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.
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)
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.
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 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 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.
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.
I'll consider that a possibility when it comes from an independent party detailing exactly which processes failed, why, and what remediation is being done beyond sacrificial dismissals. The particular WCK strike you're referring to wasn't even the first one killing WCK workers, just the most high-profile among many others.
[1]
> Yeah, it's really important to situate that attack on the World Central Kitchen in the context of these many other attacks that have occurred since October in Gaza. We've documented incidents of attacks on guest houses, on convoys of aid organizations, including Doctors Without Borders, MSF, the UN institution there UNRWA, the International Rescue Committee, and Medical Aid for Palestinians and another American aid group. And in every single one of these instances, these groups notified the authorities, the Israeli authorities multiple times about the GPS coordinate of the guest house, of the convoy that was moving. When it was convoys, they were taking agreed-upon routes that the Israelis had told them to take. And in every instance, these attacks occurred with zero prior warning to the aid organizations, and we're talking about, you know, 15 aid workers having been killed in these attacks and another including two children, family members, and another 16 injured.
Actions speak much louder than words here. If it quacks like a duck, it's probably not an accident that aid workers following all the proper procedures to make sure they don't get blown up, do get blown up.
They didn't apologize in the Hind Rajab case, they denied they were ever there.
They didn't apologize for the babies at Al-Nasr, they claimed they had to move on suddenly.
They didn't apologize for the vast majority of journalists murdered, just claimed they were Hamas.
Etc, tens of thousands of times.
What might be revealing for you is to look at the cases where they did apologize:
They apologized for shooting three of their own hostages dead in cold blood as they called out in Hebrew waving a white flag: turns out there was audio of that about to leak. No consequences for anyone involved though.
They apologized for the World Food Kitchen workers killed, after initial denials. There was undeniable evidence of that one too. Zero consequences.
They apologized for sniping Aysenur Ezgi - after it turned out she was an American citizen. They still claimed it was an accident, during stones being thrown (a lie). They still haven't reached out to a single witness during their 'investigation'. Zero consequences.
First, you're changing the subject. I never said Israel didn't commit any crimes - of course it did. I just said that Israel doesn't explicitly target aid workers. In the case of the Kitchen Aid workers that you linked to, not only Israel apologized, the chief of the army fired two very high commanders and punished a few others. Not sure why you're saying there was "zero consequences".
I'm also not sure why you mention the killing of 3 Israeli hostages, "in cold blood". Do you mean that Israel explicitly targeted them too? The fact that in this situation, unlike with the aid workers, no one was fired, only speaks to say that there's an understanding that mistakes happen even when these mistakes are killing Israelis.
With regards to hurting Palestinians, the list of Israeli soldiers that were trialed and punished for hurting Palestinians is too long to list here. The list of Palestinian freedom fighters that were trialed (forget about punished) for hurting Israelis is... well, [].
> I just said that Israel doesn't explicitly target aid workers
But they do. Aid workers have been killed in "unprecedented" "record numbers". Same with journalists, and children, and...
> With regards to hurting Palestinians, the list of Israeli soldiers that were trialed and punished for hurting Palestinians is too long to list here
Israelis rioted for the right of prison guards to anally gang rape abductees held without trial to the point of hospitalization. They gave one of the rapists (the one caught on CCTV) national attention and praise.
You're trying to defend the indefensible, after 11 months of daily atrocity. Not a good choice.
> But they do. Aid workers have been killed in "unprecedented" "record numbers". Same with journalists, and children, and...
This does not mean they are targeted. It could mean that Israel isn't careful enough, it could mean they are operating in a more dangerous situation than usually, it could mean that a higher percentage of them is also involved in non-aid related activities. Just assuming that because they were killed it means they were targeted is ridiculous. I'll give you an example: On October 7th Hamas killed a record number of Thai people in any other conflict in the middle east. Does Hamas explicitly target Thai people?
> Israelis rioted for the right of prison guards to anally gang rape abductees held without trial to the point of hospitalization. They gave one of the rapists (the one caught on CCTV) national attention and praise.
Yeah, a few hundreds of Israelis rioted for them. You know how much that is out of a population of almost 10M? And if you don't mind, the point wasn't really about "general opinion", but about the fact that systemically in Israel, soldiers hurting Palestinians were and are prosecuted, while something even remotely similar to that has never happened (I'll wait for your link) at the other side. You bringing up a case where the soldiers were detained and facing criminal charges, against some of the Israeli population opinion, proves my point exactly.
That's right. Any evaluation or discussion of this needs to take account of the fact that it makes the perpetrator culpable of an illegal act of war in which the lives of innocent children are disregarded. There are all sorts of "clever" but reprehensible things warring parties could do, but are considered to be beyond the pale. So, this is a stupid action by a reckless, immoral party which will continue to have consequences for all of us -- especially if we don't deal with anything that we control.
Again you are responding to an argument which was explicitly and clearly not made. The comment you are replying to asserts that this is an illegal act of war.
Everything only works by agreement and adherence to rules: some explicit, some considered to be so blindingly obvious to a human that there should be no need to state them.
Some of the rules around warfare involve doing your utmost to avoid collateral damage. In this case the collateral damage involves a ten year old girl.
Please try to respond to the actual arguments instead of a cheap, easy strawman. It helps improve the quality of the site.
This conflict has had a historically very notable property where civilian casualties are so much higher than military casualties as to be clearly anomalous.
According to Israel, it is the same conflict, but if you tally up civilian casualties from previous Israeli-Lebanon conflicts, you'll find a similar rate.
The ratio is at least as high in WW2, but only if you include war crimes and genocides. I think we can agree that WW2 featured notable and anomalous civilian casualties from the first industrial genocides, can't we?
If you look more closely at the data, you'll see that Germany, for example, suffered 3.8 million civilian deaths and 5.5 million military deaths. This was after Germany was completely invaded, thus the fighting reached every city.
The civilian-military death ratio in Gaza is, according to peer-reviewed independent estimates, at least 2:1, and that's if you assume that every male 18-60 is an enemy combatant. If you don't, you find a ratio of at least 4:1, with estimates mostly around 6-9:1. And this data is from before the collapse in infrastructure had time to really drive up the excess death count : https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
