- Hezbollah pager explosions caused injuries, many deaths
- Israel likely behind precise, large-scale sabotage
- Lebanon faces rising conflict, casualties mounting
It may take years to get the complete tale of how Hezbollah planned coordinated explosions of thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies. Even without Israel formally admitting guilt, it is apparent that the strike was meticulously prepared, no matter how unclear the outcome.
Experts suspect that a little stable explosive was carefully inserted into each sabotaged device. Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity professor at Surrey University, says, “There wouldn’t need to be much explosive, as proximity to a human body means it would cause injury even if it were just a few grams.”
The explosions, which began at 3.30 pm local time on Tuesday, appear to have been triggered by a special message from Hezbollah leadership, implying, according to Woodward, a specific change of the embedded software on the pagers. This meant that when the right message was sent, it would result in an explosion.
The trigger message had a sardonic twist, even though it was the pagers’ default setting. According to eyewitnesses, the pager bleeped, hesitated, and then detonated, giving them enough time to approach the owner’s face, which is why Lebanese hospitals reported treating many hand and eye injuries following the incident.
Eleven people were killed, and approximately 2,800 were injured in Tuesday’s explosions, with a second wave of blasts following on Wednesday when walkie-talkies began blowing up, implying that the attacks were part of a concerted attempt to disrupt Hezbollah’s communications, which could be a prelude to a bombing raid on south Lebanon or another conventional military attack.
According to Oleg Brodt, head of Ben-Gurion University’s Cyber Labs, sabotaging the pagers is a severe undertaking that compromises the supply chain. It is possible that the manufacturers’ collaboration was necessary or that Israel’s Mossad espionage agency – or whoever carried out the strikes in Lebanon – produced the doctored pagers themselves, but this is speculation.
The pagers featured the logo of Go Apollo, a hopeless Taiwanese manufacturer. Its inventor, Hsu Ching-Kuang, stated that his company subcontracted the manufacturing of the exploding AR-924 model to the little-known Budapest-based BAC Consulting KFT. This transaction was inked three years ago.
From here, the trail turns odd and then frigid. BAC Consulting was registered in Hungary in 2022 and used a Budapest address on its website, which several other organizations also use. According to her LinkedIn page, the company’s CEO is Cristiana Bársony-Arcidiacono, a graduate of the London School of Economics (LSE) and a native speaker of Hungarian and Italian languages.
BAC Consulting’s website went offline on Wednesday, although internet archives had generic images of coasts and imprecise descriptions of its work with no mention of pager manufacturing. Previous LinkedIn entries by Bársony-Arcidiacono include frequently misspelled pro-Russian and anti-Ukraine statements and concern about “how does it make no one say anything about US colonization?
Making the lethal booby-trapped pagers is only half of the story. Whoever did so had a good intelligence picture of Hezbollah, which the Mossad and Israel’s other security services lacked before October 7th. They were aware that Hezbollah had made an order for approximately 5,000 pagers after the group’s leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, warned in February against using mobile phones.
“Your phone is their agent,” the Hezbollah secretary-general said at the time, unaware that his group’s adversary would be willing to hide bombs within pagers. They also knew who would give the destroyed devices to Hezbollah, and they had a plan in place to ensure they could control their transportation to the militant group and their fabrication or compromise.
The scale, destruction, and precision of the attack suggests a sophisticated operation months in the making,” argued Emile Hokayem of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Though Israel has not claimed credit for the attack, few question whether its security agents were behind the remarkable effort, which involved thousands of devices rather than a single booby-trapped phone similar to the one used to assassinate Hamas leader Yahya Ayyash in 1996.
According to the Axios website, the country’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, called his US counterpart, Lloyd Austin, “several minutes” before the pagers began to inform him of an impending operation in Lebanon. No specifics were revealed, and the State Department stated that the US was not informed of the attack plan – however, Gallant’s phone call comes close to accepting blame.
Invest in your future with Webull UK – get started with free shares
However, no matter how complex the preparation, the pagers exploded, injuring several individuals. One video showed a pager bursting in a grocery store, while others showed parents and children in the hospital with severe penetrating traumatic injuries to their heads, bodies, and legs. According to Human Rights Watch, the deployment of booby traps is prohibited under human rights legislation to prevent harm to civilians.
In the immediate aftermath, Yossi Melman, co-author of Spies Against Armageddon and other works on Israeli intelligence, questioned, “Why would you waste a valuable intelligence asset that could be used in a more urgent time” amid worries of an all-out conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. However, it appears that Israel has wanted to escalate its onslaught on the militant organization, just two days after its security cabinet said that letting 60,000 displaced people return safely to their homes in the country’s north was now a war goal.
Hokayem claimed that the pager operation, followed by the walkie-talkie attack, “represents a humiliating blow and a major operational-security failure for Hizbullah,” which was already reeling from the killing of its top military commander by airstrike in July. “The large number of casualties and their distribution across the country have had a deep impact on Lebanese society and Hezbollah’s constituency,” according to his conclusion. However, as both sides teeter on the verge of war, retribution and hostility will inevitably escalate.
