BEIRUT: Hand-held radios used by Lebanon’s armed group Hezbollah detonated late on Wednesday afternoon across the country’s south and in the southern suburbs of the capital Beirut, injuring hundreds, a security source and a witness said.
At least one of the blasts took place near a funeral organised by Hezbollah for those killed the previous day when thousands of pagers used by the group exploded across the country.
The group said on Wednesday it had attacked Israeli artillery positions with rockets in the first strike at its arch-foe since pager blasts wounded thousands of its members in Lebanon and raised the prospect of a wider Middle East conflict.
The hand-held radios were purchased by Hezbollah five months ago, around the same time that the pagers were bought, said a security source.
Israel’s Mossad spy agency planted explosives inside 5,000 pagers imported by Lebanese group Hezbollah months before Tuesday’s detonations, a senior Lebanese security source, and another source told Reuters.
The operation was an unprecedented Hezbollah security breach that saw thousands of pagers detonate across Lebanon, killing 12 people and wounding nearly 3,000 others, including the group’s fighters and Iran’s envoy to Beirut.
The Lebanese security source said the pagers were from Taiwan-based Gold Apollo, but the company said in a statement it did not manufacture the devices. It said they were made by a company called BAC which has a licence to use its brand, but gave no more details.
Iran-backed Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate against Israel, whose military declined to comment on the blasts.
Hezbollah said in a statement on Wednesday that “the resistance will continue today, like any other day, its operations to support Gaza, its people, and its resistance which is a separate path from the harsh punishment that the criminal enemy (Israel) should await in response to Tuesday’s massacre”.
The plot appears to have been many months in the making, several sources told Reuters.
The senior Lebanese security source said the group had ordered 5,000 beepers from Gold Apollo, which several sources say were brought into the country earlier this year.
Gold Apollo founder Hsu Ching-Kuang said the pagers used in the explosion were made by a company in Europe that had the right to use the firm’s brand, the name of which he could not immediately confirm. The company in a statement named BAC as the firm, but Hsu declined to comment on its location.
“The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it,” Hsu told reporters at the company’s offices in the northern Taiwanese city of New Taipei on Wednesday.
The senior Lebanese security source identified a photograph of the model of the pager, an AP924, which like other pagers wirelessly receive and display text messages but cannot make telephone calls.
Gold Apollo said in a statement that the AR-924 model was produced and sold by BAC.
“We only provide brand trademark authorisation and have no involvement in the design or manufacturing of this product,” the statement said.
Hezbollah fighters have been using pagers as a low-tech means of communication in an attempt to evade Israeli location-tracking, two sources familiar with the group’s operations told Reuters this year.
But the senior Lebanese source said the devices had been modified by Israel’s spy service “at the production level.” “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,” the source said.
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.
Hsu said he did not know how the pagers could have been rigged to explode. Israeli officials did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.
Images of destroyed pagers analysed by Reuters showed a format and stickers on the back that were consistent with pagers made by Gold Apollo.
Hezbollah was reeling from the attack, which left fighters and others bloodied, hospitalised or dead. One Hezbollah official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the detonation was the group’s “biggest security breach” since the Gaza conflict between Israel and Hezbollah ally Hamas erupted on Oct 7.
“This would easily be the biggest counterintelligence failure that Hezbollah has had in decades,” said Jonathan Panikoff, the US government’s former deputy national intelligence officer on the Middle East.
Break your phones, group ordered
In February, Hezbollah drew up a war plan that aimed to address gaps in the group’s intelligence infrastructure. Around 170 fighters had already been killed in targeted Israeli strikes on Lebanon, including one senior commander and a top Hamas official in Beirut.
In a televised speech on Feb 13, the group’s Secretary 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, the group opted to distribute pagers to Hezbollah members across the group’s various branches — from fighters to medics working in its relief services.
The explosions maimed many Hezbollah members, according to footage from hospitals reviewed by Reuters. Wounded men had injuries of varying degrees to the face, 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.
The pager blasts came at a time of mounting concern about tensions between Israel and Hezbollah, which have been engaged in cross-border warfare since the Gaza conflict erupted last October.
While the conflict in Gaza has been Israel’s main focus since the Oct 7 attack by Hamas-led gunmen, the precarious situation along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon has fueled fears of a regional conflict that could drag in the United States and Iran.
A missile barrage by Hezbollah the day after Oct 7 opened the latest phase of conflict and since then there have been daily exchanges of rockets, artillery fire, and missiles, with Israeli jets striking deep into Lebanese territory.
Hezbollah has said it does not seek a wider conflict but would fight if Israel launched one.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant told US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin on Monday that the window was closing for a diplomatic solution to the standoff with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement in southern Lebanon.
Still, experts said they did not see the pager blasts as a sign that an Israeli ground offensive was imminent.
Instead, it was a sign of Israeli intelligence’s apparently deep penetration of Hezbollah.
“It demonstrates Israel’s ability to infiltrate its adversaries in a remarkably dramatic way,” said Paul Pillar, a 28-year veteran of the US intelligence community, mainly at the CIA.
Hezbollah vows to punish Israel
Hezbollah vowed to punish Israel for a deadly attack in which hundreds of paging devices used by the group’s members exploded almost simultaneously across Lebanon.
“We hold the Israeli enemy fully responsible for this criminal aggression,” the group said in a statement on Tuesday, adding that Israel “will certainly receive its just punishment for this sinful aggression”.
On Wednesday, the group vowed in another statement on Telegram it would continue its fight in support of Gaza while reiterating it would avenge Tuesday’s blasts.
“This path is ongoing and separate from the difficult reckoning that the criminal enemy must await for its massacre on Tuesday,” the group said in a statement on Telegram.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah will make a previously unscheduled speech at 5pm (2pm GMT) on Thursday, the group said.
Hospitals overwhelmed
The influx of so many casualties all at once overwhelmed hospitals in Hezbollah strongholds.
At one hospital in Beirut’s southern suburbs, an AFP correspondent saw people being treated in a car park on thin mattresses, with medical gloves on the ground and ambulance stretchers covered in blood.
“In all my life I’ve never seen someone walking on the street… and then explode,” said Musa, a resident of the southern suburbs, requesting to be identified only by his first name.
The 10-year-old daughter of a Hezbollah member was killed in east Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley when his pager exploded, the family and a source close to the group said.
A son of Hezbollah lawmaker Ali Ammar was also among the dead, a source close to the group told AFP, requesting anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
A source close to Hezbollah, asking not to be identified, told AFP that “the pagers that exploded concern a shipment recently imported by Hezbollah of 1,000 devices” which appear to have been “sabotaged at source”.
Following the wave of blasts, Lufthansa and Air France announced the suspension of flights to Tel Aviv, Tehran, and Beirut until Thursday.
Iran accuses Israel of ‘mass murder’
Meanwhile, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson accused Israel of “mass murder”.
Foreign ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani said in a statement he “condemned the terrorist act of the Zionist regime… as an example of mass murder”.
Among those wounded in the pager blasts on Tuesday was Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon Mojtaba Amani, with Iranian media reporting he suffered injuries “to the hand and the face.” State television said that Amani was only lightly injured.
The Iranian Red Crescent said on Wednesday it had dispatched “rescue teams and eye surgeons” to Lebanon to treat the wounded.
In his statement, Kanani expressed solidarity with the families of those killed and wounded in the explosions including the Iranian ambassador.
“Combating the terrorist acts of the (Israeli) regime and the threats arising from them is an obvious necessity,” said Kanani.
“It is necessary for the international community to act quickly in order to counter the impunity of the Zionist criminal authorities. “
Blinken arrives
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived back in the region at dawn on Wednesday to try to revive stalled ceasefire talks for the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza.
After months of mediated negotiations failed to pin down a ceasefire, Washington said it was still working with mediators Qatar and Egypt to finalise an agreement.
US officials have expressed increasing frustration with Israel as Netanyahu has publicly rejected US assessments that a deal is nearly complete and has insisted on an Israeli military presence on the Egypt-Gaza border.
Trail leads to Budapest
Gold Apollo founder Hsu Ching-Kuang said the pagers used in the explosion were made by a company in Europe that Gold Apollo named in a statement as BAC.
“The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it,” Hsu told reporters at the company’s offices in the northern Taiwanese city of New Taipei.
The stated address for BAC Consulting in Budapest was a peach building on a mostly residential street in an outer suburb. The company name was posted on the glass door on an A4 sheet.
A person at the building who asked not to be named said BAC Consulting was registered at the address but did not have a physical presence there. Several other companies were also registered at that address though none answered telephone calls and physical inquiries from Reuters.
The CEO of BAC Consulting, Cristiana Barsony-Arcidiacono says on her LinkedIn profile that she has worked as an advisor for various organisations including Unesco. She did not respond to emails from Reuters. The company website makes no reference to manufacturing.
