Further Thoughts on Hezbollah Pagers
What if it wasn't a nitrite-based explosive?
You can use ICD-203 to figure out probability when it comes to any sort of intelligence. Initial theories were that Israel used some sort of explosive inside tampered pagers, but my initial thought was that the pager was the weapon.
I think it is more likely that something on the circuit board or battery was used as an explosive rather than what we tend to think of as traditional nitrate-based explosives.
Well said. A few comments:
- The Hungarian firm appears to be an Israeli front. It's likely the pagers were never in Hungary to begin with.
- Lithium batteries do not explode, they burn, and the footage of the explosions does not line up with lithium fires
- The footage does match up with detonators, like Mercury fulminate (used in primers) or other blasting cap type materials which can be easily electronically detonated.
- It's likely these pagers had some arrangement of AAA sized batteries. Battery cases are hermetically sealed (often laser welded) and would present an ideal place to hide an explosive (you keep one battery functional while the other is the explosive). Since the batteries are the components with the single largest volume this in my opinion is the likeliest route.
There are, of course, a lot of ways to skin this cat, but by manufacturing the fake batteries ( or other components) in advance the assembly and cleanup time would be tremendously reduced.
The most interesting part is how the Isrealis we able to direct Hezbollah to a particular vendor at a particular moment in order to make sure they had control. If it were a movie nobody would believe it.
You might be right, especially the point about the difficulty of smuggling that amount of explosives into a third country.
BUT - the points you make about border control and flying feel a bit tainted with American/Western point of view on the world.
1. Americans (and you in particular, from following your channel) are used to flying a lot around. This isn't so common in countries like Lebanon or the middle east. Israelis fly a lot overseas but that's mostly on annual holidays not on a weekly basis back and forth between Tel-Aviv and... well there isn't much else to fly to domestically. So the argument that it's not likely that 5,000 team yellow members haven't boarded a flight is weak.
2. The pager carriers are members of Hizbullah, i.e. there is a good chance that they carry weapons and explosives on them to do... you know, shit that goes "kaboom" anyway, so an explosive hidden inside a tight plastic box could have been undetectable in the sea of other chemical noise around it.
3. It's likely that they wouldn't take the pagers with them when going overseas anyway because it's meant to be part of their "military" gear and they shouldn't be carrying around a pager that could say "hi, a message from Nassralah..." when going about in countries that would care about it.
4. The border control finding explosives is also not a strong argument - see how Team Yellow does in Lebanon whatever it pleases, smuggling tons of weapons on a daily basis through Syria or storing thousands of tons of explosives in Beirut's port (and threatening the judge who's investigating the explosion: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/we-will-remove-you-hezbollah-official-told-beirut-blast-judge-2021-09-29/). Even the Lebanese Army doesn't mess with them.
5. If you think that the Mossad did this then I imagine they could easily hire 100x guys to do the change, or as the New York Times suggests, they may have just brought their own prepared pagers in the first place https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/world/middleeast/israel-exploding-pagers-hezbollah.html