Thousands of pager bombs rock Hezbollah
Israel suspected of daring synchronised attack that injured 3,000 and killed nine
ISRAEL is suspected of being behind an audacious attack on Hezbollah commanders after nine people were killed and almost 3,000 wounded by the simultaneous explosion of pagers.
Video footage showed Hezbollah members being struck in the body and face as the pagers, which they use to communicate, blew up after seemingly being booby-trapped en masse.
About 200 of the injured were said to be in a critical condition after what Iran-backed Hezbollah described as its biggest security breach since cross-border fighting broke out in the wake of the Oct 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, Hezbollah’s Palestinian ally.
Iran’s ambassador to Beirut was among the injured. Lebanon’s prime minister and Hezbollah blamed Israel for the attacks, with the terror group vowing revenge. The US urged restraint from Iran in response.
It came hours after Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, announced that Israel was broadening its aims in the conflict to include the return of thousands of Israelis to homes near the border with Lebanon, which had been evacuated owing to missile attacks. Until now, Israel’s stated objective had been to crush Hamas and bring home the hostages from Oct 7.
Fears of a full-scale war between Israel and Hezbollah – which controls southern Lebanon – have been growing after Israel warned the US on Monday that the chance of a diplomatic solution to the conflict on its northern border was fading. Mr Netanyahu has spoken of the need for a “fundamental change” to the security situation on the border.
It is unclear whether the pagers attack – for which Hezbollah said it held Israel “fully responsible” – was designed to weaken the terror group before a possible invasion or was simply a show of strength by the embattled Mr Netanyahu to appease hawks in his country.
The affected pagers were from a shipment received by Hezbollah in the past few days, multiple sources reported. A Hezbollah official said hundreds of fighters had the devices. The group instructed its members to avoid mobile phones after the Gaza war began and to instead rely on pagers to prevent Israel from intercepting communications.
Experts said a consignment of new pagers was likely to have been intercepted in a “supply chain attack” and planted with explosives triggered by a specific text message.
Prof Alan Woodward, a cyber security expert at the University of Surrey, said: “A tiny amount of explosive can injure badly, especially when right next to the body. If this proves to be real, I don’t think it’s a cyber attack, but rather an old-fashioned explosive booby trap.”
Pager explosions also injured Hezbollah members in Syria, Iranian media reported. The son of a Lebanese MP was killed, while Mojtaba Amani, Iran’s ambassador to Beirut, and two of his bodyguards, were injured in Lebanon.
Video footage showed one device appearing to explode in a bag slung over a man’s shoulder while he shopped in a supermarket. Bleeding men were seen lying on the streets in the city of Baalbek.
Among the dead was the 10-year-old daughter of a Hezbollah member.
Explosions also occurred in the Dahiya neighbourhood in Beirut, a Hezbollah stronghold where a top commander was assassinated by Israel in July, and in the eastern Bekaa Valley, according to a Hezbollah spokesman.
Lebanon’s foreign ministry said it prepared “a complaint to submit to the UN Security Council”, as the country’s prime minister called it “a serious violation of our sovereignty”.
Israeli officials told The Telegraph they had been instructed not to comment on the attacks in Lebanon.
Mr Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, his defence minister, held discussions yesterday at the defence ministry’s headquarters at the Kirya, in Tel Aviv, about how Israel should respond to any potential escalation by Hezbollah.
HEZBOLLAH’S pagers were meant to be safety measures, secure from Israeli eavesdropping. Instead, they were a deadly Trojan horse.
After suffering a series of assassinations of top operatives during months of low-level war with Israel, this summer Hezbollah ordered its fighters to ditch their mobile phones. They were too easy to track and too readily compromised by Israel’s fearsome military hackers.
“If you’re looking for an Israeli agent, look at the phone in your hand,” Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s chief, warned his men.
Instead, communications would be confined to more old-fashioned means: couriers delivering messages by word of mouth.
Telecoms would be limited to 1980s-style pagers, with none of the vulnerabilities of smartphones, Hezing bollah sources told Reuters in July. Thousands of the latest and most secure models were duly procured and distributed to top fighters, officials and allies.
Yesterday afternoon, that was revealed as a terrible blunder.
At 3.45pm local time, thousands of pagers in thousands of pockets simultaneously exploded.
By early evening at least nine people had been confirmed killed and a staggering 2,750 injured.
Firass Abiad, Lebanon’s health minister, said 200 of them were in a critical condition.
The wounded reportedly included civilians as well as Hezbollah fighters and even Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, although the reports could not immediately be verified.
In one greengrocer’s a middle-aged man had reached the grape counter when a puff of smoke leapt from his midriff.
He fell, screaming to the floor, badly wounded by the explosion from his pocket, bag or belt. The young man serving him leapt instinctively away.
The nearest bystander, after understandably making sure he himself was unhurt, simply stood over the scream
man, as he writhed on the floor, at a loss as to what to do.
They were not alone in being nonplussed.
Ahmad Ayoud, a butcher from the Basta neighbourhood in Beirut, told the New York Times he was in his shop when he heard explosions and saw a man in his 20s fall off a motorbike.
“We all thought he got wounded from a random shooting,” Ayoud said. “Then, a few minutes later, we started hearing of other cases. All were carrying pagers.”
Within minutes, ambulances were rushing through Beirut.
Many of the wounded, screaming in pain, were rushed to hospital on motorbikes. Doctors reported patients with bloodied hands, faces, and eyes.
Iran’s Fars news agency said Mojtaba Amani, the Iranian ambassador in Beirut, had suffered superficial injuries and was under observation in hospital.
Ziad Makary, Lebanon’s information minister, said the government condemned the detonation of the pagers as an “Israeli aggression”.
Hezbollah blamed Israel for the pager blasts and said it would receive “its fair punishment”.
Israeli officials declined to comment. One Hezbollah official, speaking to Reuters, described it as the “biggest security breach” the group had suffered in a year of conflict with Israel.
That does not appear to be hyperbole. The questions remain about the mechanism of the attack.
Lebanese internal security forces said a number of wireless communication devices were detonated across the country, especially in Beirut’s southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold.
In today’s tech-obsessed world, the idea of some kind of mass cyber attack causing the pagers’ batteries to overheat or malfunction in some way sounds believable.
It would fit with the current dystopian zeitgeist to learn that our mobile devices are not only destroying our attention spans but could also be turned into bombs.
Fortunately, from the point of view of ordinary pager and electronics users
– not to mention their manufacturers – that does not seem to be what happened.
Alan Woodward, a cyber security expert at the University of Surrey, said: “I’ve heard of Lithium ion batteries spontaneously igniting but to make it happen on demand is a different matter entirely.”
“Lithium battery fires and explosions are a general problem but this looks a bit more than this,” agreed Hamish de Bretton Gordon, a retired British army chemical weapons expert.
“There must be some sort of ‘accelerant’ to make them combust in such a violent fashion – probably some form of high explosive, possibly 10 grams of HMX.”
HMX, also known as octogen, is a widely used military explosive. Mr Woodward guessed the attack might have used C4, another common military explosive.
That would imply a “supply chain attack” in which the perpetrators – and although they are not commenting, that almost certainly means the Israeli security services – had physical access to the devices to embed the explosive.
The impacted devices appeared to have included “rugged” pagers developed by Taiwanese firm Gold Apollo, according to reporters at Bellingcat.
Security sources told Reuters that the devices had been procured in recent months.
The charge could be set to trigger on receipt of a particular message or even simply timed to explode with an old-fashioned timer, said Mr Woodward.
Ken Munro, founder of cyber security company Pen Test Partners, said: “I’m leaning hard towards a supply chain attack, as to remotely cause a battery to explode in such a fashion would be extremely challenging.”
‘There must be some sort of “accelerant” to make them combust in such a violent fashion’