At approximately 3:25 p.m. Tuesday (Sept 17), two members of Hezbollah terror group were having lunch at a shopping mall in Beirut. A pager, also known as a beeper or bleeper, which is considered an obsolete one-way communication device that can only receive messages, carried by one of the men suddenly exploded. Severely injured, he was bleeding from the arms and eyes.

 

Five minutes later (3:30 p.m.), hundreds of pagers all over Lebanon started exploding. It appears Israel’s Mossad national intelligence agency has quietly retaliated without firing a single shot. Mossad’s fearsome reputation has long been a source of pride to Israelis. And the attacks using low-tech device such as pagers would send a powerful message to Iran and its proxies.

 

The fireworks were just the beginning. At 3:34 p.m., a Hezbollah office across town similarly exploded. Still, the Iran-backed militant group had no idea what hit them. Chaos was an understatement. There were waves of extreme panics over the shocking and unexplainable explosions. By the time Hezbollah realized the source of the attacks, at least 12 people were killed and injured more than 2,800.

Within minutes, hundreds, if not thousands of pagers issued to selected trusted Hezbollah officials in Beirut and around the country stunningly exploded – at markets, at cash registers and even at home – hitting the militants where they are most vulnerable. It had never happened before. The terrorist group’s communications networks have been compromised.

 

As thousands of its rank and file injured, the Iranian’s most dangerous and powerful proxy was demoralized, disarray and disorder. Hospitals across Lebanon were overwhelmed with an influx of patients. It was so bad that a field hospital was set up to accommodate the wounded. Some pagers belonging to Hezbollah also exploded in Syria. Hezbollah’s leaders blamed Israel and pledged to retaliate.

 

But as usual, Israel chose to remain silent. The Jews state does not need to issue chest-thumping statements. Only empty vessels make the most noise. Unlike Tehran’s empty threats and rhetoric to retaliate against the assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in the Iranian capital Tehran, Israel believes actions speak louder than words.

Tehran, hugely humiliated after the killing of Haniyeh on its own soil, has yet to figure out a way to retaliate as promised. It probably hopes people will forget after some time. But before Iran could even avenge Haniyeh’s death, Iran’s Ambassador to Lebanon Mojtaba Amani has lost an eye as a result of one of the pager blasts. Like a broken record, Iran has again said it will respond.

 

However, Israel was not done with its psychological warfare. The chief of Israel’s Mossad intelligence service was not bluffing when he vowed in January this year that the agency would hunt down every Hamas member involved in the Oct 7 attack on Israel. And Israel certainly was not joking when it promised to hurt anyone who hurt the country, including sending Hezbollah to Stone Age.

 

The next day – Wednesday (Sept 18) – it happened again. This time walkie-talkies and other electronics used by Hezbollah began blowing up, sending a second wave of casualties into already crowded hospitals. Even funerals were not spared, when an explosion took place on the body of a Hezbollah member, causing him to fall to the ground and prompting the crowd to flee in panic.

By the end of the day, 20 more people were dead and 450 more injured. Both “pager and walkie-talkie” attacks had killed at least 37 people and wounded about 3,000 people, whose injured faces, eyes, limbs and hands could lead to permanent disabilities. It was absolutely chaotic as ambulances struggled to reach the injured, while locals became suspicious of phones, routers and even television sets. Anything that has a battery in it could become a walking bomb.

 

From phone shops to scooters, and from the streets to living rooms, smoke was seen coming before an explosion that sounded like fireworks and the next thing was a dead body or someone losing his eyes. It was a sweet revenge and a great success for Israel as far as psychological warfare is concerned. Tel Aviv’s admission of the covert attack came from only one sentence.

 

On the same Wednesday, Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant declared the start of a “new phase” in the war with regional Islamist groups, and said troops would be diverted to the Lebanese border – indicating a shift of conflict with Hezbollah. To make the nightmare even worse for the terror group, the top general said – “We have many capabilities that we haven’t yet activated.”

It doesn’t matter whether Gallant was bluffing or more devices could be hacked. It has sent shivers down the spine of Hezbollah – even Iran regime – so much so the usual 90-minute long funeral ceremonies to honour dead Hezbollah militia might not happen again. Israel has demonstrated its creativity – and capability – that it could also sabotage and use low-tech devices instead of expensive missiles to assassinate its enemies.

 

Hilariously, Hezbollah ordered 5,000 pagers marketed by the Taiwan-based company Gold Apollo in an attempt to evade Israeli surveillance of its mobile phones, following the killing of senior commanders in Israeli airstrikes over the past year. The group was confident the obsolete devices would keep their communication safe and secure, under-estimating Mossad’s capability.

 

In a televised speech on Feb 13, Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah warned supporters that their phones were more dangerous than Israeli spies, telling them to destroy, bury or lock them in an iron box. Instead, the terror group opted to distribute pagers to Hezbollah members across the group’s various branches – from fighters to medics working in its relief services.

Telling the world that it would be ditching phones was the dumbest thing the Hezbollah chief had done as it openly forewarned Israeli Mossad that the group would be seeking a new – likely lower tech – method of communications. It allowed Israel to study and design a new counter-intelligence, intercepting and planting explosives in thousands of the devices destined for Hezbollah members and then detonated by a remote signal.

 

Up to 3 grams of highly explosive compound known as PETN were all it took for Israel to covertly lace the batteries of the pagers and walkie-talkies with, which had gone undetected for months. Hezbollah had actually examined the pagers after they took delivery starting in 2022, including by travelling through airports with them to ensure they would not trigger alarms.

 

Taiwan-based Gold Apollo has said it did not manufacture the “AR-924 pagers” used in the attack, but revealed they were made by a company in Hungary licensed to use the firm’s brand. Apparently, the AR-924 model pagers had been modified by Israel’s spy service “at the production level”. BAC Consulting, the company that sold the explosive-laden pagers to Hezbollah, was actually a shell company.

The walkie-talkies too have been bought about the same time as the pagers. ICOM, the wireless communications company based in Osaka, Japan, was believed to be the supplier. But the firm said that production of the “Model IC-V82”, which was exported to the Middle East beginning 2004, was already phased out in 2014. The manufacturing of the batteries has also stopped.

 

But the models may not even be genuinely from ICOM. It could be a knockoff product, and the terror group could have bought the counterfeit versions of the walkie-talkie easily online from sellers who could be working for Mossad. The dubious sellers just needed to offer dirt cheap price for a shipment of new compromised batteries to impress the Hezbollah operatives.

 

Not only the walking bombs – pagers and walkie-talkies – had killed and injured thousands of the group members, the attacks also have exposed the identities of thousands of Hezbollah operatives, many of whom worked covertly. Crucially, it also exposed the locations of the terror group’s entire network. We know for sure now that Iran’s Ambassador to Lebanon Mojtaba Amani was given one of the pagers.

However, the pagers and walkie-talkies explosions appeared to be just the appetizers. Nasrallah, who had been arrogantly claiming victory for the group’s drone and missile attacks on northern Israel, appeared tired and his tone was soft when he addresses his people after the humiliating biggest security breach which cripples his entire operation network.

 

Fresh from reducing Gaza to rubble and creating havoc with pagers and walkie-talkies, Israel launched dozens of bombs across southern Lebanon on Thursday, before sending a wave of warplanes to hit more than 1,000 rocket launcher barrels and other “terrorist sites” including a weapons storage facility on Friday (Sept 20) – a pre-emptive strikes that neutralizes and degrades the militants’ capabilities.

 

Among top Hezbollah top leaders injured – and flushed out – in the pagers attack was Ibrahim Aqil, who has a US$7 million reward on his head from the U.S. Department of State for bombing the U.S. embassy in Beirut in 1983. The senior leader of the Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force was killed in the Israeli air strike on Friday – the first to hit Beirut since July, when Hezbollah’s military chief Fuad Shukr was killed.

Again, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was dead serious when he vowed to return tens of thousands of residents evacuated from northern border areas to their homes since the day Hezbollah began firing into Israel after Oct 7 invasion by Hamas. The pagers and walkie-talkies attacks were part of a bigger plan to create an Israeli-controlled buffer zone inside southern Lebanon.

 

At best, the Israeli attack was to instill fear in Israel’s enemies. At worst, Lebanon could lose territories thanks to Iran-backed Hezbollah. Just 3 weeks ago, Nasrallah bragged that Lebanon “can take a breath and relax”. Hiding underground, he thought, and bet that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was afraid and powerless against Hezbollah’s daily lobbing of rockets into the Jews state.

Today, as pagers and walkie-talkies plunged the country into fear, doubt and uncertainty, the Lebanese people are isolated, tired and scared as Israeli tanks, troops and hardware are being transported to northern Israel bordering Lebanon. Hezbollah, and Iran for that matter, needs to understand that “Israel can change the rules of the game”. Even the U.S. didn’t know about the attack using pager – till it was too late. 

 

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September 21st, 2024 by financetwitter

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