By Laila Bassam and Maya Gebeily
BEIRUT (Reuters) – Israel's Mossad spy agency planted a small quantity of explosives in 5,000 Taiwanese-made pagers ordered by the Lebanese group Hezbollah several months before Tuesday's detonations, a senior Lebanese security source and another source told Reuters.
The details shed light on an unprecedented security breach by Hezbollah that saw thousands of beepers detonated in Lebanon, killing nine people and wounding nearly 3,000 others, including the group's fighters and Iran's envoy in Beirut.
Iran-backed Hezbollah has announced it will retaliate against Israel. Israel's military declined to comment on the explosions.
According to several sources, the plan has been in the works for months, Reuters reported.
The senior Lebanese security source said the group had ordered 5,000 beepers from Taiwan-based Gold Apollo, which were imported into the country in the spring, according to multiple sources.
The senior Lebanese security source identified a photo of the pager's model, an AP924, which like other pagers can receive and display text messages wirelessly but cannot make phone calls.
Hezbollah fighters are using pagers as a low-tech communications tool in an attempt to evade Israeli location tracking, two sources familiar with the group's activities told Reuters this year.
But the senior Lebanese source said the devices had been modified by Israel's intelligence service “at production level”.
“The Mossad has injected a board into the device with explosive material that receives a code. It is very difficult to detect it in any way. Even with any device or scanner,” the source said.
According to the source, 3,000 pagers exploded when a coded message was sent to them, triggering the explosives simultaneously.
Another security source told Reuters that up to three grams of explosives were hidden in the new pagers and that they had gone “undetected” by Hezbollah for months.
Neither Israel nor Gold Apollo immediately responded to Reuters requests for comment.
Reuters analyzed images of destroyed pagers, which showed that the sizes and stickers on the backs matched those of pagers made by Taipei-based Gold Apollo.
Hezbollah was reeling from the attack, which left fighters and others bloodied, hospitalized or dead. A Hezbollah official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the detonation was the group's “biggest security breach” since the conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hezbollah ally Hamas broke out on Oct. 7.
“This would easily be Hezbollah’s biggest counterintelligence failure in decades,” said Jonathan Panikoff, former U.S. deputy national intelligence officer for the Middle East.
(Reporting by Laila Bassam and Maya Gebeily in Beirut; Writing by Phil Stewart; Editing by Don Durfee and Stephen Coates)
