think the comment itself was very helpful. Sweeping generalisations based on a small minority never are, especially not in this case. I’ve seen it suggested that people who aren’t opposed to Israel’s actions simply don’t value the lives of Muslims as human beings (by – “hobbiest crank Leftie”? – Owen Jones on numerous tweets, for example). That might well be true for a small minority, but I think the majority of Israel’s supporters genuinely believe that Israel has no choice but to bombard Gaza and accusations of racism (be it of anti-semitism or Islamophobia) only contribute to the division and hatred. Examining the alternatives to the violence has to be the moral imperative.
My immediate reaction was to be reminded of the heads exploding scenes in Kingsman.
I’m normally to be seen quoting Elvis Presley, not Costello, but I’ll put this here…
“Diving for dear life, when we could be diving for pearls”.
Isn’t the latest Mojo CD, ‘Point Me At The Sky’, great.
I am loath to comment as I shy away from anything remotely political nowadays with the exemption of voicing my thoughts on various matters when in close company. However I can see absolutely nothing fascinating or laudable about the killing and maiming of people be they Lebanese, Syrian, Palestinian or Israeli. This is just the latest chapter in a conflict that has been ongoing for decades leaving far too many grieving on all sides. This is not a football match. One doesn’t have to pick a side. There won’t be any victors just victims. Idle speculation about the “ingenious ” use of technology to inflict death and harm upon others does nothing except reflect poorly upon those that choose to indulge in such crass behaviour.
Agree.
I don’t think it’s a question of picking a side. The terrorists have done that for us.
I can’t agree with you, Lando. I’ve read god knows how many voices blaming Hamas for starting the war, blaming Israel for its treatment of Palestinians, blaming Palestine for electing Hamas, blaming Israel for.. etc. etc. etc. And what good is all that doing? It’s time now to end this conflict and, somehow, find a way out of it that doesn’t involve the mass slaughter of innocents and the exacerbation of hatred.
That may be the case for you. Not for me. All I see is suffering and I cling to a no doubt naive hope for an end to that. Seeking by whatever means to spread that further does absolutely nothing other than to increase that suffering and make the continuation of that sorry state of affairs inevitable. I side with the innocent victims of aggression irrespective of whoever they may be. I condemn all those who revel in the misery of others whatever “side” they may feel compelled to align themselves to.
Also disagree with that statement.
I nail my colours to no “side” in this ongoing shitshow.
No ifs or buts.
Whatever the politics, it is clear that for Netanyahu and his cronies, the lives of Palestinians and their supporters are worthless
Absolutely. Netanyahu is not a man who wants a peaceful solution. Instead, he is ensuring generations on both sides will hold utter hatred and fear of each other for decades to come. I have no words for that man, or indeed, those who boorishly celebrate his inhumane actions.
One might equally say that about the leaders of Hamas. Or any group that routinely uses civilians as human shields in order to win cheap public opinion points when their hiding places are destroyed.
And apart from this awful situation, if the [insert odious political group] had got this terrible technology and had this terrible idea then I think they would use it too.
Of course Hamas are despicable too. The cowardly and horrific attack almost a year ago killed around 1100 Israelis. An estimated 40,000 Palestinians have since been killed including around 18,000 women and children. Gaza has been destroyed more or less completely, healthcare has collapsed and there is considerable famine. All supported by the US and the UK
Yes. Not sure why you’re replying specifically to me.
Because you replied to me and raised a point
Fair enough
I have no time for Netanyahu. however I don’t think there is any real equivalence between him and Hamas.
Hamas have a constitutional commitment to genocide – their charter calls for the murder of all Jews. The chilling thing about their bestial attack on 7th October wasn’t so much the number of people they murdered as their evident glee in doing so- for example, in discussing which child cowering under a table they would murder first.
What Netanyahu is doing is genocide and destroying an area where Palestinians are legally entitled to live. Doubt anybody here thinks Hamas are good guys.
Telling civilians to move out of an area that is about to be attacked is a pretty inefficient way of going about genocide, I’d have thought. It’s almost as if that wasn’t the intention at all!
Exactly.
They tell people to move out of an area and then they bomb it flat. Then they tell the people to move out of the area they’ve just had to move into and they bomb that place flat as well.
@Mike_H and then for good measure, they bomb and cripple people fleeing on their way to ‘safe places’ too. And the aid workers trying desperately to help them
And yet, somehow, this precise, forensic, nay civilised way of conducting a war has killed tens of thousands of women and children. I stand to be corrected, but I dare say some of them may not have been members of Hamas or in sympathy with October 7.
Genocide is a word that shouldn’t be lightly bandied about, I agree. How about ‘killing a fuck of a lot of people’, will that do?
In the book of Joshua, the chosen people set about systematically destroying the Canaanites, men women and children, without mercy. “The extermination of the nations glorifies Yahweh as a warrior and promotes Israel’s claim to the land.” This was a practice called herem, nowadays genocide.
The book of Joshua was completed around 600 BC and is set around 1300 BC, though Jericho was not thought to have been occupied until 1000 BC.
Lots of cities were utterly destroyed around that time, perpetrated by different regimes and different religions.
This war is being conducted with high tech equipment but the mindset of the Bronze Age. It is a dispute dating back 3324 years, according to the Bible.
@dai and also moderate Muslim states and even Saudi Arabia who was on the verge of an historic peace agreement with Israel before Hamas threw a massive spanner in the works.
Wonder who was behind all of this? The same govt who is sending ballistic missiles to Putin.
Taiwan is a staunch ally and supporter of Israel. Israel is one of the few states that will supply Taiwan with weapons and military tech. They signed a technology exchange agreement in in 2006. Taiwan’s NSB intelligence bureau has close links with Mossad. I’m sure when the NSB heard an order for pagers had come in from Hezbollah, Taipei tipped off their mates in Tel Aviv. The rest was just a ‘special customer order’ for Taiwan to modify the end product.
It’s grand that we now have a thread with the M word in the title. Probably just added a few hundred new people reading the Afterword with that one post…
First they attack their pagers , next will be their Walkmans
So the recent cassette revival is all part of a sinister plot by Iran? You might be onto something there.
Trying hard not to be po-faced here but still far from sure this situation has any aspect to joke about.
No offence meant, I’m trying to bring a bit of equal-opportunity AW piss-taking to this miserable thread.
For what it’s worth, I’m with Dai.
No offence taken. You, as we say, good man.
Junior on the other hand .. (although his radio show is most excellent)
It might not be something to joke about, but any conversation on the subject is rendered meaningless by instant claims of anti-semitism or anti-Palestinianism (is that a thing?) whatever anyone says.
Shelagh Fogarty has been excellent on LBC on this subject. There she is, diligently going through every single sentence, every single word, every single syllable, treading on egg-shells so as to not offend and, five minutes into her introduction, she will have already – on every single occasion – been described as anti-semitic, closely followed by then being described as anti-Palestine!
It’s like bigot-bingo or, if you like, watching a Celtic-Rangers match.
Ah, yes: but this situation doesn’t seem to have a Partick Thistle equivalent…
Well… pagers. FFS Whodathunk pagers would even be used in this era let alone what happened there.
Thanks for listening BTW.
No location data on a pager. That’s why they were using them.
Yes, I get that. But they are archaic hence my walkman quip.
Apportioning blame in this type of situation is pretty futile. It really isn’t the who started it debate that will stop the killing.
Picking sides is therefore futile. Even if you, having perfectly weighed up all of the history and background, have managed to get to a side to pick that you think makes sense.
The real point is stopping it. There are two ways. Wait until one side obliterates the other side or, actively seek peace. There is very little of the latter going on, largely because seeking the second option is percieved to be weak politically. The people who have the power to do soemthing are more concerned with their polling numbers than saving lives.
Netanyahu is using the conflict to cling to power. Hamas and Hezbollah’s leadership are doing the same. A constant state of conflict suits all of them very well indeed.
The lack of respect for human life is truly tragic. I have never felt so pessimistic about the human race as I do right now.
“What would it take?”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/sep/06/israeli-podcasters-laughing-gaza-genocide-two-nice-jewish-boys
Exactly. I often have an uncomfortable feeling that when people say “ceasefire” they mean Israel. Everyone needs to cease firing, slinging rockets, holding hostages etc.
Some of the people who have the power to stop it are not concerned about polling numbers because they need not worry about polls. Key amongst them are the monarchies across the middle east and their opponents in Iran.
Very good point.
You gotta hand it to Benito Mussolini – what with the train times, etc.
And his dynastic forward-planning…
A myth, they weren’t and he didn’t.
Feeling the need to educate myself a bit, I just bought a book called The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Very Short Introduction by Martin Bunton (OUP). It’s about 10 years old, but since the roots of it all go back a lot longer than that it should be ok.
Not feeling quite strong enough for the books on this recommended list, but time will tell.
https://theconversation.com/10-books-to-help-you-understand-israel-and-palestine-recommended-by-experts-217783
The Rashid Khalidi book is exceptionally interesting. It’s a difficult read, but that’s nothing to do with the writing.
Gaza and West Bank press clampdown.
Israel already won’t allow any foreign journalists or news organisations into Gaza. Now they’ve forcibly closed down the West Bank Al Jazeera office as well and confiscated all of their equipment.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rd5z17px4o