Thousands wounded by Exploding Pagers in Lebanon

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This might be true, but you're in no real position to be the offering the critique given your own lack of critical thinking. It comes off more like you're complaining I don't reach the same conclusions as you.

Not being persuaded by a poor argument is now a lack of critical thinking. Thanks for the redefinition Jono.

I never said that you have to be persuaded by anything or even agree with me. All I wanted, was for you to show me sources which indicate that I was wrong, and yes, I still think that a primary source is better than secondary one. You never did that.

I said that your form of "critical thinking" is that you only appear to look for sources that you already agree with. Also, the burden of proof is those who make the positive claim. It was never up to me to "prove" that Hamas' use sexual violence as a weapon of war has not been "debunked" because you made the positive claim that it was. So, the burden of proof was on you and you never showed it.

Also, I never tell people that they lack "critical thinking" just because they come to different conclusions than me, that's what you do to other people all the time. I only did it here in reaction to you doing it to something else.

As highly targetted as the IDF slaughter of 40,000+ civilians?
Killed less than 20 but maimed and blinded many, many more including children.
Ah, but that's Ok then. Gotcha. /s

I never said anything about what the IDF were doing in Gaza, so that's moving the goalposts and has nothing to do with whether the pager attack was highly targeted. As far as that's concerned, most of the injured were members of Hezbollah.

A report Thursday alleged that a Hungarian firm that apparently supplied pagers used by Hezbollah was secretly set up by Israeli spies as part of a widescale operation that appeared to culminate this week when the devices exploded, killing several and maiming thousands of Hezbollah operatives and others in Lebanon and Syria.

The New York Times claimed that rather than merely managing to tamper with the devices at some stage of their production or distribution, Israel actually “manufactured them as part of an elaborate ruse.”

Citing three unnamed intelligence officers with knowledge of the operation, The New York Times reported that BAC Consulting was part of a front set up by figures in Israeli intelligence.

Two other shell companies were also created to help mask the link between BAC and the Israelis, according to the report.

The company was listed in Hungary as a limited liability company in May 2022, though a website for BAC Consulting was officially registered almost two years earlier, in October 2020, according to internet domain records.

As of April 2021, the company website offered political and business consulting, with the firm changing addresses and expanding its offerings at least three times by 2024, archival research by The Times of Israel showed.

According to the New York Times, the company supplied other firms with pagers as well, though only the ones transferred to Hezbollah were fitted with batteries that contained explosive materiel known as PETN.

The devices first began to reach Lebanon in 2022, according to the newspaper, with production ramping up as Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah denounced the use of cellphones due to concerns they could be tracked by Israel.

As Hezbollah increasingly relied on the explosive-laced devices, Israeli intelligence officers saw them as “buttons” that could be pressed at any time, setting off the explosions that rocked Lebanon Tuesday, according to the Times.

The pagers that exploded in Lebanon carried the logo of a Taiwanese company, Gold Apollo, which said BAC was authorized to use its branding. However it said “the design and manufacturing of the products are solely the responsibility of BAC.”

BAC’s listed CEO, Cristiana Bársony-Arcidiacono, told NBC news that the firm, which took its website down Wednesday, had nothing to do with manufacturing the pagers.

A Hungarian government spokesman also said the pagers had never been in Hungary and that BAC Consultants merely acted as an intermediary.

Bulgaria, meanwhile, said it would investigate a third company linked to the sale of the pagers. The DANS state security agency said in a statement that it was working with the interior ministry to probe the role of a company registered in Bulgaria, without naming it.

Bulgarian media reports alleged that a Sofia-based company called Norta Global Ltd had facilitated the sale of the pagers. Reuters was not immediately able to confirm the link to Norta, and company officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A lawyer that registered the company at an apartment block in Sofia did not respond to Reuters questions.

The company, which says it manufactures all of its radios in Japan, said Thursday the model was manufactured and shipped to the Middle East from 2004 to 2014, but had not been shipped by the company since then. It said batteries for the devices were also no longer being manufactured.

The handheld radios were purchased by Hezbollah five months ago, around the same time as the pagers, a security source said.

The Osaka-based firm said its radio products were all manufactured by a single subsidiary in Wakayama, using only its own parts, with no overseas production.

The company has previously warned about counterfeit versions of its devices circulating in the market, especially discontinued models.

A hologram seal to distinguish counterfeit products was not attached, so it is not possible to confirm whether the product shipped from our company,” it said, referring to the devices that exploded Wednesday.

It promised to offer more information as it investigated.

Speaking to troops on Wednesday, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel was “at the start of a new phase in the war — it requires courage, determination and perseverance.”

He made no mention of the exploding devices but praised the work of Israel’s army and security agencies, saying “the results are very impressive.”

During a visit to the Northern Command on Wednesday, IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi warned cryptically that Israel has more it can do against Hezbollah.

“We have many capabilities that we have not yet employed,” he said. “We have seen some of these [capabilities in use]. It seems to me that we are well prepared and we are preparing these plans going forward.”

You've been told time and again that the Oct 7 attack didn't happen in a vacuum.

I never said anything about what the IDF were doing in Gaza, so that's moving the goalposts and has nothing to do with whether the pager attack was highly targeted.

As far as that's concerned, most of the injured were members of Hezbollah.

At least 32 people, including two children, were killed and thousands more injured, many seriously, after communication devices, some used by the armed group Hezbollah, dramatically exploded across Lebanon on Tuesday and Wednesday.

In the latest round of blasts on Wednesday, exploding walkie-talkies killed 20 and injured at least 450 people, according to Lebanon's health ministry.

The explosions occurred in the vicinity of a large crowd that had gathered for the funerals of four victims of Tuesday's simultaneous pager blasts, which killed at least 12 people and injured nearly 3,000.

Boobytrapping devices which could be used by civilians is against international law.

I am curious how Israel should have handled mass slaughter and hostages differently? Is it even possible?

Apart from enforcing and maintaining the world's largest open-air prison in Gaza, Israel has already shown how it responds - mass slaughter; 40,000+ dead civilians and counting.

The attack on the militant and political group Hezbollah via exploding pagers and walkie-talkies this week, widely believed to be conducted by Israel, was a novel use of a well-trodden spy tactic and a devastating intelligence blow to Hezbollah, according to experts who spoke with NBC News.

It’s taken journalists days to begin to unravel the details of how it unfolded.

As news has trickled out about the complex and deadly operation, it appears that Israeli intelligence agencies introduced the exploding devices via the supply chain to get modified devices in their targets’ hands.

While supply chain interference isn’t unheard of in the world of spies and espionage, the attack on the militant and political group Hezbollah opens a new chapter in covert operations as historically such supply chain compromises or supply chain attacks have been part of yearslong surveillance operations rather than to engineer a violent mass casualty event.

Emily Harding, a veteran of the CIA and the U.S. National Security Council, said that supply chain compromises are key tools for intelligence agencies but often are kept from the public.

“Supply chain compromises are tried and true in intelligence work,” said Harding, who is the director of the Intelligence, National Security, and Technology Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “I literally cannot think of a single example that is unclassified.”

But she said the combined scope, planning and violence behind the pager and walkie-talkie operation made it a unique incident in the history of supply chain compromises.

The history of elaborate supply-chain compromises for gathering intelligence goes back at least to the Cold War. After World War II, a now-defunct Swiss company called Crypto AG rose as a dominant global seller of various types of messaging equipment, such as encrypted communications devices and software. Starting in 1970, the company was acquired and largely run by the CIA, according to a 2020 joint investigation by The Washington Post and ZDF, a German public news station, which acquired a classified CIA description of the operation.

A CIA spokesperson declined to comment to NBC News. The report concludes “It was the intelligence coup of the century,” the Post reported.

Later, the National Security Agency allegedly developed a practice of intercepting computer networking gear to implant spy devices on them before they reached their target destinations.

An agency newsletter article from 2010, later stolen and leaked by former contractor Edward Snowden, described the process.

A former NSA employee from that time who was directly familiar with the practice, who requested to not be named to talk about a classified operation, confirmed the operation’s existence to NBC News.

The NSA did not provide a comment to NBC News by its deadline.

More recently, the FBI and the Australian Federal Police allegedly were the developers behind Aom, a proprietary smartphone and messaging app marketed to criminals for its supposed security. In reality, according to court documents and the book Dark Wire, police could decrypt every message sent through Anom’s messaging service, leading to more than a thousand arrests around the world.

Neither the FBI nor the Australian agency responded to requests for comment.

Countries and militant organizations have long accused opponents of sabotaging weapons and munitions to hurt the soldiers who use them.

There’s also precedent for agencies sabotaging specific items for targeted assassinations, ranging from the CIA’s varied plots to kill former Cuban leader Fidel Castro with tainted cigars in the 1960s to Israeli intelligence allegedly killing Hamas explosives expert Yahya Ayyash in 1996 by adding explosive to his cellphone and detonating it when his father called.

While the attack in Lebanon broke with spy agencies’ tradition by using a supply chain for an attack rather than for espionage, it could benefit Israel’s military objectives and have larger political implications.

“This is a big, embarrassing morale crusher” for Hezbollah, Harding said.

“This is also a physical disruptor, and it’s also an intelligence boon, because now if you have video of all these things blowing up, you know exactly who they were attached to, and you can dive in on who that person is and try to figure out who their contacts are. It’s an intelligence bonanza.”

“To the extent that international humanitarian law applies, at the time of the attacks there was no way of knowing who possessed each device and who was nearby,” the experts said. “Simultaneous attacks by thousands of devices would inevitably violate humanitarian law, by failing to verify each target, and distinguish between protected civilians and those who could potentially be attacked for taking a direct part in hostilities.

“Such attacks could constitute war crimes of murder, attacking civilians, and launching indiscriminate attacks, in addition to violating the right to life,” the experts said.

Humanitarian law additionally prohibits the use of booby-traps disguised as apparently harmless portable objects where specifically designed and constructed with explosives – and this could include a modified civilian pager, the experts said. A booby-trap is a device designed to kill or injure, that functions unexpectedly when a person performs an apparently safe act, such as answering a pager.

“It is also a war crime to commit violence intended to spread terror among civilians, including to intimidate or deter them from supporting an adversary,” the experts warned. “A climate of fear now pervades everyday life in Lebanon,” they said.