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Lebanon Pager Attacks - 17-18 September 2024

On 26 August 2024, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah bragged that he had taken aim at a "military target" in the heart of Israel's population center – "the intelligence base at Glilot, where Unit 8200 and the Mossad sit" – just over the northern border of Tel Aviv in the suburb of Ramat Hasharon. At the end of August, Nasser al-Nasser, the popular pro-Palestinian online presence with tens of thousands of followers, published an alarming report on his account: "Yossi Sariel, the commander of 8200, the most powerful espionage unit in the world, was killed along with other officers in a Hezbollah attack. Israeli officials have promised to investigate the incident." Brigadier General Yossi Sariel, the commander of Israeli Intelligence Unit 8200, reportedly informed the IDF Chief of Staff 12 September 2024 of his decision to step down from his role.

In 2008, Hezbollah even turned its weapons against its fellow Lebanese, triggering a standoff that brought the country to the brink of a civil war. Hezbollah was responding to a decision by the Lebanese government to disable the group’s private communication network, further evidence for those who labelled the group a state within a state – and one that prevented the Lebanese state from being strong enough to properly rule the country.

Unit 8200/Mossad salted thousands of pagers with explosives before conveying them to Hizballah. They used mass messages to heat up the battery, which then detonated plastic explosive. As many as 4000 injuries and dozens of martyrs were reported as a result of detonating Pager devices used by Hezbollah operators on September 17, 2024. The Mossad placed a quantity of highly explosive PETN material on the devices' battery and it was detonated by raising the battery's temperature. Sources said the amount of explosives did not exceed 20 grams, and may hav been only a few grams. One security source told Reuters that up to three grams of explosives were hidden in the new pagers, apparently months before the explosions.

Pagers exploded simultaneously on 17 September 2024 across Lebanon and Syria and a new set of bombs—hidden in walkie-talkies—detonated on the next day in Beirut and other parts of Lebanon. The total death toll from these attacks has now reached at least 37, including a 9-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy, with over 3,000 individuals injured. Doctors at a hospital in Beirut reported that many of the injured had suffered eye loss and required limb amputations. The detonating walkie-talkies ignited more than 70 fires in homes and businesses across Lebanon and damaged over a dozen vehicles.

Hezbollah gave its members new Gold Apollo pagers shortly before thousands of them were detonated, two security sources said, suggesting the group was confident the devices were secure despite ongoing inspections of electronic equipment for threats. Taiwan-based Gold Apollo said this week that it did not manufacture the devices used in the attack but rather that they were made by Hungary-based BAC, which has a license to use its brand.

Hezbollah announced that hundreds of its fighters and other Lebanese citizens were injured, with varying degrees of severity, after the explosion of pagers they were carrying, and accused Israel of being behind these explosions. These bombings took place in many areas in Lebanon, including the southern suburb of Beirut , the cities of Bekaa, Nabatieh, Al-Hawsh, Bint Jbeil, Tyre, Tripoli, Baalbek, and others.

The next day, on 18 September 2024, multiple blasts went off in different parts of Lebanon, killing at least 20 people and injuring more than 450 others, the Health Ministry said, a day after simultaneous explosions of pagers used by Hezbollah members killed 12 people and wounded thousands. The Lebanese group vowed retaliation as it held Israel “fully responsible” for the attacks. Israel has declined to comment.

“This was more than lithium batteries being forced into override,” said Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute. “A small plastic explosive was almost certainly concealed alongside the battery for remote detonation via a call or page,” the analyst said, adding Israel’s spy agency “Mossad infiltrated the supply chain”.

Media outlets revealed that Yinson Yossi, who owns the Bulgarian company Norta Global Ltd, which is involved in supplying pagers, disappeared on the day of the bombing in Lebanon. According to the British newspaper, the Daily Mail, the Norwegian Yossi (39 years old) was born in India, and is listed as the owner of a Bulgarian shell company that is said to have paid the middleman, Christiana Arcidiacono-Parsoni, 1.3 million pounds sterling as part of a complex deal orchestrated by the Israeli Mossad to obtain the pagers. Jose, who moved to Oslo in 2015 after spending two years working for an immigration consultancy in London, is believed to have left on a pre-planned business trip on Tuesday, the day the Hezbollah pagers went off in Lebanon.

The newspaper pointed out that there is no indication that Yossi was in any way aware of the secret plot to coat the pagers with high explosives, or that the ultimate buyer, Cristiana Barsoni-Arcidiacono, who has denied involvement in the plot, was working with Mossad.

The apparent indiscriminate nature of the Israeli electronic assaults involving pagers and walkie-talkies in Lebanon raised alarm among international law experts, who warn that these explosions could constitute war crimes. Protocol on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Mines, Booby-Traps and Other Devices as amended on 3 May 1996 (Protocol II to the 1980 CCW Convention as amended on 3 May 1996) Article 7 - Prohibitions on the use of booby-traps and other devices states : "2. It is prohibited to use booby-traps or other devices in the form of apparently harmless portable objects which are specifically designed and constructed to contain explosive material."

On 21 December 2001, the scope of application of the Conventional Weapons Convention (CCW) and its then annexed Protocols was extended to apply to non-international armed conflicts (NIACs). However, that extension in scope only takes effect for States that ratify the extension. Israel has not done so. Israeli intelligence services have been contemplating an operation along the lines of this week’s mass explosions of Hezbollah electronic devices for at least 15 years, a US intelligence source told ABC News. The New York Times previously reported that the supply of sabotaged devices started in the summer of 2023, citing multiple officials familiar with the operation. The devices were never in Hungary and BAC was “a trading intermediary, with no manufacturing or operational site” in the country, a spokesperson for the government in Budapest said. The evidence so far suggests that Hezbollah acquired the pagers around February when the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, ordered members to stop using cellphones because they could be easily intercepted and monitored by Israeli intelligence. The pagers procured by Hezbollah were with a third party and they sat at a port for three months, awaiting clearances, before they were finally moved to the Lebanese group. Hezbollah suspects that it was during those three months that Israel managed to plant explosives in the devices. Hezbollah’s investigation so far shows that metal balls were placed around the pager batteries, allowing the explosive force to propel metal fragments outward, “significantly increasing the lethality of the blast”. Military analyst Elijah Magnier said the ongoing attacks on communication systems in Lebanon bear the hallmarks of an initial salvo before launching a major military operation. “Normally in every war, the first attack is on a command-control base, and here the Israelis are attacking the control, which is the communication. Crippling communication is vital in any war because it is the main spine of the [enemy] army,” Magnier told Al Jazeera.

Some believed the move was aimed at creating fear and internal suspicion that could undermine the group’s ability to fight. “It promulgates fear,” says Dr. Patrick Sullivan, director of the Modern War Institute at West Point, told Jeff Wise, at New York Magazine. “It demonstrates to their enemy, ‘Hey, we can reach out and touch you anywhere, anytime.’ I would imagine that Hezbollah is significantly questioning who is in their ranks, who are their suppliers, and what vulnerabilities they have.”

Russia's permanent representative to the United Nations confirmed that the perpetrators of the "Pager" bombings in Lebanon wanted to ignite a new war.

But Hussain Abdul-Hussain noted : Non-combatant civilians in #Lebanon do not use pagers. Non-combatant civilians in Lebanon do not use walkie-talkies. Non-combatant civilians in Lebanon are like all normal people on the planet: They use commercial smartphones (mostly Samsung because it's cheaper than iPhone). Only Hezbollah's military-aged males use pagers and walkie-talkies, all that are connected to an exclusive (and they thought secure) Hezbollah network.... Israel's blowing up of Hezbollah's pagers and walkie talks was one of the most surgical attack on enemy combatants in the history of wars."

A US intelligence source has said that the suspected Mossad “supply chain interdiction” operation behind this week’s explosive pager attacks in Lebanon took 15 years or longer to plan. “Such revelations are only possible under the supervision of the special services…and the journalist writing such things, I can say with 100% certainty, is an agent of the special services, handed something to write by a trusted person. Or an editor told them ‘here’s the information, write it in your own name,’” FSB Reserve Colonel and Alfa anti-terror special forces veterans association member Andrei Popov said. “Such an operation, from an operative’s point of view, is quite simple. You don’t need to prepare it over 15 years. I think this claim was made to raise Mossad’s prestige, which, of course, fell to an unparalleled low after the October 7 terror attacks,” Popov stressed. Military and strategic expert, Major General Fayez Al-Duwairi, monitored a number of security loopholes that the Lebanese Hezbollah fell into before Israel targeted the party’s senior military leader, Ibrahim Aqil , and the leaders of his Radwan unit. Al-Duwairi said in an analysis of the military scene that what happened is considered "the biggest security breach that an organization could be exposed to," noting that such breaches are likely to occur in regular armies, but the matter is different with a resistance party like Hezbollah.

Al-Duwairi confirmed the existence of a breach within the party, explaining that the breach does not necessarily have to be through the presence of a spy only, but may have been the result of a procedural error that could lead to a disaster. He pointed out the contradictions regarding the source of the suspicious communication devices, stressing the possibility of the existence of fictitious companies affiliated with the Israeli Mossad behind the supply of these devices.

Al-Duwairi criticized the meeting of about 20 elite leaders in Hezbollah in one place, especially in light of the current circumstances and successive security breaches, adding that it was necessary to immediately stop the use of devices, as well as stop any activities of the leaders in such circumstances. The military expert wondered why this important meeting was not held in one of the tunnels that the party had shown a video of about 3 weeks ago, noting that it would have been better to take precautionary measures even if it took 48 hours for the leaders to reach a safe place.

Over 1,500 Hizbullah personnel lost operational function following the beeper explosion attack last week, as reported 25 September 2024 by the Reuters news agency. At the same time, it was reported that Hezbollah appointed replacements for some of the senior commanders who were recently eliminated by Israel. A Hezbollah official told Reuters that 1,500 of the organization's operators were "put out of action" following the attacks on pagers and walkie-talkies. Many of those activists who were hit lost their hands or were blinded. Lebanon said 06 November 2024 it had filed a complaint with the UN's International Labour Organization over deadly attacks on thousands of pager and radio users across the country in September, which Beirut blamed on Israel. Lebanon's caretaker Labor Minister Mustafa Bayram described the attack as an act of war against humanity, technology and labor, saying his country had filed a complaint with the International Labor Organization in Geneva. "It's a very dangerous precedent," Bayram said at an event organised by the United Nations Correspondents Association in the Swiss city. Bayram pointed out that these attacks, within a few minutes, killed, wounded and maimed more than 4,000 civilians.

He pointed out that among the victims who were not killed, many had their fingers amputated, and some lost their sight completely. He said that what happened was the transformation of ordinary devices used in daily life into "dangerous and deadly" tools, stressing the need not to leave these actions without deterrence. He pointed out that filing the complaint aims to prevent the recurrence of such operations in the future.

When asked why Lebanon chose to file the complaint with the International Labor Organization, Bayram pointed out that among those affected by these attacks were a large number of workers who he said were doing their work normally when the pagers and radios they used at work suddenly exploded. He pointed out that this contradicts the principles of decent work advocated by the International Labour Organization, including "security and safety." He pointed out that the Lebanese authorities may also file additional complaints regarding pager attacks before other international bodies, including the World Trade Organization. He said that in general, the Lebanese government intends to file more than one complaint against Israel over the operations in Lebanon because "the number of crimes is enormous."