I'm still trying to understand why Hezbollah people were like
Thank you for this pager, stranger, I'll use this without question for the next few months, and certainly not give it away or sell it or take it apart.
And why anyone thought that it'd go that way.
I'll need to read more about it, maybe this is explained, but it seems like such a long shot
You need some sort of chain of trust to do anything big in the world. Im sure their hierarchies are pretty flat to keep the risk of infiltration low, but still, if you have a trusted source that supplies your equipment, then that can and will get compromised.
But like... A communication device seems like THE most suspicious equipment you can get. I'm shocked nobody verified, and I'm shocked that they had the audacity to even attempt.
Wrt giving/selling the pagers, well, I'll have to read more to find out if that happened. It wouldn't surprise me but also I imagine it'd be hard to find out.
They might have been checked at some stage, but if you have enough intel, you can figure out at which stage to insert the vulnerability. But i have seen lots of fun ideas on how this could be done. The fact that its apparently alkaline batteries, makes it interesting tho. Unless it was fake batteries with something inside them.
You could also try to make it so that the people who check the devices, only get to see good ones.
And from everything we see it really seems like the IDF really doesn't gaf about collateral damage either, so they probably didn't care that they'd give any of these away to other people.