According to the report, at least nine people were killed and about 2,800 others were injured, including the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon, when radio pagers exploded across Lebanon in an unprecedented attack. The Lebanese government and Hezbollah held Israel responsible for the explosions. However, Israel has not issued any official comment on the incident.
In the United States, the New York Times quoted American officials and other unnamed sources as saying that the pagers that exploded were manufactured by the Taiwanese company Gold Apollo. The report added that Israel tampered with the devices and planted small amounts of explosives inside each one before shipping them to Lebanon.
A senior Lebanese security source and another source told Reuters that the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad planted small amounts of explosives inside 5,000 Taiwanese-made pagers ordered by the Lebanese Hezbollah group months before Tuesday’s bombings.
The source added that “Mossad injected a board inside the devices containing an explosive material that receives a code that is very difficult to detect by any means, even using any device or scanner.”
The source said that three thousand pagers exploded when they received an encrypted message that led to the activation of explosive materials simultaneously.
Another security source told Reuters that up to three grams of explosives were hidden in the new communications devices and were not discovered by the group for several months.
But the New York Times quoted its sources as saying that the order received by Gold Apollo included about three thousand devices, most of them of the AB924 model.
According to Lebanese Health Minister Firas Abiad, the explosions resulted in “the death of nine people, including a child.”
For his part, Brussels-based military and security analyst Elijah Manier told Agence France-Presse that “Israel likely needed access to the supply chain of the devices to be able to hide the explosives in the new shipment.”
Manier suggested that “Israeli intelligence was able to infiltrate the production process, add an explosive component and a remote-controlled mechanism without raising suspicion.”
He added that this raises the possibility that the third party that sold these devices may have been an “intelligence front” created specifically for this purpose by Israel.
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