Kind of brilliant, if you think about it.
The only people who consistently carry pagers are Doctors, particularly surgeons.
You could really cripple a country's medical infrastructure, just by rigging the pagers with explosives.
Or, in the case of Hezbollah, they rely on pagers for communication so Israel can't track them via cellphone. This was reported to be a new batch of pagers that had been in use about a month. Apparently they had charges in them, when they explode the debris can go through a windshield (pictures/video on the web). It is claimed they heat up first, then explode. Lithium batteries would heat up and self incinerate, so it is currently thought that these pagers had explosive charges in them.
Yes, a very clever way to take out/seriously injure the Hezbollah command network.