How Israel’s Bulky Pagers Carried Out a Devastating Attack on Hezbollah

The batteries in the armed pagers that arrived in Lebanon earlier this year, part of an Israeli plot to decimate Hezbollah, had strong deceptive properties and an Achilles heel.

The agents who built the pagers constructed a battery that concealed a small but potent charge of plastic explosives and a new type of detonator that was invisible to X-rays, according to a Lebanese source with firsthand knowledge of the pagers and teardown photos of which has battery pack seen by Reuters.

To overcome the weakness – the lack of a plausible backstory for the clunky new product – they created fake online stores, pages and posts that could deceive Hezbollah’s due diligence, a Reuters review of web archives shows.

The clandestine design of the pager bomb and the battery’s carefully constructed cover story, both described here for the first time, shed light on the conduct of a years-long operation that delivered unprecedented blows to Israel’s Iranian-backed Lebanese enemy and pushed the Middle East closer in a regional war.

According to the Lebanese source and photos, a thin, square sheet containing six grams of white plastic explosive pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) was squeezed between two rectangular battery cells.

The remaining space between the battery cells was not visible in the photos, but was taken up by a strip of highly flammable material that acted as a detonator, the source said.

This three-layer sandwich was placed in a black plastic sleeve and encapsulated in a metal casing about the size of a matchbox, the photos showed.

The arrangement was unusual because it did not rely on a standard miniaturized detonator, typically a metal cylinder, the source and two bomb experts said. All three spoke on condition of anonymity.

Since the material used for the detonation did not contain any metal components, it had an advantage: like the plastic explosive, it was not detected by X-rays.

When Hezbollah received the pagers in February, it was searching for explosives, two people familiar with the matter said, and running them through security scanners at the airport to see if they set off alarms. Nothing suspicious was reported.

The devices were likely designed to create a spark within the battery pack that was enough to ignite the detonating material and detonate the PETN film, said the two bomb experts to whom Reuters showed the pager bomb design.

Because the explosives and packaging made up about a third of the volume, the battery carried only a fraction of the energy given its 35-gram weight, two battery experts said.

“There is a significant amount of unexplained mass,” said Paul Christensen, a lithium battery expert at Britain’s Newcastle University.

At some point, Hezbollah noticed the battery was draining faster than expected, the Lebanese source said. However, the problem did not appear to cause major security concerns – the group handed out the pagers to its members hours before the attack.

On September 17, thousands of pagers exploded simultaneously in the southern suburbs of Beirut and other Hezbollah strongholds, in most cases after the devices beeped and indicated an incoming message.

Many of the victims who were hospitalized had eye injuries, missing fingers or gaping holes in their stomachs, suggesting they were near the devices at the time of the detonation, Reuters witnesses saw. In total, 39 people were killed and more than 3,400 injured in the pager attack and a second one the following day in which armed walkie-talkies were activated.

Two Western security sources said Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency spearheaded the pager and walkie-talkie attacks.

Reuters was unable to determine where the devices were manufactured. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, which has Mossad authority, did not respond to a request for comment.

The Lebanese Information Ministry and a Hezbollah spokesman declined to comment for this article.

Israel has neither denied nor confirmed a role. The day after the attacks, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant praised the Mossad’s “very impressive” results in comments that were widely interpreted in Israel as a tacit acknowledgment of the intelligence agency’s involvement.

U.S. officials said they were not informed of the operation in advance.

The weak link

From the outside, the pager’s power source looked like a standard lithium-ion battery used in thousands of consumer electronics products.

And yet the battery called LI-BT783 had a problem: like the pager, it wasn’t available on the market.

So Israel’s agents invented a backstory from scratch.

Hezbollah has strict procurement procedures to vet what it buys, a former Israeli intelligence officer who was not involved in the pager operation told Reuters.

“They want to make sure that when they look, they find something,” the former spy said, asking not to be named. “Not finding anything is not good.”

Creating backstories or “legends” for undercover agents has long been a core competency of spy agencies. What’s special about the pager plot is that these capabilities appear to have been applied to ubiquitous consumer electronics products.

For the pagers, the agents deceived Hezbollah by selling the custom-made AR-924 model under the well-known Taiwanese brand Gold Apollo.

Gold Apollo Chairman Hsu Ching-kuang told reporters a day after the pager attack that he had been approached about three years ago by a former employee, Teresa Wu, and her “big boss named Tom” about a licensing agreement to discuss.

Hsu said he had little information about Wu’s superiors, but he granted them the right to design their own products and market them under the widely used Gold Apollo brand.

Reuters was unable to determine the manager’s identity or whether the person or Wu knowingly worked with Israeli intelligence.

The chairman said he wasn’t impressed with the AR-924 when he saw it, but still included photos and a description of the product on his company’s website to give it both visibility and credibility. There was no option to purchase the AR-924 directly from its website.

Hsu said he knew nothing about the pagers’ lethal capabilities or the broader operation to attack Hezbollah. He described his company as a victim of the conspiracy.

Gold Apollo declined further comment. Calls and messages sent to Wu went unanswered. She has not made any statements to the media since the attacks.

“I KNOW THIS PRODUCT”

In September 2023, webpages and images featuring the AR-924 and its battery were added to apollosystemshk.com, a website that said it had a license to distribute Gold Apollo products as well as the rugged pager and its bulky power source, according to a Reuters report. Reviewing Internet Records and Metadata.

The website gave a Hong Kong address for a company called Apollo Systems HK. No company with that name exists at the Hong Kong address or corporate records.

However, the website was listed by Wu, the Taiwanese businesswoman, on her Facebook page and in public incorporation documents when she registered a company called Apollo Systems in Taipei earlier this year.

A section of the apollosystemshk.com website dedicated to the LI-BT783 emphasizes the battery’s outstanding performance. Unlike the disposable batteries that powered older generation pagers, it had 85 days of autonomy and could be charged via a USB cable, according to the website and a 90-second promotional video on YouTube.

In late 2023, two battery stores went online and listed the LI-BT783 in their catalogs, Reuters found. And in two online forums about batteries, participants discussed the power source even though it is not commercially available: “I know this product,” wrote a user with the pseudonym Mikevog in April 2023. “It has a great spec sheet and a great performance.” .”

Reuters was unable to determine Mikevog’s identity.

The website, online shops and forum discussions were characterized by an attempt to deceive, the former Israeli intelligence officer and two Western security officials told Reuters. The sites have been removed from the Internet since the pager bombs devastated Lebanon, but archived and cached copies remain visible.

Hezbollah leaders regretted the day they bought the pagers and said they had launched an internal investigation to understand how the breach occurred and to identify possible moles.

As Reuters previously reported, the group switched to pagers earlier this year after discovering that cellphone communications were being compromised by Israeli eavesdropping.

Hezbollah’s investigations helped reveal how Israeli agents used aggressive sales tactics to ensure Hezbollah’s procurement manager chose the AR-924, one of the people familiar with the matter said.

The salesman who delivered the offer gave the pagers a very low offer, “and kept lowering the price until he was called in,” the person said.

Lebanese authorities have condemned the attacks as a serious violation of Lebanon’s sovereignty. On September 19, Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, in his last public speech before his assassination by Israel, said the device explosions could amount to a “declaration of war” and vowed to punish Israel.

Hezbollah and Israel have been engaged in a firefight since October 8, 2023, when the operating group began firing rockets at Israeli military positions in solidarity with its Palestinian ally Hamas.

In the wake of the strikes, Israel launched an all-out war against Hezbollah that included a ground invasion of southern Lebanon and airstrikes that killed most of its top leaders.

Hezbollah’s ongoing internal investigation into the pager attack suffered a setback on September 28: Eleven days after the devices exploded, the senior Hezbollah official tasked with leading the procurement investigation, Nabil Kaouk, was himself assassinated by an Israeli Air raid killed.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)