Pagers and walkie-talkies exploded simultaneously in various parts of Lebanon, on Tuesday and Wednesday last week, injuring and killing several people in an attack reportedly launched by Israel against several individuals belonging to the Hezbollah terrorist organisation.

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Places including the capital Beirut and several towns in the central Beqaa valley experienced such attacks, and videos later showed a bloody aftermath on streets and public spaces.

The attacks left questions about what kind of warfare this is, how it is executed, and who is at risk.

Kinetic and non-kinetic warfare

In an interview with The New Times, Irina Tsukerman, the president of Scarab Rising Inc., a security, defence, and business strategic advisory in New York, shed light on such attacks, explaining that they can involve both kinetic and non-kinetic warfare.

While kinetic warfare is the kind of military activity involving the use of traditional weapons to kill or wound people and destroy things, non-kinetic warfare relies on techniques like cyberattacks and information campaigns.

"An iPhone or a different type of cell phone can be used in hybrid warfare, which is a combination of kinetic and non-kinetic warfare, depending on how an explosion is engineered,” she said.

She pointed out that the use of gadgets like phones in kinetic warfare would involve planting an explosive inside the cell phone, and then using it as a conventional Improvised Explosive Device (IED).

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However, on an even more complex note, she said the non-kinetic use of a cell phone to carry out such attacks would involve a hack that makes the gadget’s battery to overheat.

A hybrid method that combines both kinetic and non-kinetic warfare can also be used. Here, she explained, explosives can be loaded into the phone and afterwards, a message gets sent to the phone to detonate the explosives.

She noted that this is what happened with the pagers during the attack against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

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"Contrary to what most commentators seem to believe, it is not easy to execute such attacks,” Tsukerman said.

She pointed out that the only reason the attack on Hezbollah succeeded was because the operation involved 15 years of preparation which included establishing a manufacturing facility which produced separate explosive-laced pagers targeting Hezbollah.

The operation also involved setting up fake companies as part of covering up what was taking place, in addition to training spies within Hezbollah to trick their supervisors into ordering a specific type of pager from a specific place.

"This operation only became possible because Iran and Hezbollah became paranoid about the possibility of phone hacking and surveillance by Israel and believed pagers to be a more secure form of communication,” Tsukerman noted.

She explained the difficulty of targeting a phone user in such an attack, as it would require the attacker to either gain possession of the victim's phone long enough to plant explosives or successfully hack the phone in a way that could trigger an explosion

"Most people do not leave their phones long enough for such an operation to succeed. And those who are likely to be targeted are particularly cautious with their devices,” she said.

Meanwhile, for a mass attack, she noted, the targets would be limited to those who obtain the new and specific phones. Here, she explained that unless the context involves a close network purchasing from a specific supplier, the only individuals likely to succeed in such an operation are sociopaths targeting random victims or terrorists who don’t care who gets killed.

"But that means that they need to infiltrate a cell phone facility, gain access to these phones and take the risk that many of their victims will not necessarily be using the phone at the time the explosives are set off,” she noted.

She said that the attacks involve complicated logistics that are impracticable for most terrorist organisations or average sociopaths who prefer to use simple straightforward methods that are hard to intercept.

"Even for advanced intelligence agencies, it will be difficult to pull off the same trick twice given that one of most important factors in the success of both operations with the cell phones and the pagers was the element of surprise,” she said.