There is no question if an enemy set off hundreds of bombs in American ambulances we would recognize it as a mass terrorist attack.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2024-09-18/second...
It's reasonable to guess that these devices were made to only explode after a very unique code is is received, and/or only when traffic came over a radio channel known to be used by Hezbollah.
In contrast, an uninvolved civilian medical doctor buying a booby-trapped pager secondhand shouldn't be at significant risk, since before carrying the pager around all day they'll first configure it to use their hospital's radio network, which should only be broadcasting innocuous hospital messages.
> There is no question if an enemy set off hundreds of bombs in American ambulances we would recognize it as a mass terrorist attack.
However if those bombs were only triggered by the code "Immediate Mobilization" broadcast over a CIA/DIA pager network, then the real question would become why so many ambulance staff were holding down a second secret job as spies and soldiers.
Pretty sure any doctor (or anyone else) owning one of those pager wouldn’t want to keep it, even if configured safely. Would you carry an hand grenade in your backpack all day long, as safe as it it because the pin is still in?
> why so many ambulance staff were holding down a second secret job as spies and soldiers
Hezbollah is a legal and popular party in Lebanon and is at war with another country, of course the medic staff is involved what’s else would you expect ? However "all parties must refrain from attacking and misusing medical facilities, transport, and personnel", what happens here is a crime for the Geneva convention.
Hezbollah is an Iran-backed militia whose sole purpose is the destruction of Israel.
> and is at war with another country
No, they're not. They're a militia.
Here is a timeline of major Hezbollah terrorist activities. Left out, of course, is the constant barrage of missiles rained down on northern Israel by Hezbollah. I copy-pasta'd this from another source for convenience:
1983: Hezbollah sends suicide truck bomb against US embassy and murders 63 people
Also 1983: Hezbollah murders 241 American soldiers and 58 French soldiers with another suicide truck bomb
1984: Hezbollah murders 18 American soldiers with bombing in Spain
Also 1984: Hezbollah murders 11 people with another truck bomb against US embassy
1992: Hezbollah murders 29 people with suicide bombing of Israeli Embassy in Argentina
1994: Hezbollah murders 85 Jewish Argentinian civilians in another suicide truck bomb
1996: Hezbollah murders 19 American Air Force personnel with bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia
2005: Hezbollah murders 22 civilians in assassination on Lebanese PM
2011 to present: Helped Assad murder up to half a million Syrian civilians, carrying out starvation sieges and ethnic cleansing against Sunni towns and cities
Why is this a reasonable thing to guess?
Even if the engineering makes it's a choice of "all blow up" or "none blow up", they'll also want to have control when that moment happens to be, either to pre-empt discovery and defusal or to coincide with other events and factors.
The end result is still that innocents are walking around with a bomb planted in their pocket.
The latest round is handheld radios, not even cellphones or even pagers. You are trying to stretch justification far beyond the breaking point.
This is a good point. The LA Times does not report incidents involving ambulances other than in the first half of the sentence that you quoted:
>They are not usually used by fighters, but by ambulance and civil defense crews and administrators affiliated with Hezbollah.
And the report of a video of an ambulance exploding
> Video from a funeral ceremony in the country’s south depicted an explosion inside an ambulance, leading bystanders to run away in panic.
