Lebanon’s Hezbollah was still issuing new gold Apollo-branded pagers to its members hours before thousands of explosions this week, two security sources said, indicating the group was confident the devices were safe despite constant checks of electronic kit to identify threats.
One source said a member of the Iranian-backed militia received a new pager on Monday, which exploded in the box the next day.
Another source said a few days earlier, a subordinate was injured when a pager given to a senior member exploded.
Gold Apollo brand devices were detonated in a coordinated attack on Tuesday in Hezbollah strongholds in south Lebanon, the suburbs of Beirut and the eastern Bekaa Valley.
Hundreds of Hezbollah walkie-talkies exploded on Wednesday. The series of attacks killed 37 people, including at least two children, and injured more than 3,000.
The walkie-talkie’s batteries were laced with a highly explosive compound called PETN, another Lebanese source familiar with the device’s components told Reuters on Friday. Up to three grams of explosives hidden in the pagers remained undetected by Hezbollah for months, Reuters reported earlier this week.
One of the security sources said the explosives were very hard to detect “with any device or scanner.” The source did not say what type of scanner Hezbollah had run the pagers through.
Two additional sources told Reuters that Hezbollah examined the pagers after they were delivered to Lebanon in 2022, including traveling with them to the airport to make sure they did not trigger an alarm. In total, Reuters spoke to six sources familiar with the details of the explosive devices for this story.
The sources did not name the airports where they conducted the tests.
Lebanon, Hezbollah and Western security sources say Israel is behind the attacks. Israel, which has since stepped up air strikes on Lebanon, has neither denied nor confirmed involvement.
A security source said that, rather than the pagers being a specific suspicion, the check was part of a routine “cleaning” of equipment, including communications devices, to check for explosives or surveillance systems.
The attacks, and the delivery of equipment despite regular checks and violations, have dented Hezbollah’s reputation as the strongest organisation in the Iran-allied “Axis of Resistance” of anti-Israel irregular forces in the Middle East.
In a televised speech on Thursday, Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah said the attacks were “unprecedented in the history” of the group.
Hezbollah’s media office and the Israeli armed forces did not immediately respond to requests for comment on this story.
Taiwan-based Gold Apollo has said it did not manufacture the devices used in the attack, but said they were made by a company in Europe that is licensed to use the firm’s brand. Reuters has not been able to trace where they were made or at what point they were tampered with.
Earlier this year, 5,000 pagers were brought into Lebanon. Reuters previously reported that Hezbollah had resorted to pagers to evade Israeli surveillance on its mobile phones after senior commanders were killed in targeted air strikes last year.
Hezbollah’s conflict with Israel dates back decades, but flared up last year parallel to the Gaza war, raising concerns of a full-blown regional war.
too little too late
Two security sources and one intelligence source told Reuters that following the pager explosion on Tuesday, Hezbollah suspects some of its other equipment had been tampered with.
In response, it stepped up scrutiny of its communications systems, carefully examining all equipment. It has also begun investigating the supply chains through which the pagers were brought in, two security sources said.
But the review wasn’t complete until Wednesday afternoon when the hand-held radio exploded.
Hezbollah believes Israel chose to blow up the group’s handheld radios because it feared Hezbollah would soon discover that the walkie-talkies were also equipped with explosives, one source told Reuters.
According to the Lebanese Health Ministry, the walkie-talkie explosions killed 25 people and injured at least 650 – a much higher death toll than the previous day’s pager explosions, which killed 12 and injured nearly 3,000.
A security source and intelligence source said this was because they contained more explosives than the beepers.
Three sources said the group was investigating where, when and how the explosive devices were planted. Nasrallah echoed that in his speech on Thursday.
One of the security sources said Hezbollah had thwarted previous Israeli operations to target equipment imported by the group from abroad – from its private landline telephones to ventilation units in the group’s offices.
This also includes suspected violations from the previous year.
“We discovered several electronic problems – but the pagers were not found,” the source said. “They betrayed us, salute the enemy.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
