A Lebanese soldier gestures to an ambulance rushing wounded people to a hospital in Beirut on September 17, 2024, after explosions hit sites in several Hezbollah strongholds around Lebanon amid ongoing cross-border tensions between Israel and Hezbollah fighters.
Anwar Amro | AFP | Getty Images
Israel’s Mossad spy agency planted explosives inside 5,000 pagers imported by the Lebanese group Hezbollah months before Tuesday’s blasts that killed nine people, a senior Lebanese security source and another source told Reuters.
The operation, with a route from Taiwan to Budapest, was an unprecedented breach of Hezbollah security that saw thousands of pagers explode across Lebanon, injuring nearly 3,000 people, including many of the group’s fighters and Iran’s envoy to Beirut.
The Lebanese security source said the pagers came from Taiwan-based Gold Apollo, but the company said in a statement that it did not manufacture the devices. He said they were made by a company called BAC – based in the Hungarian capital – which has a license to use its brand, but gave no further details.
Iran-backed Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate against Israel, whose military declined to comment on the blasts.
The pageant blasts came at a time of growing concern over tensions between Israel and Hezbollah, which have been engaged in cross-border warfare since the Gaza conflict erupted last October.
While the war in Gaza has been Israel’s main focus since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas-led militants, the precarious situation on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon has fueled fears of a regional conflict that could draw the U.S. States and Iran.
“Hezbollah wants to avoid an all-out war. It still wants to avoid one. But given the scale, the impact on families, on civilians, there will be pressure for a stronger response,” said Mohanad Hage Ali of Carnegie Middle East. Center.
Hezbollah said in a statement on Wednesday that “the resistance will continue today, like every other day, its operations in support of Gaza, its people and its resistance, which is a separate path from the harsh punishment that must be the criminal enemy (Israel) awaits. response to Tuesday’s massacre”.
The plot appears to have been in the works for several months, several sources told Reuters. A series of murders of Hezbollah and Hamas commanders and leaders indicted in Israel since the start of the Gaza war.
The path leads to Budapest
The senior Lebanese security source said the group had ordered 5,000 pagers from Gold Apollo, which multiple sources say were imported 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 Gold Apollo identified in a statement as BAC.
“The product was not ours. It was just that it had our brand,” Hsu told reporters at the company’s offices in New Taipei, northern Taiwan, on Wednesday.
The listed address for BAC Consulting in Budapest was a peachy building on a mostly residential street in an outer suburb. The company name was posted on the glass door on an A4 sheet.
A person at the building who asked not to be named said BAC Consulting was registered at the address but had no physical presence there. Several other companies were also registered at that address, though none responded to phone calls and physical inquiries from Reuters.
BAC Consulting CEO Cristiana Barsony-Arcidiacono says on her LinkedIn profile that she has worked as a consultant for various organizations, including UNESCO. He did not respond to emails from Reuters. The company’s website makes no mention of manufacturing.
The senior Lebanese security source identified a photo of the model of the pager, an AP-924, which like other pagers receives and displays wireless text messages but cannot make phone calls.
Hezbollah fighters are using pagers as a low-tech means of communication in an effort to evade Israeli location tracking, two sources familiar with the group’s operations this year told Reuters.
However, the senior Lebanese source said the devices had been modified by Israel’s spy agency “at production level”.
“The Mossad inserted a board inside the device that has explosive material that receives a code. It is very difficult to detect it by any means. Even with any device or scanner,” the source said.
The source said 3,000 of the pagers went off when a coded message was sent to them, setting off the explosives at the same time.
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.
Israel’s Mossad spy agency has a reputation for sophisticated operations, has been accused of cyber attacks and is suspected of being behind the assassination of a top Iranian scientist with a remote-controlled machine gun.
Israeli officials did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.
Security failure
Hezbollah was rattled by the attack, which left militants and others bloodied, hospitalized or dead. A Hezbollah official said the explosion was the “biggest security breach” since the start of the conflict in Gaza.
“This would easily be the biggest counterintelligence failure Hezbollah has had in decades,” said Jonathan Panikoff, the US administration’s former deputy national intelligence officer for the Middle East.
In February, Hezbollah drew up a war plan aimed at addressing gaps in the group’s intelligence infrastructure. Some 170 militants had already been killed in targeted Israeli strikes in Lebanon, including a senior commander and a top Hamas official in Beirut.
In a televised address on February 13, the group’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah sternly warned supporters that their phones are more dangerous than Israeli spies, saying they should smash them, bury them or lock them in an iron box .
Instead, the group chose to distribute pagers to Hezbollah members in the group’s various branches – from fighters to doctors working in aid services.
The explosions maimed several Hezbollah members, according to hospital footage reviewed by Reuters. The injured had various degrees of facial injuries, missing fingers and open wounds on the hip where pagers were likely worn.
A rocket barrage by Hezbollah the day after October 7 opened the latest phase of the conflict, and since then there have been daily exchanges of rockets, artillery and missiles, with Israeli jets striking deep into Lebanese territory.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallad told US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Monday that the window is closing for a diplomatic solution to the conflict with Hezbollah.
Concerns about a wider conflict in the Middle East have prompted international airlines to suspend flights to the region or avoid airspace.
However, experts said they did not see the paging blasts as a sign that an Israeli ground attack was imminent.
Rather, it was a sign of the seemingly deep penetration of Israeli intelligence into 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, primarily at the CIA.
