Israel planted explosives in pagers that detonated across Lebanon, sources say

Warning: Graphic content

Beirut: Israel’s Mossad spy agency planted explosives inside 5000 pagers imported by Lebanese group Hezbollah months before the mass detonations, on Tuesday, a senior Lebanese security source and another source told Reuters.

The operation was an unprecedented Hezbollah security breach that saw thousands of pagers detonate across Lebanon, killing nine people and wounding nearly 3000 others, including the group’s fighters and Iran’s ambassador to Beirut.

First responders carry a man wounded after his handheld pager exploded, in the southern port city of Sidon, Lebanon.Credit: AP

The Lebanese security source said the pagers were from Taiwan-based Gold Apollo, but the company said in a statement it did not manufacture the devices. It said they were made by a company called BAC which has a licence to use its brand, but gave no more details.

Iran-backed Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate against Israel, whose military declined to comment on the blasts. Lebanon’s Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah will give a speech on Thursday, the group said in a statement.

Hezbollah said in a statement on Wednesday 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 the criminal enemy [Israel] should await in response to Tuesday’s massacre”.

The plot appears to have been many months in the making, several sources told Reuters.

The senior Lebanese security source said the group had ordered 5000 beepers from Gold Apollo, which several sources say were brought into the country earlier this year.

Gold Apollo founder Hsu Ching-Kuang said the pagers used in the explosion were made by a company in Europe that had the right to use the firm’s brand.

“The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it,” Hsu told reporters at the company’s offices.

The company said in a statement that the AR-924 model was produced and sold by Budapest-based BAC Consulting, adding it had only licensed out its brand to the company and was not involved in the production of the devices.

Gold Apollo authorised “BAC to use our brand trademark for product sales in specific regions, but the design and manufacturing of the products are entirely handled by BAC,” the statement said.

Reuters calls and emails to BAC on Wednesday morning were not answered.

Hsu said earlier there had been problems with remittances from the firm.

“The remittance was very strange,” he said, adding that payments had come through the Middle East. He did not elaborate further.

Police officers inspect a car inside of which a handheld pager exploded.Credit: AP

The senior Lebanese security source identified a photograph of the model of the pager, an AP924, which like other pagers wirelessly receive and display text messages but cannot make telephone calls.

Hezbollah fighters have been using pagers as a low-tech means of communication in an attempt to evade Israeli location-tracking, two sources familiar with the group’s operations told Reuters this year.

A pager similar to the Gold Apollo Rugged Pager AR924.

But the senior Lebanese source said the devices had been modified by Israel’s spy service “at the production level.”

“The Mossad injected a board inside 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,” the source said.

The source said 3000 of the pagers exploded when a coded message was sent to them, simultaneously activating the explosives.

Civil Defence first-responders carry a wounded man whose handheld pager exploded.Credit: AP

Another security source told Reuters that up to three grams of explosives were hidden in the new pagers and had gone “undetected” by Hezbollah for months.

Hsu said he did not know how the pagers could have been rigged to explode.

Israeli officials did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.

Images of destroyed pagers analysed by Reuters showed a format and stickers on the back that were consistent with pagers made by Gold Apollo.

Hezbollah was reeling from the attack, which left fighters and others bloodied, hospitalised or dead. One Hezbollah official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the detonation was the group’s “biggest security breach” since the Gaza conflict between Israel and Hezbollah ally Hamas erupted on October 7.

“This would easily be the biggest counterintelligence failure that Hezbollah has had in decades,” said Jonathan Panikoff, the US government’s former deputy national intelligence officer on the Middle East.

Break your phones, group ordered

In February, Hezbollah drew up a war plan that aimed to address gaps in the group’s intelligence infrastructure. Around 170 fighters had already been killed in targeted Israeli strikes on Lebanon, including one senior commander and a top Hamas official in Beirut.

In a televised speech on February 13, the group’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah sternly warned supporters that their phones were more dangerous than Israeli spies, saying they should break, bury or lock them in an iron box.

People queue to donate blood at the American University hospital after the arrival of several men who were wounded by exploded handheld pagers, in Beirut, Lebanon.Credit: AP

Instead, the group opted to distribute pagers to Hezbollah members across the group’s various branches – from fighters to medics working in its relief services.

The explosions maimed many Hezbollah members, according to footage from hospitals reviewed by Reuters. Wounded men had injuries of varying degrees to the face, missing fingers and gaping wounds at the hip where the pagers were likely worn.

“We really got hit hard,” said the senior Lebanese security source, who has direct knowledge of the group’s probe into the explosions.

The pager blasts came at a time of mounting concern about tensions between Israel and Hezbollah, which have been engaged in cross-border warfare since the Gaza conflict erupted last October.

A Lebanese woman at a Red Cross centre in Sidon, Lebanon, donates blood for those injured by the pager explosions.Credit: AP

While the war in Gaza has been Israel’s main focus since the attack by Hamas-led gunmen, the precarious situation along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon has fuelled fears of a regional conflict that could drag in the United States and Iran.

A missile barrage by Hezbollah on October 8 opened the latest phase of conflict and since then, there have been daily exchanges of rockets, artillery fire and missiles, with Israeli jets striking deep into Lebanese territory.

Hezbollah has said it does not seek a wider war but would fight if Israel launched one.

Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant told US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin on Monday that the window was closing for a diplomatic solution to the stand-off with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement in southern Lebanon.

Still, experts said they did not see the pager blasts as a sign that an Israeli ground offensive was imminent.

Instead, it was a sign of Israeli intelligence’s apparently deep penetration of Hezbollah.

“It demonstrates Israel’s ability to infiltrate its adversaries in a remarkably dramatic way,” said Paul Pillar, a 28-year veteran of the US intelligence community, mainly at the CIA.

The death toll rose to nine while the number of injured remained at 2750, Lebanon’s Health Ministry said.

Hezbollah confirmed in an earlier statement that the deaths included at least two of its fighters and a young girl.

The pagers exploded in southern Lebanon, the southern suburbs of Beirut known as Dahiyeh and the eastern Bekaa Valley – all Hezbollah strongholds. Hezbollah is a radical militant group, consisted of a political party and a military arm.

UN special co-ordinator for Lebanon Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert deplored the attack in a statement and said it “marked an extremely concerning escalation” in the conflict.

A number of airlines have suspended flights to Beirut, Lebanon, and Tel-Aviv, Israel, including Air France, Delta, Air India and Cathay Pacific.

Washington said it was not involved in the explosions and did not know who was responsible. The US renewed calls for a diplomatic solution to tensions between Israel and Lebanon.

Reuters

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