Look at the flack they're getting for defending themselves. This was after the scope and scale of that initial Hamas attack, which kicked everything off. Now imagine the flack if they blew up all those pagers (and the associated collateral damage) without a war under way.
I think if the war didn't happen, they would have targeted high-profile people all at once, but with minimal collateral damage, leaving the rest of the pagers un-triggered.
