A Japanese handheld radio manufacturer has distanced itself from walkie-talkies bearing its logo that exploded in Lebanon, saying it discontinued production of the devices a decade ago.
At least 20 people were killed and 450 injured after hundreds of walkie-talkies, some reportedly used by the armed group Hezbollah, exploded across Lebanon on Wednesday.
The devices, according to photos and video of the aftermath of the attack, appear to be IC-V82 transceivers made by Icom, an Osaka-based telecommunications manufacturer.
But Icom says it hasn’t produced or exported IC-V82s, nor the batteries needed to operate them, for 10 years.
It is the second Asian company to be embroiled in bombing incidents in Lebanon this week, after thousands of exploding pagers seemingly linked to Taiwanese firm Gold Apollo killed at least 12 people and injured more than 2,000.
I bet Lebanon got “a sweet deal” on some “old stock” of pagers and radios they couldn’t pass up.
Israel’s spy agency Mossad, which has a long history of sophisticated operations on foreign soil, planted explosives inside pagers imported by Hezbollah months before Tuesday’s detonations, a senior Lebanese security source and another source told Reuters. Source
Experts generally believe a small mount of stable explosive was carefully implanted into each sabotaged device. Alan Woodward, a professor of cybersecurity at Surrey University, said: “There wouldn’t need to be much explosive, as proximity to a human body means it would cause injury even if it was a few grams.”
The first wave of explosions – which occurred from about 3.30pm local time on Tuesday – appear to have been triggered by a special message from Hezbollah leadership, implying, Woodward argued, a specific modification of the pagers’ embedded software. This meant it would trigger an explosion when the appropriate message was sent.
It may have been a default setting on the pagers, but the trigger message came with a cynical twist. Eyewitnesses say the pager bleeped, then paused, then detonated – giving enough time for them to be brought closer to the owner’s face – which is why Lebanese doctors reported treating multiple hand and eye injuries after the blast. Source
Credit where it is due. Those genocidal motherfuckers are scary as hell.
EDIT: I understand the downvotes. Nobody, including myself, wants to say anything positive about the current Israeli regime or their industrial complex of death. Fuck those guys. That said, this op and the discipline it must have taken to keep it under wraps until just the right moment is impressive and VERY scary.
All true. The Mossad have been considered one of the most effective and efficient agencies in the world … and terrifying in their single-mindedness to eradicate every Muslim on the planet.
I guess Israel can spend some of its tax money on shit like this when Americans are paying for their military
Has Israel/Mossad ever actually called for the eradication of all Muslims? I know Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah, Lebanon, Egypt, etc. have all called for and actively tried to eradicate Israel (and many of them have/do call for the eradication Jews in general), but I’m not aware of Israel doing the same.
No, but some/many Israelis have been calling for the killing of Arabs (and Christians) for years.
Nothing about the attack or what happened since surprised Miran Krikorian. The Armenian owner of Taboon and Wine Bar in the Old City of Jerusalem was not surprised to receive a call the night of January 26 that a mob of Israeli settlers was attacking his bar in the Christian Quarter and shouting “Death to Arabs … Death to Christians.” Source
Death to Arabs" or “Death to the Arabs” is an anti-Arab slogan commonly used by Jewish extremists across Israel, the West Bank, and to a lesser extent, the Gaza Strip. Depending on the person’s temperament, it may specifically be an expression of anti-Palestinianism or otherwise a broader expression anti-Arab sentiment, which includes non-Palestinian Arabs. It is widely condemned, with some observers asserting that it manifests genocidal intent. Source
At the Flag March hours earlier, different groups of participants clashed and beat Palestinian locals and harassed journalists. They also sang racist chants such as “Death to Arabs,” “May your village burn” and “An Arab is a son of a b**ch,” as they danced near the Damascus Gate both before and during the rally on Thursday afternoon. Source
Thousands of mostly ultranationalist Israelis took part in an annual march through a dense Palestinian neighborhood in Jerusalem’s Old City on Wednesday, with some stoking wartime tensions and chanting “Death to Arabs.” Source
Thousands of Israeli nationalists, some of them chanting “Death to Arabs,” paraded through the heart of the main Palestinian thoroughfare in Jerusalem’s Old City on Sunday, in a show of force that risked setting off a new wave of violence in the tense city. Source
Hundreds of far-right and anti-Palestinian activists took to the streets in Jerusalem’s Old City on Thursday chanting “Death to Arabs” as they protested through the city centre. Source
The images of hundreds of religious Zionist activists in occupied East Jerusalem chanting “Death to Arabs” come as no surprise to Palestinians. In fact, they are commonplace, daily occurrences, the result of decades of racist policies, laws and hateful anti-Palestinian incitement. Source
(from 1995) Hundreds of Israeli settlers chanting “Death to Arabs!” clashed with police outside Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s Jerusalem residence after two victims of a Palestinian attack were buried, witnesses said. In the West Bank town of Hebron, the Israeli army confined 100,000 Arabs to their homes to protect them from any revenge attacks for Sunday’s killing of the two Jewish settlers and wounding of five others by Palestinian gunmen, a senior officer said. In Washington, President Clinton extended U.S. sympathies to the families of the victims and to the injured. Source
(from 1990) What manner of madness is it that drove mobs, some shouting ”Death to Arabs,” to mourn Rabbi Meir Kahane by running through the streets of Jerusalem hunting down Arabs and smashing shop windows? Source
(from 1986) An estimated 1,000 Jews chanting “Death to the Arabs!” and “We want revenge!” turned a memorial march for a murdered Jewish student Sunday into what Israel radio described as “an ugly demonstration that nearly ended in a riot.” Source
I recently commented on NCD with a twelve-year-old, humorous-given-present-context review I found of that radio on eham, when apparently counterfeit IC-V82 radios were a serious problem:
https://www.eham.net/reviews/view-product?id=5046
Watch out for fake v82’s! Only buy from authorized retailers or someone who did.
Words of wisdom there, eham.net.
https://jpost.com/breaking-news/article-820808
The walkie-talkies linked to explosions targeting the Hezbollah terrorist group that killed 20 people in Lebanon and injured hundreds of others could not have made the exploding devices, the Japanese company said on Thursday.
“There’s no way a bomb could have been integrated into one of our devices during manufacturing. The process is highly automated and fast-paced, so there’s no time for such things,” Yoshiki Enomoto, a director at ICOM, told Reuters outside the company’s headquarters in Osaka, Japan, on Thursday.
ICOM has said it halted production of the radio models identified in the attack a decade ago and that most of those still on sale were counterfeit.
“If it turns out to be counterfeit, then we’ll have to investigate how someone created a bomb that looks like our product. If it’s genuine, we’ll have to trace its distribution to figure out how it ended up there,” Enomoto said.
I wonder if the Mossad deliberately bought old decade+ out-of-production stock to insulate the manufacturer from blowback? Like if they chose a walkie-talkie currently sold by Motorola then it would basically kill that production line and hurt the company by association. People would avoid all Motorola devices in case there were Mossad explosives inside.
Also maybe they had these devices built and ready to go years ago and had this James Bond shit sitting on the shelf waiting to be put into circulation? This is a one-time attack vector. They won’t be able to do this again so they wanted to make it count.
Most likely it was counterfeit radios. The batteries in decade old Icom radios would probably be dead by now.
