Israel planted explosives in 5,000 pagers, say sources

Israel's Mossad spy agency planted a small amount of explosives inside 5,000 Taiwan-made pagers ordered by Lebanese group Hezbollah months before Tuesday's detonations, a senior Lebanese security source and another source told Reuters.

The operation was an unprecedented Hezbollah security breach that saw thousands of pagers detonate across Lebanon, killing 12 people and wounding nearly 3,000 others, including the group's fighters and Iran's envoy to Beirut.

The plot appears to have been many months in the making, several sources said.

The senior Lebanese security source said the group had ordered 5,000 beepers made by Taiwan-based Gold Apollo, which several sources say were brought into the country earlier this year.

The senior Lebanese security source identified a photograph of the model of the pager, an AP924, which like other pagers wirelessly receive and display text messages but cannot make telephone calls.

Hezbollah fighters have been using pagers as a low-tech means of communication in an attempt to evade Israeli location-tracking, two sources familiar with the group's operations said this year.

But the senior Lebanese source said the devices had been modified by Israel's spy service "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.

The source said 3,000 of the pagers exploded when a coded message was sent to them, simultaneously activating the explosives.

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.

Images of destroyed pagers analysed by Reuters showed a format and stickers on the back that were consistent with pagers made by Gold Apollo, based in Taipei.

Hezbollah was reeling from the attack, which left fighters and others bloodied, hospitalised or dead. One Hezbollah official said the detonation was the group's "biggest security breach" since the Gaza conflict between Israel and Hezbollah ally Hamas erupted on October 7.

"This would easily be the biggest counterintelligence failure that Hezbollah has had in decades," said Jonathan Panikoff, the US government's former deputy national intelligence officer on the Middle East.

In February, Hezbollah drew up a war plan that aimed to address gaps in the group's intelligence infrastructure. Around 170 fighters had already been killed in targeted Israeli strikes on Lebanon, including one senior commander and a top Hamas official in Beirut.

In a televised speech on February 13, the group's secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah sternly warned supporters that their phones were more dangerous than Israeli spies, saying they should break, bury or lock them in an iron box.

Instead, the group opted to distribute pagers to Hezbollah members across the group's various branches — from fighters to medics working in its relief services.

"It demonstrates Israel's ability to infiltrate its adversaries in a remarkably dramatic way," said Paul Pillar, a 28-year veteran of the US intelligence community, mainly at the CIA.