"At least eight people were killed and 2,750 others including Hezbollah fighters, medics and Iran’s envoy to Beirut were wounded on Tuesday when the pagers they use to communicate exploded across Lebanon, security sources and the Lebanese health minister said…

Lebanese internal security forces said a number of wireless communication devices were detonated across Lebanon, especially in Beirut’s southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold. The pagers that detonated were the latest model brought in by Hezbollah in recent months, three security sources said."

  • darkcalling@lemmygrad.ml
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    2 days ago

    Lithium batteries can be made to explode under the right conditions.

    There’s one of two things going on here:

    1. The pagers were perfectly normal off the shelf pagers, maybe with some minor flaw to safety or charging systems but nothing that was intentionally introduced. In this case the zionists found a way to hack the pagers (or potentially cell towers to broadcast something that causes the condition) to induce conditions leading to a battery fire/explosion. I don’t know enough about lithium batteries to say whether it’s suspicious so many of them exploded instead of catching fire though reports say at least some people noticed them getting strangely hot and discarded them which does suggest lithium battery overload.

    2. The zionists knew about their use of pagers and in some way intercepted or replaced shipment of the ones they received with a batch that could be triggered to explode. For plausible deniability I’m guessing it was still a battery explosion rather than micro-explosives but we’ll have to see if any more info comes out.

    Either one is problematic for Hezbollah’s communications though at least 2 can be addressed by attempting to do more secure sourcing (e.g. getting Iran to get a direct shipment through an intermediary from a Chinese firm and securing that to be shipped directly to Lebanon). If it’s 1 there’s not much they can do other than do an investigation on exactly how it happened and contact the manufacturers and hope one of them responds by offering a fixed model not vulnerable to this technique.

      • darkcalling@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 day ago

        Sorry to say but not great opsec by Hezbollah. I get not opening all of them but they should have opened some at random just to check for the possibility of electronic hardware bugs. Unless it was packed into the lithium cells themselves which might be possible. Heck for all we know they found a way to mix explosive compounds into the lithium itself in a way not visible by physical inspection and only by chemical analysis and perhaps subjecting them to a higher than normal voltage or something triggers the reaction.

        Edit I really am going to lean on the idea of either some sort of contaminant introduced into the lithium cells designed to make them more dangerous and likely to explode rather than just burn or some sort of explosive compound mixed in with them that required the battery be overloaded for it to go off.

    • SadArtemis🏳️‍⚧️@lemmygrad.ml
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      Personally I suspected it was something along those lines (of either #1 or #2). But the concept of #1 in particular is a certain kind of terroristic horror (that is exactly in character for the Isntrealis and the west in general) that would be concerning to learn of, if they have developed such a method. Both possibilities are horrifying, that said.

      Whatever it is, admittedly- I hope that the end result is that the resistance (and the world at large) works to address these vulnerabilities, and that the process is reverse engineered or replicated in turn.

      • l0tusc0bra@lemmygrad.mlOP
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        1 day ago

        This type of thing will absolutely, undoubtedly boomerang back to the imperial core. And when it does all the libbies who shrugged at the genocide and ignored our warnings that the violence will end up blowing back at them will just move the goalposts again. I hope other enemies of the state are observing all of this and triple-checking their supply chains.

    • merthyr1831@lemmy.ml
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      2 days ago

      I saw footage of one explosion and it was pretty powerful. I’ve seen lithium batteries explode before and they seem way less violent. Guess they’re chunky (and cheap?) batteries