2800 people injured, at least 12 dead and 170 in critical condition in Pager explosions. Hezbollah blames Israel.

[G2ThaUNiT]

Hiku said:

G2ThaUNiT said:

The Western world has largely gotten rid of pagers, but they're still used in poorer countries typically. I remember working with a guy several years ago who immigrated from Sudan and he always had a pager on him. He said that's just what many people use because they can't afford a smartphone. So they have the classic pager and a regular cellphone. Pagers are even still used in the medical field at times as well. 

But this is still terrible to hear. Mankind's ability to take each other out knows no bounds.

Yeah, I figured people would use regular cellphones instead. Like some old Nokia phone.
Maybe the cost of sending messages is cheaper for a pager.

I wonder if the explosions were caused by whatever is in the pagers normally. Can batteries of that size cause such powerful explosions?

That part is definitely confusing to me to have a blast so big it can affect that many people. I remember as a kid seeing my dad have pagers that would have proprietary batteries that were nearly the size of the pager itself, to newer models that literally took AA batteries. 

Either way, I have a hard time believing a battery causing that much damage. I remember like 10 years ago when Samsung Galaxy batteries were catching fire, but were never exploding. So my intuition says there was something more sinister installed in the pagers beforehand, but, idk enough about every kind of battery technology out there that a pager would use.