Mossad, IDF intel. planted Hezbollah pager explosives - foreign reports

A joint Mossad and IDF intelligence operation led to planting small explosive materials in Hezbollah's pagers, a variety of foreign media have reported, with the Jerusalem Post (which also has extensive Western sources) independently confirming significant details relating to the operation.

Reuters, the New York Times, CNN, Al-Monitor, Axios, and others have put together a picture in which Israel had to use the boobytrapped pagers already on Tuesday or lose the capability since portions of Hezbollah had started to discover the sabotage.

Reports say that Israel hid explosive material within a new batch of Taiwanese-made pagers imported into Lebanon. However, the Taiwanese company Gold Apollo denied making the devices, claiming the Hungarian company BAC manufactured the model using Gold Apollo's licensed brand name.

Foreign reports said that the devices were tampered with before reaching Hezbollah and that most of the pagers were Gold Apollo's AP924 model, though three other Gold Apollo models were also part of the picture.

According to reports, as little as one to two ounces of the explosive material was implanted adjacent to the battery in each pager, along with a switch that could be used to detonate the explosives.

Hezbollah discovers sabotage amid rising tensions

Moreover, reports said that the pagers and communications devices were called before the explosion for some period of seconds to increase the chance that whoever received the call would pick it up and be maximally wounded.

It is unclear why Hezbollah would have happened to have discovered the boobytrapped devices on the same day that the Shin Bet revealed that the terror group had tried to assassinate a former top Israeli defense chief and only a day after Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told US envoy Amos Hochstein that diplomatic resolutions of the situation in the North - where 60,000 Israelis have been evacuated since October 2023 - were exhausted and Israel would need to carry out a large military operation finally.

Another piece of this larger story that emerged on Wednesday was that around a dozen Iranians were killed and around 150 wounded, mostly related to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to foreign reports, whose general thrust was confirmed by the Post.

The Post has confirmed that whoever undertook the attacks, it does not appear that the attacks on those large volumes of Iranians and IRGC operatives could have been unexpected.

Rather, the Post has learned that a point was to be made – that even if Iran in a broader sense was clearly not a target, those Iranians who work so closely with a terror group like Hezbollah against Israel such that they are hooked into the same electronic network – should be deterred from continuing those terror contacts.

Under Israeli law, the Post and other Israeli outlets come under the Israeli censor regarding certain security aspects of certain conflicts, limitations not imposed on foreign outlets.