In what must count as one of the more extraordinary acts of sabotage of all time, as many as 2,800 people, including hundreds of Hezbollah officials, were injured and several killed across Lebanon on Tuesday, according to the country’s health ministry, when the pagers they use to communicate exploded. Somebody transformed the devices into bombs before their distribution, and the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon was among those wounded.
Bloomberg reports that from the moment pagers began exploding across Lebanon Tuesday, theories began to circulate on how devices considered outmoded in much of the world were turned into dangerous weapons that killed several people and wounded almost 3,000.
As Lebanon accused Israel of engineering the attack aimed at Hezbollah militants, much of the debate centered on the possibility that the supply chain for the retro devices had been compromised. One prevailing idea was that the pagers had been engineered so that their batteries would heat up until the devices exploded.
Overheating of the batteries indicated “foul play,” Lebanon’s Telecommunications Minister Johnny Corm told Bloomberg.
But one cybersecurity expert, Robert Graham, dismissed that theory. He said on X that “making batteries do anything more than burn is very hard and implausible. Far more plausible is that somebody bribed the factory to insert the explosives.”
Among the other theories was that an electronic signal triggered the explosions.
“If true, I suspect it was an intentional physical defect enabled by cyber” or a radio frequency signal, said Mark Montgomery, a retired admiral and executive director of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission.
Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television showed what it said were images of Motorola pagers that were being used before the attack. “These pagers were detonated with high-tech by the Israeli enemy,” Hezbollah lawmaker Ibrahim Mousawi told the group’s TV network.
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