‘Use it or lose it’: Israel reportedly set off pagers amid fears plot was exposed
Mossad reportedly put explosives in thousands of pagers during production before devices reached Lebanon, planning to detonate them in the event of full-scale war
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.
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
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.
Mojtaba Amani, ambassador of the #Iran's Islamic Regime was wounded in the explosion of a #Hezbollah's pager in his pocket after #Israel Defense Force jammed and hacked it. This video shows his transportation to hospital by an ambulance. pic.twitter.com/InlUFp5UFk
— Babak Taghvaee – The Crisis Watch (@BabakTaghvaee1) September 17, 2024
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.”
Hezbollah blamed Israel for the apparent attack and vowed to retaliate.
In a statement Wednesday, the terror group warned of a “harsh punishment that the criminal enemy (Israel) should await in response to Tuesday’s massacre.”
The explosions came with Israeli leaders reportedly considering a major offensive in southern Lebanon to drive Hezbollah forces north of the Litani River, 10 miles north of Israel’s border, in line with a 2006 United Nations Security Council resolution.
Hezbollah has been firing at Israel almost daily since October 8, 2023, following its ally Hamas’s cross-border terror onslaught the day before, which started the ongoing war in Gaza.
On Tuesday, just hours before the pager explosions, the security cabinet officially added as a war goal the safe return home of tens of thousands of citizens who were evacuated from their homes in Israel’s north when the war broke out. Also on Tuesday, the Shin Bet security service announced that it had foiled a Hezbollah plot to assassinate a former high-ranking defense official on Israeli soil.
US President Joe Biden’s administration has largely avoided commenting on the pager explosions, while stressing that Washington was not involved and had no advance knowledge of the apparent attack.
“The US was not involved in it. The US was not aware of this incident in advance, and at this point, we’re gathering information,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said during a press briefing on Tuesday.
According to Axios, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin minutes before the explosions, telling him Israel was about to carry out an operation in Lebanon, but refusing to elaborate.
Israeli officials who met with US envoy Amos Hochstein on Monday did not tell him about the operation, though at the time they were discussing among themselves for hours the possibility that it had been compromised, the report added.
Tuesday evening, after the detonations, the IDF carried out an airstrike in southern Lebanon’s Majdal Selm. The military said it targeted a building where several Hezbollah operatives were identified.
Overnight, fighter jets also struck buildings used by the terror group in southern Lebanon’s Odaisseh, Markaba, Blida, Maroun al-Ras, and Chihine, the IDF said.
The terror group said Tuesday night that 12 of its members were killed by the pager explosions and the IDF strikes.
Early Wednesday morning, sirens sounded in the northern Israeli city of Tiberias and surrounding communities, as well as the southern Golan Heights. They were the first sirens to be activated since the pager explosions.
The military said they were activated due to a suspected drone, which was intercepted. There were no reported injuries.
So far, the skirmishes between Israeli and Hezbollah forces since Hamas’s October 7 attack have resulted in 26 civilian deaths on the Israeli side, as well as the deaths of 20 IDF soldiers and reservists. There have also been several attacks from Syria, without any injuries.
Hezbollah has named 453 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.
Jacob Magid contributed to this report.