Hezbollah official calls it the group’s ‘biggest security breach’ in nearly a year of cross-border fire with Israel.
  • @dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
    67•3 months ago

    NYT has a link up which it claims has been verified. It is a video of someone at a market who had one of these in their messenger bag. The video shows a decent size explosion, which blew a big hole in the bag and knocked the guy to the ground.

    https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/09/17/world/israel-hamas-war-news/44771255-fd1d-5028-8228-aff0ca5b8139

    I doubt you could make an explosion that big with a AA battery. They must have planted the stuff in some massive supply chain hack.

    • @alvvayson@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      50•3 months ago

      Yep, all the electrical engineers who have chimed in say it looks more like explosives.

      A battery would get hot and start a fire. It wouldn’t instantly explode like this.

    • @Dave@lemmy.nzEnglish
      4•3 months ago

      Given how targeted the attacks were at certain people, does this imply a bunch of people walking around with explosives in their pagers, where they weren’t set off because they weren’t one of the targets?

      • @dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
        21•3 months ago

        NYT says this switch to pagers has been recent, after the Oct 7 attacks last year, when Hezbollah suspected that Israel was spying on the cell network, and using it to locate targets for strikes. So all these pagers got distributed to Hezbollah-affiliated people in short order . This system doesn’t use commercial networks, and has been called a “closed” network by the NYT.

        If all that is true, then that means anyone with one of these closed-network pagers got it from being involved with Hezbollah in the first place.