I am fully against this booby trapping war crime regime but the problem with your first options is that pagers don't transmit like phones do. That means there would be no way to remotely aquire the GPS or other saved data undetected.
to be fair, a gps tracker probably wouldn't be very useful. You wouldn't even know which pager is held by who. It would just tell you where people "probably are generally" which you probably already know.
you could intercept communications, but they're probably already doing that. doing it at a pager level would be weird, you should be doing it from a transmission level. But i don't know how pagers work so don't quote me on that.
you could put a bomb inside of it. That's an option...
the real problem is assuring the chain of custody through the owner of the pager itself.
It could be in the hands of "mr bob" for example, but maybe mr bob left it at his home, or gave it to a friend to hold onto for a while, or maybe two people ended up swapping pagers accidentally, there's no trivial way to know the immediate distribution of pagers either, so you should probably assume it's random, as distributing them alphabetically is probably unlikely. Although it is technically possible.
I just don't really know of a good way of specifically targeting a single pager with the intent of actually making the one you need to go off. to go off, the obvious problem if you fuck up, is that within a few hours, everybody knows you fucked up. All of those pagers are now going to be gone.
yeah, i would be curious to know how much of a success this was, and what the intent was. I assume it was primarily to create paranoia within hezbollah specifically, and i imagine it was quite successful.
Generally yes, I think for this model of pager, that is the case. I think pagers operate on some oldass unencrypted 80's era protocol where a station just transmits the message freely on all waves until the pager comes into range and accepts it. You could've probably triggered this bombing with a big enough antenna inside of israel broadcasting the message. You can read as much on the wikipedia page.