(Paris) 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 [un système de radiomessagerie, NDLR] The bombs that exploded concern a shipment recently imported by Hezbollah of a thousand devices, which appear to have been “hacked at source.”
Read “Pager explosion: nine dead and nearly 2,800 injured in Lebanon”
Logistical infiltration and trapping
“According to the video recordings […]a small plastic explosive was certainly hidden next to the battery [des téléavertisseurs] for remote triggering by sending a message,” says Charles Lister, an expert at the Middle East Institute (MEI), on the social network X.
Which means to him that “the Mossad [service secret extérieur israélien, en charge des opérations spéciales, NDLR] infiltrated the supply chain.”
Israeli agents probably “infiltrated the production process and added an explosive component and a remotely activated detonator to the pagers, without arousing suspicion,” adds Brussels-based military analyst Elijah Magnier, describing “a major security breach in Hezbollah protocols.”
“Either by posing as a supplier or by injecting the smuggled equipment directly into Hezbollah’s supply chain via its vulnerabilities (transport trucks, merchant ships), they were able to spread the Charles Listers within the organization,” said 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, which they were unable to foil, recalls French defense expert Pierre Servent.
“The recent series of operations carried out over the past few months mark their big comeback, with a desire for dissuasion and a message: ‘We messed up but we’re not dead,'” he stressed to AFP.
He notes, however, the risk of a “misunderstanding by the families of the Israeli hostages” still held in Gaza: “they must be saying to themselves: ‘you are capable of trapping hundreds of Hezbollah pagers and detonating them at the same time and you cannot free ours?'”
The Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, of unprecedented scale and violence, resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP count based on official figures that include hostages killed in captivity.
The Israeli retaliation in Gaza has caused a humanitarian disaster and left at least 41,252 people dead, according to the Gaza government’s health ministry.
As tensions rise between Israel and Hamas’ ally Hezbollah, the operation is fraught with significance.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Tuesday that the return of residents of the north of the country, who fled because of Hezbollah fire, was now one of the goals of his government.
Tuesday’s “radical” attack, “carried out with very basic equipment, is most likely increasing the stress and embarrassment of the movement’s leaders” in Lebanon, said former Israeli intelligence officer Avi Melamed.
“If you are preparing a ground incursion into Lebanon to push Hezbollah north […]”That’s exactly the kind of chaos you would sow upstream,” says Mike DiMino.