The series of explosions that hit pager-type messaging devices in several locations in southern Lebanon, the eastern Bekaa Valley and the southern suburbs of Beirut, all areas under the control of the Hezbollah terrorist group, dominated international news on Tuesday (17).
The blasts killed nine people, including a child and at least two Hezbollah terrorists, and injured more than 2,800, according to Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health.
Lebanese journalist Kim Ghattas, who writes for the American magazine The Atlantiche told the broadcaster CNN that Hezbollah had recently adopted the strategy of using “low technology” with the aim of “protecting” its terrorists against attacks and tracking that could occur precisely through the remote control of electronic devices.
As reported by the journalist, Hezbollah terrorists were instructed to discard their smartphones, especially iPhones, and disconnect surveillance systems, which is why they were using pagers.
For Ghattas, what happened today was “clearly a targeted attack by Israel against members of Hezbollah.” Israel did not claim responsibility for the acts and also did not comment on the explosions. The terrorist group Hezbollah and the Lebanese government, however, blamed the country for the attack.
Ghattas gave two possible reasons for Israel to carry out such an attack. The first would be an attempt to demonstrate to Hezbollah that Israel has extensive knowledge of its operations, which could force the terrorist group to adopt a more “submissive” stance and “make it clear that an increase in its attacks against Israel will be met with even greater violence,” he said.
The second hypothesis, according to the journalist, would be that the attack was a kind of “preparation” for a large-scale military campaign against Lebanon, taking advantage of the confusion caused by the explosions.
Other experts told international news agencies that the explosion of the pagers could have been the direct result of an Israeli “infiltration” into the “Hezbollah supply chain”, something that could possibly have been carried out by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service.
According to information from the agency France-Presse (AFP), A source close to Hezbollah said the pagers that exploded were part of a recent batch imported by the terrorist group and had been sabotaged to include explosive devices in them. Al Jazeera mentioned that the explosive located in each pager weighed less than 20 grams and that the devices were imported five months ago.
As reported by the Argentine portal InfobaeCharles Lister, expert and director of the Combating Terrorism and Extremism Program at the American think tank Middle East Institute (MEI), stated on his X account that the attack that occurred today may have involved the “insertion of small explosives” next to the batteries of the pagers that were activated “remotely through messages”.
Journalist and military analyst Elijah Magnier followed the same line as the source AFP and, according to information from the French agency, stated that the Mossad could have infiltrated Hezbollah’s logistics chain and inserted the explosives during the production or transportation of the pagers.
National security expert and former CIA analyst Mike DiMino called the bombings a “classic sabotage operation,” noting that executing an attack of this magnitude requires “extensive planning, possibly months or even years.” He also suggested that infiltration of Hezbollah’s supply chain by operatives may have “allowed the distribution of sabotaged devices” within the Lebanese terrorist organization.
Former CIA analyst Edward Snowden, a refugee in Russia, also commented on the act that occurred in Lebanon and followed the same line as other experts, stating that the pagers could probably have been the target of sabotage.
“It seems more likely that these are implanted explosive devices [nos pagers]and not a hacker attack,” Snowden wrote on the social network X, according to information from the EFE Agency.
“If these were explosions from overheated batteries, there would be a greater number of fires and smaller failures,” he argued.
Snowden also said Israel may have been behind the attack and condemned what he described as the “irrationality” of the method.
“It is indistinguishable from terrorism,” he concluded.
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