Exploding pagers join long history of killer communications devices
Israel, blamed by Hizbollah for Tuesday’s attack, has long used telephones and their successors to track and kill enemies

by Mehul Srivastava
September 17, 2024

"Israeli spies have a decades-long history of using telephones — and their technological successors — to track, surveil and even assassinate their enemies.
As far back as 1972, as part of their revenge on the #Palestine Liberation Organization for the killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, #Mossad operatives swapped out the marble base of the phone used by Mahmoud Hamshari, the PLO’s representative in Paris, in his French apartment.
On December 8, when he answered the phone, a nearby #Israeli team remotely detonated the explosives packed inside the replica base. Hamshari lost a leg and later died.

"In 1996, #Israel’s internal security agency, #ShinBet, managed to trick Yahya Ayyash, a skilled Hamas bombmaker responsible for the killing of dozens of Israelis, into accepting a call from his father on a Motorola Alpha #CellPhone brought into #Gaza by a Palestinian collaborator.
Hidden inside the phone was about 50g of explosives — enough to kill anybody holding the phone to their ear. Both instances are now part of Israeli spy legend.

"Among former intelligence officials, the cases are considered textbook successes, in which the phones served several crucial purposes: monitoring and surveilling the target ahead of the #assassination; identifying and confirming the identity of the target during the assassination; and finally making it possible to use small explosive charges that killed only Ayyash and Hamshari in each case.

"As hundreds of pagers suddenly exploded across Lebanon on Tuesday afternoon, the suspicion has immediately turned to #Israel, the only regional power with a spy network capable of carrying out such an audacious, sophisticated and co-ordinated attack.

"Hizbollah, the militant group many of whose devices were blown up in the attack, said that 'we hold the Israeli enemy fully responsible'.

"Israel’s military declined to comment on the attack, though Prime Minister Benjamin #Netanyahu was on Tuesday evening consulting with his top security chiefs after the blasts, which killed at least nine people including a child, and injured more than 2,700.

"The Lebanese militant group had turned to the pagers to avoid Israeli surveillance after a public plea by Hizbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, for its operatives to ditch their smartphones as Israel stepped up attacks against its commanders during almost a year of intensifying clashes.

"With no GPS capabilities, no microphones or cameras, and very limited text broadcasting, pagers — at least in theory — have smaller 'attack surfaces' than smartphones, making them tougher to hack.
Hizbollah appears to have preferred them for the same simplicity: they collect very little data to be siphoned off by Israel’s military intelligence.

"But they seem not to have counted on the possibility that the tiny devices, usually powered by single AA or AAA batteries — and in the newest models, #lithium — could be forced to explode."

Read more:
https://www.ft.com/content/dbaac693-2fd2-41bc-b5e7-6c2c7dd92277

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