At least nine people were killed and about 3,000 injured when pagers used by Hezbollah members exploded simultaneously across Lebanon.
Israel’s Mossad intelligence service had planted explosives in 5,000 pagers months before Tuesday’s blasts, according to Reuters. The blasts killed nine people and injured nearly 3,000, including Hezbollah militants and Iran’s envoy to Beirut.
A Lebanese security source reported that the pagers were manufactured by the Taiwanese company Gold Apollo. However, the company stated that it did not produce the devices. It said they were manufactured by BAC, which had a licence to use its brand, but gave no details.
Iranian-backed Hezbollah vowed to retaliate against Israel, whose military declined to comment on the bombings. In a statement on Wednesday, the group promised that “the resistance will continue today, like any other day, its operations to support Gaza, its people and its resistance which is a separate path from the harsh punishment that [Israel] should await in response to Tuesday’s massacre.”
Gold Apollo founder Hsu Ching-Kuang said the pagers used in the bombing were manufactured by the company in Europe. It was authorised to use the brand of the firm, the name of which he could not immediately confirm.
The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it.
Hidden threat
A high-ranking Lebanese security source identified a photograph of a pager model, the AP924. Such devices can wirelessly receive and display text messages, but cannot make phone calls.
Hezbollah fighters use pagers as a low-tech means of communication in an attempt to avoid Israeli location tracking. However, a senior Lebanese source revealed that the devices had been modified by Israel’s intelligence service “at the production level.”
The Mossad injected a board inside of the device that has explosive material that receives a code. It’s very hard to detect it through any means. Even with any device or scanner.
Hsu said he did not know how the pagers could have been set to explode. Meanwhile, Jonathan Panikoff, the US government’s former deputy national intelligence officer on the Middle East, stated:
This would easily be the biggest counterintelligence failure that Hezbollah has had in decades.
Experts name two explanations of the incident. The first is a hacker attack that caused processes in device batteries. The second is the deployment of a batch of remote-activated mined pagers. This is the most likely version, given Israel’s last year’s experience of mined communication means to eliminate high-ranking officials.
Middle East escalation
The pager blasts came at a time of growing concern over tensions between Israel and Hezbollah. While the war in Gaza has been Israel’s main focus since the 7 October attack by Hamas-led militants, the volatile situation along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon has fuelled concerns of a regional conflict.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant told US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin on Monday that the window for a diplomatic solution in southern Lebanon was closing.
Nevertheless, experts said they did not see the pager blasts as a sign that an Israeli ground offensive was imminent. On the contrary, it was a sign of an obvious deep penetration of Hezbollah by Israeli intelligence, Paul Pillar, a 28-year veteran of the US intelligence community, said.
It demonstrates Israel’s ability to infiltrate its adversaries in a remarkably dramatic way.
The mass detonation in Lebanon could also have been an Israeli response to a recent successful Hezbollah strike on Israeli intelligence targets, where 22 killed and 74 wounded were claimed. In turn, the Hezbollah strike was in retaliation for Israel’s assassination of senior official Fuad Shukr in Beirut.
