Wednesday, September 18, 4:30 p.m. Walkie-talkies explode in the southern suburbs of Beirut. It feels like reliving the nightmare of the day before. It was around 3:30 p.m. in Lebanon on Tuesday when hundreds of people simultaneously received a mysterious message on their pagers. A few seconds later, the devices exploded, causing 12 deaths and more than 2,800 injuries. Among them were several members of the “Party of God”: Hezbollah.
After the tragedy, one of the leaders of the pro-Iranian party, quoted by Reuters, acknowledged that Hezbollah had just experienced its “biggest security breach”. But while the party has continued to review its security protocols and call on its members to be vigilant since October 2023, what breach could Israel have fallen into?
The supply chain infiltrated
While several theories have circulated as to the origin of the explosions, the most plausible points the finger at Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service. “According to the video recordings […]a small plastic explosive was certainly hidden next to the battery [des bipeurs, NDLR] for remote triggering by sending a message. The Mossad has therefore infiltrated the supply chain,” estimates Charles Lister, expert at the Middle East Institute (MEI) on the social network X this Tuesday.
An analysis confirmed by the testimony of American officials to the New York Times. According to this source, the secret services would have indeed managed to hide explosives in a shipment of pagers ordered by Hezbollah. And this, before their delivery to Lebanon. According to the American media and the Reuters agency, thousands of pagers were ordered from the Taiwanese company Gold Apollo and delivered in recent months.
Gold Apollo, for its part, denies having manufactured the devices and claims that their production was ensured by the company BAC, a Hungarian partner. Information contradicted by Budapest. “(The company) is a commercial intermediary, without a production or operational site in Hungary,” confirmed government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs on X this Wednesday.
Pagers, a false good idea?
The pro-Iranian group had decided to return to using the ancestor of the mobile phone in recent months. An outdated method that its fighters had used in the early 2000s. Short, coded messages, private network. According to information from the British press agency last July, Hezbollah thought it had finally got its hands on a means of communication that would allow it to evade the sophisticated surveillance technology of the Hebrew state. In vain.
“This is a major blow to Hezbollah. It has always attributed its performance during the July war [en 2006, contre Israël]in part, to its primitive telecommunications network that relied on pagers and an ‘internal’ fiber optic line. By neutralizing Israel’s technological superiority with ‘simplicity’, to use Nasrallah’s words [chef du mouvement chiite, NDLR]”Hezbollah has prevented Israel from disrupting its command and control system. Today’s attack nullifies that advantage,” Lebanese writer and political analyst Amal Saad explained on her X account.
Phones banned on the front
According to an anonymous Reuters source, the “Party of God” fighters were no longer allowed to bring their mobile phones to the front. A device that the inhabitants of southern Lebanon had already been warned about last February. “Throw away your smartphones, bury them, put them in a metal box and move them away. […] “They hear everything you do, say, send and take pictures of. Your location, your house… Israel doesn’t need more than that,” Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah had recommended.
Another source from the news agency said that the Shiite party was carrying out surprise checks on members of the field units as well as senior political officials to verify whether they had their phones on them. This rule was particularly in response to the assassination of Saleh-el-Arouri, a senior Hamas leader killed by a drone strike while attending a meeting in Beirut last January. To counter these unexpected attacks, Hezbollah had also adopted the DroneGun Tactical, a portable anti-drone jammer.
On July 18, 2021, the revelation of the Pegasus spyware scandal had already put a brake on the use of mobile phones to transmit confidential information. More than 80 international journalists coordinated by Forbidden Stories had demonstrated that the software, sold by the Israeli company NSO, had targeted thousands of civil society figures.
But after these events of September 17 and 18, a question remains for Amal Saad: “Why did Israel decide to play this card outside the context of a total war, where such a disruption could have changed the course of the war?” On the subject, the analyst still has his own idea: “Israel has other objectives that could go well beyond a total war.”