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 Budapest-based BAC Consulting as the firm.
"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 AR-924, which like other pagers wirelessly receives and displays 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.
Eric848448 on September 18th, 2024 at 11:58 UTC »
This goes beyond anything from Bond movies. Fiction has to make sense!
ZeinTheLight on September 18th, 2024 at 09:34 UTC »
There's actually three possibilities:
Modified when it was manufactured. Despite the Lebanese claim about the production level, this is highly unlikely as the factory which produced the pagers can be traced. Anyway, producers don't always know who is the customer of each batch of products. Modification en route. This means Israel intercepted the shipment and then tampered with the devices. This is possible but delays and repackaging might raise suspicions. Of course, this is less of an issue if the pagers were unwittingly bought from an undercover agent. Modification of another batch of devices which were then swapped with Hezbollah's purchase. This scenario has less risk of being discovered, but requires knowledge of Hezbollah's order. We'll soon know if the batch number wasn't the same.Either way, it's clear Hezbollah had been infiltrated. Now the twist is, those who knew about the plot probably avoided the explosions by staying away from their pagers, and could now be promoted to fill the ranks since they remain able-bodied. Of course, Hezbollah knows this, so the injured might be suspicious of members who escaped without a scratch. We could be witnessing the collapse of Hezbollah as a major player in Lebanon.
Jazzlike-Perception7 on September 18th, 2024 at 09:15 UTC »
I think the key word here being "At the production level"
So what happens now to Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers of American brands from China, or vice-versa? or If I'm a Ukrainian buyer of DJI commercial drones, how can I know those arent, or more importantly, will not be rigged?
who's to say that rigged commercial drones, cellphones, batteries, cameras won't end up in ships bound for Long Beach instead of Yemen.
"We'll only use this technology against bad actors" - who is a bad actor according to whom?
This is going to spark a massive over haul of supply chain, vendor relationships, and the like.