Hezbollah was still distributing pagers hours before Tuesday blast
Sources say Lebanese terror group checked devices before distribution; screening of walkie-talkies was underway on Wednesday as those devices exploded
BEIRUT, Lebanon — The Lebanese terror group Hezbollah was still handing its members new Gold Apollo branded pagers hours before thousands of the devices blew up this week, two security sources said, indicating the group was confident they were safe despite an ongoing sweep of electronic equipment to identify threats.
One member of the Iranian-backed organization received a new pager on Monday that exploded the next day while it was still in its box, one of the sources said. A pager given to a senior member just days earlier injured a subordinate when it detonated, another source said.
In an apparently coordinated attack, the Gold Apollo branded devices detonated on Tuesday across Hezbollah’s strongholds of south Lebanon, Beirut’s suburbs and the eastern Bekaa valley, killing 12 and wounding nearly 3,000.
Taiwan-based Gold Apollo has said it did not manufacture the devices used in the attack, saying they were made by a company in Europe licensed to use the firm’s brand. Reuters has not been able to establish where they were made or at what point they were tampered with.
A batch of 5,000 of the pagers were brought into Lebanon earlier this year. Reuters previously reported that Hezbollah began transitioning to pagers in an attempt to evade Israeli surveillance of its mobile phones, following the killing of senior commanders in targeted airstrikes over the past year.
Hezbollah had been importing pagers to Lebanon since 2022. The group had them examined by traveling through airports with them to ensure they would not trigger alarms, two sources told Reuters without specifying at which airports these tests were conducted.
Rather than a specific suspicion of the pagers, the checks had been part of a routine “sweep” of its equipment, including communications devices, to find any indications that they were laced with explosives or surveillance mechanisms, one source said.
Another source had told Reuters that the pagers had been implanted with explosives that were difficult to detect. A different source told Reuters that up to three grams (0.11 ounce) of explosives had been hidden in the new pagers, apparently months before the blasts.
Walkie-talkies
Hezbollah suspected after the Tuesday explosions that more of its devices may have been compromised, two security sources, as well as an intelligence source, told Reuters.
In response, it intensified the sweep of its communications systems, carrying out careful examinations of all devices. The group also began investigating the supply chains through which the pagers were brought in, the two security sources said.
But the review had not been concluded by Wednesday afternoon when the hand-held radios exploded, killing 25 people and injuring at least 650.
Hezbollah believes that Israel opted to detonate the group’s hand-held radios because it feared Hezbollah would soon find that the walkie-talkies were also rigged with explosives, one of the sources told Reuters.
The larger fatality rate attributed to the walkie-talkie attack in comparison to the pager attack is because the former devices carried a higher payload of explosives than the latter, one of the security sources and the intelligence source said.
The batteries of the walkie-talkies were laced with a highly explosive compound known as PETN, another Lebanese source familiar with the device’s components told Reuters on Friday.
Pictures of the walkie-talkies that had exploded showed labels reading “ICOM” and “made in Japan”. Icom 6820.T has said it halted production a decade ago of the radio models identified in the attack, and that most of those still on sale were counterfeit.
Yoshiki Enomoto, the general manager of Icom’s security and trade division, told Reuters it was possible that an older Icom device had been modified to make a bomb.
It would be difficult to insert an explosive device into the main compartment of the walkie-talkie because its electronics are tightly packed, so it was more likely to have been in the detachable battery pack, Enomoto told the Japanese broadcaster Fuji TV.
A Lebanese source told Reuters that explosions had occurred even in cases where the battery pack was separated from the rest of the device.
In total, the consecutive attacks killed 37 people, including at least two children, and injured more than 3,600 people.
Investigations
The Saudi news outlet Al-Hadath reported Thursday that Hezbollah has begun arresting people on suspicion of involvement with the attacks, including the brother of a senior member of the terrorist organization and the Hezbollah member responsible for the group’s communication devices.
The report added that the Lebanese army has been detonating Hezbollah communication devices and requesting that citizens report on devices they find and stay away from them.
The Lebanese news site Al-Janubiyeh reported that the Lebanese justice ministry will cooperate with Hezbollah in its investigation into the explosions.
Lebanon and Hezbollah say Israel was behind the attacks. A Western security source told Reuters this week that Israel’s secretive military intelligence Unit 8200 was involved in the planning. Israel, which has since stepped up airstrikes on Lebanon, has neither denied nor confirmed involvement.
The attacks, and the distribution of the devices despite the routine sweep and checks for breaches, have struck at Hezbollah’s reputation as the most formidable of Iran’s allied ‘Axis of Resistance’ umbrella of anti-Israel irregular forces across the Middle East.
In a televised speech on Thursday, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah said the attacks were “unprecedented in the history” of the group.
Hezbollah’s media office and Israel’s armed forces did not immediately respond to requests for comment for this story.
Hezbollah’s conflict with Israel dates back decades but has flared up in the past year in parallel with the Gaza war, heightening worries of a full-blown regional war.
Since October 8, Hezbollah-led forces have attacked Israeli communities and military posts along the border on a near-daily basis, with the group saying it is doing so to support Gaza amid the war there.
So far, the skirmishes have resulted in 26 civilian deaths on the Israeli side, as well as the deaths of 22 IDF soldiers and reservists. There have also been several attacks from Syria, without any injuries.
Hezbollah has named 482 members who have been killed by Israel during the ongoing skirmishes, mostly in Lebanon but some also in Syria. Another 79 operatives from other terror groups, a Lebanese soldier, and dozens of civilians have also been killed.
Hezbollah’s probe into precisely where, when and how the devices were laced with explosives is ongoing, three sources told Reuters. Nasrallah later said the same in his speech on Thursday.
One of the security sources said Hezbollah had foiled previous Israeli operations targeting devices imported from abroad by the group — from its private landline telephones to ventilation units in the group’s offices.
That includes suspected breaches in the past year.
“There are several electronic issues that we were able to discover but not the pagers,” the source said. “They tricked us, hats off to the enemy.”
Glenn Gerstell, the general counsel of the National Security Agency was quoted by The New York Times as saying on Wednesday: “[The explosions] might well be the first and frightening glimpse of a world in which ultimately no electronic device, from our cellphones to thermostats, can ever be fully trusted.”
