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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Who uses pagers? Aid workers carry phones. The pagers are deliberate opsec move for Hezbollah.

I've used them for DevOps on-call in the last ten years in the US, as a backup to phone-based alerts. It's far too easy to mess up phone DND settings, forget to charge a phone, be outside cell service, or leave a phone in the wrong room. The pager had a long battery life and I clipped it to my pants waistband. I definitely caught pages via the pager that I would have missed over the phone.

If you're worried about the cell network going down, they serve as a backup comms device as well since they use different infrastructure.

Presumably Lebanese DevOps on-call isn't sharing pagers from a shipment to Hezbollah from Iran.

Hezbollah is essentially a government entity in much of Lebanon, they totally would. Hezbollah runs schools, hospitals - it's easily the largest social services provider in large swathes of Lebanon. That's why it enjoys so much support, in many ways it was a much more competent alternative to the failed Lebanese government.

People who work in schools in Lebanon carry smartphones like everybody else. Pagers are obsolete. Some doctors may carry them because they work when the cell network is down, but they don't all re-up from Iran all at once. Hezbollah carries pagers because they're one-way devices that are hard to track, which is not a problem a Lebanese school teacher has with his Chinese Android phone.

What makes you think pagers are obsolete? When I worked at a big-three cloud provider (2016) we used them and it was a great fit for on-call requirements. I regularly find I don't have cell service when in large buildings, out in the woods, or even just random spots in US cities. The pager didn't have those issues, and helped us build highly available services. Does Fly use something different for on-call alerts?

A quick search shows the US Government/Army [1] and hospitals use them [2] [3] [4]. I'm not familiar with Lebanese wireless networks, but pagers are certainly still used for these use-cases in the US.

"Residents reported that they used one-way pagers for work-related communication more often than smartphones" (2018)

[1] https://gov.spok.com/contracts-and-agreements/

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10407125/

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6490267/

[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7426134/

People still use pagers for specialty purposes, like being on call in disaster zones, or serving as a parallel armed forces in a country with a hostile neighbor who has infiltrated your cell phone network.

I've said this like 5 times on this thread and feel bad for continuing to repeat myself, but: Hezbollah operates its own telecommunications network. The Hezbollah pagers probably do not work on the normal Lebanese telecoms systems. This in addition to the fact that Hezbollah procures pagers for its service members; it does not go to the Cricket Wireless store at the corner of Mousa al Sadr and Kouds and pick them up retail a couple at a time.

Pagers don't use normal telecom systems, and they're not limited to paramilitary organizations. They're very useful in any critical application because they have low infrastructure requirements.

The comment you're replying to explains how they're used routinely in most hospitals in the world for this purpose.

You can't buy pagers off stores on the corner, either. They don't have SIM cards and most of them can't report back to the network, so they need to be pre-configured by the network operator. Just the same way, if you work at a hospital and are issued a pager, it will be issued to you by your employer and you won't be able to pick it up off the street.

In a country with extremely unreliable telecom infrastructure, it's not at all unlikely for an organization to use pagers, especially if it operates emergency services, and they would have to be procured through that organization.

Right, but if you are mossad, you're not going to spread your bomb pagers far and wide for a number of reasons:

1) its expensive

2) it massive increases the risk of detection

3) in a hospital there is a high chance it'll get triggered. (MRIs, spillages, incinerators.)

Mossad didn't spread them. They sold them to Hezbollah. Hezbollah runs many hospitals in Lebanon.

You're pulling this out of thin air. You do not know this.

Lebanon has incredibly unreliable cell service. Anyone who needs to receive messages in a timely and reliable fashion would have no choice to have a pager or similar device. That would include many people in schools and most people in a hospital.

> they don't all re-up from Iran all at the same time

Who says anyone does? Hezbollah has 40k fighters, and we have reports of 2000 people being injured, so clearly Hezbollah, military or civilian, didn't "all re-up from Iran all at once", the numbers are more than an order of magnitude off for you to conclude as much.

Reuters has specific shipments and provenance for the pagers attributed now, and also notes that the explosions were concentrated in Hezbollah strongholds (Dahiah, Bekaa, southern Lebanon), lending further evidence that these were not off-the-rack pagers.

No one is saying these were off the rack or that they weren't distributed as part of Hezbollah's operation, so I don't understand how this is relevant.

The claim is that carrying one of these pagers is dispositive evidence that you are an according-to-IHL combatant.

The point I made is that less than half of Hezbollah is combatant, therefore the possession of a device procured and distributed by Hezbollah cannot be dispositive evidence as most Hezbollah members aren't IHL combatants. The fact the pagers were ordered by Hezbollah doesn't contribute anything in the context of a discussion on civilian Hezbollah members that would need to use pagers.

This is such a strange take. As if CIA operatives and a random teacher at some elementary school just both reach into a box with pagers and pick one because they're both employed by the government.

If the US government was sanctioned to the extent Hezbollah was, someone like an elementary school principal would most likely have to ask a higher-up to provide them with something like a pager, which would likely have been smuggled together with others.

You can buy mobile phones in Lebanon just fine, there's no reason why anyone except active duty members of Hezbollah would get their communication equipment from Hezbollah.

Mobile phone service is horrible in Lebanon and cannot be relied on in any type of emergency.

Also, the whole point of this is that active duty members of Hezbollah includes hospital staff and teachers. Hezbollah's civilian division is about as large as the paramilitary one, if not larger. So it's not possible to confidently state that anyone affected was part of a milita with the information we have right now.

Why are teachers carrying Hezbollah military pagers?

Why would employees of Hezbollah carry Hezbollah communication devices? That doesn't seem like the question you're trying to ask, in which case, what is a 'military' pager and how is it different from a 'civilian' pager? How are you able to tell apart a 'military' pager from a 'civilian' pager with such confidence as to present it as an unquestioned assumption?

I've spent quite some time looking, and I cannot find such a thing as a military pager. The only pagers I can find mentioned in a military setting are no different from the pagers that civilians would use, for example, the use of commercial pagers in US military hospitals.

Nurses and medical staff, at least in the US.

https://www.npr.org/2023/12/15/1219737658/why-do-doctors-sti...

For collateral, I was thinking more along the lines of non-Hezbollah civilians right next to the target, or perhaps a building set on fire

Here's a video of someone standing right next to the target: https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1836037485492629605

They are unharmed.

At the same time, I don't think there's any reason to disbelieve accounts (and video footage) of children among the injured. Unless you're sending operatives with pistols and killing targets individually, I don't think there's a way to do a strike of this scale without killing innocents.

Actually this is probably more accurate than a pistol. Bullets miss and ricochet. Plus other people would fire back, leading to a gun fight and more deaths.

So 1-2 feet away is safe from serious injury resulting from the explosive force itself. Though the probability seems high at least some out of thousands had people standing close enough for worse, or further away and hit with shrapnel.

I’m just commenting on injury though, not making a moral or ethical judgement. That’s not an easy call when an opponent is embedded in a population of non-combatants.

not sure of band allocations around israel, but in the US pagers were long wavelength devices and, as such, could receive signals much further inside buildings than pre-wifi cellular bands could reach. again, band / frequency (wavelength) allocation dependent. but if similar there, pagers might get signals in tunnels whereas cellular bands may not, for one plausible conjecture.

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