Technically speaking that would be much harder: pagers don’t have microphones, and most don’t transmit - and those that do send very small messages.

You’d have to add significant new capabilities to pull off surveillance, which would increase the risk of detection.

> spying would make more sense to me..

Probably they did. The problem with pager like communication is that it is very easy to employ codewords. Something like "if we send orange, bring your weapon and meet us at the market, if we send pear pack a week worth of stuff and meet us at the pumping station, if we send melon disappear to the countryside for two days". Monitoring that can give you a sense that "something is happening" but it won't tell you exactly what. So all in all it is not terribly valuable.

But if I would be working for Hez I would assume that all communication over the pagers have been completely compromised.

Of important note, none of that requires any modification to the pager. Paging protocols are ancient and unencrypted: a little SDR stick and you can run your own sigint on your local pager network.

Yes, the WaPo and NYT both reported that Mossad spent a fair amount of time eavesdropping on the communications between these two devices.

The eavesdropping played a significant role in the decision to detonate the devices.

That seems like a big risk to take though? The best scenario is they get these out to all the leaders and do what they did. Why would you risk that with “random” signals coming out of the pagers occasionally that might get spotted by the some Hezbollah member who also is good at radio/digital comms. It seems unlikely they did anything other than what they did which was set them all up for a crotch bomb.

Maybe they sent coded messages. Pager communications would be easily decryptable without having supplied the pagers.

thats the point of the bombs -- they can't be listened in on, so it's the only way to compromise them

Did they want a war