According to Joshi, it looks to have been a supply-chain attack in which Mossad set up front companies that look to have manufactured real pagers for some time.
And when it came to this consignment bound for Hezbollah, it seems that Mossad placed explosives inside the devices that they were then subsequently able to remotely trigger.
In 2018, Bergman says, a young intelligence officer found out that Hezbollah had started using pagers and came up with the idea of Mossad infiltrating their supply chain. Some 4,500 booby-trapped devices were then supplied to Hezbollah, Bergman adds.
There are some accounts that suggest Mossad knew where these pagers were and who was in possession of them before detonating them. However, Joshi is sceptical of these claims.
He says, too, that “this was not some magical cyber-attack in which the batteries spontaneously combusted by some clever bit of code as people may initially have thought or suspected”.
CCTV footage of the pagers going off were broadcast around the world.
The images were shocking – and they also tell us a great deal about Hezbollah’s organisation and structure, says Prof Khatib.
Typically, the group operates with a high degree of secrecy, she says: “Not all its members are known, sometimes even to their own families.”
What the attacks have done, then, is expose who paid members of Hezbollah actually were. That information, she says, has already proved useful to Israel.
In one case, “one of the people who ended up in hospital was later visited by someone, and that person as a visitor was later tracked by Israel, leading them to find out where the leaders of Hezbollah were meeting on the Friday that came after the attack”, Prof Khatib adds. Those commanders were later targeted by an Israeli strike, she adds.
To some the attacks will have looked like a new type of warfare. Joshi, however, is not so sure. “It’s always been possible if you wanted to put explosives inside a phone, a pager, inside a banana, if you feel like it. The point is to what end?”
He says the Americans had contemplated carrying out similar attacks in the past, but had shied away because of the potential implications.
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