Hezbollah Hand-Held Radios Detonate Across Lebanon
September 18th, 2024Via: Reuters:
Hand-held radios used by Hezbollah detonated on Wednesday across Lebanon’s south and in Beirut suburbs, further stoking tensions with Israel a day after similar explosions launched via the group’s pagers.
Lebanon’s health ministry said the initial casualty toll was one person killed and more than 100 injured. Earlier the state news agency said three people had died.
At least one of the blasts took place near a funeral organised by Iran-backed Hezbollah for those killed the previous day when thousands of pagers used by the group exploded across the country and wounded many of its fighters.
Now it’s 12 killed and thousands injured.
The Wall Street Journal:
How Did Thousands of Pagers Used by Hezbollah Explode at the Same Time?
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/hezbollah-pager-explosion-explained-ed4274f3
How can the West keep denying the genocide going on when cleverly disguised bombs are given to unwitting soldiers to take home to their families and neighborhoods, then remotely exploded, injuring and killing the soldiers and civilians, including women and kids?
I hope this is enough to wake up the West and force its govts to push much harder for peace.
Robert Frost wondered whether fire or ice will finish us off. Now it looks like zaps will do it.
Does anyone see a chance that the tech industry will take control of itself, set standards to avoid the harmful use of its products, and enforce them? That seems impossible to me, even if they wanted to.
The companies that produced the devices likely had nothing to do with these atrocities. Intelligence agencies routinely perform man in the middle operations that modify equipment before it is delivered to a target. In this case, small amounts of high explosives were probably added to these devices with some form of remote trigger.
If you have seen the videos of these explosions, it’s clear that this is not thermal runaway of the batteries.
“How can the West keep denying the genocide…”
Decades ago, I took an International Law class in college. The main textbook was, “Law Among Nations: An Introduction to Public International Law” by Gerhard Von Glahn.
I think the book was close to a thousand pages in length. However, right at the beginning, the author lets the cat out of the bag:
“International Law is the law which the wicked do not obey and which the righteous do not enforce.” (Abba Eban, Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. – 1957)
So can tech industries do anything to prevent modification of their products? Make them self-destruct in a way harmless to their user if they’re tampered with? A hermetically sealed case that causes a total internal zap if the seal is broken? Everything could be built of sealed units strung together instead of exposed components — taking up more space, heavier and costlier, but safer.
But, if you can dip the case in a clear solution of something like nanothermite and attach a micro-sizes trigger somewhere…
Add countless billions in production costs (passed on to customers) to protect against a handful of cases in which intelligence agencies modify products for nefarious purposes???
Nope.
Also, it would make things impossible to repair.
The mobile phone industry probably came closest to doing what you describe. Phones have been engineered to be very difficult to repair. Apple was the worst offender, but the PR was so bad they recently embraced allowing people to repair their own devices.
But at the end of the day, governments, with lots of tax money from their enslaved citizens and roomfuls of engineers, would probably be able to carry out the modifications anyway.