I'm not going to completely dismiss the high explosives argument, but the level of masterful infiltration it would take to get into a communication device manufacturing process, to insert high explosives secretly, have none be discovered FOR YEARS, even by accident, and have it only sent to members of Hezbollah is so amazing it's fucking preposterous that anyone could pull it off.
It would be one of the greatest military supply chain attacks in human history, and frankly, I just don't think that the Israelis could possibly be that good. Frankly, it would mean that the Mossad has full knowledge of the entire logistical and personelle structure of Mossad. Which is absurd for an organization that has been fighting the Mossad and the CIA for decades.
It's on the same level of "The world trade center was detonated by thermite that was secretly installed on every pillar, of every floor, of both WTC 1 & 2 by the entirety of the NYPD and NYFD over the course of 10 years". It's so fucking difficult to keep that secret you'd be better of doing literally anything else and spending 1/1000th the money.
I find it far more likely that the cyber-warfare specialists figured out a way to force the lithium batteries to over-heat and explode by transmitting specific signals to these pagers and walkie-talkies. Hezbollah probably thought that these devices were so low tech, that it couldn't happen to them, but even low-tech stuff can be hacked (like how payphones used to be hacked by whistling).
Considering how often, or not often, these devices would be changed out or maintained, I would expect that if this were a bombing campaign, we'd be looking at thousands of exploding pagers in the local Lebanese dump. And then an entire radio shack blowing up in a violent explosion for the walkie-talkies. The pagers would be swapped out relatively quickly, but then the walkie-talkies wouldn't be.
Hell, that hypothesis would be closer to the spiked ammunition sabotage programs that most militaries try to use, but they typically can't even accomplish that at the weapon's factories. They have to plant pre-spiked ammunition onto battlefields and hope that enemy pick-ups scavenge it. Most militaries have no capacity to infiltrate an enemy supply chain to the extent the bombing hypothesis would require. It seems like way to difficult of a feat.
I'm not going to completely dismiss the high explosives argument, but the level of masterful infiltration it would take to get into a communication device manufacturing process, to insert high explosives secretly, have none be discovered FOR YEARS, even by accident, and have it only sent to members of Hezbollah is so amazing it's fucking preposterous that anyone could pull it off.
It would be one of the greatest military supply chain attacks in human history, and frankly, I just don't think that the Israelis could possibly be that good. Frankly, it would mean that the Mossad has full knowledge of the entire logistical and personelle structure of Mossad. Which is absurd for an organization that has been fighting the Mossad and the CIA for decades.
It's on the same level of "The world trade center was detonated by thermite that was secretly installed on every pillar, of every floor, of both WTC 1 & 2 by the entirety of the NYPD and NYFD over the course of 10 years". It's so fucking difficult to keep that secret you'd be better of doing literally anything else and spending 1/1000th the money.
I find it far more likely that the cyber-warfare specialists figured out a way to force the lithium batteries to over-heat and explode by transmitting specific signals to these pagers and walkie-talkies. Hezbollah probably thought that these devices were so low tech, that it couldn't happen to them, but even low-tech stuff can be hacked (like how payphones used to be hacked by whistling).