Whoa, nice job, Israel!
1. ....force Iran/Hezbollah to abandon much cell phone use.
2. Hezbollah has to transition to pager usage.
3. Several thousand pagers are modified and slipped into the retail sales stream in the region. That's a whole separate social engineering
project....
4. My bet is plastic casing of the pager is the explosive, not AA batteries. Pagers of that vintage don't have rechargeable batteries & they get replaced frequently depending on messaging use - and these pagers were apparently in service for maybe 5+ months... so explosives in AA batteries at best supplemental, not primary.
5. Pagers have 'motors' for vibration. This has enough power to trigger detonator.
6. Pager internal firmware settings are very configurable by
vendors - no firmware changes likely necessary. The pager could run normally responding to one address but would only 'trigger' on an alternate address, perhaps within a specific narrow time window. These parameters/defaults would all be preset before entering the vendor stream and would likely not be changed by anyone for normal use incl Hezbollah. And 'normal use' allowance was important, to avoid initial detection.
7. Modifying the internal firmware would allow much more flexiblity. I will note that if it's a Flex 2-way pager, message
receipt can be guaranteed (i.e retransmit page til acknowledged).