Thousands wounded by Exploding Pagers in Lebanon

Post Reply New Topic

In what appears to be a sophisticated, remote attack, pagers used by hundreds of members of Hezbollah exploded almost simultaneously in Lebanon and Syria Tuesday, killing at least nine people — including an 8-year-old girl — and wounding thousands more.

A U.S. official said Israel briefed the U.S. on the operation — in which small amounts of explosive secreted in the pagers were detonated — on Tuesday after it was concluded. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the information publicly.

The Iran-backed militant group blamed Israel for the deadly explosions, which targeted an extraordinary breadth of people and showed signs of being a long-planned operation. Details on how the attack was executed are largely uncertain and investigators have not immediately said how the pagers were detonated. The Israeli military has declined to comment.

Here's what we know so far.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah previously warned the group’s members not to carry cellphones, saying they could be used by Israel to track the group's movements. As a result, the organization uses pagers to communicate.

A Hezbollah official told The Associated Press the exploded devices were from a new brand the group had not used before. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press, did not identify the brand name or supplier.

Taiwanese company Gold Apollo said Wednesday it had authorized its brand on the AR-924 pager model and a company called BAC produced and sold the pagers. Further information on BAC wasn't immediately available.

Nicholas Reese, adjunct instructor at the Center for Global Affairs in New York University’s School of Professional Studies, explains smart phones carry a higher risk for intercepted communications in contrast to the simpler technology of pagers.

This type of attack will also force Hezbollah to change their communication strategies, said Reese, who previously worked as an intelligence officer, adding that survivors of Tuesday's explosions are likely to throw away "not just their pagers, but their phones, and leaving their tablets or any other electronic devices.”

Even with a U.S. official confirming it was a planned operation by Israel, multiple theories have emerged Tuesday around how the attack might have been carried out. Several experts who spoke with The Associated Press explained how the explosions were most likely the result of supply-chain interference.

Very small explosive devices may have been built into the pagers prior to their delivery to Hezbollah, and then all remotely triggered simultaneously, possibly with a radio signal.

By the time of the attack, “the battery was probably half-explosive and half-actual battery," said Carlos Perez, director of security intelligence at TrustedSec.

A former British Army bomb disposal officer explained that an explosive device has five main components: A container, a battery, a triggering device, a detonator and an explosive charge.

“A pager has three of those already,” explained the ex-officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he now works as a consultant with clients on the Middle East. “You would only need to add the detonator and the charge.”

After security camera footage appeared on social media Tuesday purporting to show one of the pagers explode on a man’s hip in a Lebanese market, two munitions experts offered opinions that corroborate the U.S. official's statement that the blast appeared to be the result of a tiny explosive device.

Looking at the video, the size of the detonation is similar to that caused by an electric detonator alone or one that incorporates an extremely small, high-explosive charge,” said Sean Moorhouse, a former British Army officer and explosive ordinance disposal expert.

This signals involvement of a state actor, Moorhouse said. He adds that Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad, is the most obvious suspect to have the resources to carry out such an attack.

It would take a long time to plan an attack of this scale. The exact specifics are still unknown, but experts who spoke with the AP shared estimates ranging anywhere between several months to two years.

The sophistication of the attack suggests that the culprit has been collecting intelligence for a long time, Reese explained. An attack of this caliber requires building the relationships needed to gain physical access to the pagers before they were sold; developing the technology that would be embedded in the devices; and developing sources who can confirm that the targets were carrying the pagers.

And it's likely the compromised pagers seemed normal to their users for some time before the attack. Elijah J. Magnier, a Brussels-based veteran and a senior political risk analyst with over 37 years experience in the region, said he has had conversations with members of Hezbollah and survivors of Tuesday's pager attack. He said the pagers were procured more than six months ago.

“The pagers functioned perfectly for six months," Magnier said. What triggered the explosion, he said, appeared to be an error message sent to all the devices.

Based on his conversations with Hezbollah members, Magnier also said that many pagers didn’t go off, allowing the group to inspect them. They came to the conclusion that between 3 to 5 grams of a highly explosive material were concealed or embedded in the circuitry, he said.

Jenzen-Jones also adds that “such a large-scale operation also raises questions of targeting" — stressing the number of causalities and enormous impact reported so far.

“How can the party initiating the explosive be sure that a target’s child, for example, is not playing with the pager at the time it functions?” he said.

Hezbollah issued a statement confirming at least two members were killed in the bombings. One of them was the son of a Hezbollah member in parliament, according to the Hezbollah official who spoke anonymously. The group later issued announcements that six other members were killed Tuesday, though it did not specify how.

“We hold the Israeli enemy fully responsible for this criminal aggression that also targeted civilians,” Hezbollah said, adding that Israel will “for sure get its just punishment.”

“We hold the Israeli enemy fully responsible for this criminal aggression that also targeted civilians,” Hezbollah said, adding that Israel will “for sure get its just punishment.”

Anyone know if Boo is ok?

Another wave of explosions involving wireless devices rocked Lebanon on Wednesday afternoon, local officials said, a day after at least 12 people were killed and thousands more injured in Lebanon in an apparently coordinated attack that targeted members of Hezbollah by blowing up their pagers.

At least nine people were killed and more than 300 wounded in the second wave of blasts, according to the Lebanese health ministry, even as the country reeled from a stunning day of explosions that wounded and maimed thousands as pagers detonated in hands and pockets. The attack embarrassed Hezbollah, incapacitated many of its members, and ratcheted up fears of a wider escalation between the Iran-backed Lebanese armed group and Israel.

“There are buildings burning right now in front of me,” Mortada Smaoui, 30, a resident of Beirut’s southern suburbs, said after a series of explosions hit his neighborhood on Wednesday. He said that firefighters and soldiers were rushing to the scene.

The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the new attack. Hezbollah, as well as Lebanese, U.S. and other officials briefed on the operation, have said that Israel was responsible for the deadly pager blasts on Tuesday, which blew up hand-held devices in homes and grocery stores across Lebanon.

On Wednesday, even funerals were not safe. When blasts were heard at a rite for dead Hezbollah fighters on Tuesday, mourners were urged to remove the batteries from their devices.

Two Lebanese security officials and a Hezbollah official, who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the situation, said the devices that exploded on Wednesday were hand-held radios — commonly known as walkie-talkies — belonging to Hezbollah members.

The Lebanese Red Cross said that 30 ambulance teams were responding to “multiple explosions” in different areas of Lebanon, including the country’s south and east. Fires have broken out in homes, cars and shops in several parts of Lebanon, including the Bekaa Valley and Beirut’s southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold, the Lebanese Civil Defense said.

But despite the tactical forcefulness of the attacks, Hezbollah said it would not cease the cross-border strikes it has launched against Israel since last October in solidarity with Hamas. The conflict has caused over 150,000 people to flee their homes in Israel and Lebanon, and Israeli officials have faced growing frustration from the tens of thousands of displaced Israelis unable to return home.

Here’s what else to know:

Taiwanese company: Israel hid tiny explosives inside a new batch of Taiwanese-made pagers imported to Lebanon, according to American and other officials briefed on the operation. The Taiwanese company some of the officials named as the supplier, Gold Apollo, on Wednesday sought to distance itself from the devices, saying that another manufacturer with a Hungarian address had made the model of pager targeted in the attack as part of a licensing deal.

Thousands injured:Lebanese officials on Wednesday raised the death toll from the day before to 12 people, including two children, and said that nearly 2,800 people were injured. Hezbollah said at least eight of its fighters were among those killed. Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amini, was injured by an exploding pager, and he was evacuated to Tehran for treatment, according to two members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps briefed on the attack.

A child’s funeral: Mourners gathered in the village of Saraain for the funeral of the youngest confirmed victim of the pager attack: 9-year-old Fatima Abdullah. They chanted as they made their way through the cemetery: “They killed our child Fatima!”

Hezbollah’s pagers targeted:Three officials briefed on the Tuesday attack said that the operation targeted hundreds of pagers belonging to Hezbollah operatives who have used such devices for years to make it harder for their messages to be intercepted. The use of pagers became even more widespread after the Oct. 7 attacks, when Hezbollah’s chief warned that Israeli intelligence had penetrated the cellphone network, security experts said.

Covert operations: Israel has carried out a series of clandestine attacks against Iran and its allies as part of a yearslong shadow war. Israel assassinated Iran’s top nuclear scientist and deputy defense minister, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, in 2020 using an A.I.-assisted robot controlled remotely via satellite. In February, Israel blew up two major gas pipelines in Iran, disrupting service to several cities, and, in 2021, an Israeli hack of Iran’s oil ministry servers disrupted gasoline distribution nationwide.

Israel caused thousands of Hezbollah terror group pagers to explode Tuesday, killing nine people and wounding nearly 3,000, amid fears that Hezbollah was about to uncover that the devices had been tampered with, according to Wednesday reports.

Israeli intelligence services originally wanted to detonate the pagers as an opening blow in an all-out war against Hezbollah, Axios reported, citing American and Israeli officials. They chose to act early, however, when a Hezbollah member became suspicious of the devices and planned to alert his superiors, Al-Monitor reported.

Just days earlier, a different Hezbollah member had come to suspect the devices had been tampered with, and then he was killed, Al-Monitor said.

Upon learning of the suspicions, Israeli leaders reportedly considered launching an immediate full-scale war in order to retain the pager attack as an opening blow. They also considered leaving things as they were, even at the risk of the operation being compromised, according to the Al-Monitor report.

Israel has not commented on the detonations, neither claiming nor denying responsibility.

The New York Times and Reuters reported Tuesday that Israeli agents had tampered with the pagers before they reached Lebanon, though it was not clear where the tampering had taken place.

“The Mossad injected a board inside of 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,” a senior Lebanese security source told Reuters.

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

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.

Mojtaba Amani, the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon, lost one eye and his other was seriously wounded in the attack, according to The New York Times.

Members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps told the newspaper that Amani’s injuries were more serious than initially reported, and he would be taken to Tehran for treatment.

Video on social media purported to show Amani on a Lebanese street in the aftermath of the attack, with blood on the front of his shirt.

Also reported among the dead were the son of a Hezbollah lawmaker and the 10-year-old daughter of a member of the terror group.

Footage from hospitals, reviewed by Reuters, showed wounded men with facial injuries of varying degrees, 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 attack appeared to have been many months in the making, several sources told Reuters.

In a televised speech on February 13, the terror group’s leader 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.

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

The senior Lebanese security source said Hezbollah ordered 5,000 beepers from Taiwan-based Gold Apollo, which several sources said were brought into the country earlier this year.

Gold Apollo said on Wednesday that the devices were made by BAC, a Budapest-based firm that has the right to use the Gold Apollo’s brand but is otherwise independent.

Gold Apollo authorized “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,” it said in a statement.

“The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it,” Gold Apollo’s founder and president, Hsu Ching-kuang, told reporters at the company’s offices in the northern Taiwanese city of New Taipei on Wednesday.

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

He also noted that remittances from BAC had been “very strange,” and said that payments had come through the Middle East. He did not elaborate further.

Hsu said Gold Apollo was a victim of the incident and planned to sue the licensee.

“We may not be a large company but we are a responsible one,” he said. “This is very embarrassing.”

If the Israeli state is responsible they need to be treated as a terrorist organization.

Glass houses, throwing the first stone? technically using that logic we shouldn't be buying one drop of oil from any middle eastern country then. Like the whole embargo on Russia thing is propping up a corrupt Ukrainian government while punishing civilians in the EU who are struggling with the cost of living/energy prices.

Lebanon’s health minister says the number of people killed when pagers used by members of the armed group Hezbollah exploded on Tuesday has risen to 12, including two children and four healthcare workers.