A massive wave of pager explosions in Lebanon and Syria that began at 3:30 p.m. local time today has killed at least 11 people and wounded more than 2,700, local officials said. Many of the wounded appear to be Hezbollah members, although a young girl is also believed to be among the dead.
Anonymous officials with knowledge of the matter now describe it as a supply chain attack in which Israel was able to hide small amounts of explosives in Taiwanese pagers being shipped to Lebanon. The explosive was reportedly triggered by a small switch in the pagers that would be activated upon receipt of a specific code. Once that code was received, the pagers would beep for several seconds and then detonate.
New York Times reporters captured the chaos of the remarkable scene in two anecdotes:
Ahmad Ayoud, a butcher from Beirut's Basta neighborhood, said he was in his shop when he heard explosions. Then he saw a man in his 20s fall from a motorbike. He appeared to be bleeding. “We all thought he was injured in random shootings,” Ayoud said. “A few minutes later we heard about other cases. They all had beepers.”
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Residents of Beirut's southern suburbs, where many of the explosions occurred, reported seeing smoke coming from people's pockets, followed by an explosion that sounded like fireworks. Mohammed Awada, 52, was driving next to one of the victims. “My son went crazy and started screaming when he saw the man's hand flying away from him,” he said.
Video footage from the region already shows an explosive device detonating in a supermarket checkout line. Photos show scores of young men lying on the ground with large, bloody wounds on their upper legs and thighs.
The shocking — and new — attack appears to be based on a wave of recently imported Hezbollah beepers, according to reports in The Wall Street Journal. (The group had already warned its members not to use cellphones because of both tracking and assassination concerns.)
According to the WSJ, a Hezbollah official who spoke shortly after the attack speculated that “malware may have caused the devices to explode. The official said some people felt the pagers getting hot and threw them away before they exploded.” The pagers in question are said to have lithium-ion batteries, which sometimes ignite after first generating significant heat. (A previous story from a local media outlet claimed that “the pager server was compromised, leading to the installation of a script that caused an overload. This likely caused the lithium battery to overheat, which then exploded.”)
According to the WSJ, regional security analyst Michael Horowitz suggested the attack was likely caused by 1) malware that caused the batteries to overheat/explode, or 2) an explosive charge that was placed in the devices at some point in the supply chain and then detonated remotely.
“Either way, this is a very sophisticated attack,” Horowitz told the WSJ. “Especially if this is a physical breach, because that would mean that Israel has access to the manufacturer of those devices. That could be part of the message that's being sent here.”
By the end of the day, U.S. and other officials anonymously told The New York Times that the attack was in fact caused by explosives. Israel managed to place “as little as one or two ounces” of explosive material next to the battery in each pager, officials said. The pagers themselves were believed to have come from a company called Gold Apollo in Taiwan, though where and how the manipulation was accomplished remain unclear.
Reuters has a similar report, with different sources, but it also notes that Gold Apollo’s president emphatically claimed today that the pagers were not made by his company in Taiwan. Instead, he said, they were made under license by a company called BAC, which then slapped Gold Apollo’s branding on them.
Hezbollah officials publicly blame Israel. Israel has not taken responsibility, despite being able to launch surprise electronic attacks, including the Stuxnet malware that damaged Iran’s nuclear program.
According to the Associated Press news agency, the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon was also injured in the large-scale attack.
The attacks come shortly after an Israeli claim that Hezbollah had targeted one of its former senior defense officials, but that Israel had foiled the plan. According to Reuters, Israel “said it had seized an explosive device attached to a remote detonation system, using a mobile phone and a camera that Hezbollah planned to operate from Lebanon.”
In today's US State Department briefing, which you can watch here , spokesman Matthew Miller was asked about the pager attacks. “The US was not involved,” he said. “The US had no prior knowledge of this incident.” He said the US government is currently gathering more information about what happened.
This breaking news item has been rewritten to include updates added throughout the day.
