Deadly Hezbollah pager explosions will cause immense embarrassment and sow chaos! B
Eight people have died after hundreds of pagers exploded simultaneously across Lebanon and in parts of Syria on Tuesday, wounding members of the militant group Hezbollah, the Iranian ambassador and dozens of other people.
It really is like something out of a Hollywood spy movie.
The pagers of Hezbollah officials simultaneously exploding in a southern Beirut suburb, causing hundreds of injuries and immense embarrassment.
Israel hasn’t claimed responsibility, but all fingers will point to the Mossad, Israel’s external intelligence agency famed for inventive and audacious attacks on its enemies.
Technically, we might never know how it was achieved but it could have been done by sending signals to overload the individual circuits which would overheat the batteries, effectively turning them into small hand grenades.
To do that, the attackers would have had to know at least the make and models of the individual pagers; to go further and co-ordinate the explosions on specific devices, it’s likely the serial numbers would also be known, all of which points to another major security breach for Hezbollah.
Alternatively the pagers themselves, all apparently part of the same batch, could have been tampered with before delivery.
We can reasonably assume that those carrying pagers would have been fairly senior within the group. That is supported by reports Iran’s Ambassador to Lebanon was also injured when his pager exploded.
Hezbollah has been very cautious with its communications, aware that mobile phone conversations can be easily hacked and traced – pagers would have been considered a lo-fi alternative and harder to infiltrate.
Repeatedly Israeli intelligence has shown its reach into Hezbollah, most notably the assassination of the senior commander Fuad Shukr in late July.
This latest attack will cause deep internal concern within Hezbollah, possibly even some chaos among its ranks, their safety now compromised in such a dramatic way.
