The spectacular simultaneous explosion of the pagers of hundreds of Hezbollah members in Lebanon appears to be the result of an infiltration by Israel of the supply chain of the pro-Iranian Islamist movement, a new major success for the Israeli services.
According to a source close to Hezbollah to AFP, “the pagers (Editor’s note: a radio paging system) which exploded concern a shipment recently imported by Hezbollah of a thousand devices”, which appear to have been “hacked at the source”.
Logistical infiltration and trapping
“According to the video recordings (…), a small plastic explosive was certainly hidden next to the battery (of the pagers) for remote triggering by sending a message,” estimates Charles Lister, an expert at the Middle East Institute (MEI), on the social network X. Which means for him that “the Mossad (Editor’s note: Israeli foreign secret service, in charge of special operations) has infiltrated the supply chain.”
Israeli agents likely “infiltrated the production process and added an explosive component and a remotely activated detonator to the beepers, without arousing suspicion,” adds Brussels-based military analyst Elijah Magnier, describing “a major security flaw in Hezbollah’s protocols.” “Either by posing as a supplier or by injecting the tampered equipment directly into Hezbollah’s supply chain via its vulnerabilities (transport trucks, merchant ships), they managed to spread the beepers throughout the organization,” says Mike DiMino, a security expert and former CIA analyst.
Another hypothesis, according to Riad Kahwaji, a security analyst based in Dubai, is that “Israel controls a large part of the electronics industries in the world and, without a doubt, one of the factories it owns manufactured and shipped these explosive devices that exploded today.”
Israeli services “at the top”
This operation, a sophisticated attack but using tools that are largely out of fashion, marks a new spectacular success for the Israeli services, after the assassination at the end of July of the political leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, killed in Tehran. According to the New York Timesa bomb had been hidden two months earlier in the building. For expert Mike DiMino, “it is a classic sabotage operation, intelligence work at the height of its art”, judging on X that “an operation of this magnitude takes months, if not years, to organize adequately”.
Israeli intelligence services were known to be among the best in the world before the October 7 attacks that they failed to foil, French defense expert Pierre Servent points out. “The recent series of operations conducted over the past few months mark their big comeback, with a desire for deterrence and a message: ‘We messed up but we’re not dead,'” he emphasizes to AFP. However, he notes the risk of a “misunderstanding by the families of the Israeli hostages” still held in Gaza: “they must be thinking: ‘you are capable of trapping hundreds of Hezbollah pagers and blowing them up at the same time and you can’t free ours?'”
The Israeli retaliation in Gaza has caused a humanitarian disaster and left at least 41,252 people dead, according to the Hamas government’s health ministry in Gaza. As tensions mount between Israel and Hamas’s ally Hezbollah, the operation is fraught with significance. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Tuesday that the return of residents of the north of the country, who fled because of Hezbollah’s gunfire, was now one of his government’s goals.
Tuesday’s “radical” attack, “carried out with very basic equipment, is likely to increase the stress and embarrassment of the movement’s leaders” in Lebanon, said former Israeli intelligence officer Avi Melamed. “If you’re planning a ground incursion into Lebanon to push Hezbollah north (…), that’s exactly the kind of chaos you’d be sowing upstream,” said Mike DiMino.