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Inside Israel’s Trojan Horse pager attack: How explosives were secretly planted in Hezbollah gadgets in meticulously-planned ‘Mossad op’ as murky trail emerges from Taiwan to Hungarian ‘factory’ | Avi Melamed’s insights quoted in this article by David Averre, Originally published in The Daily Mail.
Former Israeli Intelligence official and regional analyst Avi Melamed told MailOnline: ‘Hezbollah regressed back to these devices thinking that these devices would be safer for its combatants to use instead of phones which could be GPS targeted.Â
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Almost 3,000 people were injured and at least 12 killed in Lebanon and Syria on Tuesday when pagers belonging to members of Hezbollah exploded in a shocking, co-ordinated attack of unprecedented scope and scale.
The crippling security breach is believed to be the result of a shady operation stretching from Hungary to Taiwan that was masterminded by Israel‘s foreign spy agency.
It is alleged that Mossad, working in collaboration with elements of Israel’s Defence Forces (IDF), managed to infiltrate the supply chain and plant a small quantity of high explosives within the communication devices before they were delivered to Lebanon some time this spring.
These rigged devices were subsequently distributed to thousands of unsuspecting members across the political, military, operational and medical branches of Hezbollah before they were eventually detonated on Tuesday afternoon.
Officials in Jerusalem have thus far declined to comment on the incident, but Hezbollah has placed the blame squarely on Israel and has vowed to punish it.
An American official speaking on condition of anonymity said Israel briefed the United States on Tuesday after the attack, but gave no more details.
Meanwhile, a slew of security sources, regional analysts and munitions experts concur that Mossad and the IDF are the only entities capable of pulling off such an operation.
Now, as Hezbollah reels from the extraordinary attack and Lebanese officials work fervently to uncover the details, MailOnline breaks down what we know so far.
Why was Hezbollah using pagers?
Just one day after Hamas‘ October 7 attacks that triggered the war in Gaza, Lebanon’s Hezbollah entered the fray in support of its ally and began trading strikes with Israel along their shared border.
Since then, hundreds of the group’s operatives have been killed in targeted Israeli strikes on Lebanon, including several senior commander and a top Hamas official in Beirut.
Fearing that the phones used by Hezbollah members to communicate presented a massive security risk, Hezbollah’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah in February declared the devices were ‘more dangerous than Israeli spies’ and his officials began drawing up plans to address gaps in the group’s intelligence infrastructure.
In a televised speech on February 13, Nasrallah sternly ordered his followers and supporters to break, bury or lock their phones in an iron box.
The group opted to replace the phones its members had previously used to communicate with pagers – one way receivers that are more secure than smartphones and do not operate on the same network.
They also have an extremely long battery life, with some models able to last up to three months on one charge – a key advantage given Lebanon’s economic crisis and unreliable electricity supply.
The timeline
A Lebanese security source confirmed to Reuters that Hezbollah placed an order for thousands of pagers in February with a Taiwan-based company called Gold Apollo.
The AR-924 pager ordered by Hezbollah is advertised a ‘rugged’ device allowing users to securely communicate in messages of 100 characters.
But Gold Apollo said in a statement on Wednesday that it did not manufacture the devices delivered to Lebanon, claiming instead they were manufactured by in Budapest, Hungary, by another entity called BAC Consulting Kft under a brand licensing deal.
Gold Apollo founder Hsu Ching-Kuang said: ‘The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it,’ with an official statement from the company adding: ‘Apollo Gold Corporation has established a long-term private label authorisation and regional agency cooperation with BAC… but the design and manufacturing of the products are entirely handled by BAC.’
An executive of BAC Consulting Kft confirmed to NBC in a phonecall that the company worked with Gold Apollo but said ‘I don’t make the pagers. I am just the intermediary’, before hanging up.
This is where the trail has gone cold – for now.
The limited liability company was registered in May 2022, with records showing it had revenue of $725,768 in 2022 and $593,972 in 2023.
Reporters located the registered address of BAC Consulting in Budapest, but a person at the building speaking on condition of anonymity said the company did not have a physical presence there.
How were the pagers sabotaged?
The exact method by which the pagers were sabotaged remains unverified.
But a senior Lebanese security source told Reuters that it appeared the booby-trapped devices distributed to thousands of Hezbollah members had been modified ‘at the production level.’
‘The Mossad injected a board inside of the device that has explosive material that receives a code. It’s very hard to detect it through any means. Even with any device or scanner,’ the source said.
Another security source said that up to three grams of explosives were hidden in the new pagers and had gone ‘undetected’ by Hezbollah for months.
How were the pagers detonated?
The source said 3,000 of the pagers exploded when a coded message was sent to them, simultaneously activating the explosives.
Early speculation in the wake of the blasts suggested an Israeli hack could have overloaded the lithium ion batteries powering the pagers, which can burn up to 590 degrees celsius (1,100 F) when ignited.
But munitions experts reviewing examples of the blasts caught by security cameras determined the pagers were detonated by an explosive charge, given the sudden and uniform nature of the explosions and the kind of injuries sustained by the victims.
A former British Army bomb disposal officer explained that an explosive device has five main components: A container, a battery, a triggering device, a detonator and an explosive charge.
‘A pager has three of those already,’ explained the ex-officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he now works as a consultant with clients on the Middle East.
‘You would only need to add the detonator and the charge.’
‘Looking at the video, the size of the detonation is similar to that caused by an electric detonator alone or one that incorporates an extremely small, high-explosive charge,’ said Sean Moorhouse, a former British Army officer and explosive ordinance disposal expert.
Mossad ‘most likely culprit’
Security experts, regional analysts and military officials have almost unanimously pointed fingers at Mossad and elements of the Israeli military, arguing that no other actor has the capability nor the motive to carry out such an attack.
Former Israeli Intelligence official and regional analyst Avi Melamed told MailOnline: ‘Hezbollah regressed back to these devices thinking that these devices would be safer for its combatants to use instead of phones which could be GPS targeted.
‘In one sweeping attack, with both significant operational and psychological ramifications, these very low-tech devices were used against them, deepening the stress and embarrassment on its leaders.
‘The characteristics of the incident indicate the use of advanced technologies for disruption, communication system takeovers, and remote operations with an exceptionally high level of synchronisation.
‘The accumulating evidence suggests that the devices were handled in advance, not through malicious software. While Israel has not taken, and is unlikely to take, responsibility for the attack, there is no doubt in regional discourse that Israel is behind it.’
Professor Andreas Krieg, Middle East expert, senior lecturer at the School of Security Studies at King’s College London, said: ‘Regardless of how they sourced it or how they procured this device, Israel has been able to infiltrate and compromise the supply chain.
‘Tampering with a physical device that then was rolled out across the network of Hezbollah is quite extraordinary because it requires coordination, and it likely requires someone on the inside who is cooperating.
‘If you look at the wider picture that’s emerging over the last couple of months, it seems like the Israelis have been been fairly successful on the intelligence front in compromising their foes, given who they’ve targeted and how precisely they have been able to do so.
If you look at the way that they killed Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, for example, it suggests Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranians are heavily infiltrated – there may also be are certain people who cooperate with the Israelis.’
Mossad has a reputation for carrying out sophisticated operations.
It is blamed for a spate of cyber attacks and is suspected of being behind the assassination of a top Iranian scientist with a remote-controlled machinegun.
But the pager attack would constitute one of the agency’s most complex and daring operations, and represents ‘easily the biggest counterintelligence failure that Hezbollah has had in decades’ according to Jonathan Panikoff, the US government’s former deputy national intelligence officer on the Middle East.
Inside Israel’s Trojan Horse pager attack: How explosives were secretly planted in Hezbollah gadgets in meticulously-planned ‘Mossad op’ as murky trail emerges from Taiwan to Hungarian ‘factory’ | Avi Melamed’s insights quoted in this article by David Averre, Originally published in The Daily Mail.
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