9 killed, hundreds wounded as Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon in new explosions
World
9 killed, hundreds wounded as Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon in new explosions
(Reuters) - Hand-held radios used by Lebanese armed group Hezbollah detonated on Wednesday across Lebanon’s south and in Beirut suburbs, further stoking tensions with Israel a day after similar explosions were launched via the group’s pagers.
Lebanon’s health ministry said nine people had been killed and more than 300 injured, while the death toll from Tuesday’s explosions rose to 12, including two children, with nearly 3,000 injured.
At least one of Wednesday’s blasts took place near a funeral organised by Iran-backed Hezbollah for those killed the previous day when thousands of pagers used by the group exploded across the country and wounded many of its fighters.
A Reuters reporter in the southern suburbs of Beirut said he saw Hezbollah members frantically taking out the batteries of any walkie-talkies on them that had not exploded, tossing the parts in metal barrels around them.
Lebanon’s Red Cross said on X that it was responding with 30 ambulance teams to multiple explosions in different areas, including the south of Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley.
Hezbollah, which was thrown briefly into disarray by the pager attacks, said on Wednesday it had attacked Israeli artillery positions with rockets, the first strike at its arch-foe since the blasts wounded thousands of its members in Lebanon and raised the prospect of a wider Middle East war.
The hand-held radios were purchased by Hezbollah five months ago, around the same time that the pagers were bought, said a security source.
Israel’s Mossad spy agency planted explosives inside 5,000 pagers imported by Hezbollah months before Tuesday’s detonations, a senior Lebanese security source, and another source told Reuters.
The operation was an unprecedented Hezbollah security breach that saw thousands of pagers detonate across Lebanon.
The Lebanese security source said the pagers were from Taiwan-based Gold Apollo, but the company said in a statement it did not manufacture the devices. It said they were made by a company called BAC which has a licence to use its brand, but gave no more details.
Iran-backed Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate against Israel, whose military declined to comment on the blasts.
Hezbollah said in a statement on Wednesday that “the resistance will continue today, like any other day, its operations to support Gaza, its people, and its resistance which is a separate path from the harsh punishment that the criminal enemy (Israel) should await in response to Tuesday’s massacre”.
The plot appears to have been many months in the making, several sources told Reuters.
The senior Lebanese security source said the group had ordered 5,000 beepers from Gold Apollo, which several sources say were brought into the country earlier this year.
Gold Apollo founder Hsu Ching-Kuang said the pagers used in the explosion were made by a company in Europe that had the right to use the firm’s brand, the name of which he could not immediately confirm. The company in a statement named BAC as the firm, but Hsu declined to comment on its location.
“The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it,” Hsu told reporters at the company’s offices in the northern Taiwanese city of New Taipei on Wednesday.
The senior Lebanese security source identified a photograph of the model of the pager, an AP924, which like other pagers wirelessly receive and display text messages but cannot make telephone calls.
Gold Apollo said in a statement that the AR-924 model was produced and sold by BAC.
“We only provide brand trademark authorisation and have no involvement in the design or manufacturing of this product,” the statement said.
Hezbollah fighters have been using pagers as a low-tech means of communication in an attempt to evade Israeli location-tracking, two sources familiar with the group’s operations told Reuters this year.
But the senior Lebanese source said the devices had been modified by Israel’s spy service “at the production level.” “The Mossad injected a board inside of the device that has explosive material that receives a code. It’s very hard to detect it through any means. Even with any device or scanner,” the source said.
The source said 3,000 of the pagers exploded when a coded message was sent to them, simultaneously activating the explosives.
Another security source told Reuters that up to three grams of explosives were hidden in the new pagers and had gone “undetected” by Hezbollah for months.
Hsu said he did not know how the pagers could have been rigged to explode. Israeli officials did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.
Images of destroyed pagers analysed by Reuters showed a format and stickers on the back that were consistent with pagers made by Gold Apollo.
Hezbollah was reeling from the attack, which left fighters and others bloodied, hospitalised or dead. One Hezbollah official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the detonation was the group’s “biggest security breach” since the Gaza conflict between Israel and Hezbollah ally Hamas erupted on Oct 7.
“This would easily be the biggest counterintelligence failure that Hezbollah has had in decades,” said Jonathan Panikoff, the US government’s former deputy national intelligence officer on the Middle East.
