At least 12 people were killed and around 3,000 were injured when thousands of ‘pagers’ carried by members of the Hezbollah group detonated simultaneously in some parts of Lebanon and Syria on Tuesday afternoon.
So far no one has taken responsibility for the incident. But Hezbollah blamed Israel and said it would retaliate.
Israel has not officially said anything about the incident. However, this attack is believed to have been carried out by Israel.
Israel rarely talks about its intelligence operations and assassinations abroad.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah last February ordered members of the group not to carry mobile phones because Israel could use them to ‘track’ their activities and carry out targeted attacks.
The US media estimated that Hizbollah, which has been using pagers for a long time, may have distributed about 3,000 new pagers to its members.
The pagers, carried by Hezbollah members, exploded almost simultaneously at around 3:30 pm local time on Tuesday. Pager Surowal sustained injuries on the leg and thigh of the carrier, on the hand of the carrier, and on the face of the carrier. Their family members have also suffered.
As many people who were carrying those pagers were in public places when the explosion occurred, many people nearby were also injured in this incident. Hezbollah has admitted that at least eight of its members were killed and hundreds were wounded. The death toll is expected to rise as many people are injured.
Hezbollah fighters fighting for President Bashar al-Assad in Syria and other Iran-run groups using the pager to coordinate with Hezbollah have also been targeted.
The Iranian ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, was also injured in the blast.
According to the Iranian embassy, he was injured not because he was carrying a pager, but because he was close to someone who was carrying a pager. Even if he carried it himself, he would have been reluctant to admit that he was carrying a pager used for internal communications by the Hezbollah group, considered by many to be a terrorist group.
Although the border is not connected, Iran mobilizes various groups in the neighborhood to encircle Israel. Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, Houthi in Yemen and various groups in Iraq attack Israel by providing weapons and military training. So it is normal to have a Hezbollah member close to the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon.
How did Israel simultaneously detonate so many pagers used by the Hezbollah group for internal communication?
Before mobile phones came into use, many people used pagers to communicate through ‘Akshar’ (text) between their office or any other limited group of people. Many hospital doctors and nurses in the US still use pagers to communicate with each other because pagers can work even in rooms or places where mobile networks are not available.
Various terrorist organizations use pagers to prevent them from being tracked, and humanitarian aid organizations in war-torn areas also use pagers.
Since a pager does not have a camera, microphone and tracking GPS, it is very difficult to track. It is also considered very difficult to hack as it does not use internet.
Since the Mossad has used the technology to assassinate its enemies in the past, it can also hack Hezbollah’s pagers.
In 1996, Yaya Ayyash, a Hamas bomb-making expert known as ‘The Engineer’, was killed by the Mossad when he answered the phone by detonating a bomb hidden in the phone.
The most successful cyber attack on an Iranian nuclear reactor in 2010 is considered to be the most successful use of technology for the Mossad, which has killed many of its enemies in various countries. Using the ‘Stuxnet’ virus created by Israel in collaboration with the US, Iranian computers were hacked and destroyed by spinning about 1000 ‘centrifuges’ in a nuclear reactor uncontrollably.
The reputation of the Mossad, which created such a fearsome image that it could do anything and wipe out the enemy in any way, was undermined by the attack on Israel by Hamas on October 7, 2023. In that attack, 10 people from Nepal and some foreigners as well as 1200 Israelis were killed.
Since then, the Mossad has taken a number of bold and successful actions to protect its reputation, which had suffered because it had no idea that such a large-scale attack was about to take place in Israel.
But blasting Hezbollah’s pager at once has to be considered his biggest success of the past one year.
Although it is not impossible for the Mossad to hack the pager, various western media have written based on their conversations with experts that this incident was not done by hacking but by hiding explosives in the pager itself.
Although it is possible to hack the pager and cause its battery to overheat, after watching the public videos about the incident, they stated that this incident did not happen due to battery overheating.
He pointed out that when the battery gets too hot, it starts to catch fire. They also argue that the explosion in this incident is more powerful than the explosion that occurs when the battery is overheated.
Looking at the videos of the incident, it appears that the pager is an AR 294 model pager made by Taiwan’s Gold Apollo Company. It is said that Hezbollah mainly bought AR 294 model pagers along with some other model pagers of that company.
Before the pagers fell into Hezbollah’s hands, Israel placed less than 50 grams of explosives near the batteries in each pager, according to The New York Times. It is not yet clear at what stage the explosives were stored before being produced and obtained by Hezbollah.
A switch was also inserted to detonate the explosives by remote control.
Citing a senior Lebanese security source and another source, Reuters also reported that Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad had hidden explosives in 5,000 pagers imported by Hezbollah.
A message was sent to that pager once on Tuesday. The pager used by senior leaders of Hizbullah to send messages exploded after a few seconds of beeping. All the pagers that were placed so that the message could be received were detonated.
On the other hand, Taiwan’s Gold Apollo Company said that the pager was not made by itself but was made by another company with its company’s logo.
After the incident, the president and owner of the company, Soo Ching-kwang, revealed that he had given permission to a European company called BAC to make pagers with the logo of his popular model on the condition that they would give him a share of the profits. Gold Apollo claims that it has only licensed the brand and is not currently involved in the design and manufacturing process of the pager.
Now let’s discuss why Israel detonated those pagers, and especially now.
Hezbollah has a long history of enmity with Israel and has fought several wars. Hezbollah has been continuously firing rockets at Israel since Israel launched an attack on Gaza on October 7 last year in response to an attack by Hamas on Israel.
Israel is also killing Hamas as well as Hezbollah fighters and commanders.
On July 30, Israel killed Hezbollah’s top military commander, Fuad Shouk, in an airstrike on the seventh floor of a residential building in the Lebanese capital, Beirut.
Israel killed Ismail Haniyeh, the top leader of Hamas, in Tehran, the capital of Iran, a few hours after Shukra was killed. The threat of an Iran-Israel war was raised.
Hezbollah retaliated by launching hundreds of rockets and drone attacks on Israel on August 25. On the same day, knowing that Hezbollah was retaliating for Shukra’s murder, Israel attacked Lebanon before Hezbollah did. About 100 fighter jets struck 40 different rocket launch sites in Lebanon.
A war with Hezbollah was averted because Hezbollah said the revenge operation for Shukra’s killing was over. Iran also avoided the Iran-Israel war because it did not attack itself and attacked Israel through Hezbollah in retaliation for Haniyeh’s murder.
Yet Hezbollah continued to fire rockets at Israel, as it had done since October. Israeli officials have been saying that since diplomacy has not reduced Hizbullah’s attacks in recent days, they must now enter Lebanon and attack Hizbullah.
In this case, Israel may have detonated pagers to prevent Hezbollah from continuing to attack Israel. It is also possible that Israel caused this incident to destroy their communication system before starting a war with Hezbollah.
According to the American online Axius, Israel did not want to detonate the pager yesterday. But the online revealed that Israel may have exploded it thinking that Hezbollah could find out that they had hidden explosives in the pager.
Israel briefed the US after the attack. Axius wrote, citing three US officials with knowledge of the briefing.
Israel planted explosives in Hezbollah’s pager a few months ago. If a war had to be fought with Hezbollah, Israel’s plan was to detonate all the pagers at once during the war, damaging many fighters and disrupting Hezbollah’s communications system.
But since there is a danger that Hizbollah will find out about it, thinking that all that effort will be wasted, Israel has already detonated it. For that, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took a decision about it only on Monday after a long discussion with his ministers and military generals and security officials.
US President Joe Biden’s adviser Amos Hochstein was in Israel on Monday, but he was not informed about it.
Shortly before the pager was detonated on Tuesday afternoon, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galliant called his American counterpart, Lloyd Austin, to say he was planning to take action in Lebanon. But he did not reveal what kind of action he would take. US officials told Axius that Israel briefed US officials about the detonation of pagers in Lebanon and Syria at the same time.
Despite not being able to detonate pagers during the war with Hezbollah as they would have liked, Israel has achieved great success because of this incident. Hizbullah’s information system, which uses pagers, is not secure due to the threat that Israel will track them if they use a mobile phone.
It would be easy for Israel to launch a war against Hezbollah now if they launch a major retaliation attack as Hezbollah has warned.
But it will be more difficult for Hizbullah, who does not want war for fear of incurring huge losses if there is a war with Israel, to give a strong response.
Hizbollah, which has only launched rocket and drone attacks without launching a war even to avenge the killing of its top military commander, Fuad Shukra, will find it difficult to launch a war.
Hezbollah will be more fearful of what else Israel has been up to and could do after the discovery of explosives hidden in a pager long used for its internal communications.
Therefore, instead of war between Israel and Hizbullah due to this incident, there is a possibility that the daily attacks by Hizbullah, who are more afraid, will be reduced somewhat.
