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2024-09-21 Syria-Lebanon-Iran
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Hezbollah was still distributing pagers hours before Tuesday blast
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[IsraelTimes] Sources say Lebanese terror group checked devices before distribution; screening of walkie-talkies was underway on Wednesday as those devices exploded
The Lebanese terror group Hezbollah was still handing its members new Gold Apollo branded pagers hours before thousands of the devices blew up this week, two security sources said, indicating the group was confident they were safe despite an ongoing sweep of electronic equipment to identify threats.
One member of the Iranian-backed organization received a new pager on Monday that went kaboom! the next day while it was still in its box, one of the sources said. A pager given to a senior member just days earlier injured a subordinate when it detonated, another source said.
A batch of 5,000 of the pagers were brought into Leb
 ...an Iranian satrapy currently ruled by Hassan Nasrallah situated on the eastern Mediterranean, conveniently adjacent to Israel. Formerly inhabited by hardy Phoenecian traders, its official language is now Arabic, with the usual unpleasant side effects. The Leb civil war, between 1975 and 1990, lasted a little over 145 years and produced 120,000 fatalities. The average length of a ceasefire was measured in seconds. The Lebs maintain a precarious sectarian balance among Shiites, Sunnis, and about a dozen flavors of Christians, plus Armenians, Georgians, and who knows what else? It is the home of the original Hezbollah, which periodically starts a war with the Zionist Entity, gets Beirut pounded to rubble, and then declares victory and has a parade. The Lebs have the curious habit of periodically murdering their heads of state or prime ministers...
earlier this year. Rooters previously reported that Hezbollah began transitioning to pagers in an attempt to evade Israeli surveillance of its mobile phones, following the killing of senior commanders in targeted Arclight airstrike
...KABOOM! ...
s over the past year.
Hezbollah had been importing pagers to Lebanon since 2022. The group had them examined by traveling through airports with them to ensure they would not trigger alarms, two sources told Rooters without specifying at which airports these tests were conducted.
Rather than a specific suspicion of the pagers, the checks had been part of a routine "sweep" of its equipment, including communications devices, to find any indications that they were laced with explosives or surveillance mechanisms, one source said.
Another source had told Rooters that the pagers had been implanted with explosives that were difficult to detect. A different source told Rooters that up to three grams (0.11 ounce) of explosives had been hidden in the new pagers, apparently months before the blasts.
WALKIE-TALKIES
Hezbollah suspected after the Tuesday explosions that more of its devices may have been compromised, two security sources, as well as an intelligence source, told Rooters.
In response, it intensified the sweep of its communications systems, carrying out careful examinations of all devices. The group also began investigating the supply chains through which the pagers were brought in, the two security sources said.
But the review had not been concluded by Wednesday afternoon when the hand-held radios went kaboom! , killing 25 people and injuring at least 650.
Hezbollah believes that Israel opted to detonate the group’s hand-held radios because it feared Hezbollah would soon find that the walkie-talkies were also rigged with explosives, one of the sources told Rooters.
The larger fatality rate attributed to the walkie-talkie attack in comparison to the pager attack is because the former devices carried a higher payload of explosives than the latter, one of the security sources and the intelligence source said.
The batteries of the walkie-talkies were laced with a highly explosive compound known as PETN, another Lebanese source familiar with the device’s components told Rooters on Friday.
Pictures of the walkie-talkies that had went kaboom! showed labels reading "ICOM" and "made in Japan". Icom 6820.T has said it halted production a decade ago of the radio models identified in the attack, and that most of those still on sale were counterfeit.
Yoshiki Enomoto, the general manager of Icom’s security and trade division, told Rooters it was possible that an older Icom device had been modified to make a bomb.
It would be difficult to insert an bomb into the main compartment of the walkie-talkie because its electronics are tightly packed, so it was more likely to have been in the detachable battery pack, Enomoto told the Japanese broadcaster Fuji TV.
A Lebanese source told Rooters that explosions had occurred even in cases where the battery pack was separated from the rest of the device.
In total, the consecutive attacks killed 37 people, including at least two children, and injured more than 3,600 people.
INVESTIGATIONS
The Saudi news outlet al-Hadath reported Thursday that Hezbollah has begun arresting people on suspicion of involvement with the attacks, including the brother of a senior member of the terrorist organization and the Hezbollah member responsible for the group’s communication devices.
The report added that the Lebanese army has been detonating Hezbollah communication devices and requesting that citizens report on devices they find and stay away from them.
The Lebanese news site al-Janubiyeh reported that the Lebanese justice ministry will cooperate with Hezbollah in its investigation into the earth-shattering kabooms.
Lebanon and Hezbollah say Israel was behind the attacks. A Western security source told Rooters this week that Israel’s secretive military intelligence Unit 8200 was involved in the planning. Israel, which has since stepped up airstrikes on Lebanon, has neither denied nor confirmed involvement.
The attacks, and the distribution of the devices despite the routine sweep and checks for breaches, have struck at Hezbollah’s reputation as the most formidable of Iran’s allied ’Axis of Resistance®’ umbrella of anti-Israel irregular forces across the Middle East.
In a televised speech on Thursday, Hezbollah Secretary-General His Eminence Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah
...The satrap of the Medes and the Persians in Leb...>
said the attacks were "unprecedented in the history" of the group.
Hezbollah’s probe into precisely where, when and how the devices were laced with explosives is ongoing, three sources told Rooters. Nasrallah later said the same in his speech on Thursday.
One of the security sources said Hezbollah had foiled previous Israeli operations targeting devices imported from abroad by the group — from its private landline telephones to ventilation units in the group’s offices.
That includes suspected breaches in the past year.
"There are several electronic issues that we were able to discover but not the pagers," the source said. "They tricked us, hats off to the enemy."
"Along with the tops of several heads" 
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