https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/09/18/israel-hamas-war-gaza-latest-news-hezbollah-pagers-lebanon/
- Israel’s
Mossad spy agency planted a small amount of explosives inside 5,000
pagers ordered by Hezbollah months before Tuesday’s detonations, sources
say. The plot appears to have been many months in the making, several
sources told Reuters.
- Hezbollah
fighters have been using pagers as a low-tech means of communication in
an attempt to evade Israeli location-tracking. But a senior Lebanese
source said the devices had been modified by Israel’s spy service “at
the production level”.
- “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. Even with any device or scanner,” the source said.
- Taiwan’s Gold Apollo has denied reports that it made the pagers that were used in the detonations in Lebanon on Tuesday.
- Images of destroyed pagers showed a format and stickers on the back that were consistent with pagers made by Gold Apollo.
- But
the company’s founder, Hsu Ching-Kuang, told reporters on Wednesday
that the pagers used in the explosion were made by a company in Europe
that had the right to use the Taiwanese firm’s brand. “The product was
not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it,” he said.
- Mr
Hsu did not name the company which he said manufactured the pagers,
adding Gold Apollo was also a victim of the incident. “We are a
responsible company. This is very embarrassing.”
- Hezbollah vows to avenge pager attack
- Hezbollah
thought older devices would keep them safe. Hezbollah’s pagers were
meant to be safety measures, secure from Israeli eavesdropping. Instead, they were a deadly Trojan horse.
- After
suffering a series of assassinations of top operatives during months of
low-level war with Israel, this summer Hezbollah ordered its fighters
to ditch their mobile phones. They were too easy to track and too
readily compromised by Israel’s fearsome military hackers. “If you’re
looking for an Israeli agent, look at the phone in your hand,” Hassan
Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s chief, warned his men.
- Airlines suspend or cancelled flights as Middle East tensions rise: Ryanair, Air France, KLM, EasyJet, Air India, Cathay Pacific, Delta Air Lines, Lufthansa, and United Airlines until the end of October, longer, or until further notice.
- Iran accuses Israel of ‘mass murder’
- The
Iranian Red Crescent says it has dispatched “rescue teams and eye
surgeons” to Lebanon to treat the almost 3,000 who were injured by the
widescale detonation of pagers on Tuesday.
- Among
those wounded was Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani. Iranian
officials told The New York Times that his injuries were more serious
than initially reported. He is believed to have lost one eye, while his
second was severely injured.
- The
IDF has deployed the elite 98th Division from Gaza to its northern
border with Lebanon as Israel prepares for a possible escalation from
Hezbollah. The IDF already redeployed a significant number of troops
from Gaza to the northern border in recent months.
- Russia
says it strongly condemns the deadly pager attack, saying it was an act
intended to “provoke a major war in the Middle East”. Moscow had
earlier called for a thorough investigation to identify the
perpetrators.
- Blinken denies US knowledge of pager attack.
- Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, has denied any US knowledge of Tuesday’s pager attacks across Lebanon and Syria.