Several members of the pro-Iranian group were killed in the simultaneous explosion of these small communication devices, which were very popular in the last century, before the advent of mobile phones.
Means of communication that were supposed to help people remain discreet turned into pocket bombs: several people were killed and thousands injured by the simultaneous explosion of pagers belonging to Hezbollah members in Lebanon on Tuesday, September 17. These message receivers, which have fallen into disuse since the arrival of the mobile phone, are still widely used by members of the pro-Iranian group, who hoped to escape Israeli surveillance and attacks.
Ancestor of the cell phone, the pager (or “pager” in English) arrived in the late 1970s. It allows you to receive short messages by radio waves and to be reachable even far from your landline. Initially, the accessory often received a message displaying a telephone number to call back from the nearest telephone box or landline. Then it became possible to receive a few words, indicating for example that your next appointment had been postponed or that your parents were eagerly awaiting your return home.
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Pagers in hospitals or restaurants
To do this, it was necessary to call a switchboard, where an operator would transmit the message to the requested pager. Over time, it became possible to do this directly by Minitel. Pagers, on the other hand, are passive communication devices: they only allow messages to be received, not sent. Easy to carry, with a long-lasting battery, it allowed people to contact each other (or ask to be called back) in the event of an emergency.
Made obsolete by cell phones, pagers have hardly been used since the early 2000s. Today, we mainly find simplified versions of the system in restaurants, with this box that vibrates and flashes when the order is ready to be collected at the counter.
But they have continued to hold out in some sectors, notably healthcare: they allow doctors to be contacted efficiently in an emergency, without having to be distracted by the flood of messages that a phone can receive. Not to mention that messages sent on pagers do not use the same waves as the telephone network, allowing you to be contacted even when the latter is saturated. In the United Kingdom, there were still 130,000 in circulation before the 2020s, but they were abandoned shortly after the Covid-19 pandemic.
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Avoid being located
Among the latest beeper addicts is Hezbollah. The pro-Iranian group recently turned to this old-fashioned method of communication because its leaders believed that fighters were too easily spotted by the Israelis thanks to the location of their mobile phones. According to sources cited by Reuters, the beepers that exploded were the latest model acquired by Hezbollah.
With some technological advances, “you have to go back to the old ways”Qassem Kassir, a Lebanese analyst close to Hezbollah, told Reuters at the time. “Phones, in-person communications… Any method that allows you to bypass technology.” The fact remains that if the pagers are less easily located, the messages can easily be intercepted. The explosions of this Tuesday, whose modus operandi and responsibility have yet to be clarified, show that even the most archaic communication tools have their weak points.
