Hezbollah pager blasts raise chances of a full-scale war
Iran-backed entity reeling from security breach
Beirut – The detonation of thousands of pagers targeting Hezbollah in Lebanon on Tuesday has left a mysterious trail from Taiwan to Hungary, while raising the prospect of another full-scale war in the Middle East between the Iranbacked group and foe Israel.
Israel’s Mossad spy agency, which has a long history of pulling off sophisticated attacks on foreign soil, planted explosives inside pagers imported by Hezbollah months before Tuesday’s detonations that killed nine people, a senior Lebanese security source and another source said.
The operation was an unprecedented Hezbollah security breach that saw thousands of pagers explode across Lebanon, wounding nearly 3,000 people, including many of the group’s fighters and Iran’s envoy to Beirut.
The Lebanese security source said the pagers were from Taiwan-based Gold Apollo, but the company said it did not manufacture the devices. It said they were made by a company called BAC – in Budapest, Hungary, – which has a licence to use its brand.
Iran-backed Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate against Israel, whose military declined to comment. The two sides have been engaged in crossborder warfare since the Gaza conflict erupted last October.
While the war in Gaza has been Israel’s main focus since the October 7 attack by Hamas-led gunmen, fighting along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, has fuelled fears of a regional conflict that could drag in the US and Iran. “Hezbollah wants to avoid an all-out war. It still wants to avoid one. But given the scale, the impact on families, on civilians, there will be pressure for a stronger response,” said Mohanad Hage Ali of the Carnegie Middle East Centre.
Hezbollah said yesterday “the resistance will continue today, like any other day, its operations to support Gaza, its people and its resistance which is a separate path from the harsh punishment that the criminal enemy [Israel] should await in response to Tuesday’s massacre.”
The plot followed a series of assassinations of Hezbollah and Hamas commanders and leaders blamed on Israel since the start of the Gaza war.
The senior Lebanese security source said the group had ordered 5,000 pagers from Gold Apollo, brought into the country earlier this year.
Gold Apollo founder Hsu Ching-Kuang yesterday said: “The product was not ours. It only had our brand on it.”
The stated address for BAC Consulting in Hungary’s capital Budapest was on a mostly residential street and did not have a physical presence there. Its CEO Cristiana Barsony-Arcidiacono says on her LinkedIn profile that she has worked as an adviser for various organisations including Unesco. She did not respond to emails from Reuters.
Hezbollah fighters have been using pagers as a lowtech means of communication to evade Israeli location-tracking. The source said about 3,000 of the pagers exploded when a coded message was sent to them, simultaneously activating the explosives.
Another security source said up to three grams of explosives were hidden in the new pagers and had gone “undetected” for months. Hezbollah was reeling from the attack, which left fighters and others bloodied, hospitalised or dead. One official said the detonation was the group’s “biggest security breach” in its history.