Jeremy Scahill, Murtaza Hussain & Sharif Abdel Kouddous
Drop Site News / September 18, 2024
[via email]
What we know about Israel’s bloody attacks targeting consumer electronic devices in Lebanon.
For the second day in a row, electronic devices across Lebanon, including walkie talkies, exploded on Wednesday, killing 14 people and injuring over 450, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.
The attack came one day after thousands of pagers across the country exploded at the same time, killing eleven people—including a 9-year-old child—and wounding nearly 3,000, including many civilians and government and hospital workers. Hezbollah and the Lebanese government blamed Israel for the attacks.
“Everyone’s scared to send text messages, to make calls, and they’re afraid to open laptops. It’s definitely led to some level of complete disorientation, fear, confusion, paranoia. It has huge psychological effects,” said Amal Saad, a leading expert on Hezbollah. “People have started to say, ‘Okay, this is going to be the new type of warfare. This is going to be how they’re going to fight. It’s going to be terrorism warfare. So this is the new normal now.’ People are preparing themselves for more of this.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a brief video statement on Wednesday after the second round of attacks. “I have said it before: We will return the citizens of the north to their homes in security, and that’s exactly what we are going to do.”
“We have many capabilities that we have not yet activated,” Israeli lieutenant general Herzi Halevi said, regarding Israel’s plans for military operations at the northern border with Lebanon.
The second attack appeared timed to cause total panic among the civilian population and to undermine confidence in Hezbollah’s ability to control and contain Israel’s assault. On Wednesday, multiple explosions went off at a funeral for some of those killed on Tuesday, according to the AP whose reporters witnessed the attack.
“I’m starting to realize,” Saad said, “the objective behind this was to terrorize and paralyze and demoralize.”
Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah is scheduled to give a public speech Thursday where he is expected to address how these attacks were conducted and to lay out the group’s plans for a military response. “Hezbollah has to respond and will respond,” Saad said. Israel, she said, has at times denied or downplayed the effectiveness of Hezbollah’s attacks. To restore morale, “you need it to be indisputable that Hezbollah did this,” she said. “If it’s a different type of response that Israel can conceal and hide, I’m not sure how effective that’s going to be.”
At approximately 3:30 p.m. local time on Tuesday, thousands of pagers across Lebanon sprang to life, beeping and vibrating. The message on the screen indicated an error. “The message was: Fault. Fault. And it continued to beep and heat up before the explosion of the pager,” said Ali Jezzini, a security analyst and journalist in Lebanon who has been speaking to hospital workers treating the wounded.
Many victims, he said, lifted the devices to examine the pagers and as they did so, they exploded, causing injuries to their faces and hands. “It did give a code and it continued to ring and vibrate. So that’s why they had to hold it in their hands to check what’s happening. It was faulty, it was not responding, so that’s why they kept it in front of their faces and the palms of their hands, because they’re trying to figure out what’s wrong with it. That’s why most of the injuries are like that. It didn’t explode right away.”
The widespread physical injuries are intended to have a larger psychological effect, according to Jezzini. “I would compare it to an operation made by the Americans in Vietnam where they actually planted faulty ammunition that made the guns explode for the Viet Cong on the NVA and during the Vietnam war,” said Jezzini, referring to an operation called Project Eldest Son.
“Psychologically, it does actually help to, you know, make the fighter lose confidence in his equipment. That’s the aim.” He compared it to a psyop, intended to “alter the perception of Hezbollah’s leadership” and perhaps force it into a ceasefire.
Speaking to Israeli troops at the Ramat David Airbase on Wednesday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant made no mention of the explosions but he did declare “the start of a new phase in the war” saying, “the center of gravity is moving north. We are diverting forces, resources, and energy toward the north.”
The United Nations Security Council will meet on Friday over the attacks following a request by Algeria on behalf of Arab states.
Experts are still searching for the precise mechanism that triggered the explosions in the pagers yesterday. The most likely scenario, based on available evidence, is that the pagers were rigged with some form of explosive material or mechanism before being delivered to Lebanon. That would mean Israeli agents were able to access the devices at the point of manufacture or to interdict the supply chain. Officials in Lebanon have said they believe the pagers contained 10-20 grams of explosive material. The devices were then detonated through a message, code, or pulse pushed to the devices, which triggered whatever mechanism had been installed.
“I have to give credit to those that fabricated those pagers, very ingenious,” said Mike Vining, a legend in the world of U.S. covert operations, one of the first members of Delta Force and an expert on explosives. “When I was in the military at my old job we developed a lot of tricks. I am saddened about the fact that innocent people were injured. The goal is never to hurt the innocent.”
Vining told Drop Site News that he had no inside knowledge of the operation in Lebanon, but offered some plausible theories on how the pagers were rigged and detonated. “Probably had some pure PETN explosives in the pagers,” he said, referring to pentaerythritol tetranitrate, a highly explosive substance. “I believe from what I see, first the lithium battery is shorted and explodes and that causes the PETN to detonate. What makes me think this is that the pager got hot and smoked first. A single signal must have been what triggered the reaction.”
“Sources today in Lebanon were saying that the [pagers] have passed the inspections on multiple airports, such as X-rays,” said Jezzini, making it difficult to place blame on one single agency for allowing the attack to happen.
Reporting by Al-Monitor and Axios has suggested that Israel decided to move forward with the attack out of concerns that Hezbollah was on the brink of discovering the rigged pagers, but this remains unconfirmed. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also echoed the point at a briefing at UN headquarters: “What has happened is particularly serious, not only because of the number of victims that it caused, but because of the indications that exist that this was triggered, I would say, in advance of a normal way to trigger these things, because there was a risk of this being discovered.”
Multiple news outlets have reported that Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant informed U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin that Israel was going to carry out an operation in Lebanon, but offered no specifics. The U.S. has officially denied any involvement or foreknowledge of the plot. “We were not aware of this operation and we were not involved in it,” said U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller on Tuesday.
The model of the pagers matches that of a model manufactured by a Taiwanese company called Gold Apollo. Images of damaged devices shared online after the blasts showed labelling matching the AR-924 model built by the company, along with the company name.
The AR-924 was listed on the company’s website prior to its removal this week. In statements issued by the company after the attacks, Gold Apollo denied manufacturing the product and said the model in question is produced and sold by BAC Consulting KFT, a Hungarian company that had been authorized to use its branding. In public comments, Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs said that its records showed no direct exports to Lebanon by Gold Apollo.
The president of Gold Apollo, Hsu Ching-Kuang, told the press that a year after signing their partnership, BAC made the unusual request to design its own products but with Gold Apollo’s trademark. According to Hsu, payments to Gold Apollo from BAC reportedly came from a bank account registered to an unnamed country in the Middle East, causing occasional delays and freezes in payment, despite BAC being based in Hungary, an arrangement he called “strange.”
BAC is based in Budapest and was established in 2022, publicly available information shows. A company website, since taken offline, describes the role of BAC in developing, “international technology cooperation among countries for the sale of telecommunication products,” and “scaling up a business from Asia to new markets.”
Business records listed for the company in Hungary show around $584,000 in revenue for the company in 2023 along with only $320 in fixed assets. Reporters from the Associated Press who visited the building listed as the headquarters of BAC in a residential neighbourhood of Budapest found a building used as a site for headquarter addresses of multiple companies.
The CEO of the company is listed as Cristiana Bársony-Arcidiacono. A LinkedIn page for Bársony-Arcidiacono indicates that, prior to her role at BAC she had previously worked for the European Commission, as well as a “strategic advisor” for consulting firms in various countries. (The EU Commission denied she was ever a staff member, but could not rule out the possibility she worked as a contractor.) After the attacks, Bársony-Arcidiacono was quoted in press reports confirming her company’s licensing arrangement with Gold Apollo, but stating, “I don’t make the pagers. I am just the intermediate. I think you got it wrong.”
In a statement posted on Twitter on Wednesday, Zoltan Kovacs, a spokesperson for the government of Hungary, also called BAC “a trading intermediary, with no manufacturing or operational site” in the country. “The referenced devices have never been in Hungary,” he added.
Globally, many condemned Israel’s use of such a widespread tactic that, by design, would clearly harm and kill civilians. “It’s not just fighters” being maimed, Saad said. “Hezbollah is such a huge grassroots organization, there are so many people who work [in its civil institutions]. My friend’s cousin lost his eyes and his fingers yesterday because he’s a nurse in Al Rassoul Al Azam Hospital. He’s a part time nurse in that hospital, but he’s a student. And there are many, many people who are connected to Hezbollah in this way just through part time work.”
“Customary international humanitarian law prohibits the use of booby traps – objects that civilians are likely to be attracted to or are associated with normal civilian daily use – precisely to avoid putting civilians at grave risk and produce the devastating scenes that continue to unfold across Lebanon,” Lama Fakih, Middle East and North Africa Director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for information from the U.S. State Department as to whether any funding from the U.S. went into the attack. “This attack clearly and unequivocally violates international humanitarian law and undermines US efforts to prevent a wider conflict,” she posted on Twitter. “Congress needs a full accounting of the attack, including an answer from the State Department as to whether any US assistance went into the development or deployment of this technology.”
“It’s the only way to wage war for the Israelis, the dirty war,” said Jezzini. “They are aiming to change the whole perspective of the world on how to wage war and what is legitimate or not to survive. So instead of complying with international law, they are trying to change the whole concept of international law. That is real danger here.”
Jeremy Scahill – journalist at Drop Site News, co-founder of The Intercept, author of the books Blackwater and Dirty Wars; Reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, etcetera
Murtaza Hussain is a reporter at The Intercept who focuses on national security and foreign policy
Sharif Abdel Kouddous has reported from across the Arab world, including Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Iraq, Bahrain, and Algeria, as well from across the United States and internationally
