Many questions remain, but, also, one: If Mossad had the capability to pull off such a complex supply chain fiesta here, could they not as certainly hack the firmware to intercept all traffic? (Now that Hezbollah is alledged to be using them to communicate?)
Maybe they did, and - at this point - decided that detonating them was preferable to having the asset - and whatever information it was yielding ...
... which is worrying.-
PS. There's talk of this being a "use it or lose it" kind of scenario, with the pagers being close to compromised.-
Pagers last for a very long time. Some one-ways can last for over a month. At that point, you probably wouldn't notice it's just over 3 weeks, or maybe think the product is lying in the advertisements and lasts less but not enough to replace the "company provided" one.
There are tons of more likely explanations for that, though, with the top of the list being "dang bosses bought low quality pagers".
And if they can make the combined package big enough that the battery life is still acceptable, it's even less likely that someone will pull the pager, notice that they should be getting "great" battery life instead of "just ok", and investigate deeply.
I read elsewhere that Hezbollah recently changed to this pagers to communicate, maybe it those who put the bombs bet on the fact their victims wouldn't have time to realize that the battery have shorter life than advertised
Bricklaying it is ...