[The Weeping Angel]

I've read various accounts of how Israeli hostages were treated humanely they were not.

[Philip Marlow]

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/septemb ... -you-leave

‘Let’s for a minute imagine a world without Hamas,’ the surgeon-turned-satirist Bassem Youssef said to Piers Morgan on 17 October 2023. ‘What will this world look like? Let’s give this world a name, and let’s name this world the West Bank.’

[The Weeping Angel]

[Philip Marlow]

For those minded to chip in towards good causes, this seems like it might qualify.

[Samanfur]

Inverted commas or not, it'll be a sleepless night in the legal department:

[Killer Whale]

Really? Even if it wasn't Israel*, they won't mind at all people thinking it was.

*Of course it was Israel.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Indiscriminate terrorism, punishment of the innocent, high-tech making a statement.

Yup, Israel...

[Andy McDandy]

Given the body count's just getting to the level of point scoring now, I'm coming round to the idea of just nuking the entire fucking region, turning the sand into glass, and then finding the oil by looking down.

[Yug]

Playing devil's advocate here. It might not be Israel. It might be that they've just bought a load of cheap shit off Temu.

[Watchman]

Clearly whoever is behind this, they didn’t care who was holding the pager at the time

[Malcolm Armsteen]

The BBC reported that Hezbollah ordered a bulk batch of pagers and Mossad intercepted them and modified them...

One of the dead is a child.

What a bunch of cunts...

[Bones McCoy]

There's a lesson here.
If you're gonna work for terrorists, make sure they're vaguely competent.

But beware.
The "only have to get lucky once" strategy doesn't select for competence.

[The Weeping Angel]

[Malcolm Armsteen]

And now walkie-talkies and domestic solar power apparatus.

[kreuzberger]

The international legalities and the obvious murderous intent to one side, for a moment, this is looking to be a remarkable technological and logistical coup.

The Mossad have intercepted perhaps ten thousand devices - pagers, solar setups, walkie-talkies - and meticulously opened, reengineered, and resealed them to go off pop at the press of a button. Presumably, many of these victims/targets will have flown with these devices, yet they sailed through security, untroubled. This is a remarkable level of achievement. How do you even execute that?

Let's say that each tampering took two hours to complete, repackage, and make good. That's 20,000 hours' labour or, at 8 hours per day, some 2,500 days' labour - 7 years or 360-odd weeks without a break.

That suggests then that this was a massive interception and implementation operation which could complete the job without delivery times being notably disrupted. Yet still, there were no leaks. Even if a 36-hour delay would not raise suspicions, you're looking a 1,700 workers to complete the task, from start to finish.

Simple maths points to institutional sabotage on an industrial scale. If I was in Beirut tonight, I would be fearful of doing any ironing.

[Bones McCoy]

But according to Twitter, we should be worrying about chemtrails.

[Watchman]

The international legalities and the obvious murderous intent to one side, for a moment, this is looking to be a remarkable technological and logistical coup.

The Mossad have intercepted perhaps ten thousand devices - pagers, solar setups, walkie-talkies - and meticulously opened, reengineered, and resealed them to go off pop at the press of a button. Presumably, many of these victims/targets will have flown with these devices, yet they sailed through security, untroubled. This is a remarkable level of achievement. How do you even execute that?

Let's say that each tampering took two hours to complete, repackage, and make good. That's 20,000 hours' labour or, at 8 hours per day, some 2,500 days' labour - 7 years or 360-odd weeks without a break.

That suggests then that this was a massive interception and implementation operation which could complete the job without delivery times being notably disrupted. Yet still, there were no leaks. Even if a 36-hour delay would not raise suspicions, you're looking a 1,700 workers to complete the task, from start to finish.

Simple maths points to institutional sabotage on an industrial scale. If I was in Beirut tonight, I would be fearful of doing any ironing.

Unless it was already prepared as part of a longer term strategy. Mossad has all these “bomb phones” ready to go, intercept the delivery, simply switch one crate for another. When they arrive with Hezballoh, I doubt they will be concerned enough to check manifests etc, in a state of war, one walk-in-talkie looks the same as another.

[Philip Marlow]

I must admit that this particular thought had occurred to me…

[Youngian]

Certainly an audacious innovative military plan. Sounds like a plucky SOE operation, that would have become a film with Richard Todd or John Mills shown on sunday afternoon for three decades.

[Philip Marlow]

Oz Katerji in full ‘You kiss your mother with that mouth?’ mode.

I’m no tone policeman, but 8.5 out of every 10 times Katerji appears on my feed it’s because he’s screaming abuse at someone in the apparent belief that he’s a far more intimidating man than he actually is.