As a spy thriller fan, I love reading about the clever gadgets the good guys use to vanquish the bad guys, which is why I've been fascinated by the story of Hezbollah's deadly exploding pagers. How did Israel pull this off? Was it really Israel who did this? This attack is even more exacting than the exploding bed at the Iranian "safe" house.
Now we're learning more details of the attacks, and they're as impressive as they are diabolical.
Three thousand beepers exploded this week, killing a bunch of Hezbollah terrorists and some innocents. Iran's ambassador to Lebanon lost an eye in the attack.
After that attack, Hezbollah began using walkie-talkies, and they exploded.
When the terrorists decided to meet in person in Lebanon Friday, someone bombed the meeting.
Israel has not confirmed it carried out the attacks, nor is it likely they will ever lay claim to them, but U.S. intelligence officials who talked to their favorite intelligence mouthpiece, the New York Times, claimed Israel pulled it off. Time will tell what the truth is.
This operation has obviously been planned for quite some time. Though Israeli intelligence agencies were completely caught off guard by Hamas's Iran-backed October 7 attack, they appear to be trying to make up for that huge intelligence debacle.
Defense One reports that Hezbollah had a deal with a Taiwan company, Gold Apollo, to supply the Islamic supremacist terror organization with pagers. Someone probably needs to have a little chat with the Taiwan company that sells AR-924 pagers to terrorists, but they told whoever asked that they weren't responsible for the pagers.
They pointed the finger of blame at a Hungarian firm called BAC Consulting KFT. This appears to be a shell company run by friendly or Israeli intelligence. Indeed, multiple Israeli cutouts may have been involved in the manufacturing and sales of the devices.
The Times reports that Israel "did not tamper with the Hezbollah devices that exploded, defense and intelligence officials say. It manufactured them as part of an elaborate ruse."
That's right. The shell company sold the rigged pagers manufactured by the good guys.
And this is the best part of the story—if you hate Islamo-Nazi terrorists, anyway—Hezbollah paid for its own rigged and exploding pagers.
Related: The Meaning of the Pager Strike: Mind Over Matter
Defense One characterized the "supply chain hack" operation as "legendary." The hackers installed "tiny quantities of explosives into at least 3,000 pagers specially ordered by Iran-backed Hezbollah militants across Lebanon and Syria." Legendary, indeed.
The pagers reportedly were laced with the chemical PETN.
The National Institutes of Health says that "Pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN), CASRN 78-11-5, belongs to the class of compounds known as organic nitrates. It is used mainly as a demolition explosive and in the manufacture of detonating fuses and blasting caps...and is the main ingredient in Semtex, a plastic explosive." Ah, Semtex. That's a big boom-boom right there.
And the terrorist outfit handed out the pagers after they inspected them and still couldn't detect the Semtex.
Israel didn’t just tamper with the pagers, they manufactured them and used a shell company to sell them to Hezbollah. It’s unclear how much Hezbollah paid for their own humiliation, but they certainly got a lot of bang for their buck. pic.twitter.com/TcJistvSRg
— Gurwinder (@G_S_Bhogal) September 20, 2024
I guarantee you this episode will be in every spy thriller novel for 20 years forever.
The Times reports Iran's terror proxies have been on their heels for a few years. The paper report that "in 2020, for example, Israel assassinated Iran’s top nuclear scientist using an A.I.-assisted robot controlled remotely via satellite."
Like Afghanistan terror groups did after they realized U.S. drones could track their phones, Hezbollah has gone low-tech, hence the pagers, walkie-talkies, and in-person meetings.
More soberly, however, the exploding pagers and walkie-talkies killed more than a dozen bad guys, and 2,700 people were wounded, including some kids.
This was the reported breakdown of the casualties.
🚨 Breaking: According to a leaked document from Hezbollah intelligence, 879 died in pager explosions, out of which 291 senior commanders. 509 were blinded, and 1735 “injured in their reproductive organs”, out of which 906 “total damage” and 613 “permanent function damage” 👇 pic.twitter.com/tqbO5Ssk0x
— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) September 20, 2024
I guess some of the guys who lived won't have the balls to reproduce and taint humanity's gene pool anymore.
When you start feeling sorry for these guys, just remember what their Hamas buddies did to families, babies, and women on October 7, and then you'll snap right out of it.
And Israel literally made them pay for their own deaths.
Iran's puppet terror group, Hezbollah has incessantly bombed northern Israel for decades from their Lebanon perches. Recently intensified bombing has driven more than 60,000 Israelis from their homes, depopulating that area and in effect making the part of Israel a no-go zone.
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