—Turn it off! Put it in a locked iron box and bury it! The cell phone you have in your hands, and in the hands of your wives and children, is the killer —the leader of the gang had said. HezbollahHassan Nasrallah, in a speech last February.
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Nasrallah was convinced that Israel – his greatest enemy – was using mobile phone networks to locate members of his movement. That is why he had been insisting for several years on the need to resort to simpler, even outdated, communication technology: asked to return to the beeper. Their use had already begun to spread among members of the Lebanese militia, convinced that their information and location were safer there. What neither Nasrallah nor any member of Hezbollah expected was that these small devices would soon become real weapons. Trojan horses.
The first thing they heard last Tuesday was the sound announcing a message. It was 3:30 in the afternoon in Lebanon. Some were in the market buying fruit, others were riding motorcycles down the street, others were resting at home or standing in line at a supermarket. At that moment, one of them asked his daughter to bring him the device that was starting to ring. Perhaps they thought it was an urgent message from their bosses. But instead, when they rang the phone, they heard a message that was ringing. beepertaking it out of your pocket or bringing it closer to your face to see it better, What came was an explosion. One, two, three, hundreds of explosions have rocked the country, especially in areas that are Hezbollah strongholds. Some videos show them writhing on the ground, screaming, smoke pouring from their pockets or briefcases.
Ambulances were ringing on every corner and medical services collapsed due to the number of people arriving with injuries, especially on the face, hands, hips, depending on where they had the pager. Medical spokesmen reported more than Four hundred surgeries performed that day alone as a result of the attack. There were eleven dead and more than three thousand injured. Two children lost their lives. Fatima Abdullah, 9 years old, was the one who went out to look for the beeper to take it to his father.
One of the injured, according to local media, turned out to be Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani. It is not known whether he had one of the devices in his possession or whether he was near someone who was carrying it. Hezbollah acknowledged that eight of the dead were fighters. Until then, the identity of its members had been a secret even from their families. This attack broke that mystery and made it clear that any neighbor could be one of them.
The beepers of thousands of Shiite militia members had exploded in unison: it could not have been a coincidence. It was obvious that they had been loaded with some kind of explosive. Could it happen with other devices? Panic gripped people in general, who rushed to turn off their cell phones, unplug their appliances, their laptops, the baby monitors. If a pager had caused such chaos, anything could be a lethal weapon.
Hezbollah began a review of its communications systems, but was unable to complete it when the second attack came. It happened the next day, as hundreds of people were attending the funerals of some of Tuesday’s victims. At that moment, the new explosions began, no longer from the beepersbut of the walkie-talkies. People ran for cover. Screams could be heard asking people to get away from the devices and to turn them off. This second attack caused twenty-five deaths – apparently the devices had more explosives and were therefore more lethal – and at least six hundred wounded.
A ghost company and a powerful explosive
When thinking about those responsible, eyes immediately turned to Israel. Hezbollah and Israel have had a history of conflict — since the birth of the pro-Iranian militia in the 1980s — which has intensified over the past year. Over the past few months, their clashes have been constant due to the solidarity that Hezbollah has shown to Hamas.
Israel — through its famous and feared intelligence agency, the Mossad — had already been planning an attack of this magnitude. Israeli intelligence knew of the Shiite militia’s penchant for using beepers and had designed a sophisticated plan to intercept them. According to security experts consulted by The New York Times, Israel had created long ago a shell company that offered to manufacture these devices. BAC Consulting, based in Hungary, was actually a front company that produced such devices for various clients, although it was only interested in one of them: Hezbollah.
The devices were manipulated to conceal a few grams of Pent, one of the most powerful explosives, along with their battery, as well as a switch to activate them remotely.
The Lebanese group had ordered more than 3,000 beepers to distribute to its members in Lebanon and some in Iran and Syria. The devices, most of them model AR924, were stamped Gold Apollo, a Taiwanese high-tech company with which BAC Consulting had negotiated permission to use its brand. During manufacturing, the devices were manipulated to conceal a few grams of Pent—one of the most powerful explosives—along with their battery, as well as a switch that would allow them to be activated remotely.
The shipment of the beepers towards Hezbollah began in 2022 and was strengthened at the beginning of this year, when the leader of the movement launched his request for “bury the cell phones”” and switch to the pager. According to a source close to the militia consulted by the AFP agency, “the ones that exploded corresponded to a recent shipment.” The Israeli intelligence agents sent them through their ghost factory, waiting for the right moment to detonate them.
On Wednesday, after the attacks, Taipei-based media arrived at Gold Apollo’s offices to inquire about what had happened. Members of the Taiwanese Prosecutor’s Office were already there, questioning the company’s chairman and founder, Hsu Ching-kuang. They asked him for all kinds of details about his partners and their contracts. “They are not our products,” Hsu Ching-kuang was quick to say. The Hungarian government said the devices had been manufactured by BAC Consulting, which had been authorised to use the brand and distribute them in different regions. The Hungarian government, for its part, said the devices had not been manufactured in Hungary. The details of this case will take some time to be known, but its consequences have only just begun to be seen.
“The reckoning will happen”
“This is pure terrorism. We will call it the Tuesday massacre and the Wednesday massacre. It is a declaration of war,” the Hezbollah leader said last Thursday. And then came the warning from the “retribution”: “I will not speak of the place, the moment, the location. You will find out when it happens. The reckoning will happen.”
Nasrallah also acknowledged that it had been an “unprecedented” attack in the history of his movement. In general, all kinds of adjectives were heard to describe the event: bold, daring, ingenious, precise, “like a movie”. It is by no means the first time that the Mossad shows its particular reach. Hezbollah, other Iranian-backed groups – and Iran itself – have been targeted by Israeli intelligence in actions using the most advanced technology.
This case has brought to mind that of Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who Israel said led that country’s nuclear program and was a threat to its security. Fakhrizadeh was killed in 2020 in an attack that they say had the signature of the Mossad and was executed by a robot controlled by artificial intelligence.
Israeli services have already carried out attacks by exploding cell phones. But until now these had been isolated cases involving a single device. The massive and simultaneous action carried out with beepers and walkie-talkies It was on another level and, beyond the surprise, has generated debateOne criticism is that the bombings were carried out in places where civilians could have been affected. “The explosions in Lebanon appear to have been selective, but they caused serious indiscriminate collateral damage among civilians. There were dead children”said the High Representative of the European Union, Josep Borrell. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, told the Security Council that he was “appalled by the impact of the attacks”. “It is a war crime to commit acts of violence aimed at spreading terror among the civilian population.”
Such remarks do not seem to affect the intentions of either side. Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallan announced “the beginning of a new phase in this war”which apparently has Lebanon as its target, even beyond Gaza. Hezbollah, for its part, felt the blow – the humiliation, as they have defined it, its “biggest counterintelligence failure in decades” – but that is not going to lead it to back down on its war intentions.
The reaction from both sides following the attacks on Tuesday and Wednesday has been to step up their offensives. On Friday, Hezbollah fired dozens of rockets at Israeli military bases, while Israel responded with more intense attacks and claimed to have killed 1,000 people. one of its strategic leaders, Ibrahim Aqil, head of the elite forcesWhat many fear, given this new scenario, is that the waters will become even more turbulent and end up provoking a broader confrontation, a regional war with disastrous consequences.
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