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That is a very good point.
Mossad could certainly replace the circuit board with one which has an additional UMTS modem and a GPS tracker on it, but this would be rather trivial to detect once you open the device and compare it to the manufacturers PCB.
If you assume that Hezbollah is smart enough to do the that, but not smart/paranoid enough to short circuit one of the lithium batteries to verify that it will not cause a bigger fire or explosion than normal.
Of course, if I knew Mossad was after me, I would at least disassemble the PCB layer by layer, looking for any chips hidden within it, then open up any chips, compare the silicon to the original under a microscope, then worry about how programmable they are, then consider the possibility that Mossad would build custom chips which look identical to specs on the top layer and finally decide to find myself a job compatible with the continued existence of Israel so that I don't have to live a life full of well-justified paranoia. Thus I would make a terrible jihadist.
TX capability also requires much more power, and these pagers run off a AAA battery.
Agreed that most of the fun 'send real time GPS coordinates every ten seconds' options are off the table.
OTOH, with a capacitor, the pager could still send out a short, triangulate-able burst when it receives a certain message.
I was kind of assuming the pagers were coming with their own lithium batteries, which would be a pain to replace. Someone here claimed the devices were in use for months before exploding. I would think that most of the devices would no longer be running with their original (rechargeable, presumably) battery at that point.
Edit: The Guardian says (or implies) that it was an Apollo AR924 pager powered by a 90g Li battery. This is roughly similar to the ~115g battery found in Nokia phones from ca. 2000 and should easily be powerful enough to do the odd transmission.
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