Report: Hezbollah pagers were detonated individually; attackers knew who and where the target was

Each of the pagers that exploded on their Hezbollah owners across Lebanon on Tuesday, injuring thousands of the terror group’s operatives, was individually detonated, with the attackers knowing who was being targeted, where he was, and whether others were in close proximity, Channel 12 claims.

In a lengthy report quoting Israeli and foreign sources, the TV channel says those behind the attack were determined to ensure that only the person carrying the pager would be hurt by the blast.

“Each pager had its own arrangements. That’s how it was possible to control who was hit and who wasn’t,” it quotes an unnamed foreign security source saying.

The report says: “They knew who he was with and where he was, so that the vegetable seller in the supermarket would not be hurt” when a pager exploded on a man alongside him. This is a reference to footage from the pager explosions in which a man is apparently blown up by his pager next to a fruit and vegetable stand.

A video circulating on social media purports to show the moment that a pager used by a Hezbollah operative exploded in Lebanon. According to Lebanese media, dozens were injured after Israel allegedly hacked the devices and detonated them. https://t.co/1RMiF8wqAA pic.twitter.com/b07wTuRQ0N

— Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian (@manniefabian) September 17, 2024

The TV report adds several other new details to what has been uncovered so far regarding the unprecedented attack, which Hezbollah has blamed on Israel and Israel has not officially confirmed.

It quotes an unnamed foreign security saying “tens of thousands of pagers” were produced, and manufactured with the knowledge that the client would check them carefully. Therefore, the pagers had to work properly and betray no indication that they had been primed with explosives. Their appearance and weight had to be unchanged.

Interviewed in the report, Ronen Bergman, an investigative reporter for The New York Times and Yedioth Ahronoth, says the whole scheme was dreamed up by a brilliant female intelligence operative, aged less than 30, somewhere in the Middle East.

Whoever was responsible, the report says, decided to set up a factory to build the devices from scratch — so that “it won’t be a device that we will tamper with; it will be a device that we will produce.” The New York Times came to the same conclusion in a report on Thursday.

The ability to supply the device to Hezbollah was helped by the fact that the terror group cannot make purchases on the open market, because of suppliers’ fears of US sanctions, and therefore must routinely work with intermediary suppliers.

Channel 12’s report says that when, on October 10, the IDF and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant had pressed for Israel to attack Hezbollah, rather than focus initially on Hamas after its October 7 invasion and massacre, “it is reasonable to assume” that buttons detonating these devices would have been pressed, and very heavy air strikes on Hezbollah would have followed.

In the event, the IDF focused first on Gaza, and Hezbollah has been pounding northern Israel ever since.

The report, which was approved by the Israeli military censor, says Hezbollah bought more pagers after its military chief Fuad Shukr was killed in a targeted IDF strike in Beirut in July, and thereafter used pagers even more widely because of its growing wariness about using mobile phones. Hezbollah, the report says, long assumed that Israel would be a threat to its cellphone communications in the event of a major escalation, and thus widely integrated the use of pagers.

While Channel 12 repeats the widely reported assessment that the pagers were detonated this week because of a fear that the Trojan Horse devices were about to be exposed by Hezbollah, it also quotes a foreign security source saying this was not the case, and that Israel decided it needed to step up its actions against Hezbollah.

Amos Yadlin, a former IDF intelligence chief, says more broadly that Israel’s goal is to cause Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah to realize that his attacks on the north “are costing him more than he’s gaining,” including in terms of support within Lebanon.

The report says it was regarded as “preferable” that the large number of Hezbollah fighters whose devices exploded be badly injured rather than killed, in part because of the immense strain this placed on health services in Lebanon, and by extension the raised domestic pressure on Hezbollah.

A foreign security source tells Channel 12 that the detonating pagers operation is by no means considered a strategic attack, and that Israel has much more dramatic capabilities.

The source says Israel has spent years developing these far more extensive capabilities for use against Hezbollah and Iran, but not as regards to Hamas — apparently because it underestimated the danger posed by Hamas — and that this partly explains the failure to prevent the October 7 catastrophe. The capabilities used thus far in Lebanon are “relatively low-level,” the source says.

Eyal Hulata, a former National Security Adviser, tells Channel 12 after the report airs that thousands of Israelis have been working for years to create capabilities to ensure security for Israel. “There are more capabilities like these,” he says, referencing the recent events in Lebanon. Given the collapse of public faith in the security establishment after the October 7 failure, it is important for Israelis to know this, says Hulata, who is also a former head of the Mossad’s technological branch.