Israel planted explosives in 5,000 Hezbollah pagers, sources claim

Israel's Mossad spy agency planted explosives inside 5,000 pagers imported by Lebanese group Hezbollah months before Tuesday's detonations, 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 3,000, including the group's fighters and Iran's envoy to Beirut.

The Lebanese security source said the pagers were from Taiwan-based Gold Apollo, but the company said it did not manufacture the devices. It said they were made by BAC, which has a licence 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.

Hezbollah said on Wednesday “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 the criminal enemy (Israel) should await in response to Tuesday's massacre”.

The plot appears to have been many months in the making.

The senior Lebanese security source said the group had ordered 5,000 beepers from Gold Apollo, which several sources said 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 name of which he could not immediately confirm. The company named BAC as the firm, but Hsu declined to comment on its location.

“The product was not ours. It only had our brand on it,” Hsu told reporters at the company's offices in the Taiwanese city of New Taipei on Wednesday.

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.

Gold Apollo said the AR-924 model was produced and sold by BAC.

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.

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 a device or scanner,” the source said.

The source said 3,000 pagers exploded when a coded message was sent to them, simultaneously activating the explosives.

Another security source told Reuters that up to 3g of explosives were hidden in the 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 requests for comment.

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 detonations were 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 Hezbollah has had in decades,” said Jonathan Panikoff, the US government's former deputy national intelligence officer on the Middle East.

In February, Hezbollah drew up a war plan that aimed to address gaps in the group's intelligence infrastructure. About 170 fighters had 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 warned supporters their phones were more dangerous than Israeli spies, saying they should break, bury or lock them in an iron box.

Instead, the group opted to distribute pagers to Hezbollah members across the group's 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 to the face, missing fingers and gaping wounds at the hip, where the pagers were likely worn.

“We got hit hard,” said the senior Lebanese security source, who has direct knowledge of the group's investigations 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.

While the war in Gaza has been Israel's main focus since the October 7 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 US and Iran.

A missile barrage by Hezbollah the day after October 7 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 standoff with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement in southern Lebanon.

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

Instead, it was a sign of Israeli intelligence's 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.

Reuters