How Israel built modern-day troian horse-exploding pagers.

19 September The pagers began beeping just after 3:30 in the afternoon in Lebanon on Tuesday, alerting Hezbollah operatives to a message from their leadership in a chorus of chimes, melodies, and buzzes.

- SHEERA FRENKELRONEN BERGMAN& HWAIDA SAAD

But it wasn't the militants' leaders. The pages had been sent by Hezbollah's archenemy, and within seconds the alerts were followed by the sounds of explosions and cries of pain and panic in streets, shops and homes across Lebanon.

Iranian-backed groups like Hezbollah have long been vulnerable to Israeli attacks using sophisticated technologies. In 2020, for example, Israel assassinated Iran's top nuclear scientist using an AIassisted robot controlled remotely via satellite. Israel has also used hacking to stymie Iranian nuclear development.

In Lebanon, as Israel picked off senior Hezbollah commandos with targeted assassinations, their leader came to a conclusion: If Israel was going high-tech, Hezbollah would go low. It was clear, a distressed Hezbollah chief, Hassan Nasrallah, said, that Israel was using cellphone networks to pinpoint the locations of his operatives.

He had been pushing for years for Hezbollah to invest instead in pagers, which for all their limited capabilities could receive data without giving away a user's location or other compromising information, according to American intelligence assessments.