An invisible detonator and wafer-thin plastic explosives turned batteries into bombs

BEIRUT, Oct 16 (Reuters) - The batteries inside the weaponised pagers that arrived in Lebanon at the start of the year, part of an Israeli plot to decimate Hezbollah, had powerfully deceptive features and an Achilles’ heel.

The agents who built the pagers designed a battery that concealed a small but potent charge of plastic explosive and a novel detonator that was invisible to X-ray, according to a Lebanese source with first-hand knowledge of the pagers, and teardown photos of the battery pack seen by Reuters.

To overcome the weakness - the absence of a plausible backstory for the bulky new product - they created fake online stores, pages and posts that could deceive Hezbollah due diligence, a Reuters review of web archives shows.

The stealthy design of the pager bomb and the battery’s carefully constructed cover story, both described here for the first time, shed light on the execution of a years-long operation which has struck unprecedented blows against Israel’s Iran-backed Lebanese foe and pushed the Middle East closer to a regional war.

  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    4·
    13 days ago

    Thanks! I was thinking of injured, clearly.

    Interesting that by deaths, civilians are a much larger share. It makes sense in that it would take less to blow up a kid, so in the rare cases they were handling the top-secret Hezbollah pager it was more likely to be fatal. (Welcome to war, where kids are reduced to a physics problem)

    I’m still not sure why this is the one people are hung up on, when there’s a plethora of clear-cut IDF warcrimes to choose from.

    • Keeponstalin@lemmy.worldEnglish
      32·
      13 days ago

      I think it’s only because the US State Department praised the operation as legitimate and completely downplayed the reality of the casualties, instead of acknowledging it for the mass terrorism that it was. Not at all surprising for those who know how routinely the State Dept lies about the realities of US and US-backed warfare, but many people in the West still ran with it thanks to the coverage by US Media that shares that sentiment with the State Dept.

      It’s really nothing new for anyone aware of how many war crimes the IDF commits daily, just another form and against a different resistance group