this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2024
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[–] [email protected] 67 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 month 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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago

Oh wow, that's quite... something.