Iran-backed Hezbollah said on Wednesday it had attacked Israeli artillery positions with rockets aimed at its arch-enemy, coming after rocket bombs in Lebanon injured thousands of its members and raised the prospect of a wider Middle East war.
A senior Lebanese security source and another source told Reuters that Israeli spy agency Mossad, which has a long history of sophisticated operations on foreign soil, had planted explosives inside pagers imported by Hezbollah months before Tuesday’s blasts.
Lebanon’s Health Minister Firas Abiad said on Wednesday that the death toll had risen to 12, including two children. Nearly 3,000 people were injured in Tuesday’s attack, including several of the group’s fighters and Iran’s envoy to Beirut.
A Taiwanese pager manufacturer has denied that it produced the pager device that exploded in a daring attack that has raised the possibility of a full-scale war between Iran-backed Hezbollah and Israel.
Gold Apollo said the devices were manufactured under licence by a company called BAC, based in Budapest, the capital of Hungary.
There was no immediate information on when Hezbollah carried out its latest rocket attack, but the group usually announces such strikes shortly after they take place, indicating that it struck Israeli artillery positions on Wednesday.
Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate against Israel, whose military has declined to comment on the blasts. The two sides have been engaged in a cross-border war since the Gaza conflict began last October, raising fears of a wider conflict in the Middle East that could also engulf the United States and Iran.
Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi accused Israel of pushing the Middle East to the brink of regional war by planning dangerous escalation on multiple fronts.
“Hezbollah wants to avoid a full-blown war. It still wants to avoid it. But given the scale of the war, the impact on families and civilians, there will be pressure for a more robust response,” said Mohanad Hage Ali of the Carnegie Middle East Center.
Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful proxy in the Middle East, said in a statement it would continue to support Hamas in Gaza and that Israel should await its response to the “massacre” in which fighters and others were bled, hospitalised or dead.
A Hezbollah official said the blast represented the “biggest security breach” in the organization’s history.
Hospital footage reviewed by Reuters showed people with a variety of injuries, some to their faces, some missing fingers and deep wounds to the hip where the pager was likely worn.
Multiple sources told Reuters the plot had been in the works for several months and came after a series of assassinations of Hezbollah and Hamas commanders and leaders since the start of the Gaza war, which were blamed on Israel.
This road leads to Budapest
A senior Lebanese security source said the group had ordered 5,000 pagers from Gold Apollo, which several sources say were brought into the country earlier this year.
Gold Apollo founder Su Ching-kuang said the pagers used in the explosion were made by a European company, which Gold Apollo named in a statement as B.A.C.
“The product was not ours. It’s just that it had our brand on it,” Hsu told reporters at the company’s office in the northern Taiwanese city of New Taipei on Wednesday.
The stated address of BAC Consulting in Budapest, the capital of Hungary, was a peach-coloured building on a mostly residential street in an outer suburb. The company’s name was written on an A4 sheet on a glass door.
A person in the building, who asked not to be named, said BAC Consulting was registered there but had no physical presence. BAC Consulting CEO Cristiana Barsoni-Arcidiacono said on her LinkedIn profile that she has worked as a consultant for several organisations, including UNESCO. She did not respond to a Reuters email seeking comment.
BAC’s registered activities are wide-ranging, ranging from computer game publishing to IT consultancy and crude oil extraction.
A senior Lebanese security source identified a photo of the model of the pager as the AR-924. Hezbollah fighters have been using the pagers as a means of low-tech communications in an effort to evade Israeli location-tracking.
The senior Lebanese source said the devices had been modified “at the production stage” by Israel’s spy service. Israeli officials did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.
“Mossad has installed a board inside the device which contains explosive material which receives a code. It is very difficult to detect it by any means,” the source said.
The source said about 3,000 pagers exploded when a coded message was sent, activating the explosives.
Another security source told Reuters that up to three grams of explosives were hidden in the new pagers and that Hezbollah had been unaware of them for months.
In a televised speech on February 13, the group’s secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, issued a stern warning to his supporters that their phones were more dangerous than Israeli spies. He said they should smash their phones, bury them or lock them in iron boxes.
Instead, Hezbollah opted to distribute pagers to its members across the group’s various branches – from fighters to medics working in relief services.
Israel’s Mossad has gained notoriety for its complex operations, beginning with the daring kidnapping of high-ranking Nazi Adolf Eichmann in 1960. More recently, the spy agency has been blamed for cyber attacks and the assassination of a top Iranian scientist with a remote-controlled machine gun in 2020.
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