Hezbollah exploding pager trail runs from Taiwan to Hungary

 Hezbollah exploding pager trail runs from Taiwan to Hungary

By Laila Bassam and Maya Gebeily September 18, 2024

• Summary

• 12 killed, 3,000 wounded in unprecedented security breach
• Hezbollah ordered pages months ago; vows retaliation
• Pagers made by Europe firm BAC, Taiwan-based firm says
• Devices modified by Israel at production, Lebanon security sources say
• Israel makes not comment

BEIRUT, Sept 18 (Reuters) - A Taiwanese pager maker denied on Wednesday that it had produced devices that wounded thousands of Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon when they exploded, an audacious attack that raised the prospect of a full-scale war between the Iran-backed group and arch-foe Israel.

Gold Apollo said the devices were made by under licence by a company called BAC, based in Hungary's capital Budapest.

Israel's spy agency Mossad, which has a long history of pulling off sophisticated attacks on foreign soil, planted explosives inside pagers imported by Hezbollah months before Tuesday's detonations, a senior Lebanese security source and another source told Reuters.

The death toll rose to 12, including two children, Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad said on Wednesday. The attack wounded nearly 3,000 people, including many of the group's fighters and Iran's envoy to Beirut.

Iran-backed Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate against Israel, whose military declined to comment on the blasts. The two sides have been engaged in cross-border warfare since the Gaza conflict erupted last October, fuelling fears of a wider Middle East conflict that could drag in the United States and Iran.

Jordan's Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi accused Israel of pushing the Middle East to the brink of a regional war by orchestrating a dangerous escalation on many fronts.

"Hezbollah wants to avoid an all-out war. It still wants to avoid one. But given the scale, the impact on families, on civilians, there will be pressure for a stronger response," said Mohanad Hage Ali of the Carnegie Middle East Center.

Hezbollah, Iran's most powerful proxy in the Middle East, said in a statement it would continue to support Hamas in Gaza and Israel should await a response to the pager "massacre" which left fighters and others bloodied, hospitalised or dead.

One Hezbollah official said the detonation was the group's "biggest security breach" in its history.

Footage from hospitals reviewed by Reuters showed men with various injuries, some to the face, some with missing fingers and gaping wounds at the hip where the pagers were likely worn.

The plot appears to have been many months in the making, several sources told Reuters. It followed a series of assassinations of Hezbollah and Hamas commanders and leaders blamed on Israel since the start of the Gaza war.

TRAIL LEADS TO BUDAPEST

The senior Lebanese security source said the group had ordered 5,000 pagers from Gold Apollo, which several sources say were brought into the country earlier this year.

Item 1 of 5 A man's bag explodes in a supermarket in Beirut, Lebanon September 17, 2024 in this screen grab from a video obtained from social media. Social Media/via REUTERS

A man's bag explodes in a supermarket in Beirut, Lebanon September 17, 2024 in this screen grab from a video obtained from social media. Social Media/via REUTERS Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab

Gold Apollo founder Hsu Ching-Kuang said the pagers used in the explosion were made by a company in Europe that Gold Apollo named in a statement as BAC.

"The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it," Hsu told reporters at the company's offices in the northern Taiwanese city of New Taipei on Wednesday.

The stated address for BAC Consulting in Hungary's capital Budapest was a peach building on a mostly residential street in an outer suburb. The company name was posted on the glass door on an A4 sheet.

A person at the building who asked not to be named said BAC Consulting was registered there but did not have a physical presence. The CEO of BAC Consulting, Cristiana Barsony-Arcidiacono says on her LinkedIn profile that she has worked as an adviser for various organisations including UNESCO. She did not respond to emails from Reuters.

BAC's registered activities are wide ranging, from computer game publishing to IT consulting to crude oil extraction.

The senior Lebanese security source identified a photograph of the model of the pager, an AR-924. Hezbollah fighters have been using pagers as a low-tech means of communication in an attempt to evade Israeli location-tracking.

The senior Lebanese source said the devices had been modified by Israel's spy service "at the production level." Israeli officials did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.

"The Mossad injected a board inside of the device that has explosive material that receives a code. It's very hard to detect it through any means," the source said.

The source said about 3,000 of the pagers exploded when a coded message was sent to them, simultaneously activating the explosives.

Another security source told Reuters that up to three grams of explosives were hidden in the new pagers and had gone "undetected" by Hezbollah for months.

In a televised speech on Feb. 13, the group's Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah sternly warned supporters that their phones were more dangerous than Israeli spies, saying they should break, bury or lock them in an iron box.

Instead, Hezbollah opted to distribute pagers to its members across the group's various branches - from fighters to medics working in its relief services.

Israel's Mossad has gained notoriety for its complex operations stretching back to the daring 1960 abduction of high-ranking Nazi Adolf Eichmann. More recently, the spy agency has been blamed for cyber attacks and the assassination of a top Iranian scientist in 2020 with a remote-controlled machinegun.

Nine killed, 2,750 wounded across Lebanon as Hezbollah pagers explode

 

 

Nine killed, 2,750 wounded across Lebanon as Hezbollah pagers explode

Hezbollah official calls it the group’s ‘biggest security breach’ in nearly a year of cross-border fire with Israel.

17 Sep 2024 AJ

At least nine people were killed and about 2,750 were wounded by exploding handheld pagers across Lebanon, the country’s health minister has said.

Firass Abiad said that an eight-year-old girl was among those killed and that more than 200 people are in critical condition after the communication devices exploded on Tuesday, with injuries mostly reported to the face, hands and stomach.

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Lebanon’s Hezbollah blamed Israel for the spree of pager blasts, saying it will get “its fair punishment”, according to a statement released by the Iran-backed group which has been exchanging almost daily cross-border fire with Israel for almost a year.

There was no comment on the blasts from the Israeli military.

Hezbollah said in an earlier statement on Tuesday that two of its fighters and a girl were killed as “pagers belonging to employees of various Hezbollah units and institutions exploded”.

A Hezbollah official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the explosion of the pagers was the “biggest security breach” the group has experienced since October 7, when Israel’s war on Gaza began following the Hamas-led attacks on Israel.

Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, was among those injured by the pager explosions on Tuesday, Iran’s Mehr news agency reported.

US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told a regular news briefing the United States was not involved in the incidents and did not know who was responsible.

“We are gathering information on this incident,” Miller said. “I can tell you that the US was not involved in it. The US was not aware of this incident in advance.”

Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr, reporting from Beirut, said it appears the devices were detonated in a coordinated attack, which represented a “major development” in the hostilities between Israel and the Iran-backed Lebanese group.

“This is a major security breach. Hezbollah’s communication devices have been compromised. We have seen pictures from across Lebanon of men lying on the floor wounded, bleeding. We have seen reports of hospitals asking for blood,” she said.

She said “near-simultaneous explosions” were reported in southern Lebanon, in the east of the country and in Beirut’s southern suburbs, where there was widespread panic.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had called on his fighters a few months ago to stop using smartphones because Israel has the technology to infiltrate those devices, Khodr said.

“So now they’ve resorted to this different communications system using pagers, and it seems they have been penetrated,” she said.

Elijah Magnier, an independent military and political analyst, said Hezbollah relies heavily on pagers to prevent Israel from intercepting its communications, and he speculated that the pagers would have had to have been tampered with before being distributed to Hezbollah members.

“This is not a new system. It has been used in the past … so in this case, there has been involvement of a third party … to allow access …to remotely activate the explosions,” he told Al Jazeera.

“These explosions … are powerful enough to [severely] hit the psychology of Hezbollah.”

Earlier on Tuesday, Israel announced the expansion of its official war aims to include enabling Israelis who have fled areas near the Lebanese border to return to their homes, widening its nearly yearlong fight against Hamas in Gaza to focus on Hezbollah.

The exchanges of fire between the Israeli military and Hamas ally Hezbollah in Lebanon have forced tens of thousands of people on both sides of the border to flee their homes.

“The political-security cabinet updated the goals of the war this evening, so that they include the following section: the safe return of the residents of the north to their homes,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement early on Tuesday.

The exchanges of fire between Israeli soldiers and Hezbollah have killed hundreds of people, mostly fighters, in Lebanon and dozens of civilians and soldiers on the Israeli side.

On Monday, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said “military action” was the “only way left to ensure the return of Israel’s northern communities”.

Hezbollah claimed a dozen attacks on Israeli positions on Monday and three more on Tuesday.

How did Hezbollah’s pagers explode in Lebanon?

Localised explosions across Lebanon open a new chapter in one of the region’s most established conflicts.

Hundreds of pagers belonging to the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah have simultaneously exploded across Lebanon.

At the time of publishing, at least nine people have been killed and 2,750 wounded, according to security services and the Lebanese health minister.

What’s a pager? Why use them?

Pagers are small communication devices used commonly before mobile phones became widespread.

The devices display a short text message for the user, relayed by telephone through a central operator.

Unlike mobile phones, pagers work on radio waves, the operator sending a message by radio frequency – rather than the internet – unique to the recipient’s device.

It is thought that the basic technology used in pagers as well as their reliance upon physical hardware means they are harder to monitor, making them popular with groups such as Hezbollah where both mobility and security are paramount.

What happened?

The series of explosions began at about 15:30 local time and lasted for around an hour.

Casualty numbers are still being confirmed.

One eight-year-old girl has been confirmed among the dead.

Mohammad Mahdi Ammar, the son of Hezbollah MP Ali Ammar,  has also been reported killed.

Hezbollah confirmed that two of its fighters had been killed.

Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad told Al Jazeera: “About 2,750 people were injured, … more than 200 of them critically” with injuries mostly reported to the face, hands and stomach.

Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, was also injured in the explosions.

Who carried out the attack?

Many people, including Hezbollah, are pointing to Israel.

Israel and Hezbollah have been engaged in a mostly low-level exchange of fire over the Lebanon-Israel border since October 8, the day after Hamas-led attacks on Israel killed 1,139 people, saw about 240 taken captive and set off Israel’s war on Gaza.

Recently, Israeli politicians and media have increasingly talked of military action against Lebanon to drive Hezbollah back from the border to allow for the return of about 60,000 Israelis evacuated right after the attacks began.

“We hold the Israeli enemy fully responsible for this criminal aggression,” Hezbollah said in a statement, adding that Israel “will certainly receive its just punishment for this sinful aggression”.

Despite a similar condemnation from Lebanese Information Minister Ziad Makary, Israel itself – in keeping with previous situations – remains tight-lipped.

Why didn’t similar blasts occur in Gaza?

According to Hamze Attar, a defence analyst based in Luxemburg, “They cannot use the same method in Gaza because Hamas is very cyber-aware compared to Hezbollah.

“They are very capable when it comes to telecommunications,” he said of Hamas, stressing the efforts the group goes to to encrypt communications.

“They don’t use phones or cellphones. They have their own network and internet and communication and don’t need anything above ground,” he said.

How did the pagers explode?

We still don’t know.

Some speculation has focused on the radio network that pagers rely on, suggesting that it may have been hacked, causing the system to emit a signal that triggered a response within the already doctored pagers.

“What I think happened [is that] every Hezbollah [member] who was at a specific level was attacked,” data analyst Ralph Baydoun told Al Jazeera.

He also suggested that Israel would not need to know the names of whoever received the corrupted signal but it could gather valuable intelligence after the detonations.

“If they had the satellites on, … they would know the names and locations of all operatives who were attacked … immediately when [they asked] for help. They would disclose [their] locations,” he speculated.

Other analysts, such as former British army officer and chemical weapons expert Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, suggested that Hezbollah’s pagers may have been tampered with along the supply chain and “wired to explode on command”.

OK, but how could a pager blow up?

If the pager’s lithium battery was triggered to overheat, this would kick-start a process called thermal runaway.

Essentially,  a chemical chain reaction would occur, leading to an increase in temperature and eventually the battery’s violent explosion.

However, triggering that chain reaction within multiple devices that have never been connected to the internet is far from straightforward.

“You have to have a bug in the pager itself [so that] it will overheat as a result of certain circumstances,” Baydoun said, speculating that those circumstances would most likely be a trigger introduced into the pager through doctored code.

Source: Al Jazeera and news agencies

Why Sri Lanka’s disenchanted Tamils are divided this election

 The Hindu- September 18, 2024 at 11:17 AM. | Jaffna

Disappointment with southern leadership over long-pending demands, and a divided Tamil polity have led them to consider different options

By Meera Srinivasan

Sri Lanka’s northern Tamil voters are torn this presidential election, between a candidate who may win, and one who will certainly lose.

While some are backing one of the frontrunners among the Sinhalese candidates, others have decided to support a Tamil candidate. Every voter knows well that “Tamil common candidate” P Ariyanethiran — fielded jointly by some political and civil society groups based in the island nation’s north and east — cannot win given the numeric reality of Sri Lanka’s electoral map. The Sinhalese majority make up around 75 per cent of the country that was torn apart by bitter ethnic conflict between the two communities.

“After the civil war ended in 2009, our people hoped that even if their political rights were denied, they could live with some security and dignity. Listening to our (Tamil) political leadership, they backed different candidates in past elections. What did we gain?” asks Fr Santhiyogu Marcus, President of the Mannar Citizens’ Committee.

For at least two decades, Tamils had a straightforward choice and delivered a bloc vote — except when the rebel Tamil Tigers enforced a boycott in 2005 — in the presidential elections. They despised the Rajapaksa clan, accused of serious human rights violations during and after the civil war. They emphatically rejected Mahinda Rajapaksa in 2010 and 2015, and Gotabaya Rajapaksa in 2019. The main Tamil party representing Tamils of the north and east, too, invariably backed the chief challenger of the Rajapaksas in every national election.

Altered landscape

However, this is the first election campaign in 20 years that is not dominated by a Rajapaksa surname. Two years after a people’s uprising evicted Gotabaya Rajapaksa from office in 2022, Sri Lanka’s political terrain looks starkly different. The September 21 election, the first poll since, has three candidates at the fore – incumbent Ranil Wickremesinghe, opposition politicians Sajith Premadasa and Anura Kumara Dissanayake, one of whom is expected to win.

“Ariyanethiran is not seen as an individual who will win this contest, but as someone who is a symbol of our identity and struggles,” Fr Marcus observes. Many acknowledge his bleak electoral prospects but say they will back him nevertheless, to deliver a “strong message” to the southern political establishment and the international community.

On the other hand, critics of the move term it “political suicide”. Abandoning pragmatic negotiation with the southern leadership would further isolate Tamils and weaken their bargaining power, they contend.

Fifteen years after the civil war ended, after claiming several tens of thousands of civilian lives, Tamils in the north and east are unable to live in peace. Their lands are systematically grabbed by state agencies, their call for truth and justice over alleged war crimes remain, the whereabouts of scores of forcibly missing persons are unknown, a just political solution is elusive, and the war-battered economy has not created decent jobs or livelihoods.

In this context, sections see backing the Tamil candidate as a way of airing their frustration – not just with the national leadership, but also with their own, deeply divided Tamil political leadership. “Tamil leaders are showing us that they cannot be united in this struggle. The parties have split and there are so many splinter groups. They have weakened our position so much,” says K Rajachandran, leader of a Jaffna-based fisheries cooperative. “So, we want to tell our Tamil politicians, even if you can’t stand united, the Tamil people will come together behind this common candidate.”

Fragmented Tamil polity

The northern Tamil polity is in shreds, with prominent leaders taking poll positions ranging from backing a southern candidate, campaigning for the Tamil “common candidate”, to boycotting the polls altogether.

The once-powerful Tamil National Alliance (TNA), led by the prominent Ilankai Tamil Arasu Katchi (ITAK), has collapsed, with two other constituents breaking away some years ago. Even the ITAK is marred by serious internal divisions, seen in the conflicting positions aired by its members on a daily basis in the run up to the polls. The contradictions within were no secret earlier but have become more pronounced after the passing of senior Tamil leader R Sampanthan in June.

Earlier this month, the ITAK, through its Jaffna legislator MA Sumanthiran, announced its support for presidential aspirant Premadasa. Meanwhile, ITAK legislator Sivagnanam Shritharan is canvassing for Ariyanethiran, and senior leader Mavai Senathirajah continues to give mixed signals.

“Voters are finding it very confusing this election,” notes Rajany Rajeshwary, founder of Vallamai, a Jaffna-based movement for social change. “I fear that our votes will be split, and we will expose our weakness,” she says.

Meanwhile some voters, especially the youth, are disillusioned. “In the south, they tell us ‘think and vote as a Sri Lankan’. How can I do that when their discriminatory actions keep reminding me that I am Tamil?” asks Marynathan Edison, a fisherman and environmentalist in Mannar⍐.