Twas an IP67 pager, at least. Pretty bulky but promised 85 days of battery life youtu.be/x50wwGjX2Ao?t=34 Alas no photos of the back in that self-ad, so IDK where it said it was made, precisely.

Ah, yeah, found a photo of the back. Claimed indeed to be "made in Taiwan", or at least a very similar looking model did. Apparently, really made in Budapest, which seems quite likely! apnews.com/article/…

IIRC a number of Asian electronics firms have assembly plants in Hungary, including Samsung etc. They really like the 12-hours shifts. etui.org/sites/default/files/Chapter%206_2.pdf

I'm really confused as to how the attack was pulled off. Presumably, the vast majority of pagers sold in the world do not contain bombs. I thought that a shipment known to be going to Hezbollah must have been intercepted and sabotaged, but if the assertion is that the bombs were planted by the (small) manufacturer, how did they know (a) that Hezbollah would be buying pagers specifically from them (does Hezbollah have brand loyalty?) and (b) that they wouldn't be selling them to tons of other people, risking early exposure ("I dropped my pager and it had explosives in it when it broke open")?

Did they somehow set up a new company to sell only (or mostly) to Hezbollah, and then somehow get Hezbollah to buy from them?

@Obie2.0: apparently the latter, although only for a specific product that was licensed to this apparently Budapest-based company. The real manufacturer might actually be in Israel proper for all we know. 'Gold Apollo authorised "BAC to use our brand trademark for product sales in specific regions, but the design and manufacturing of the products are entirely handled by BAC," the statement said.'

I guess it seems possible that if they have a spy within Hezbollah's...technology supply divisision?...they could have gotten them to start buying pagers from a new and untested company that was actually run by Israeli spies. Or maybe they just set up the company for general surveillance (maybe not even just of Hezbollah!) and decided to carry out the bomb strategy when they realized that Hezbollah was using a lot of their pagers. It all seems incredibly convoluted.

And not in a good way. Assuming that one views assassination of any and all Hezbollah members as morally justified—a big assumption—it still seems unlikely that such an attack could be limited to those targets.

I doubt the alleged pre-teen child victim was a Hezbollah member.

According to france24.com/en/middle-east/… the whole PCB might have been made of explosives. Which would be pretty hard to do other than from the get go.

@MakeStackExchangeGREAT4ever It just seems weird how Israeli intelligence agencies were apparently able to either get Hezbollah to buy from a specific company that they had set up, or somehow infiltrate a pre-existing company and put completely different boards in their shipments without anyone noticing.

Maybe they had agents in Hezbollah to facilitate it, because otherwise it would seem to be leaving a lot to chance.

OTOH rfsafe.com/… claim that explosive was injected into the batteries. Seem unlike to me as a distances between electrodes need to be tightly controlled, so they'd not work at all like that. A batch of batteries with the explosives would have to be designed, and that's probabaly harder than it sounds.

Right, I can't think of any reasoning except Israel having complete control of the manufacturer, likely from the beginning. You cannot just get a few spies in an organization and expect to totally and silently rework their entire manufacturing process, let alone quickly.

But then it's either extraordinary luck or an inside job for them to get Hezbollah members to buy so many of their pagers.

I guess they could have marketed heavily in Lebanon in general and hoped that Hezbollah members in particular took the bait.

With a combination of either not caring about other people getting hurt, trying to target user IMEIs based on their previous spying, or both.

The Hungarian firm appears to have been mostly a shell company though. The actual product, nobody seem to know where it was made for now, except Israel, of course reuters.com/world/middle-east/…

Also some interesting claims about the context the op: Israel planned it as opening stage for their next op/war in Lebanon, but was forced to do it sooner because Hezbo was apparently about to discover it axios.com/2024/09/18/…

I missed this news then: Israel also tried to sell Iran explodey military connectors apnews.com/article/…

The Hungarian's manager CV's doesn't check out so she was likely in on the op apnews.com/live/…