The scene is a hospital ward in Beirut. The atmosphere is one of devastation and chaos. Men lie on beds or slump in wheelchairs, their clothes spattered with blood. One rolls onto his side: the end of his hand is ragged, torn almost like paper. Stumps dangle where his fingers once were.
It’s just one of several videos from Lebanon sent to me by Middle Eastern sources over the last 24 hours. I’m watching the visceral aftermath of one of the most audacious intelligence operations in history, but I’m also watching something else – a clear message: don’t mess with the state of Israel. The country’s security forces have a reputation of carrying out operations with unparalleled ruthlessness and efficacy. Over the past 24 hours, it seems they may have surpassed themselves.
On Tuesday afternoon, explosions from the pagers of Hezbollah fighters rippled across Beirut. What happened next was an extraordinary sight – terrorists collapsing while browsing fresh produce; keeling over in the street as their trouser pockets exploded; imploding into a heap as they paid at tills.
Hezbollah is now reaping what for so long it has sown for others. Amid the destruction there was, I thought, a certain irony.
By yesterday afternoon the death toll had reached 12, with thousands injured.
Then, incredibly, a second wave of explosions: at around 17:30 local time Hezbollah walkie-talkies began blowing up. Images of the exploded devices examined by Reuters showed an inside panel labelled ‘ICOM’ and ‘Made in Japan’. Mossad, it seems, may have access to more than one supply chain.
Crowds watch as smoke rises from a building following an explosion, as hand-held radios used by Hezbollah detonated across south Lebanon’s and in Beirut
Reports are that Hezbollah used walkie-talkies as a back-up comms system: who says Mossad has no sense of humour? But how did the Israelis do it? Though they have not claimed responsibility, believe me it is Israel.
No one is more certain of this than Hezbollah, which released a statement soon after the explosions. ‘After examining all the facts, data and information regarding the sinful attack that occurred this afternoon,’ it thundered, ‘we hold the Israeli enemy fully responsible for this criminal aggression.’
So how did the Israelis manage to pack thousands of Hezbollah pagers with explosives then distribute them to the group’s members across Lebanon?
The answer lies, as always with Israeli security operations, in fastidious planning, creativity and guts. All these qualities were needed for this operation because Hezbollah is far more than just a terror organisation. It is a paramilitary group that also de facto runs the state of Lebanon.
This means it has a lattice of procurement supply chains that it uses to obtain weapons, launder money and traffic drugs.
For all this it needs several things, not least of which is an equally large and opaque network of shell companies around the globe. The Israelis know about these and nickname them ‘monkeys’. It is highly likely that Hezbollah would have used one of these companies to buy the several thousand pagers needed for their army of thugs.
Reports are that the Israelis compromised and penetrated this supply chain years ago then lay dormant, waiting. A few months ago Hezbollah leaders decided it was time to switch out mobile phones for pagers. This was, of course, just what Mossad had been waiting for. It was time to move. Saboteurs, working somewhere along the pager manufacturing supply chain, implanted one to two grammes of explosives inside more than 5,000 pagers shortly before these devices – now Israeli Trojan horses – were exported to Lebanon.
Sources say the explosive material was PETN, or pentaerythritol tetranitrate – structurally very similar to nitroglycerin and formidably powerful while at the same time very stable.
For months, members of this proscribed terror group unwittingly used the pagers for communication. It would have been a tense time for those monitoring things back in Jerusalem. If just one device exploded ahead of time, the entire plot would have curdled into failure. But it didn’t; and then: D-Day. On Tuesday at 15.45 (local time) users received an unknown message; many of them held the pager up to their face. Seconds later, the pager went not ‘beep’ but ‘boom’.
There are many theories about what happened. One says a code – for example ‘00000’ or whatever – was sent to a small electronic card inside the pagers causing the machines to heat up rapidly and ignite the explosives.
Unsurprisingly, most injuries were to hands and faces.
As of last night, at least 14 people had died – including two children – and around 3,000 are injured across Lebanon and Syria (where Hezbollah are also active).
Around 200 are in a critical condition while hundreds are said to have been blinded by the explosions. In the village of Saraain, in eastern Lebanon, mourners gathered at the funeral of the youngest confirmed victim, nine-year-old Fatima Abdullah.
This is a disaster for Hezbollah. The pagers were most likely used by its most senior officers – meaning those maimed were likely from the rank of major or lieutenant- colonel and above.
According to Eyal Pinko, a former Navy commander and intelligence officer in the IDF ‘the entire senior backbone of Hezbollah was impacted’ by this attack. He added: ‘They will need to reset themselves. They need to set up again to understand who is leading the battalions and military units. It will take time to recover.’
The operation – which would have involved hundreds of Israeli operatives – is one of the most complex and impressive feats in modern warfare. It is unclear why the decision was made to ignite the beepers on Tuesday.
US sources told the Axios news website that the decision was made to blow up the pager devices out of concern the secret operation might be discovered by the group in a decision described as a ‘use it or lose it moment’.
These sources suggested Israeli officials were initially planning to use the pagers as a surprise opening blow in an all-out war. Other analysts are suggesting that this attack was a preventative strike following intelligence that Hezbollah intended to escalate the conflict between Israel and Lebanon on the northern border.
Pinko said: ‘I think Hezbollah is culturally a very suspicious organisation by nature and if they had an inkling about the explosives inside the pagers they would have immediately stopped using them. The idea that officers grew suspicious is nice gossip, but I don’t think it’s true.’
Beyond the practical effects on Hezbollah there is, of course, the huge embarrassment. The operation is being described as Hezbollah’s ‘biggest security breach’. And it comes after the Israelis whacked Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in the centre of Tehran on the day of the new Iranian president’s inauguration to boot.
The Iranians and Hezbollah need to be careful: any more of this and they might start to suffer a ‘terror brain drain’. Internationally, all parties who could even be vaguely considered to have a connection with the supply chain at the heart of the operation have been feverishly distancing themselves from events.
Branding from Taiwanese manufacturing company Gold Apollo was found on the compromised devices. Most of them were the company’s AR924 model, though three other models were included in the shipment. Founder and President Hsu Ching-Kuang has said production was outsourced to the firm BAC Consulting, which has an address in Budapest.
He added that he considered himself a ‘victim’ of the incident and planned to sue BAC. He did, however, acknowledge that payments had come through the Middle East stating: ‘The remittance was very strange.’
On the BAC Consulting website the company said it was involved in ‘bridging technology and innovation from Asia’. The company’s address was registered to a two-storey building in Budapest; its name was posted on the glass door on an A4 sheet.
Around three years ago BAC was given permission to sell its own products using the Gold Apollo brand. Gold Apollo makes a wide range of devices including pagers – wireless devices that can send messages without an internet connection commonly used by emergency services and hospitals.
Taiwan has no record of Gold Apollo pagers being shipped to Lebanon, according to preliminary investigations by its Ministry of Economic Affairs.
British-educated Cristiana Barsony-Arcidiacono is Chief Executive of BAC Consulting. She told NBC News: ‘I do not make the pagers. I am just the intermediary. I think you got it wrong.’
The remains of a handheld pager after explosions rocked Lebanon this week. Hezbollah has blamed Israel for the ‘sinful aggression’
Frantic people gather outside a hospital where the atmosphere is one of devastation and chaos
What now? Among the injured was Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani who lost an eye in the first attack. Let’s not forget that Iran launched a direct mass-missile attack on Israel in April because the Israelis struck a target in the Iranian consulate in Syria.
Iran has also vowed revenge for Haniyeh’s assassination – and so far done nothing. Tehran may now feel that the pressure to respond is too great to resist.
Yesterday I interviewed Foreign Secretary David Lammy for the Mail’s new weekly global news podcast 90 Seconds To Midnight.
As we discussed Britain’s role in an increasingly dangerous world, my producer Bella Soames twice had to update me with yet more news of carnage from Lebanon. Once more, the irony was not lost on me.
Predictably, there are those – especially in the EU and UN – who are rounding on Israel, criticising Jerusalem for ‘escalation’ and other assorted misdemeanours frowned upon by the sorts of bloodless functionaries who comprise the senior leadership of these organisations.
But remember: Israel is a country at war; it is a British ally and it is fighting the forces of extremism and terror that we have suffered from ourselves. What happened yesterday was an astonishing feat of creativity and brains against a malign terror group that opposes all the values we hold dear.
The world is getting closer to midnight; indeed, we are accelerating towards it.
So let’s support all those on the right side of a war that, whether we like it or not, we have been fighting for many years now – or it might swallow us all.
Search 90 Seconds to Midnight wherever you get your podcasts now.