A senior Lebanese security source and another source told Reuters that months before Tuesday’s detonations, Israel’s Mossad espionage agency had hidden explosives inside 5,000 pagers smuggled by the Lebanese group Hezbollah.
Thousands of pagers detonated throughout Lebanon as part of an unparalleled Hezbollah security breach, leaving nine people dead and nearly 3,000 injured, including the group’s fighters and Iran’s representative to Beirut.
The Lebanese security source claimed that Gold Apollo, a business based in Taiwan, was the source of the pagers; however, Gold Apollo denied manufacturing the devices in a statement. It provided no other information other than stating that they were manufactured by BAC, a business that is licensed to use its brand.
Iran-supported Hezbollah has sworn to exact revenge on Israel, whose military has refrained from commenting on the explosions.
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”.
Several sources told Reuters that the scheme seems to have been developed over several months.
According to a top security source in Lebanon, the organization had placed an order for 5,000 beepers from Gold Apollo, which numerous sources said had entered the nation earlier this year.
Hsu Ching-Kuang, the creator of Gold Apollo, said that the pagers used in the explosion were manufactured by a European company, whose name he was unable to immediately verify, and that it had the authorization to use the company’s brand. Hsu declined to comment on the firm’s location, but the company identified BAC as the firm in a statement.
“We did not own the product. At the company’s offices in the northern Taiwanese city of Hsu informed reporters, “It was just that it had our brand on it.”
The senior Lebanese security source identified a photograph of the model of the pager, an AP924, which, like other pagers, wirelessly receives and displays text messages but cannot make telephone calls.
Gold Apollo said in a statement that the AR-924 model was produced and sold by BAC.
Hezbollah fighters have been using pagers as a low-tech means of communication to evade Israeli location-tracking. However, a senior Lebanese source said that the devices had been modified by Israel’s spy service “at the production level.” The Mossad injected a board inside the device with explosive material that receives a code, making it difficult to detect. 3,000 of the pagers exploded when a coded message was sent to them, simultaneously activating the explosives. Up to three grams of explosives were hidden in the new pagers and had gone “undetected” by Hezbollah for months.
The detonation left fighters and others bloodied, hospitalized, or dead. Hezbollah officials 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. In February, Hezbollah drew up a war plan to address gaps in the group’s intelligence infrastructure. The explosions maimed many Hezbollah members, with wounded men having injuries of varying degrees to the face, missing fingers, and gaping wounds at the hip where the pagers were likely worn.
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. Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant told U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin that the window was closing for a diplomatic solution to the standoff with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement in southern Lebanon.
(Reuters)
