pton_xd 6 hours ago | next |

Seems like the citizens have been successfully terrorized.

BenFranklin100 6 hours ago | root | parent | next |

As have the Israeli citizens who have been subject to indiscriminate rocket attacks over the last 11 months from Hezbollah. Personally,If had the choice between enduring rockets versus not taking a pager on a flight, I’d prefer the pager ban.

DoreenMichele 6 hours ago | root | parent | next |

Israel controls the water supply in Gaza. They aren't even allowed to collect rain water.

It rains something like 2 inches a year there. People collecting rain water someplace with so little rain are likely quite desperate.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2017/11/the-occu...

I wish there wasn't so much conflict but sometimes the people resorting to violence have been essentially left with no other meaningful solution. People with power can politely ruin your life and murder you and yours and then claim you are the bad guy when you fight back less politely.

dotancohen 3 hours ago | root | parent | next |

> Israel controls the water supply in Gaza.

1. That is a completely different subject - Beirut is in Lebanon, not Gaza.

2. Israel _supplies_ Gaza with water. So Israel controls the water supply in Gaza just like your own water company supplies you with water. And if you were to walk into the offices of the water company and burn the workers' children to death and murder them and kidnap them, well, don't be surprised if they turn off your water supply.

DoreenMichele 2 hours ago | root | parent |

Israel "supplies" Gaza with water because the source of Wadi Gaza (the Gaza River) happens to be on Israeli land.

That's like saying "The US supplies Mexico with water" because the Colorado River originates in the US and the mouth of it is on Mexican soil. Reality: America does all in its power to give as little water as possible to Mexico and the water that reaches the Gulf is a mere trickle, having been largely syphoned off by multiple US states before that point.

What I've read indicates Israel controls the water supply to Gaza and uses and abuses that fact in a hostile fashion.

luuurker 5 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

> I wish there wasn't so much conflict but sometimes the people resorting to violence have been essentially left with no other meaningful solution.

They've been trying to kill each other for years, even when they had other solutions and when Israel was the underdog. The difference in power now is huge, but it's always the same story... if some on both sides had their way, the other side would be wiped without a thought.

jiggawatts 4 hours ago | root | parent | next |

Millenia.

They’ve been at this since biblical times.

This is an ongoing culture war like Sunni vs Shia or Protestant vs Catholic.

The original people involved in the fight are long dead from old age, replaced by generation after generation claiming to be the victim (on both sides, of course).

This is why it’s best to stay out of it and watch from a safe distance. There is no right or wrong, good vs evil, victim and oppressor. It’s A vs B, cats vs dogs, my sports team vs your sports team.

Israel happens to have the technological edge at the moment, but that’s after a couple of thousand years of being a powerless diaspora victim to oppression and actual genocide.

Conversely, their opponents cry victim while we all full well know that if they got the military upper hand they’d do to the Israelis the same or worse.

It’s depressing to see this from the outside, watching the long term damage wrought by what amounts to mind viruses.

That’s all religions are: particularly addictive memes. Memes that kill hosts to protect themselves from other memes.

If you’ve picked a side, you’ve picked a meme you’d like to be infected by.

I prefer the vaccine.

ls612 5 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Which has absolutely nothing to do with Lebanon.

DoreenMichele 5 hours ago | root | parent |

That's not my impression. Some time ago, I tried to sort out why there was conflict in Gaza and there's a complex history going back at least a thousand years.

Saying conflict between Israel and Lebanon is wholly unrelated to conflict between Israel and Gaza is like saying stuff happening in the US state of Georgia has nothing to do with its neighbor Alabama.

I'm failing to readily find an online blurb that supports my understanding. But that detail fails to convince me my understanding is wholly in error.

luuurker 5 hours ago | root | parent | next |

I wouldn't say that currently there's a conflict between Israel and Lebanon, but Hezbollah is in Lebanon and has a lot of power there. They've been launching rockets at Israel and Israel has been killing their higher ups and targetting their ammo.

Depending on how you look at this, you can even call it a proxy war as Hezbollah is supported by Iran. Curiously (or not), one of those injured by the pagers blowing up was the Iranian ambassador... https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/irans-ambassador-l...

DoreenMichele 5 hours ago | root | parent |

I'm not the one who brought up Lebanon as a proxy for Hezbollah. I'm just attempting to reply as best I can in a good faith fashion knowing that's not how most people are trying to reply.

Most people on the Internet are looking to win an argument, not engage in discussion. I appreciate your comment as it adds information rather than picking a fight, but I'm somewhat inclined to step away from this nonsense at this point.

dotancohen 3 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

That complex history goes back to the 7th century. Feel free to ask me anything about it - I'm not an expert but I've spent the past year and a half learning Arabic language and learning both their and our own history here. I'll try to give you as balanced an answer as I can.

You are right - the conflict in Lebanon is related to the conflict in Gaza. That is because despite efforts to frame the conflict as "Israel against 2 million poor Palestinians" the real conflict is "2 billion Muslims against Israel". Every time we have a conflict with one of them, the others jump in to attack us. What's worse, they deliberately keep the Palestinians impoverished and suffering to fester conflict - they say this blatantly. The Palestinian cause is not about creating a state to care for the Palestinian people. The Palestinian cause is about creating an Islamic state to displace the Jewish state, and the Palestinian people are the tool to use to pressure the Jewish state and other interested states. They say this clearly - both the Palestinians and the other Arab nations. But that line is so different from Western line of thinking that I know you find it incredible. I implore you to simply read what they themselves say.

DoreenMichele 2 hours ago | root | parent |

(Assuming your take is correct) Well perhaps if Israel would try to help Palestine care for its people, Palestine would be less willing to be used as a tool for Jewish oppression by other Muslim nations.

At the moment, they are in horrendous crisis, the most obvious and immediate cause of that is Israel and Israel is effectively cooperating with the (according to you) Islamic agenda of painting them as the bad guy so they have a good excuse to exterminate them.

I'm an environmental studies major. I've read for years that our next wars will be fought over water. It looks to me like that's what we are seeing in Gaza.

Water is life. You can't survive without it. Politics aside, if Gaza can't get adequate water to survive, well, most organisms have a survival instinct and will fight like a cornered rat when given no viable means to survive while playing nice with their neighbors.

BenFranklin100 6 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

[flagged]

joomooru 5 hours ago | root | parent | next |

Raping and killing innocent civilians is an abhorrent crime. So we both agree that what Israel has done in Gaza (40,000 killed) and the systemic rape of Palestinian prisoners is abhorrent as well? What say you, Ben?

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-ham... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sde_Teiman_detention_camp#Sexu...

riscy 5 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

The difference is that Western media only refers to the detonation of boobytrapped devices that have injured thousands of civilians as an “intelligence operation” rather than a terror attack.

yellowapple 4 hours ago | root | parent | next |

Do you have a source for that number of civilian injuries? Everything I can find (incl. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz04m913m49o) gives every indication that Hezbollah members were the target, that these pagers and radios were primarily/exclusively issued to Hezbollah members, and that the civilians killed/injured were those in close proximity to said Hezbollah members.

EasyMark 4 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

I don’t consider Hezbollah as “civilians”and I highly doubt your “injured thousands of citizens” and more like “injured thousands of Hezbollah terrorists and a few dozen civilians”

riscy 4 hours ago | root | parent |

Hezbollah is a political party that holds seats in Lebanon’s parliament. It’s bizarre to paint them with a broad brush.

firejake308 6 hours ago | prev | next |

What I'm interested to see is how this will spur additional divestment from Chinese supply chains in Western countries. Now that Israel has set a precedent, Western governments will likely be even more hesitant to use any goods that touched Chinese territory during production.

kylehotchkiss 6 hours ago | root | parent | next |

If that were the case, I think China would have the incentive to remove this from their own supply chains, they don't want to be excluded from world trade because of this stuff. But as others have noted, China was not the link in this specific instance, rather a European country was

krm01 6 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

You mean European supply chains. Devices were produced in EU (Hungary)

rysertio 6 hours ago | root | parent |

Devices were procured through Hungary, they were made in Taiwan

lukan 6 hours ago | root | parent |

The parts maybe, but they were assembled and the explosives put in in hungary as of current information.

(And Taiwan is not China, but the 3. World war might be fought over the question whether they must be the same)

ls612 5 hours ago | root | parent |

Well the classic route for electronics manufacturing is chips get fabricated in Taiwan/Japan/SK/America -> the PCB and other mechanical elements get integrated in China -> the finished product gets exported to the West. So you could certainly have the explosives adding process be done in step 2 regardless of if step 2 occurs in Europe or China.

hooverd 5 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

Why would they? It was likely our ally and NATO member Hungary who did it.

fmobus 5 hours ago | root | parent |

I don't think the current Hungarian government could be trusted with this. The only participation from Hungary was that the company selling the tampered devices was supposedly registered there.

But we all know that company was just a front for Mossad, and in all likelihood the devices never even touch Europe.

jxramos 6 hours ago | prev | next |

interesting strategy, make the cost of modern communications to be too high due to hard to verify risks and subsequently push your enemy back to adopting slower modes of communication.

imglorp 6 hours ago | root | parent |

Cellphones can be tracked. Walkies and pagers can't.

bigfatkitten 5 hours ago | root | parent | next |

Thuraya handsets don't work without reporting their GNSS position to the network in cleartext, they only work outdoors (ie they don't work inside tunnels and "hospitals"), and because of their cost they tend to be carried by senior leaders.

If I were the IDF, this is the communications system that I would prefer the enemy to use.

imglorp an hour ago | root | parent |

The cell network knows a lot about handset position without handset gps participation. UTDOA is good to several meters, CGI-TA to a lesser extent, etc.

brk 5 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

This isn't entirely true. Cellphones are actively transmitting and checking in with the towers, so they're pretty easy to track.

Walkies transmit sporadically, so they can be tracked when activated. It's not instantaneous, but with a decent logging system you can keep track of users to a large degree. Even when you have multiple units all of the same model on the same frequency, there are various tricks to sorting them out to individual units.

One-way pagers don't transmit typical signals, buy like all RF devices, they're still emitting some signals and are trackable to a large degree with an antenna network deployed for that purpose. You might not be able to track them deep within enemy territory, but there is still a lot that can be done to track general movements or to find where clusters of the oscillators associated with the pagers turn up in large numbers.

bewaretheirs 6 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

If you transmit, you can be tracked. If you could modify a device to include an explosive, you could also modify it to include an undisclosed transmitter.

nirav72 an hour ago | root | parent |

Which would then require Israel to use missiles. Which would be more complicated. Both logistically and politically. Also, it would be like playing whack-a-mole and risk of lot more collateral damage. Not to mention expensive.

At least with the pager attack, Israel hasn’t directly admitted it was behind it. Even though pretty much everyone knows it was them. But kinda hard to deny missile attacks.

outworlder 6 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

Of course they can, just not as easily or conveniently.

EDIT: I meant walkie talkies. Old school pagers probably can't. Also I guess if you just use walkie talkies to listen to instructions. The station broadcasting can be tracked, however.

bhelkey 6 hours ago | root | parent | next |

A walkie-talkie receiving a message should be a passive device no?

One can triangulate a radio broadcasting, I don't know how one would track receiving the broadcast.

vueko 6 hours ago | root | parent | next |

A traditional FM walkie-talkie, yes, passive, but a P25/DMR handheld radio, especially operating in trunked mode, not necessarily. One notorious example of this is P25's use of packet retransmission requests: https://www.mattblaze.org/papers/p25sec.pdf

A lot of worksite-oriented handheld radios these days are not just oldschool FM and use digital protocols to efficiently manage bandwidth, which can involve transmitting when not actually sending voice data. I haven't seen any confirmation of whether the affected devices were digital or not, but if they were buying COTS radio equipment there's a decent chance that they were.

lukan 6 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

If the walkie talkie remains a passiv listener, then no, but then it is also only half as useful. And a unmodified pager is a passive listener by default and cannot be tracked, which is why they were bought in the first place from Hezbollah.

donsupreme 6 hours ago | prev | next |

how soon will US overreact and start banning within US airport and other public places?

ProfessorLayton 6 hours ago | root | parent | next |

9/11 happened long enough ago that most people don't remember what it was like flying before all the security theater and TSA bs happened, so they don't know how nice it could be.

But if personal smartphones/tablets are banned people will riot.

roozbeh18 6 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

we have not had a plane blow up into buildings since, so something must be working. yes, it's also inconvenient.

jgwil2 5 hours ago | root | parent | next |

That's specious reasoning. I have a rock that keeps tiger away. How does it work? It doesn't, it's just a stupid rock. But I don't see any tigers around here, do you?

ok_dad 5 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Yea they added flight deck doors that you can’t get through and a policy that the doors stay closed through a flight. The TSA did nothing to help, the planes are a hard target now.

positr0n 5 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

> we have not had a plane blow up into buildings since, so something must be working

Yeah, 10 minutes after the event every person on earth now knows the best strategy is to rush the cockpit, not sit calmly and wait for the hijackers to ask for a ransom, which was the previous norm.

Between that and reinforced concrete doors flying planes into buildings is no longer a viable strategy.

mlazos 6 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

Or the threat has subsided. Not saying get rid of security, but I think it’s okay to allow water bottles again.

JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

The new scanners (ones that can differentiate water and explosives) would pick this up.

trebligdivad 6 hours ago | root | parent | next |

It does make me wonder if there delay in the UK/EU is related to this; the delay happened within the same time frame of these devices being delivered.

lukan 6 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

How would you know this?

Lots of different explosives exist and if it is sealed in an airtight container, good luck finding it.

JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

> Lots of different explosives exist and if it is sealed in an airtight container, good luck finding it

The new scanners take a CT scan [1]. Airtightness is irrelevant. It's not foolproof, largely because we man the scanners with idiots [2]. But it would be detectable and, particularly after the element of surprise has been lifted, likely to be caught.

Interestingly, "Lebanon has one of the highest number of computed tomography (CT) scanners per capita in the world" [3]. Hezbollah being Hezbollah, they could repurpose these from healthcare.

[1] https://www.internationalairportreview.com/news/32019/analog...

[2] https://abcnews.go.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-...

[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09698...

AmericanChopper 5 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

I don’t know how those scanners work, but I’ve always presumed they’re looking for individual chemicals. There’s not many you’d need to detect to find explosives (probably just high concentrations of carbon, nitrogen and metals?)

lukan 5 hours ago | root | parent |

There are lots of different explosives. High concentrations of nitrogen you can also find in the air for example. And metal all around in an airport. Carbon as well.

AmericanChopper 5 hours ago | root | parent |

There’s not a lot of solid state nitrogen or metallic powders in an airport. The rest of the high explosives that I’m aware of are all rather dense organics. Possessing those things is how you get yourself selected for secondary screening.

Again, I’m not an expert in how these things work, so I’m happy to be corrected. That to me just seems like the most obvious way the new dual energy scanners would be put to use.

klarzn 6 hours ago | prev | next |

Lots of ink has been spilled on whether this operation was "legal" in a war or not. The Guardian points out a global treaty, which is signed by Israel, that prohibits booby trapped innocent looking devices:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/sep/18/the-gu...

So now we have new fodder for the TSA and others, probably justified this time.

ChocolateGod 6 hours ago | root | parent | next |

> The Guardian points out a global treaty, which is signed by Israel, that prohibits booby trapped innocent looking devices:

If the last 3 years (Ukraine onwards) have proved, international law and treaties mean nothing, other states are too cowardly to enforce them.

maxglute 5 hours ago | prev | next |

Wonder if any of these electronics passed modern airport security, someone must have travelled with 1000s of devices out there for months.

stoperaticless 5 hours ago | prev | next |

Are the models of walkies talkies and pagers known?

Did they use batteries or rechargeable batteries?

I guess one of those might get banned as well.

colechristensen 6 hours ago | prev | next |

That is entirely sensible, I wonder how long it will last or if it will spread?

How difficult was the sabotage to detect? Would it be detectable by ordinary airport scanners/explosives detection methods?

What do we do if the answer is "you can't trust a flight with an electronics device onboard"?

AI detection of anomalous Xray readings from known hardware?

miki123211 6 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I'm afraid that the only sensible answer might end up being no more right to repair, no more phones from smaller manufacturers and no more unauthorized parts.

Something like, if it goes through an airport, it has to have enough charge to turn on, and all the parts need to deliver a cryptographic signature (via an USB-C connection) that they're genuine and that they haven't been tampered with. Your phone is from a Chinese manufacturer? Good luck entering the US.

It's that or no electronic on flights, not even in checked-in luggage,, and that won't fly (no pun intended) in 2024.

That's assuming airport scanners are genuinely incapable of detecting this kind of sabotage, and I hope that this assumption is wrong.

mc32 6 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Yep, no-brainer with regards to the decision.

W/regard to the method used… that open a new vector for all kinds of bad things. These were working devices that would function like normal but could be remotely detonated. What else would a terrorists want in a tool?

rogerrogerr 6 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

The answer might be “you can’t trust a flight with potential terrorists onboard”. There are obvious, but high-false-positive and non-PC, methods to make that estimation.

kmeisthax 6 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

You forgot "high false-negative". There are plenty of white guys that want to do a terrorism as well.

bigfatkitten 5 hours ago | root | parent |

And the security services have done an amazing job of mostly ignoring the white supremacists, Sovereign Citizens, Christian fundamentalists and other white guys with a penchant for politically motivated violence.

whimsicalism 6 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

hizbollah is a broad political party in lebanon, not simply a paramilitary group

i know blonde hair blue eye people with relatives involved, so you are just making false inferences

crooked-v 6 hours ago | root | parent | next |

More than that, it's basically a mini-state within a state... and at this point more functional than the government of Lebanon. The attack was by all accounts pretty well targeted, but that still means there are probably a bunch of dead or maimed civil servants of the sort that a traditional military offensive would never care about.

jordanb 6 hours ago | root | parent |

> attack was by all accounts pretty well targeted

Which accounts are you listening to? The accounts that I've heard is that they set every single one of these off all at once with no targeting and they blew up all over Lebanon in markets, theaters, schools, public transportation, etc.

Sabinus 5 hours ago | root | parent |

They weren't a random shipment of pagers to Lebanon, they were specifically ordered and used by Hesbollah.

jordanb 4 hours ago | root | parent |

They were distributed randomly throughout the country before detonation. The fact that they were likely purchased by Hezbollah members is kinda beside the point when Israel knew they were going to be all over the place in public places and crowds when they blew up. Thousands of people were injured and some killed for the crime of being near a member of Hezbollah (or even just their belongings) when the bombs went off.

If thousands of bombs were distributed to members of a large criminal syndicate in the US or other western country and then all detonated as these people went about their lives and interacted with normal citizens, we would be absolutely horrified.

JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago | root | parent |

> were distributed randomly throughout the country before detonation

We have literally zero evidence of this. Either way. If you think you can pierce the fog of war by looking at one side's official announcements, you're going to spend a lot of time confused.

JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

> hizbollah is a broad political party in lebanon

To be fair, so were the Nazis. (Trying to think of a less-combustible example.)

hammock 6 hours ago | root | parent | next |

The Bolsheviks? Southern Democrats in 1883 after the Supreme Court ruled the federal government lacked jurisdiction over racist terror?

whimsicalism 5 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

right, so if you were trying to look for militants when you should be looking for civilians with pagers… you’d be wrong

JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago | root | parent |

> if you were trying to look for militants when you should be looking for civilians with pagers… you’d be wrong

We're speaking within the fog of war. It's unclear, for example, what fraction of Hezbollah's ranks had a pager or walkie talkier. And what fraction of those were military. I'd still challenge that the collateral damage from such an attack constrained to Hezbollah members--even arbitrarily--is less than a conventional strike on suspected militants.

alephnerd 6 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

> broad political party

But overwhelmingly Shia, and has token Christian and Sunni membership due to Lebanon's constitution.

Hezbollah is not Lebanon, and Lebanon is not Hezbollah.

Lebanon is an equal 3 way split between Sunni (Future Movement/Hariri), Shia (Hezbollah), and Christian (Kaateb and smaller parties).

All 3 fought a vicious civil war from the 1970s into the 1990s, and then multiple invasions and interventions by Israel and Syria lead to factional conflicts.

The Sunni bloc and Christian bloc both oppose Hezbollah in Lebanon, and this helped the Israel-Saudi rapprochement, as it is Saudi that supports Hariri and Israel supported the Christian bloc during the civil war and occupation.

Edit: Love the downvotes from idiots who can't even find Tripoli or Beqaa on a map for pointing out how Lebanon is a very complex and split country.

whimsicalism 4 hours ago | root | parent |

My understanding is cooperation between Hizbollah and some christian communities is a lot more than token, but that is mostly talking from friends with family (christian) in Lebanon

alephnerd 4 hours ago | root | parent |

> cooperation between Hizbollah and some christian communities is a lot more than token

Yep. I made a broad strokes statement because it gets complex very fast.

The Christian community appears to be split between anti-Hezbollah and anti-Palestinian groups like Kaateb (that were also historically pro-Israel during the civil war and intervention), and historically Syrian supported parties who supported Syria during their intervention in Lebanon such as Tashnag, Marada, etc.

FPM was historically opposed to Syria but Michel Aoun made a strategic deal with Hezbollah in order to become M8's face in Lebanon, and because Hezbollah was never going to get Sunni support.

Hezbollah will only accept Shia and are Shia-first, but allied with Syrian-then-Iranian backed parties because they all fought together on behalf of Assad in the Syrian Civil War, along with the alliance of convenience with FPM.

The Pro-Syrian/Iranian coalition is the March 8th Coaliton (of which Hezbollah is the lynchpin), and the anti-Hezbollah/Saudi-funded coalition was the March 10th coalition before it splintered due to political infighting, corruption, and the Syrian Civil War.

Furthermore, now that the Syrian Civil War is largely over, a LOT of battle hardened nuts from all sides in Lebanon have started returning, plus the economic collapse exacerbated an already tense political environment.