Thursday, September 19, 2024, 11:51
The beepers began ringing shortly after 3:30 p.m. in Lebanon: the buzzers alerted Hezbollah agents of a message from their leader. But it was all a trap. Behind the melodies was their main enemy and the alerts turned into explosions, death and wounded people screaming in pain. Video recordings spread across the internet show men being thrown off their motorcycles or falling to their knees while buying fruit.
In the first attack, at least a dozen people were killed and nearly 3,000 injured and maimed. In the second, another 20 were killed and hundreds more were injured when the walkie-talkies also began to explode. Some of the victims were Hezbollah militants, others were not: four of the dead were children.
At one point, Hezbollah’s leader banned his fighters from carrying mobile phones, because Israel could use them to track their movements. Instead, they were given pagers. pic.twitter.com/Q8euyTFQvD
— Inna Kovalska (@InnaKovalska_) September 17, 2024
This is an unprecedented operation, which many see as the hand of Israel. The country, however, remains silent as it always does on such attacks. However, according to testimonies from US defence and intelligence officials to which The New York Times has had access, there is no doubt that the Mossad is behind an operation that the same sources describe as “complex and long in the making.”
Pagers and booby-trapped walkie-talkies have been the latest chapter in a decades-long conflict that has come to a head after the Gaza war began. While the impact of their use has been outsized this time, it is not the first time that Israeli intelligence services have used the technology to target Iranian-backed groups such as Hezbollah. In 2020, for example, it assassinated Tehran’s top nuclear scientist with an AI-assisted, satellite-controlled robot.
Shell company
In Lebanon, when Israel liquidated senior Hezbollah commanders through targeted killings, its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, came to a conclusion: If Israel went high-tech, Hezbollah would revert to more rudimentary methods to avoid detection by cyber spies. He warned in a publicly televised address in February: “You ask me where the agent is. I tell you that the phone in your hands, in the hands of your wife and in the hands of your children is the agent.”
Faced with this warning, his followers and many others, out of fear, took a step back and replaced their mobile phones with pagers and walkie-talkies. But the Shiite leader’s message was also heard by Israeli intelligence. The New York Times reveals that it was then that the Mossad launched a plan to set up a shell company that would pose as an international pager manufacturer.
Israel 🇮🇱 hacked the cellphones and pagers of a Hezbollah terrorist in Lebanon and then blew up the devices. It planted malware in them that caused the batteries to overheat until they exploded.
Nearly 2,500 terrorists were hit by the… pic.twitter.com/kVFa6d8VNK
— Raul Aragon Loya (@RaulAragonLoya) September 17, 2024
This is where BAC Consulting and Gold Apollo come in. The former is a Hungarian-based firm contracted to produce the devices on behalf of the latter, a Taiwanese firm. The same sources explain that the Israelis set up at least two other shell companies to conceal the true identity of the people who assembled the devices: intelligence officers.
The camouflage was perfect since BAC also marketed pagers to regular customers. The difference was that those destined for Hezbollah were manufactured separately and contained batteries loaded with the explosive PETN, according to the three intelligence officials who spoke to The New York Times.
By the thousands
The pagers began to be shipped to Lebanon in the summer of 2022 in small numbers, but production quickly ramped up after Nasrallah gave up on the phones. Thousands were shipped last summer and distributed to Hezbollah officials and their allies.
All that was left to do was press the button. The moment arrived on Tuesday. How? According to the New York daily’s sources, Israel triggered the explosions by ringing pagers and sending them a message in Arabic that seemed to come from Hezbollah’s top leaders. Everyone fell right into the trap.
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