In all likelihood even if they were abandoned, probably nothing would happen since modern explosives tend to be designed to be rather stable unless intentionally detonated(an intelligence organization would want to design them this way to avoid detection due to accidental detonation of course).

> The angry pagers were being bought under the guise of legitimate companies. I find it very hard to believe that some gravel pit or factory who needed 20 and bought 200 on a "we pay you for 250 basis" didn't have their 20 go poof while sitting on the charging shelf in the office or whatever.

From what was reported it looks like Mossad essentially licensed the brand rights for the pagers through shell companies, manufactured the pagers themselves and then distributed them exclusively to the terrorists after infiltrating the terrorists hardware procurement process in some way. One would also likely assume only pagers actually connected to the network of the terrorists would get triggered.

> This whole thing is just too "meta targeted" for my taste in the same way that "signature strikes" were. It's not like these organizations lack the capacity to kill people the old fashioned way, heck it might even be cheaper.

I think there's a bit of a difference here, it's not like these pagers were random consumer devices actually being sold on the open market, they were in reality a highly exclusive device sold only to the terrorists through some sort of supply chain infiltration attack with what appears to be only the marketing material along with fake customer testimonials being distributed publicly to trick the buyers into thinking these were normal consumer devices. For such a precise attack against a terrorist organization it seems unlikely tradition methods would have been more effective for the cost of the operation. Most traditional methods would also likely incur far higher civilian casualties.