They literally never knew what hit them. Hezbollah is still trying to figure out how Israel allegedly intercepted a shipment of new pagers from Taiwan and planted one or two ounces of explosives in them. Then, with nobody the wiser, shipped 5,000 pagers merrily on its way to end up in the pockets of Hezbollah operatives and fighters.
The reported details of this operation reveal a startlingly thorough job of planning and execution right down to the fake message from Hezbollah leadership that detonated the devices. Israel has not taken responsibility for the attack, though it's widely believed they were behind it.
The death toll has risen to 11, with nearly 3,000 wounded, many of them critically.
The 5,000 pagers were ordered from the Taiwanese electronics company Gold Apollo. "Most were the company’s AR924 model, though three other Gold Apollo models were also included in the shipment," reports the New York Times.
The explosives were embedded next to the battery and included a switch that would detonate the device remotely. At 3:30 p.m. local time, the pagers beeped three times, as they were programmed to do, with a message that appeared to be from Hezbollah headquarters.
A few seconds later, the pagers detonated.
Hezbollah did not reply to questions from Reuters on the make of the pagers. Gold Apollo's founder said the company did not make the pagers used in the explosions in Lebanon. They were manufactured by a company in Europe that had the right to use the Taiwanese firm's brand.
Hezbollah fighters began using pagers in the belief they would be able to evade Israeli tracking of their locations, two sources familiar with the group's operations told Reuters this year.
Three security sources told Reuters that the pagers that detonated were the latest model brought in by Hezbollah in recent months.
Some early reports speculated that the batteries had exploded, but experts in lithium-ion batteries scotched that notion.
"What we're talking about is a relatively small battery bursting into flames. We're not talking of a fatal explosion here... my intuition is telling me that it's highly unlikely," said Paul Christensen, an expert in lithium-ion battery safety at Newcastle University.
Naturally, Hezbollah's toadies in the Lebanese government were upset by this "attack on Lebanon's sovereignty." While Hezbollah is screaming bloody murder, it could be that the terrorist group's operations have been disrupted so thoroughly that it may be many months before they're able to respond.
Earlier this year, Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, strictly limited the use of cellphones, which he saw as increasingly vulnerable to Israeli surveillance, according to some of the officials as well as security experts.
“This attack hit them in their Achilles’ heel because they took out a central means of communication,” Ms. Elazari said. “We have seen these types of devices, pagers, targeted before but not in an attack this sophisticated.”
Axios is reporting that Mossad believed that Hezbollah was close to uncovering the plot, so they took the attitude of "use it or lose it" and went ahead with the attack.
A former Israeli official with knowledge of the operation said Israeli intelligence services planned to use the booby-trapped pagers it managed to "plant" in Hezbollah's ranks as a surprise opening blow in an all- out war to try to cripple Hezbollah.
But in recent days, Israeli leaders became concerned that Hezbollah might discover the pagers. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his top ministers and the heads of the Israel Defense Forces and the intelligence agencies decided to use the system now rather than take the risk of it being detected by Hezbollah, a U.S. official said.
The Israeli concerns that led to the decision to conduct the attack were first reported by Al-Monitor, which said two Hezbollah operatives raised suspicions about the pagers in recent days.
Intelligence services are calling Israel's pager attack the most devastating blow against Hezbollah in decades.
From what we know, that's hard to argue with.
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