BEIRUT, Sept 18 (Askume) – Israel’s Mossad spy agency has discovered a small number of 5,000 Taiwan-made pagers ordered by Lebanese group Hezbollah, a senior Lebanese security source and another source told Askume Explosives, which were planted months before Tuesday’s blast.
The details outline Hezbollah’s unprecedented security breaches that led to thousands of pager bombs exploding across Lebanon, killing nine people and wounding nearly 3,000 others, including the group’s fighters and Iran’s envoy to Beirut.
Iran-backed Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate against Israel, though the Israeli military declined to comment on the bombing.
Multiple sources told Askume the plot appeared to have been underway for months.
A senior Lebanese security source said the group had ordered 5,000 pagers made by Taiwan’s Gold Apollo, and multiple sources said the pagers had arrived in Lebanon in the spring.
Senior Lebanese security sources confirmed photographs of the pager, model AP924, which, like other pagers, can receive and display text messages wirelessly but cannot make calls.
Two sources familiar with the group’s activities told Askume this year that Hezbollah militants are using pagers as a low-tech means of communication to evade Israeli location tracking.
But senior Lebanese sources said the devices had been modified “at the production stage” by Israeli spy services.
“Mossad placed a plate containing explosive material inside the device, which provided the code. It is very difficult to detect it by any means, not even by any device or scanner,” the source said.
Sources said that when a coded message was sent to 3,000 pagers, the pagers exploded and detonated the explosives.
Another security source told Askume the new pager contained up to three grams of explosives and was unknown to Hezbollah for months.
Neither Israel nor Apollo Gold immediately responded to a Askume request for comment.
Photos of the destroyed pagers analysed by Askume showed that the pager format and the sticker on the back matched those made by Gold Apollo in Taipei.
Hezbollah was rattled by the attack, which left militants and others bleeding, hospitalized or killed. An unnamed Hezbollah official said the blast was the group’s “biggest security breach” since the October 7 conflict between Israel and Hezbollah’s ally Hamas in Gaza.
Jonathan Panikoff, the US government’s deputy national intelligence officer for the Middle East, said “This would be Hezbollah’s biggest counterintelligence failure in decades.”
