The New York Times: New details revealed about the communication devices that exploded in Lebanon
The New York Times reported that the pagers that exploded simultaneously in the hands of Hezbollah members on Tuesday, leaving about 3,000 wounded and at least nine dead, came from Taiwan and were booby-trapped by Israel before reaching Lebanon.
At least nine people were killed and about 2,800 others were injured, including the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon, when radios exploded across Lebanon in an unprecedented attack that the Lebanese state and Hezbollah blamed on Israel.
In the United States, the New York Times quoted unnamed American and other officials as saying that the radios that exploded were manufactured by the Taiwanese company Gold Apollo.
The New York Times added that Israel tampered with these devices before they reached Lebanon by planting a small amount of explosives inside each one.
A source close to Hezbollah told AFP earlier on Tuesday, requesting anonymity, that the devices that exploded arrived via a shipment recently imported by Hezbollah containing a thousand devices and that they appeared to have been hacked from the source.
However, the New York Times quoted its sources as saying that the order received by Gold Apollo included about three thousand devices, most of which were of the AR 924 model.
According to the military and security analyst Elijah Magnier, who lives in Brussels, “in order for Israel to be able to hide an explosive catalyst in the new shipment of pagers, it likely needed access to the supply chain for these devices”.
Magnier suggested that Israeli intelligence may have infiltrated the production process and added an explosive component and a remote-operation mechanism to the pagers, without raising suspicion.
He added that this raises the possibility that the third party that sold these devices is an intelligence front created by Israel for this purpose.
