{"id":295081,"date":"2024-09-18T07:19:10","date_gmt":"2024-09-18T07:19:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=295081"},"modified":"2024-09-20T06:58:37","modified_gmt":"2024-09-20T06:58:37","slug":"explosive-pagers-used-by-hezbollah-had-been-modified-by-israel-at-production-level-reuters-told-by-lebanese-security-sources","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=295081","title":{"rendered":"Explosive pagers used by Hezbollah had been modified by Israel ‘at production level’, Reuters told by Lebanese security sources"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sky News \u2013 Sept 18, 2024<\/strong><\/h1>\n

Israel’s Mossad spy agency planted a small amount of explosives inside thousands of pagers ordered by Hezbollah months before the devices exploded, a Lebanese security source has told the Reuters news agency.<\/p>\n

The senior source said the militant group had ordered 5,000 beepers which several other sources said were brought into Lebanon<\/a><\/strong> in the spring.<\/p>\n

The same source claimed that the devices had been modified by Israel’s spy service “at the production level”.<\/p>\n

A second security source told Reuters that up to three grammes of explosives were hidden in the new pagers that went “undetected” by Hezbollah for months.<\/p>\n

Details from the Reuters report are similar to one by the New York Times<\/a><\/strong>, which citied American and other officials.<\/p>\n

Images of the destroyed devices analysed by Reuters showed a format and stickers that were consistent with the 924 model of pagers made by Gold Apollo – a Taiwan-based company.<\/p>\n

The firm’s founder, Hsu Ching-Kuang, said the devices were actually made under licence in Europe using the Gold Apollo name.<\/p>\n

He did not give any further detail on the European company.<\/p>\n

The model, like other pagers, wirelessly receives and display text messages but cannot make telephone calls.<\/p>\n

Nine people were killed and thousands seriously injured<\/a><\/strong> in Tuesday’s explosions in different parts of Lebanon, the country’s health minister said.<\/p>\n

Firas Abiad said 200 of the 2,750 wounded were in a critical condition.<\/p>\n

Lebanese officials laid the blame on “Israeli aggression”, while Hezbollah<\/a><\/strong> promised to retaliate insisting Israel<\/a><\/strong> would receive “its fair punishment” for the blasts.<\/p>\n

The Israeli military, which has been engaged in cross-border fighting with Hezbollah since the start of the Gaza war in October last year, has refused to respond to questions about the detonations.<\/p>\n

Experts broadly agree that the blasts do not look like a typical lithium battery fire.<\/p>\n

Keren Elazari, a hacker and security researcher at Tel Aviv University, told Sky News: “There is no remote hacking capability that could generate that kind of kinetic explosion… some sort of a physical explosive component was probably part of the equation.”<\/p>\n

Bomb disposal expert and former British army officer Chris Hunter added that his initial theory – based on injuries – suggests the blasts are “consistent with one to two ounces of high explosive”<\/p>\n

“We’ve seen this sort of similar MO [particular method] with mobile devices before,” he said, pointing to the assassination of Hamas master bomb maker Yahya Ayyash whose mobile phone had been laced with a small amount of explosives.<\/p>\n

Hezbollah fighters would have considered pagers a lo-fi, harder to infiltrate alternative to mobile phones, according to Sky News’s Middle East correspondent Alistair Bunkall.<\/p>\n

It comes after Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah previously warned the group’s members in February not to carry mobile phones because Israel could use them to track their movements.<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Experts say the blasts were consistent with one of two ounces of explosive. The objective being to provoke retaliation from Iran\/Hezbollah and thereby draw the U.S. into a wider Middle East war <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":295089,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[118,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-295081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-7-10-gaza-war","category-Israel_Anti-Semitism_Zionism_and_US-UK_allies"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=295081"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295081\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":295090,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295081\/revisions\/295090"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/295089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=295081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=295081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=295081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}