In an unprecedented security and technological breach, thousands of Gold Apollo pagers carried by members of Hizbullah in Lebanon blew up last Tuesday, followed by a similar attack on Wednesday. The explosions in the two operations killed 37 people, including at least two children, and injured more than three thousand. The explosions caused panic around the world due to the sophistication of the hack that enabled them.

“The whole scheme was dreamed up by a brilliant female intelligence operative, aged less than 30, somewhere in the Middle East,” Ronen Bergman, an investigative reporter for The New York Times and Yedioth Ahronoth, told The Times of Israel, which also quoted television report broadcast by Israel’s Channel 12 indicating that the pagers were manufactured from scratch in a dedicated factory so they could not be tampered with. They were then sold to Hizbullah through intermediary suppliers who had worked the organisation on a routine basis on the black market, since Hizbullah avoids open markets for fear of US sanctions.

Another report by The Times of Israel quotes a senior Iranian official revealing the possibility that a similar pager device caused the crash of Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi’s plane last May, indicating that Tehran was involved in purchasing the same devices.

According to Reuters, a senior Lebanese security source revealed that the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad planted a quantity of explosives inside five thousand Taiwanese-made wireless communication devices that the Lebanese Hizbullah group requested months ago, a breach for Hizbullah. The security source described the aforementioned pagers as AR-924 automatic pagers that receive and display text messages wirelessly, like other pagers, but cannot make phone calls. He added, “the Mossad injected a board inside the device with explosive material detonated by code. It’s very hard to detect even with a device or scanner.”

In an unexpected and unconvincing reaction to many, Israeli President Isaac Herzog categorically denied that Israel was behind the explosion despite the escalation of military conflict between Israel and Hizbullah.

Contrary to the Israeli president’s denial, a senior US official confirmed to Fox News that Israel was involved in the bombing of the pagers in the possession of Hizbullah members. Fox News also quoted Senator John Fetterman, a Democratic member of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, as saying, “I want to be very clear. What Israel chose to do about blowing up the pagers, walkie-talkies and then after targeting and eliminating membership and leadership of Hizbullah — I absolutely support that. In fact, if anything, I love it.”

On the other hand, in a post on social media congresswoman Alexandria Osaka-Cortez said the attack against Hizbullah was carried out by Israel, expressing her criticism of this attack that led to the serious injury and killing of innocent civilians: “This attack clearly and unequivocally violates international humanitarian law and undermines US efforts to prevent a wider conflict. Congress needs a full accounting of the attack, including an answer from the State Department as to whether any US assistance went into the development or deployment of this technology.”

According to India Today, the Hizbullah pager bombing operation consists of four operations combined into one. The first operation is “Mapping and Infiltrating the Hizbullah Supply Chain”, which involves advanced intelligence work to infiltrate the manufacturing and supply of pagers and planting explosive components inside them, a sophisticated breach of Hizbullah’s supply chain, as a fake company was established in Budapest specialising in manufacturing and selling these devices. The second operation is “Creating an Ideal Explosive Device in the Thousands”, and through this operation the devices sold to Hizbullah were prepared with a high degree of precision so that the pagers appeared to be normal, in normal condition, with no difference even in weight so as not to raise suspicions.

The third operation is “Getting Rigged Devices to Targets and Coordinated Blasts”, and through this operation thousands of booby-trapped electronic devices were distributed over a period of months to specific targets, sitting silently, and then all of them were detonated, which required a certain amount of patience. The website reported: “The potential for their painstaking efforts to unravel must have been a constant concern too. The constant threat of detection was well-founded, especially after spying devices were uncovered in shipments of solar panels arriving in Syria through Latakia Port and the land border with Lebanon. According to a May 2024 investigation by Syria TV, these devices were traced back to Israel and were intended for surveillance of the IRGC and Iran’s proxies in Syria.”

The fourth operation was “Crippling Hizbullah Communication and Fighters,” and through this operation, Hizbullah’s pagers and radios were disabled, which prevented its members from communicating with each other. Last February, Hizbullah fighters got rid of their mobile phones because they were hacked by Israeli intelligence agencies.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 26 September, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly