Cyberattack or Explosive Batteries: How Hezbollah Pagers Became Bombs

In a controversial incident, thousands of pagers were suddenly and simultaneously exploded in Lebanon on September 17, killing more than 12 people, including two children, and injuring about 4,000 others.

While a Hezbollah official described the incident as a major security breach, reports indicated that the incident was the result of an Israeli cyber attack, raising many questions about the loopholes that enabled this breach and the methods used to carry it out.

The Hebrew website Walla claimed that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved the decision to blow up Hezbollah’s communication devices earlier this week, while a Lebanese security source said that pagers that exploded were booby-trapped earlier.

Pager Explosions

“Israel” is witnessing a state of alert, as the Lebanese government and Hezbollah have accused it of being responsible for the pagers’ explosions, which Tel Aviv has met with official silence.

Reuters quoted Lebanese government sources as saying that thousands of injuries occurred in Lebanon and Syria, including the Iranian ambassador to Beirut, Mojtaba Amani, as a result of simultaneous explosions of these devices.

A Hezbollah official said the pager explosions were the largest security breach in a year, accusing “Israel” of being behind the attack.

The pager is a small, portable, wireless electronic communication device used by civilians and others to communicate within institutions or within different groups and systems. It operates on rechargeable batteries and receives written messages, communications, and audio and visual signals.

Citizens shared on social media scenes of the moment of the explosions and the injured, while hospitals in the southern suburbs of Beirut and southern Lebanon recorded thousands of injuries.

A member of the Hezbollah bloc in the Lebanese parliament, Ali Ammar, also announced the death of his son in the attack.

The Hebrew website Walla quoted unnamed senior American officials as saying that Israel was behind the pager explosions, despite Netanyahu’s office disavowing a post by his advisor Topaz Luke on X in which he hinted at Tel Aviv’s responsibility for the pager explosions in Lebanon before deleting it.

The website explained that the Israeli intelligence services estimated before the operation that Hezbollah might respond with a major counterattack on “Israel.”

For days, Netanyahu has been pushing hard to launch a military operation against Hezbollah, under internal pressure due to the party’s continued bombing of Israeli military sites.

The explosions came hours after Israel’s internal security agency said it had foiled an attempt by Hezbollah to kill a former senior Israeli security official using a planted explosive device that could be remotely detonated.

Security Breach

For years, members of the Lebanese Hezbollah group have been using pagers dedicated to receiving messages, but after the start of the Gaza war on October 7, 2023, this device became more widespread, amid concerns that Israeli intelligence could hack and spy on the mobile phone network.

The New York Times quoted security experts as saying that thousands of members of the group, not just fighters, have switched to pagers, especially as Israel continues its assassinations targeting a number of senior Hezbollah leaders.

In a speech last February, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah called for abandoning and burying mobile phones because of Israel’s ability to spy on them, and described them as “free and best agents.”

Following the Israeli operation targeting Hezbollah’s communications network, the Wall Street Journal reported that the pagers that exploded were part of a new shipment that the party had received in recent days.

The newspaper quoted the security firm Lubeck International as saying that the pager explosions were caused by malicious software that overheated the batteries, causing them to explode.

After the incident, attention turned to the parent company that manufactured the pagers, the Taiwanese company Gold Apollo, which denied on September 18 that the pagers that exploded were manufactured by it.

The AR-924 pagers used in Tuesday’s attack were manufactured by BAC Consulting KFT, based in the Hungarian capital of Budapest, according to a statement released by Gold Apollo.

While tech companies and media outlets described the operation as a cyber attack, former Lebanese Defense Minister Yacoub Sarraf ruled out that these explosions were a cyber breach, explaining that this type of equipment has a special code known to its manufacturer, to ensure that it can be detonated remotely.

“The explosion takes place using an information key called (Back door) that allows the factory to access and give instructions to detonate the device. Israel may have obtained this code and used it,” he said.

The New York Times quoted officials as saying that the pagers ordered by Hezbollah from Taiwanese company Gold Apollo were tampered with before they arrived in Lebanon.

A Lebanese official said that the Israeli Mossad planted explosives inside 5,000 pagers imported by Hezbollah months before the recent bombings.

Independent cybersecurity experts who studied footage of the attacks also confirmed that the force and speed of the explosions were clearly caused by some type of explosive material.

They explained that the explosive material, which does not exceed 20 grams, was planted next to the battery in each pager.

This statement is largely consistent with the statement of Dmitri Alperovitch, Chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator Center, a national security think tank, who explained how these devices were booby-trapped.

Alperovitch believes that this attack is perhaps the largest in history, targeting a supply chain, by replacing imported devices with others containing explosives and operating them all at the same time through a command-and-control center.

On his part, military analyst Brigadier General Omar Melhem explained in a statement to Al-Estiklal that “Israel carried out the operation in order to move its fight against Hezbollah to a new stage, while trying not to escalate to the level of a comprehensive war.”

“The Israeli operation aimed to undermine Hezbollah’s confidence and create a feeling within the party’s ranks that it was completely penetrated by Israeli intelligence,” he added.

Bri. Gen. Melhem concluded that “Israel used a global company and a civilian communications device with its extensive control over the cyber world, and made a decision to commit deliberate mass killing, which is a violation of the forbidden rules in security wars.”

Israeli Record

The pager explosions are not the first, as there is a decade-long Israeli record of using phones and related tech to track, monitor, and even assassinate their enemies, according to the Financial Times.

In 1972, Mossad agents replaced the marble base of the phone used by Mahmoud Hamshari, the Palestine Liberation Organization’s representative to France, in his apartment in the capital, Paris.

On December 8 of that year, when he answered the phone, a nearby Israeli team detonated the planted explosives remotely. Hamshari lost his leg and died of his wounds a month later.

In 1996, the Israeli internal security service Shin Bet assassinated Hamas leader and explosives engineer Yahya Ayyash after he received a call from his father on a Motorola Alpha mobile phone brought to Gaza by a Palestinian collaborator.

An Israeli team detonated the phone, which contained about 50 grams of explosives, enough to kill anyone holding the phone to their ear.

In 2001, Israel was blamed for booby-trapping a public phone in the Palestinian city of Nablus, which exploded when Palestinian Fatah leader Osama Jawabreh went to use it.

This year, separate Israeli airstrikes in Beirut killed senior Hamas official Saleh Arouri and a top Hezbollah commander. 

A mysterious explosion in Iran, also blamed on Israel, killed Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ supreme leader.