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A Brief History of Booby-Trapping Electronics to Blow Up
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of The Intercept
Posted: September 26th, 2024
https://theintercept.com/2024/09/18/pagers-explosives-histor...
Two large-scale, coordinated attacks this week rocked Lebanon — the latest iteration in a historical pattern of booby-trapping electronics. On Tuesday, one attack caused pagers to explode across Lebanon and Syria, injuring thousands of people and killing at least 12. A second wave of bombings unfolded on Wednesday, when explosives detonated inside a slew of hand-held radios across the country, leaving nine dead and 300 wounded. Israel, which is widely assumed to be behind both attacks, reportedly booby-trapped pagers used by Hezbollah members, carrying out a similar feat with the hand-held radios. The bombings appear to be supply-chain attacks — meaning the gadgets were tampered with or outright replaced with rigged devices containing explosives and a detonator at some point prior to arriving in the hands of the targets. The tactic of turning an electronic gadget into an explosive device ... dates back at least half a century. Field Manual 5-31, titled simply “Boobytraps” and first published by the U.S. Department of the Army in 1965, describes the titular objects as explosive charges “cunningly contrived to be fired by an unsuspecting person who disturbs an apparently harmless object or performs a presumably safe act.” In 1996, the Israeli Security Agency, also known as Shin Bet, is said to used a similar technique to detonate a small charge of explosives near the ear of Hamas bomb-maker Yahya Ayyash.
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