Lebanon pager blasts: Key takeaways from mystery explosions

• If someone were to engineer such a pager attack, it could involve remotely triggering explosives hidden inside the devices by manipulating their frequencies or radio signals. This would require the pagers to be tampered with before distribution. Remote detonation using wireless signals is possible, given advances in electronic warfare.

• There have been instances in the past where mobile phones and other communication devices have been used to trigger explosions, but an attack involving pagers hasn’t been widely reported. Cell phones have been used as IEDs in conflict zones, including the Middle East. Israel has, in the past, conducted cyber operations and targeted assassinations involving communications devices.

• Hezbollah is known to use a variety of communication methods, including encrypted cell phones, radio systems and pagers for secure internal communication. The group’s communication networks are likely to be multi-layered, using a mix of civilian networks and their own infrastructure. They are known to have developed an independent fibre-optic network to avoid interception by Israel.

• Hezbollah has been developing its communications infrastructure for decades, especially after realising how vulnerable it was to Israeli surveillance during the earlier conflicts. The exact timeline for pager usage, however, isn’t clear, but the group’s overall communications network has been evolving since at least the late 1980s.

• Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, and military intelligence have sophisticated electronic warfare capabilities. They could have intercepted communication signals, hacked into infrastructure, or implanted malware within Hezbollah’s devices, giving them control over the pagers. It’ is also possible that human intelligence played a role, with informants planting modified pagers into Hezbollah networks.

• Israel would likely have gathered information, either through human intelligence or through tracking the communications flow, to confirm that specific pagers were being used by Hezbollah operatives. Electronic surveillance, like monitoring usage patterns, or intercepted radio transmissions, could help identify which pagers were being used by Hezbollah.

• For an operation of this scale, Israel is likely to have targeted specific pagers rather than detonating all of them randomly. This would be based on intelligence identifying the devices that were directly linked to Hezbollah leadership or operations.

• Meanwhile, an attack of this scale would likely involve both human and technical intelligence. While human intelligence could help identify key figures using specific pagers, technicaland electronic surveillance would enable Israel to track communication patterns and movements associated with those pagers.

• Hezbollah has long been concerned about mobile phones being used to track the location of their members, as mobile devices can reveal location data through GPS or by triangulating cell tower signals. This is why Hezbollah prefers using older technology like pagers or encrypted radio communication.

• It is technologically possible to rig pagers or other devices with explosive components that can be triggered remotely. Remotely detonating devices like pagers would require careful planning and precise knowledge of the communication networks they rely on.

• There have been targeted assassinations using electronic devices by Mossad, including the use of cell phones to track and kill targets. One famous example was the 2008 assassination of Hezbollah’s military commander, Imad Mughniyeh, in a car bombing in Damascus.