this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2024
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NYT has a link up which it claims has been verified. It is a video of someone at a market who had one of these in their messenger bag. The video shows a decent size explosion, which blew a big hole in the bag and knocked the guy to the ground.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/09/17/world/israel-hamas-war-news/44771255-fd1d-5028-8228-aff0ca5b8139
I doubt you could make an explosion that big with a AA battery. They must have planted the stuff in some massive supply chain hack.
Yep, all the electrical engineers who have chimed in say it looks more like explosives.
A battery would get hot and start a fire. It wouldn't instantly explode like this.
Given how targeted the attacks were at certain people, does this imply a bunch of people walking around with explosives in their pagers, where they weren't set off because they weren't one of the targets?
NYT says this switch to pagers has been recent, after the Oct 7 attacks last year, when Hezbollah suspected that Israel was spying on the cell network, and using it to locate targets for strikes. So all these pagers got distributed to Hezbollah-affiliated people in short order . This system doesn't use commercial networks, and has been called a "closed" network by the NYT.
If all that is true, then that means anyone with one of these closed-network pagers got it from being involved with Hezbollah in the first place.
Oh wow, that's quite... something.