Small plastic explosives were built into weaponized pagers to fool Hezbollah

A photo taken on September 18, 2024, in Beirut's southern suburbs shows the remains of exploded pagers on display at an undisclosed location. The pagers were used by Hezbollah and the attack has been blamed on Israel. (AFP)
A photo taken on September 18, 2024, in Beirut's southern suburbs shows the remains of exploded pagers on display at an undisclosed location. The pagers were used by Hezbollah and the attack has been blamed on Israel. (AFP)

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The batteries inside the weaponized pagers that arrived in Lebanon at the start of the year, part of an Israeli plot to decimate Hezbollah, had powerfully deceptive features and an Achilles’ heel.

The agents who built the pagers designed a battery that concealed a small but potent charge of plastic explosive and a novel detonator that was invisible to X-ray, according to a Lebanese source with first-hand knowledge of the pagers, and teardown photos of the battery pack seen by Reuters.

To overcome the weakness — the absence of a plausible backstory for the bulky new product — they created fake online stores, pages, and posts that could deceive Hezbollah due diligence, a Reuters review of web archives shows.

The stealthy design of the pager bomb and the battery’s carefully constructed cover story, both described here for the first time, shed light on the execution of a years-long operation that has struck unprecedented blows against Israel’s Iran-backed Lebanese terror group and pushed the Middle East closer to a regional war.

A thin, square sheet with six grams of white pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) plastic explosive was squeezed between two rectangular battery cells, according to the Lebanese source and photos.

The remaining space between the battery cells could not be seen in the photos but was occupied by a strip of highly flammable material that acted as the detonator, the source says.

People gather outside the American University hospital after the arrival of several men who were wounded by exploded handheld pagers, in an attack on Hezbollah fighters blamed on Israel, in Beirut, Lebanon, September 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Bassam Masri)

This three-layer sandwich was inserted in a black plastic sleeve, and encapsulated in a metal casing roughly the size of a matchbox, the photos show.

The assembly was unusual because it did not rely on a standard miniaturized detonator, typically a metallic cylinder, the source and two bomb experts say. All three spoke on conditions of anonymity.

Without any metal components, the material used to trigger detonation had an edge: like the plastic explosives, it was not detected by X-ray.

Upon receiving the pagers in February, Hezbollah looked for the presence of explosives, two people familiar with the matter say, putting them through airport security scanners to see if they triggered alarms. Nothing suspicious was reported.

The devices were likely set up to generate a spark within the battery pack, enough to light the detonating material and trigger the sheet of PETN to explode, the two bomb experts, to whom Reuters showed the pager-bomb design, say.

Since explosives and wrapping took about a third of the volume, the battery pack carried a fraction of the power consistent with its 35-gram weight, two battery experts say.

“There is a significant amount of unaccounted-for mass,” Paul Christensen, an expert in lithium batteries at Britain’s Newcastle University says.

At some point, Hezbollah noticed the battery was draining faster than expected, the Lebanese source says. However, the issue did not appear to raise major security concerns — the group was still handing its members the pagers hours before the attack.

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.

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