A Lebanese army soldier waves as an ambulance transports wounded to a hospital in Beirut on September 17, 2024, after explosions rocked several Hezbollah positions across Lebanon amid continued cross-border tensions between Israel and Hezbollah fighters.
Anwar Amro | AFP | Getty Images
Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency had planted explosives in 5,000 pagers imported by the Lebanese group Hezbollah months before the blast that killed nine people on Tuesday, a senior Lebanese security official and another source told Reuters.
The operation, which was tracked from Taiwan to Budapest, was an unprecedented security breach by Hezbollah and led to the explosion of thousands of pagers across Lebanon, wounding around 3,000 people, including many Hezbollah fighters and the Iranian envoy in Beirut.
Lebanese security sources said the pagers were made by Taiwan’s Gold Apollo, but the company said in a statement that it did not manufacture the devices. It said they were made by a company called BAC, based in the Hungarian capital, which it had a license to use the brand, but did not provide further details.
Iran-backed Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate against Israel, but the Israeli military has declined to comment on the blast.
The pager explosion comes amid growing concerns about tensions between Israel and Hezbollah, which have been fighting across the border since the Gaza conflict erupted in October last year.
While the war in Gaza has been Israel’s main focus since an Oct. 7 attack by Hamas-led militants, the instability along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon has raised fears of a regional conflict that could draw in the United States and Iran.
“Hezbollah wants to avoid all-out war. It still wants to avoid it, but the scale of it, the impact on families and civilians, will put pressure on them for a stronger response,” said Mohanad Hagee Ali of the Carnegie Middle East Center.
Hezbollah said in a statement on Wednesday that “today, as every other day, the resistance will continue its work in support of Gaza, its people and the resistance. This is an alternative to the harsh punishment that awaits its criminal enemy (Israel) for Tuesday’s massacre.”
Multiple sources told Reuters the plan appears to have been in the works for months and follows a series of assassinations of Hezbollah and Hamas commanders and leaders blamed on Israel since the start of the Gaza war.
The road to Budapest
A senior Lebanese security official said the group had ordered 5,000 pagers from Gold Apollo, and several sources said they were brought into the country earlier this year.
Gold Apollo founder Xu Qingguang said the pagers used in the explosion were made by a European company that Gold Apollo named in a statement as BAC.
“The product is not ours. It just has our brand on it,” Xu told reporters at the company’s office in New Taipei City, northern Taiwan, on Wednesday.
The listed address for BAC Consulting in Budapest was a pink building in a residential suburb, with the company name printed on an A4 sheet of paper and stuck to the glass door.
A person at the building, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said BAC Consulting is registered to the address but is not physically based there. Several other companies are registered to the address, but none of them responded to calls or direct inquiries from Reuters.
BAC Consulting CEO Cristiana Barthony Arcidiacono says on her LinkedIn profile that she has served as an adviser to various organisations, including UNESCO. She did not respond to an email from Reuters. The company’s website does not mention manufacturing.
A senior Lebanese security official identified a photo of the pager, model AP-924, which, like other pagers, can wirelessly receive and display text messages but cannot make calls.
Hezbollah fighters use pagers as a low-tech form of communication to evade Israeli tracking of their location, two sources familiar with the group’s operations told Reuters this year.
But a senior Lebanese source said the device had been modified “at the production level” by Israeli intelligence.
“Mossad injected a circuit board containing an explosive that received a code into the device. It would be extremely difficult to detect by any means, with any device or scanner,” the source said.
According to the sources, 3,000 pagers exploded when the encrypted message was sent, and explosives were also detonated at the same time.
Another security source told Reuters the new pagers contained up to three grams of explosives and went “undetected” by Hezbollah for months.
The Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, is known for carrying out sophisticated operations and has been held responsible for cyber attacks and is suspected of being behind the assassination of a top Iranian scientist with a remote-controlled machine gun.
Israeli authorities did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Security failure
Hezbollah was shaken by the attack, which left its fighters bloodied, hospitalized or dead, and a senior Hezbollah official said the blast was the group’s “biggest security breach” since the Gaza conflict began.
“This will undoubtedly be Hezbollah’s biggest counterintelligence failure in decades,” said Jonathan Panikov, a former U.S. deputy national intelligence director for the Middle East.
Hezbollah drew up a war plan in February aimed at filling gaps in the group’s intelligence infrastructure. Targeted Israeli attacks in Lebanon have already killed about 170 of its fighters, including a senior commander in Beirut and a senior Hamas official.
In a television address on February 13, the organization’s secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, issued a stern warning to his supporters that mobile phones are more dangerous than Israeli spies and should be destroyed, buried or locked in iron boxes.
Instead, the group opted to distribute the pagers to Hezbollah members in its various branches, from fighters to medical workers engaged in relief efforts.
Hospital footage seen by Reuters showed many of the Hezbollah members were seriously injured in the blast, with those suffering varying degrees of facial injuries, missing fingers and a large wound on their lower back where they likely had been wearing a pager.
The latest phase of the conflict began with a Hezbollah missile attack the day after Oct. 7, and since then rocket, artillery and missile exchanges have become near-daily, with Israeli jets striking deep into Lebanese territory.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Monday that the window for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict with Hezbollah was closing.
Concerns over escalating conflict in the Middle East have led international airlines to suspend flights to the region or avoid its airspace.
Still, experts said they did not see the pager explosions as a sign of an imminent Israeli ground attack.
Rather, it was a sign of Israeli intelligence’s deep penetration into Hezbollah.
“This shows that Israel has the capability to infiltrate an enemy country in an incredibly dramatic way,” said Paul Pillar, a 28-year veteran of U.S. intelligence, primarily with the CIA.