Mobile phones make geolocation data and the content of communications available to mobile phone operators. In a context of conflict such as that between the State of Israel and the Lebanese Shiite Muslim paramilitary group Hezbollah, this circumstance led senior members of this organisation to use pagers to communicate with each other.
Following Hamas’s attacks on Israel in October 2023, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah called on members of his organisation not to use mobile phones. And on 17 September at 3:30 p.m. in Lebanon, Israel decided to synchronisedly detonate a multitude of pagers found in the hands, pockets or around a large number of people, thereby spreading panic and confusion. The attack killed at least 12 citizens and left around 4,000 injured, many of them maimed.
The next day, other electronic devices, such as walkie-talkies, exploded, killing at least 20 people and injuring more than 450. Among those affected, some were Hezbollah members, but others were not. Four of the dead were children.
Independent pagers
A pager (also known as a beeper, pager, pager, or simply pager) is a telecommunications device that receives short messages and displays them on a liquid crystal display.
Pagers use electromagnetic waves of VHF or UHF frequencies, depending on the country, to communicate with a central base station that has the capacity to send short messages individually to a specific device, or group messages to all devices associated with that call center. There are pagers that only receive numeric messages and others that receive alphanumeric messages. There are also those that can both receive and send messages.
The first such device was manufactured in 1921 and was used by the Detroit Police Department. In 1949, Al Gross invented and patented the first telephone pager, which was used by the Jewish Hospital in New York. In 1958, the Federal Communications Commission approved its use by the public. And when Motorola introduced the Pageboy product in 1974, these devices became known as pagers. They later became known as beepers, after the alert sound they made when a notification was received.
Pagers became more widely used in the 1990s, as they were cheaper than mobile phones at the time, they could reach areas where the mobile network did not yet have coverage, and they allowed people to send text messages. All of these advantages gradually faded away as mobile telephony became more affordable, its coverage expanded, and it incorporated the incoming caller ID service. Pagers became definitively obsolete when mobile phones began to offer the short message service (SMS).
Despite all this, we can still speak of certain residual uses of pagers today. For example, in some hospitals they are used to communicate with medical personnel. And, as we have already explained, Hezbollah used them because of their independence from the mobile phone network and to avoid the geolocation of smartphones.
Two-way walkie-talkies
As for walkie-talkies, they work in a similar way to pagers, but they allow only voice communication, not text messages. This communication is two-way, but not simultaneous. Communication is initiated by pressing a button. The speaker on the communicator allows you to hear in noisy environments where a telephone earpiece would not be audible.
It has been used by police, emergency services, in commercial and industrial applications, and, due to its low cost, also as a toy.
Activation of explosives
According to reports, the exploding pagers were supplied by Hungary-based BAC Consulting, which was given permission by Taiwanese company Gold Apollo to market the pagers under its name.
The low activity, the short history of BAC Consulting (only two years since it was registered) and the fact that it is formed by a single shareholder suggest that this company could be a front company used by Israeli intelligence to provide pagers modified with explosives to Hezbollah.
The most likely hypothesis is that the pagers were made with a detonator and several grams of explosive. And everything points to the fact that they were programmed so that the detonator of all of them would be activated upon receiving a certain group message.
This article has been published in ‘The Conversation’
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