A Lebanese army soldier flags down an ambulance to take the injured to hospital after explosions rocked several Hezbollah strongholds around Lebanon on September 17, 2024, as cross-border tensions between Israel and Hezbollah fighters continued. .
Anwar Amro | AFP | Getty Images
Israel’s Mossad spy agency planted a small amount of explosives inside 5,000 Taiwanese-made pagers ordered by Lebanon’s Hezbollah months before Tuesday’s blast, a senior Lebanese security source and another source told Reuters.
The operation was an unprecedented security breach for Hezbollah, with thousands of pagers detonated across Lebanon, killing nine people and injuring nearly 3,000, including the group’s fighters and Iran’s envoy in Beirut.
Iran-backed Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate against Israel, and the Israeli military declined to comment on the bombing.
Several sources told Reuters the plot appeared to have been brewing for months.
Senior Lebanese security sources said the group had ordered 5,000 pagers made by Taiwan’s Gold Apollo, which several sources said had been introduced into the country earlier this year.
Senior Lebanese security sources confirmed a photo of the pager model, identified as the AP924, which like other pagers can wirelessly receive and display text messages but cannot make calls.
Two sources familiar with Hezbollah operations told Reuters this year that Hezbollah militants have been using pagers as a low-tech means of communication to try to evade Israeli location tracking.
But senior Lebanese sources said the devices had been modified “at the production level” by Israeli spy services.
“The Mossad injected a plate containing explosive material inside the device that could receive the code. It would be very difficult to detect it by any means, even with any device or scanner,” the source said.
Sources said that when a coded message was sent to 3,000 pagers, they exploded, detonating explosives.
Another security source told Reuters that the new pagers contained up to three grams of explosives that Hezbollah “had not discovered” for months.
Neither Israel nor Apollo Gold immediately responded to Reuters’ request for comment.
Images of the destroyed pagers analyzed by Reuters showed the format and stickers on the back were consistent with those made by Taipei-based Gold Apollo.
Hezbollah was shaken by the attack, which left militants and others bleeding, hospitalized or dead. An unnamed Hezbollah official said the explosion was the group’s “biggest security breach” since the incident. Gaza conflict Clashes between Israel and Hezbollah’s ally Hamas broke out on October 7.
“This may well be Hezbollah’s biggest counterintelligence failure in decades,” said Jonathan Panikoff, the U.S. government’s former deputy national intelligence officer for the Middle East.
In February, Hezbollah laid out a war plan aimed at addressing shortcomings in the group’s intelligence infrastructure. Israel’s targeted attacks in Lebanon have killed about 170 militants, including a senior commander in Beirut and a senior Hamas official.
In a televised address on February 13, Hassan Nasrallah, the group’s secretary-general, sternly warned supporters that their phones were more dangerous than Israeli spies and said they should destroy, bury or lock them In the iron box.
Instead, the group has chosen to distribute pagers to Hezbollah members across the organization’s various branches – from fighters to medical personnel working in the rescue sector.
Hospital footage reviewed by Reuters showed the bombings injured many Hezbollah members. The injured man’s face had varying degrees of damage, his fingers were missing, he may have been wearing a pager on his hip, and there were open wounds on the wound.
“We have been hit really hard,” said a senior Lebanese security source with direct knowledge of the group’s investigation into the bombing.
The pager bombing comes amid growing concerns about tensions between Israel and Hezbollah, which has been waging a cross-border war since the Gaza conflict erupted last October.
The war in Gaza has been Israel’s main focus since an attack by Hamas-led gunmen on October 7, but instability along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon has heightened concerns that a regional conflict could drag down the United States and Iran.
Hezbollah launched a missile strike the day after October 7, kicking off the latest phase of the conflict, which has been followed by daily exchanges of rockets, artillery fire and missiles, and Israeli warplanes attacking deep into Lebanese territory.
Hezbollah says it does not seek a wider war but will fight if Israel starts one.
The window for a diplomatic solution to the standoff with the Iran-backed Hezbollah movement in southern Lebanon is closing, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant told U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Monday.
Experts, however, said they did not believe the pager explosions indicated an imminent Israeli ground attack.
Rather, it points to an apparent deep penetration of Hezbollah by Israeli intelligence.
“This demonstrates Israel’s ability to penetrate its adversaries in a very dramatic way,” said Paul Pillar, a 28-year veteran of the U.S. intelligence community, primarily with the CIA.
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