Was it ACME? Please tell me it was ACME. 

Whatever their source for 1980s tech was, suffice it to say that Hezbollah will not be a return customer. Pagers got distributed to thousands of significant figures within the Iranian proxy terror army, as a means to keep Israel from penetrating their sensitive communications. Instead, Hezbollah walked into a trap that the Israelis waited for months to trigger. 

And it all starts with a bad choice of vendors, according to the Associated Press:

The pagers that exploded had been newly acquired by Hezbollah after the group’s leader ordered members to stop using cell phones, warning they could be tracked by Israeli intelligence. A Hezbollah official told The Associated Press the pagers were a new brand the group had not used before.

At about 3:30 p.m. local time on Tuesday, pagers started heating up and then exploding in the pockets and hands of those carrying them -- particularly in a southern Beirut suburb and the Beqaa region of eastern Lebanon where Hezbollah has a strong presence, and in Damascus, where several Hezbollah members were wounded, Lebanese security officials and a Hezbollah official said. The Hezbollah official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press.

Yes, because when you need mission-critical infrastructure, always choose some new and untested outfit. To be fair, the Department of Defense sometimes makes that same choice, albeit with far more oversight over product manufacturing. Nor are we alone in that either, although this error was clearly a lot less fatal:

South Korea removed 1,300 cameras from its military bases after discovering they're designed to feed back to a Chinese server:https://t.co/wVHtJvnqmK

— Sheena Chestnut Greitens (@SheenaGreitens) September 17, 2024

Back to the pagers, however, which were part of a critical security strategy for the terror group. Did Hezbollah even bother to inspect the pagers before sending them to every important figure within their command structure? Apparently not, which would be their second mistake in outsourcing.

But how did Israel rig the pagers? Some suggested a malware implant that overloaded a lithium-ion battery, but lithium-ion fires are usually incendiary. None of the explosions caught on video produced an ongoing fire, which means ...

The images seen Tuesday showed signs of detonation, said Alex Plitsas, a weapons expert at the Atlantic Council. “A lithium ion battery fire is one thing, but I’ve never seen one explode like that. It looks like a small explosive charge,” Plitsas said.

That raises the possibility Israel was aware of a shipment of pagers heading to Hezbollah and managed to modify the pagers before delivery, he said.

Most pagers use replaceable batteries rather than rechargeable batteries anyway. At least, that was true in the 1980s and 1990s when pagers were in common use. That would make more sense for a distributed network in areas that may not have reliable electricity for recharging, too. 

Sky News Arabia and Al Jazeera now report that the Israelis intercepted the delivery of the pagers and modified them with explosive charges. The method of detonation is still unknown, but this was a massive and time-consuming operation if this report is accurate:

Sky News Arabia quotes sources saying that today’s large-scale pager attack in Lebanon was possible because the Mossad spy agency got hold of Hezbollah’s communication devices before they were handed over to the terror group.

The Israeli spy agency placed a quantity of PETN, a highly explosive material, on the batteries of the devices, and detonated them by raising the temperature of the batteries from afar, the source says. ...

Al Jazeera quotes a Lebanese security source saying that the weight of the explosive placed in each device was below 20 grams, and that the pagers that were blown up were imported five months ago. An investigation is being conducted into how the explosive charge was activated, the source adds.

Imagine how much time and effort it took to install a PETN charge in thousands of pagers. Not only did it have to work, but the Israelis had to ensure that the pagers looked as though no one had tampered with a single one of them. Otherwise, Hezbollah would have recognized the tampering and realized the potential danger. 

And one has to wonder what else the Israelis did with those pagers. Did they rig them with some sort of beacon to allow tracking of Hezbollah's officers in Lebanon and elsewhere? That might explain how the Israelis remained accurate in their pinpoint attacks even after Hezbollah gave up cellphones and dumbed down their communications infrastructure. They may have also been able to track the data on these pagers by modifying the code. One presumes that they modified the code enough to trigger the explosives on their command, and other modifications can't be ruled out. 

Hezbollah may have handled its pager program incompetently, but they understand what operational security is. Both they and the Iranians have to be asking themselves what Israel may have gotten from months of pager data before setting them to explode today, and what that means for any previous plans for both offense and defense. 

And that brings us to another benefit from this operation. October 7 had damaged Israel's credibility on both defense and offense, which made for a dangerous reduction in Israel's deterrent value. The breathtaking results of this operation has to force both Hezbollah and Iran to recalculate the risks of a full-scale war, and indeed of any more provocations. That doesn't mean they'll quit fighting, but the odds on that certainly improved today, even while Hezbollah promises revenge for Pagercide.