Middle East | At 15:30, a message in Arabic was sent to thousands of pagers – This is how the “Trojan horse” built by Israel drove Lebanon into chaos

Soon after 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, the pagers of members of the Lebanon-based Hezbollah organization started beeping. It seemed that they had received a message from the organization’s top management, the US newspaper The New York Times (NYT) tells.

Seconds later, the pagers began to explode. The message in Arabic activates modern-day Trojan horses, triggering systems and explosives hidden in paging devices – in thousands of devices across Lebanon.

For example, NYT, a British newspaper, has called beepers a Trojan horse Daily Mail and various parties in social media.

In Tuesday’s blast wave, at least twelve people were killed and around 2,800 were wounded. Among the dead was a nine-year-old girl and an eleven-year-old boy.

In social and traditional media have published plenty of pictures and videos of wounded people with injuries to their hands, torso and face. Hospital emergency rooms have been thrown into chaos due to the huge number of casualties.

One video that spread on social media, for example, shows how an exploding pager in a male customer’s pocket or belt in a grocery store knocks the man to the floor and causes him to struggle. In the second video, a man at the store’s checkout seems to pick up the pager and start reading the message when the device explodes, knocking the man to the ground.

According to NYT, eyewitnesses and videos had told of scenes where men riding motorcycles had crashed into walls after the explosions.

One of Tuesday’s victims was nine years old Fatima Abdullah In the village of Saraai near the Syrian border. NYT’s to interview according to the girl’s aunt, the girl had just returned from school when her father’s pager had started beeping on the kitchen table.

The girl started to take the device to her father when it went off in his hand, mauling his face and killing him.

On Wednesday exploded walkie-talkies, apparently pretty much exactly a day after the previous day’s attacks. The Reuters news agency said in its instant telegram at 15:58 that at least ten members of Hezbollah had reportedly been wounded in the explosions of radio phones.

During the following hours, the information became more detailed, and the extent of the new chaos began to become clear: according to the authorities, there were at least 20 dead and more than 450 wounded.

CNN news channel by dozens of ambulances arrived to rescue the victims, who were at least in Beirut, southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley east of Beirut.

According to the Lebanese authorities, as a result of the explosions, at least fifteen cars and dozens of motorcycles caught fire. In addition, in the administrative region of Nabatîyé in South Lebanon, two fingerprint recording devices had caught fire.

CNN eyewitness quoththat at one of the funerals organized by Hezbollah there had been a loud bang followed by screams. The eyewitness said he saw a man covered in blood and his hands looked like they had been blown off.

News agency AP by In several Lebanese homes in various parts of the capital Beirut, devices using solar energy had also exploded on Wednesday. At least one girl is said to have been injured in these explosions.

In total, at least four children have died in different attacks. Hezbollah has vowed to avenge the attacks, which the organization calls a “mass murder” by Israel.

NYT’s according to the security sources interviewed, the Israeli intelligence services were behind the attacks. It has been generally assumed that the operation was planned by the Mossad intelligence service, known for its many assassination attacks. Israel has not said it was behind the attacks.

According to NYT’s three different sources, PETN explosive, or pentaerythritol tetranitrate, was installed in the search devices used in Tuesday’s attacks. It is a very powerful explosive that is used, for example, in plastic explosives.

Also Al Jazeera channel sources by it would be a PETN explosive with only 1-3 grams placed in each device.

NYT also reports that Israel had set up at least three cover companies for the operation, one of which was BAC Consulting, which operates in Budapest, the capital of Hungary.

BAC had manufactured, commissioned or delivered to Hizbullah AR-924 search devices, originally products of the Taiwanese company Gold Apollo. BAC is said to have started deliveries of paging devices to Hezbollah in the summer of 2022.

According to NYT, the delivery volumes grew rapidly after last spring, when the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah warned in February Hezbollah members from using smartphones. According to him, cell phones were vulnerable to Israeli espionage, while old-fashioned “pagers” were supposed to be safer.

American NBC channel told Referring to information from the Hungarian Ministry of Justice, BAC had been established as a new company on May 21, 2022, that is, just some time before the paging equipment began to be delivered to Lebanon. Apparently, a company with the same name had operated in Hungary before, but it was closed during 2020.

A BAC executive contacted by NBC had told the channel that the company does not manufacture pagers. “I’m just an intermediary,” the manager had said.

Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán spokesman Zoltán Kovacs in turn told on Wednesday in the X service, that the authorities found out that BAC is only a “trading intermediary with no production” in Hungary.

According to Kovács, the paging devices that exploded in Lebanon were never in Hungary.

Explosive the walkie-talkies, on the other hand, were model IC-V82, which had previously been produced by the Japanese company Icom. According to the company, the production of the products and the batteries used in them was stopped in 2014.

The company’s statement dated Thursday by it was not possible to confirm whether the devices that exploded in Lebanon were fakes made by it or by someone else.