Israel’s Mossad spy agency planted a small amount of explosives inside thousands of pagers ordered by Hezbollah months before the devices exploded, a Lebanese security source has told the Reuters news agency.

Sky News – Sept 18, 2024

The senior source said the militant group had ordered 5,000 beepers which several other sources said were brought into Lebanon in the spring.

The same source claimed that the devices had been modified by Israel’s spy service “at the production level”.

A second security source told Reuters that up to three grammes of explosives were hidden in the new pagers that went “undetected” by Hezbollah for months.

Details from the Reuters report are similar to one by the New York Times, which citied American and other officials.

Images of the destroyed devices analysed by Reuters showed a format and stickers that were consistent with the 924 model of pagers made by Gold Apollo – a Taiwan-based company.

The firm’s founder, Hsu Ching-Kuang, said the devices were actually made under licence in Europe using the Gold Apollo name.

He did not give any further detail on the European company.

The model, like other pagers, wirelessly receives and display text messages but cannot make telephone calls.

Nine people were killed and thousands seriously injured in Tuesday’s explosions in different parts of Lebanon, the country’s health minister said.

Firas Abiad said 200 of the 2,750 wounded were in a critical condition.

Lebanese officials laid the blame on “Israeli aggression”, while Hezbollah promised to retaliate insisting Israel would receive “its fair punishment” for the blasts.

The Israeli military, which has been engaged in cross-border fighting with Hezbollah since the start of the Gaza war in October last year, has refused to respond to questions about the detonations.

Experts broadly agree that the blasts do not look like a typical lithium battery fire.

Keren Elazari, a hacker and security researcher at Tel Aviv University, told Sky News: “There is no remote hacking capability that could generate that kind of kinetic explosion… some sort of a physical explosive component was probably part of the equation.”

Bomb disposal expert and former British army officer Chris Hunter added that his initial theory – based on injuries – suggests the blasts are “consistent with one to two ounces of high explosive”

“We’ve seen this sort of similar MO [particular method] with mobile devices before,” he said, pointing to the assassination of Hamas master bomb maker Yahya Ayyash whose mobile phone had been laced with a small amount of explosives.

Hezbollah fighters would have considered pagers a lo-fi, harder to infiltrate alternative to mobile phones, according to Sky News’s Middle East correspondent Alistair Bunkall.

It comes after Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah previously warned the group’s members in February not to carry mobile phones because Israel could use them to track their movements.

Source

…AND THEN:

More Wireless Devices Explode in Lebanon in Second Attack

For a second day, hand-held communication devices exploded across Lebanon and in the southern suburbs of the capital, Beirut, in an apparent attack on Hezbollah. At least 20 people were killed and 450 people were injured, according to the Lebanese health ministry…Live Updates: More Wireless Devices Explode in Lebanon in Second Attack – The New York Times (nytimes.com)

So much for the warnings then…

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