News about Hezbollah, Lebanon, and Israel

Walkie talkies are handheld portable radios that use radio waves to communicate wirelessly on a single frequency band. They were first developed in the 1930s by a Canadian inventor named Donald Higgs and, quite independently, by an American named Alfred Gross.

The devices that blew up were a discontinued model made by the Japanese firm ICOM, according to Lebanon's communications ministry. The IC-V82 radios were not supplied by a recognized agent, were not officially licensed and had not been vetted by the security services, the ministry said.

Tuesday's explosions were most likely the result of supply-chain interference, several experts told the AP — noting that very small explosive devices may have been built into the pagers prior to their delivery to Hezbollah, and then all remotely triggered simultaneously, possibly with a radio signal.