On Tuesday, nearly 3,000 people were hurt, with nine dead in Lebanon when electronic pagers used by Hezbollah members exploded. Lebanon’s National News Agency said this was an “unprecedented security incident,” with the explosions focused in Beirut’s southern suburbs and surrounding areas.
Lebanon’s acting health minister, Firass Abiad, said most of the injuries were to people’s faces, hands, or stomachs.
Hezbollah said that pagers used by its members exploded around 3:45 p.m., killing one child and two of its members. Iran’s ambassador was also hurt, according to its embassy. Hezbollah’s statement added that their experts are investigating why and how these explosions happened simultaneously.
Hezbollah, which has been in ongoing conflicts with Israel since October, started using pagers to avoid the tracking of phones by the Israelis. The explosions happened just hours after Israel hinted it might escalate its military actions against Hezbollah, a powerful political party in Lebanon backed by Iran.
Israeli officials and the military did not comment on the pager explosions on Tuesday, but Israel has previously shown it can carry out advanced remote attacks.
One possibility is that Israel might have found a way to overheat the pager batteries. Modern pagers use lithium-ion batteries, which can catch fire and explode if they get too hot.
Alan Woodward, a cyber security expert at the University of Surrey, mentioned that while lithium-ion batteries can catch fire by themselves, making them ignite on command is much more challenging. Hamish de Bretton Gordon, a retired British Army chemical weapons expert, agreed, saying that while lithium battery fires are a known issue, this situation seems to be more complicated.
Instead, experts from SMEX, an internet security firm in Beirut, think that someone might have intercepted a shipment of pagers and added small explosives to them. A timer or a signal could have set off these explosives. A security expert told Al Jazeera that the pagers seemed to have about an ounce of explosives inside. They also said the pagers were part of a shipment of about 5,000 that Hezbollah brought in.
Woodward theorized that something needed to be added to make the batteries explode violently. HMX, or octogen, is one commonly used military explosive. Woodward also guessed that C4, another common military explosive, might have been used.
This suggests that the attackers had to handle the devices to physically place the explosives inside them. According to Woodward, the explosive could go off when a specific message is received or be timed to explode using an old-fashioned timer.
The day before the pager incident, Israel’s domestic spy agency, Shin Bet, announced it had stopped Hezbollah from trying to kill a former senior Israeli security official using a remote device. The attack was planned for the near future.
Senior Israeli military leaders, including Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, had a meeting that evening to discuss preparations for possible attacks and defense. They did not mention the pager explosions in their statement.
Analysts say that even though Israel hasn’t admitted to causing the pager explosions, the incident has increased the chance of a significant conflict. Orna Mizrahi, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, believes that a full-scale war is now more likely than before.
The United Nations said Tuesday’s events were “extremely concerning,” primarily because of the ongoing tensions between Israel and Hezbollah. Stephane Dujarric, a spokesman for Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, emphasized how dangerous the situation has become. She warns about the risks of more conflict in Lebanon and the surrounding area.
The pager attack happened right after Israel’s defense minister said the country would take military action to bring civilians back to the northern part of the country, raising worries about a full-scale war with Hezbollah.
This follows nearly a year of increasing conflict. The Israeli government recently made it a goal to return 60,000 civilians who had been evacuated from the north and have not ruled out military action to accomplish their goal.
After losing several top members in a series of assassinations during their ongoing conflict with Israel, Hezbollah told its fighters to stop using mobile phones this summer. The phones were too easy to track and hack by Israel’s skilled military hackers. Instead, they decided to use older methods for communication, like couriers who deliver messages in person and the doomed 1980s-styled pagers.
Hezbollah is running out of options for its organization’s communications. It’s rumored that carrier pigeons are evacuating the area in large numbers, just in case.
