All Passengers Departing Beirut Are Now Banned From Traveling With Pagers, Walkie Talkies

Pagers used by Hezbollah exploded in unison in Lebanon and Syria on Tuesday. Many were in the pockets of their terrorist owners. Thousands were wounded, and a smaller number were killed.

Hezbollah moved away from cell phones, believing that Israel could listen in even on encrypted conversations. Instead, they bought pagers from an Israeli front company that was placing small amounts of explosives in the devices intending to sell them to terrorists.

The pager attack was followed up by exploding terrorist walkie talkies and other personal electronic devices.

Here is not-Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah on the attack:

Lebanon’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation has banned passengers departing from Beirut from traveling with walkie talkies and pagers – either with them into the cabin, or in checked luggage.

While some people whom I respect are concerned with sabotaging of electronic devices, this seems like one of the most targeted large-scale operations ever carried out in terms of having relatively few civilian casualties compared to the number of legitimate targets taken out. War always causes collateral damage. It’s often estimated at 9 civilians per military casualty while using Hamas figures which have very much been called into question it’s been closer to even in Gaza, and it’s clearly been far less than 1:1 here.

Any civilian deaths are regrettable, but also entirely the fault of the terrorists. Israel is far from the only enemy of Hezbollah, an Iran proxy: they bombed U.S. military barracks in Beirut killing 241 Americans, and bombed the U.S. embassy in Beirut. They hijacked commercial airline flights, including TWA flight 847.

The UN Secretary-General condemned the operation, declaring that governments shouldn’t “weaponize civilian objects,” which is an odd thing to focus on since Hamas continues to use its own civilian population as human shields.

Personal electronic devices, by the way, are far from the major safety risk in Beirut aviation, and carrying them is likely far safer today than it was a week ago – we just didn’t realize it.

Nonetheless, I fully expect calls to broaden the ban put in place by Lebanon – to electronics broadly, and even wifi, out of fear that a connected device could be ordered to detonate.

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. @Gary – I suspect the “weaponize civilian objects” was an assumption that these were not Hezbollah-specific devices. That assumption was incorrect. I fully expect a retraction of those statements, probably replaced with a statement about the regrettable loss of life amongst civilians.

    Truly, well executed attacks deserving kudos for their extremely limited, targeted impact. Not perfect, but this is what war should look like today, not 2000 lb bombs being dropped on schools.

  2. easier solution:
    1. helsinki
    2. two states
    3. 1967 borders
    4. replace killingry profit with livingry profit

  3. Al Jazeera news: IDF performed “Brit Milah” to the entire Hezbollah leadership.

    The good news: 72 virgins in Paradise get a lot less to worry about

  4. It is the fault of Israeli terrorists. This is a violation of international law. Terrorism is terrorism. Don’t condemn one and excuse the other.

  5. Gary! Thanks for writing about the pagers: that actually could be a concern if any do explode in flight … Hmmmm

    Re the bigger picture of hatred & pointing fingers at isreal… I do need to respond…

    I don’t understand how the world is so blind to fact that the pagers/walkie talkies were given to Hezbollah operatives, or Hezbollah associates. NO-ONE who was NOT Hezbollah was given them.
    There are NO civilian casualties.

    I am sad for loss of life and injury to these terrorists, however by carrying them they affiliated themselves with Hezbollah, and these pagers may have at other times carried messages for them to go out and kill people: Jews, Christians, Israelis, and others who are against Hezbollah or other terrorist entities. Meaning: if you affiliate yourself with evil and hatred, be prepared for consequences!

    Isreal has the right to defend borders, and the situation in Lebanon is awful with Hezbollah now in control zof so much of what used to be a chic, tolerant country!

    Re: hagberd celine comment above about 2 states… LET GO… Ham~as has clearly said NO to it, and UN accepting this fake entity calling itself “Palestine” is part of the wider hatred and evil growing in the world.

    I wish more will understand that actually 2 states already existed from 20th century:
    1. Arab “Palestine” = Jordan EAST of the river
    2. Jewish “Palestine” = Israel WEST of river Jordan

    End of story.

    BTW “Palestine” coins actually say eretz yisrael = א”י = land of Israel!!

    The mid east is about to be shook up as Isreal starts finally to roll up the sleeves and mean business!

  6. Was really hoping for a takedown of OMAATs trash take on this topic.

    How dare he call this a terror attack when it was the most targeted mass attack against terrorists in history?

    When did Lucky become a terror simp?

  7. @Jeff how is it terrorism, dummy?

    Terrorists attack and threaten and kill civilians. IDF surgically removed a dozen, and emasculated a few thousands more, of terrorists. The ones who do exactly what terrorists do – hide behind civilians and kill women and children.

    Some idiots never learn. Go join Hezbollah and get your member blown off as well.

  8. I will limit my comments to strictly aviation. It never crossed my mind at all that one of these pagers might have gone off on a plane that was in flight, landing or taking off, or just sitting on the ground with passengers. While the pager itself might have belonged to a Hezbollah member, he would have been surrounded by innocent Lebanese civilians. That would have been an unintended catastrophic event. So, pretty amazing it did not happen. In the history of aviation, there were a good number of skyjackings and shootouts on planes perpetuated by Palestinian terrorists and victims were not necessarily Jewish or Israeli. Aviation needs to be safe…..at least in this case, the pager case, a plane was not brought down and innocents killed.

  9. @Jeff – this was one of the most highly targeted attacks on an adversary in military history, and a direct contrast with the bombings undertaken by… Hezbollah.

  10. “Governments shouldn’t weaponize civilian objects” is a bit rich coming from the guy whose own UNHWR employees kept hostages in their homes and participated in 07/10 attacks.

    Does the Secretary General find the pager attack is the moral equivalence of Hamas randomly murdering 100s of young people at a music festival and decapitate babies? Or in the case of Hezbollah, to indiscriminately launch 100s of rockets at civilian population centers and murder 12 children on a soccer field?

  11. Interesting how to General directorate is allowed to make such questionable calls, especially when he’s doing it out of fear, which means he is not making calls in a calm/ Clear judgement calls with a clear head. He’s literally making stupid calls out of his own fear,which is NOT a smart move- It’s very Stupid Behaviour

  12. Western leftists confused about their gender and fundamentalist islamists sure do make strange bedfellows, but when their d1cks are blown off by pagers I guess they have more in common. Will the terrorist cultists still get their 72 virgins if their d1ck is blown off? They might be saddened to learn that those virgins are all just basement dwelling leftist keyboard warriors.

  13. Strategic and targeted, and clever. Hopefully indicating a shift in Israel’s approach to dealing with its enemies.

  14. Remember
    Colonel William Buckley, 1928-1985. CIA Station Chief in Lebanon. Tortured over 15 months. Not waterboarded but beaten with hard objects, drills drilled into his joints. He became incoherent, drooling, and screaming before he died of a heart attack. Killed by Hezbollah.

    Remember
    Colonel William Higgins, 1945-1990, former US Army, later working for the United Nations in Lebanon. Tortured and then hung with video released to CNN. Killed by Hezbollah.

  15. Also Remember, (actually you don’t need to remember because its happening as we speak)

    The 10,000’s of thousands of Israeli civilians who have been homeless and 10’s who have been killed for almost a year because 1000’s of rockets and missiles have been shot at them from Lebanon…
    The millions of civilians who have to run to a bomb shelter because of these rockets is also terror…

  16. The Israelis’ pager detonations did injure several hundred civilians and kill some civilians on top of the many Hezbollah personnel injured and some killed by the Israelis’ pager detonations.

    There was some risk that one or more of these explosives-packed devices could have exploded on some commercial carrier flights. On top of that, at least a bunch of these devices had been carried by questionable travelers at airports in quite a mix of countries and not been stopped by airport security screeners. For such remaining unexploded devices that are identified as such, they can be rather easily repurposed for detonation and used by a bomb smuggler at airports around the world.

  17. There is no shift in strategy and tactics by Israel that is part and parcel of the Israeli use of explosives-laden electronic devices in Lebanon. Netanyahu’s Israel is headed in the same direction it already was before it had gotten these devices into Hezbollah’s hands: to drag out and expand conflicts and casualties in the region, to not prioritize negotiating in good faith to get the Israeli and American hostages out alive sooner than later, and to grab more living room for itself than is legal.

  18. Sorry, it doesn’t seem that there was a significant risk to aviation from the pagers. The pagers were triggered by a specific signal sent within Lebanon that would not have been received in flight except, perhaps, right at takeoff or landing. Even if the signal was received during takeoff or landing, the very small explosive charge in each pager (see many videos of bystanders <1 m away walking away uninjured), and the low altitude and thus unpressurized cabin, even a detonation on board an aircraft would likely have been survivable for the rest of the passengers.

  19. WhoMe’s “sorry” seems either misplaced or otherwise problematic.

    There was and remains a risk to aviation from the Israeli explosive devices meant for Hezbollah.

    The bomb-concealing pagers and other such bomb-concealing electronic devices were triggered by a specific signal sent within Lebanon that was also receivable elsewhere and could have been received in flight even sometimes well after takeoff or well before descending for landing.

    Does WhoMe know that sometimes terrestrial-based cellphone signals even reach some phones at cruising altitude for long-distance flight because of some mix of circumstances that aren’t easily replicable under controlled conditions but have been noted to take place repeatedly in various places and at various times. Even I have received a cell phone signal at cruising altitude over the Azores — surprising as that was to me for a few reasons.

    Israel’s many “very small explosive charge” if placed against the plane hull or windows would have caused sufficient damage that you can bet that the planes would be diverted to land instead of directed to continue to fly to another continent or otherwise stick to the original flight plan.

    What does “WhoMe” think of the wannabe shoe bomber’s “shoe bomb” and the shoe carnival still in play at a lot of airports? That “shoe bomb” not a significant risk to aviation”?

  20. I didn’t say there was *no* risk to aviation but the theoretical risk to people beyond the target seems quite small, requiring a confluence of unlikely events – a stray signal picked up at altitude along with a very unlikely placement of the pager. Certainly the risk to aviation was dramatically smaller than the risk to bystanders on the ground, itself pretty small given the highly-targeted results.

    As for the shoe bomb, unlike the Lebanese pagers, it was a deliberate attack on aviation with the intention of bringing down the plane. Whether the shoe bomb would have been effective with a more competent operator, I don’t know, but the intent was to kill noncombatants. I do agree that the war on shoes and the war on water are probably overkill as reactions to those incidents, but the incentives for security are perverse; no one gets fired or blamed for too much security, even if it costs society more than it’s worth.

    The pager attack, on the contrary, seems to have been carefully designed to avoid killing noncombatants, including in airplanes. It wasn’t 100% perfect in that regard, but it was very very good by the standards of military action.

  21. The Israeli government’s concealed explosives contraband devices used in these attacks in at least Lebanon also killed some non-combatants and injured a lot of non-combatants even as many or maybe most of the killed and injured from these devices so far have been Hezbollah.

    And now terrorist groups — state actors and non-state actors alike — from around the world are probably more inspired to play from this same old playbook used by Israel and are more likely to do so in the future than they were last month. And that some such devices have been on board scheduled passenger flights is never a good thing if you really care equally about passenger security on all common carrier flights.

    As the latest assessments go, Israel has increased the risk that American persons and American interests end up harmed by non-state-actor terrorist attacks and other asymmetrical attacks by having escalated matters in this way.

    With friends like Netanyahu who needs enemies. If only Hezbollah and Hamas had friends like Netanyahu. Oh, that’s right, Hamas did have Netanyahu acting as a material supporter of Hamas.

  22. Came here for the popcorn knowing that GU would be a party pooper. He is what is wrong with US govt bureaucrats.

  23. “Hmmmmmmm“, you’ll keep fishing but again you’re as you usually are: rather wrong again about me. 😉

    But even when facts are inconvenient and may be felt by some to be a party pooper, facts are what they are and so deal with it. Don’t be like that clown Tr*mp who has no respect for facts that get in the way of his wishful thinking and whatever loaded narrative he wants the gullible to believe for his own personal or tribalist interests.

  24. @GUWonder: Yes, some noncombatants were unfortunately caught up in the attack on Hezbollah. I submit that this was one of the most, if not the most, targeted large-scale attacks in the history of warfare. Typically, urban combat results in something like 10:1 civilian:military casualties. Here the result was more like 1:500 or better, an extraordinary feat of targeting; many of the injured noncombatants seem to have been affiliated with Hezbollah in some way, like that young girl who picked up her Hezbollah father’s pager. Sadly, no war is risk free.

    Terrorist copycats seem unlikely for both means and motive. This appears to have been a very sophisticated attack with many months or years of planning and execution behind it. There’s nothing new about hiding explosives in everyday objects, the key is getting them into the hands of your enemies and only your enemies. Run-of-the-mill terorist groups simply don’t have the capability to plan and execute this kind of targeted attack or the desire to distinguish combatants from civilians to make it worth their while.

    Finally, I don’t think this particular attack will materially impact US security. As I said, terrorist copycats are unlikely and the US military isn’t buying from random Bulgarian consulting firms, we hope. There may well be a wider war in the region, but it was brewing long before and I don’t think this attack makes it significantly more likely.

  25. Moe is as clueless as ever. The only boss I recognize as boss are values which don’t include racist or other tribalist supremacy inhumanity such as that near and dear to Moe’s walk and talk in life. That is part and parcel of why racist and religious bigots such as Moe but aLao otherwise really dislike me.

    WhoMe wants to give Netanyahu a get-out-of-jail-free-card for the country’s right-wing regimes’ screwing over the US yet again with the expansionist war-mongering. Because of the anti-American Netanyahu regime in Israel, the US has had to ramp up force protection measures for US personnel and other US interests. And the American public faces increased security costs in the region and heightened risk this week and beyond because of that and more from the extremist Israeli rogue regime.

  26. The Israeli government have also ended up delivering a lot of unexploded pagers into the hands of Hezbollah and other questionable actors. The sealed explosives inside the sealed and cleaned dual-use batteries mean that airport security is highly unlikely to intercept any of the large quantities of these Israeli devices, and the unexploded devices can rather easily be repurposed for other terrorist activity. They failed to design them with an auto-“fake off” setting after being initially powered on and “off”. And now these problem devices will eventually get around and their design features will eventually flow to a broader network of questionable actors.

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