According to the sources, Israel had planted explosives in 5,000 Hezbollah pagers.

 By Mr, Adil and Nook Studio

September 18, 202411:40 AM GMT+5Updated 6 min ago

• 9 dead, 3,000 hurt in worst security breach to date
• Hezbollah apparently ordered the pages months ago. vows retaliation
• Pagers made by the Europe-based firm BAC said Taiwan-based company.
• Devices that had been tampered with by Israel in the manufacturing stage, security sources in Lebanon said.

BEIRUT, Sept 18 (Reuters) - Israel's Mossad spy agency had placed explosives inside 5,000 pagers imported by Lebanese group Hezbollah months before Tuesday's detonations, a senior Lebanese security source and another source said.

The explosion was one of the most unprecedented Hezbollah security breaches whereby hundreds of thousands of pagers detonated across Lebanon, killing nine people and leaving almost 3,000 more injured, including the group's fighters and Iran's envoy to Beirut.

A Lebanese security source said the pagers were from Taiwan-based Gold Apollo, but the company said in a statement it did not manufacture the devices. It said they were made by a company called BAC which has a licence to use its brand, but gave no more details.

The Iran-backed Hezbollah has threatened to retaliate against Israel, whose military refused to comment on the blasts.

Hezbollah said in a statement on Wednesday that "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".

According to Reuters, the plot seemed to have been months in the works; several sources reported that. A senior Lebanese security source said the group had ordered 5,000 beepers from Gold Apollo, which several sources say were brought into the country earlier this year.

Gold Apollo founder Hsu Ching-Kuang said the pagers used in the explosion were made by a company in Europe that had the right to use the firm's brand, the name of which he could not immediately confirm. The company in a statement named BAC as the firm, but Hsu declined to comment on its location.

"The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it," Hsu told reporters at the company's offices in the northern Taiwanese city of New Taipei on Wednesday.

A photograph of the model of the pager, an AP924, which like other pagers wirelessly receive and display text messages but cannot make telephone calls, was identified by a senior Lebanese security source.

In a statement, Gold Apollo said BAC produced and sold the model AR-924.

"We only give brand trademark authorization and have no involvement with the design or manufacturing of this product," the statement said.

Hezbollah fighters have used pagers as low-tech means to communicate in a bid to avoid Israeli location-tracking, two sources familiar with the group's operations said Reuters this year.

But the senior Lebanese source said the devices have been tampered with by Israel's spy service "at the production level."

"The Mossad injected a board inside of the device that has explosive material that receives a code. It's very hard to detect it through any means. Even with any device or scanner," the source said.

The source added that 3,000 of the pagers detonated when they received the encrypted message, which activated the explosives simultaneously.

A security source, however, said Reuters that three grams of explosives were concealed in the new pagers, which "evaded" Hezbollah's detectors for months.

Hsu said he could not explain how the pagers had been rigged to explode.

Israeli officials could not be reached immediately for comment by Reuters.

The images of ruined pagers that Reuters subjected to analysis revealed that the configuration and strips on the rear side corresponded to Gold Apollo-produced pagers.

Hezbollah was reeling on Tuesday from the attack, which left fighters and others bloodied, hospitalized, or dead.

 "I'm of the opinion that this is the biggest security breach Lebanon and Hezbollah have had since the explosion of the Gaza-Israel war on Oct. 7," said a Hezbollah official speaking on condition of anonymity.

"This would easily be the biggest counterintelligence failure that Hezbollah has had in decades," said Jonathan Panikoff, the former deputy national intelligence officer on the Middle East for the U.S. government.

BREAK YOUR PHONES, GROUP ORDERED:

In February, Hezbollah unveiled a war plan designed to fill gaps in the group's intelligence infrastructure. Meanwhile, nearly 170 fighters had been killed in targeted Israeli strikes on Lebanon, including one senior commander and a top Hamas official in Beirut.

During a live televised speech on Feb. 13, the group's Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, sternly cautioned followers that phones are more dangerous than Israeli spies, saying they should break, bury, or lock them in an iron box.

Instead, the group resorted to handing out pagers to Hezbollah members across the group's various branches-fighters, to medical personnel working in its relief services.

We really got hit hard," said the senior Lebanese security source, who has direct knowledge of the group's probe into the blasts. Explosions maimed many Hezbollah members, footage from hospitals reviewed by Reuters shows. Wounded men had injuries of varying degrees to the face, missing fingers and gaping wounds at the hip where the pagers were likely worn.

The blasts came at a time of mounting unease about the tensions between Israel and Hezbollah, which have been engaged in cross-border warfare since the Gaza conflict began last October.

While Israel's primary focus since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas-led gunmen has been the war in Gaza, a sensitive situation along its northern border with Lebanon has fed into fears of a regional conflict that threatens to drag in the United States and Iran.

A Hezbollah missile barrage a day after Oct. 7 opened the current round of conflict, and since then have been daily exchanges of rockets, artillery fire and missiles, with Israeli jets striking deep into Lebanese territory.

Hezbollah says it doesn't want a wider war but would fight if Israel launched one.

Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant told U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Monday that the window was closing for a diplomatic solution to the standoff with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement in southern Lebanon.

Still, experts said they did not see the pager blasts as a sign that an Israeli ground offensive was imminent.

Instead, it was a sign of Israeli intelligence's apparently deep penetration of Hezbollah.

"It shows Israel's capacity to penetrate its enemies in a really dramatic way," said Paul Pillar, a 28-year veteran of the U.S. intelligence community, primarily at the CIA.