People gather outside a hospital as more than 1,000 people, including Hezbollah fighters and medics, were wounded when the pagers they use to communicate exploded across Lebanon, according to a security source, in Beirut.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Lebanon’s Hezbollah was still handing its members new Gold Apollo branded pagers hours before thousands blew up this week, two security sources said, indicating the group was confident the devices were safe despite an ongoing sweep of electronic kit to identify threats.

One member of the Iranian-backed militia received a new pager on Monday that exploded the next day while it was still in its box, said one of the sources.

A pager given to a senior member just days earlier injured a subordinate when it detonated, the second source said.

In an apparently coordinated attack the Gold Apollo branded devices detonated on Tuesday across Hezbollah’s strongholds of south Lebanon, Beirut’s suburbs and the eastern Bekaa valley.

On Wednesday, hundreds of Hezbollah walkie-talkies exploded. The consecutive attacks killed 37 people, including at least two children, and injured more than 3,000 people. The batteries of the walkie-talkies were laced with a highly explosive compound known as PETN, another Lebanese source familiar with the device’s components told Reuters on Friday. Up to three grams of explosives hidden in the pagers had gone undetected for months by Hezbollah, Reuters reported earlier this week.

One of the security sources said it was very hard to detect the explosives “with any device or scanner.” The source did not specify what type of scanners Hezbollah had run the pagers through.

Hezbollah examined the pagers after they were delivered to Lebanon, starting in 2022, including by travelling through airports with them to ensure they would not trigger alarms, two additional sources told Reuters. In total, Reuters spoke to six sources familiar with the details of the exploding devices for this story.

The sources did not specify the name of the airports where they conducted the tests.

Lebanon, Hezbollah and Western security sources say Israel was behind the attacks. Israel, which has since stepped up airstrikes on Lebanon, has neither denied or confirmed involvement.

Rather than a specific suspicion of the pagers, the checks had been part of a routine “sweep” of its equipment, including communications devices, to find any indications that they were laced with explosives or surveillance mechanisms, one of the security sources said. The attacks, and the distribution of the devices despite the routine sweep and checks for breaches, have struck at Hezbollah’s reputation as the most formidable of Iran’s allied ‘Axis of Resistance’ umbrella of anti-Israel irregular forces across the Middle East.

In a televised speech on Thursday, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah said the attacks were “unprecedented in the history” of the group.

Hezbollah’s media office and Israel’s armed forces did not immediately respond to requests for comment for this story. Taiwan-based Gold Apollo has said it did not manufacture the devices used in the attack, saying they were made by a company in Europe licensed to use the firm’s brand. Reuters has not been able to establish where they were made or at what point they were tampered with. A batch of 5,000 of the pagers were brought into Lebanon earlier this year. Reuters previously reported that Hezbollah turned to pagers in an attempt to evade Israeli surveillance of its mobile phones, following the killing of senior commanders in targeted airstrikes over the past year. Hezbollah’s conflict with Israel dates back decades but has flared up in the past year in parallel with the Gaza war, heightening worries of a full-blown regional war.

Too little, too late

After the pagers detonated on Tuesday, Hezbollah suspected more of its devices may have been compromised, two of the security sources, as well as an intelligence source, told Reuters.

In response, it intensified the sweep of its communications systems, carrying out careful examinations of all devices. It also began investigating the supply chains through which the pagers were brought in, the two security sources said.

But the review had not been concluded by Wednesday afternoon, when the hand-held radios exploded.

Hezbollah believes that Israel opted to detonate the group’s hand-held radios because it feared Hezbollah would soon find that the walkie-talkies were also rigged with explosives, one of the sources told Reuters.

The walkie-talkie explosions left 25 people dead and at least 650 injured, according to Lebanon’s health ministry – a much higher fatality rate than the previous day’s pager blasts, which killed 12 and wounded nearly 3,000.

That is because they carried a higher payload of explosives than the beepers, one of the security sources and the intelligence source said.

The group’s probe into precisely where, when and how the devices were laced with explosives is ongoing, three of the sources said. Nasrallah later said the same in the speech on Thursday.

One of the security sources said Hezbollah had foiled previous Israeli operations targeting devices imported from abroad by the group — from its private landline telephones to ventilation units in the group’s offices.

That includes suspected breaches in the past year.

“There are several electronic issues that we were able to discover — but not the pagers,” the source said. “They tricked us, hats off to the enemy.”

A man’s bag explodes in a supermarket in Beirut, Lebanon September 17, 2024 in this screen grab from a video obtained from social media.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Taiwanese company Gold Apollo on Wednesday (September 18, 2024) denied a report that it had produced hundreds of explosive-packed pagers used by Hezbollah members which simultaneously exploded, killing at least nine people.

“They are not our products from beginning to end. How can we produce products that are not ours?” company head Hsu Chin-kuang told reporters in Taipei after the New York Times reported that his company’s pagers were involved in the blasts.

Beirut:

The United Nations said pager explosions that killed nine people and wounded 2,800 across Lebanon Tuesday marked “an extremely concerning escalation” nearly one year into the Gaza war.

“The developments today mark an extremely concerning escalation in what is an already unacceptably volatile context,” UN special coordinator for Lebanon Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert said in a statement.

She urged “all concerned actors to refrain from any further action, or bellicose rhetoric, which could trigger a wider conflagration that nobody can afford”.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Civil Defence first-responders carry a wounded man whose handheld pager exploded at al-Zahraa hospital in Beirut, Lebanon, on September 17, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP

Hundreds of people were injured across Lebanon when their pagers exploded Tuesday (September 17, 2024), Health Minister Firass Abiad said, with a source close to Hezbollah saying its members were targeted.

The source close to Hezbollah said a large number of the Iran-backed movement’s members had been injured in the near-simultaneous incidents, but that no deaths had been reported.

It wasn’t immediately clear if people were killed.

A senior military intelligence official and an official with a Lebanese group with knowledge of the situation, both of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation, said that pagers carried by Hezbollah members were detonated. The second official said it was believed to be an Israeli attack.

The Associated Press reached out to the Israeli military, which declined to comment.

Photos and videos from Beirut’s southern suburbs circulating on social media and in local media showed people lying on the pavement with wounds on their hands or near their pants pockets.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah previously warned the group’s members not to carry cellphones, saying that they could be used by Israel to track their movements and to carry out targeted strikes.

Lebanon’s Health Ministry called on all hospitals to be on alert to take in emergency patients and for people who own pagers to get away from them. It also asked health workers to avoid using wireless devices.

AP photographers at area hospitals said the emergency rooms were overloaded with patients, many of them with injuries to their limbs, some in serious condition.

The state-run National News Agency said hospitals in southern Lebanon, the eastern Bekaa Valley and Beirut’s southern suburbs — all areas where Hezbollah has a strong presence — had called on people to donate blood of all types.

The news agency reported that in Beirut’s southern suburbs and other areas “the handheld pagers system was detonated using advanced technology, and dozens of injuries were reported.”

The Associated Press quoted a Hezbollah official as saying that “several hundred” people in Lebanon, including its members, were wounded.

A Hezbollah official, quoted by Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the detonation of the pagers was the “biggest security breach” the group had suffered in nearly a year of war with Israel.

“The enemy (Israel) stands behind this security incident,” the official said, without elaborating. He added that the new pagers that Hezbollah members were carrying had lithium batteries that apparently exploded.

Lithium batteries, when overheated, can smoke, melt and even catch on fire. Rechargeable lithium batteries are used in consumer products ranging from cellphones and laptops to electric cars. Lithium battery fires can burn up to 590°C.

The incident comes at a time of heightened tensions between Lebanon and Israel. The Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and Israeli forces have been clashing near-daily for more than 11 months against the backdrop of war between Israel and Hezbollah ally Hamas in Gaza.

The clashes have killed hundreds in Lebanon and dozens in Israel and displaced tens of thousands on both sides of the border.

Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon injured

Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, was slightly injured on Tuesday (September 17, 2024) by the explosion of an electronic pager, Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency reported.

“Amani has a superficial injury and is currently under observation in a hospital,” Fars quoted a source as saying.