“The secret of war lies in the communications.”
(Napoleon Bonaparte)
Pagers and Radios, Hezbollah, The Islamic Republic of Iran and The State of Israel
Introduction
The communication system of Iran-backed Hezbollah suffered a huge setback for the terrorist organisation when numerous pagers and hand-held communication systems used by the group exploded causing deaths and numerous casualties.
On the 17th September 2024 pagers used by the group exploded. The Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had some time ago declared the group not to use of mobile phones for fear of being tracked and had resorted to pagers in order to communicate with the group. Pagers although limited in use could still receive data or a message to contact another member of the group. This would be effective against anyone attempting to find the location of an individual or any other compromising information.
Previously the Hezbollah leader Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah had ordered his followers to lock their mobile phones into an iron box. He was paranoid that Israeli secret services would be able to track his followers. The next best method were pagers.
Mossad, the national intelligence agency of the State of Israel has a history of planning elaborate assassinations. Some have been up close and personal while some have been through bombs and missile strikes on targeted individuals, while others have been a little more sophisticated. The first case of using a communications device to target and kill an enemy was on the 6th January 1996. Yahya Ayyash (the Engineer) a Hamas bomb maker had his head blown off by cell phone bomb responding to a call from his father.
Background Prior to the Communications Attack
The Blue Line
The Blue Line serves as a demarcation line dividing Lebanon from Israel and the Golan Heights. It was established by the United Nations on the 7th June 2000, with the purpose of determining whether Israel had fully withdrawn from Lebanon after its occupation. The Blue Line is not a formal border but rather a “line of withdrawal.” It remains the subject of an ongoing border dispute involving Israel, Lebanon, and Hezbollah1. The conflict over this line has historical roots and geopolitical implications, making it a significant point of contention in the region.
Hezbollah Disarm
Hezbollah was required to disarm after the 2006 Israel-Lebanon War by United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1701. This resolution aimed to maintain peace along the Israel-Lebanon border, known as the Blue Line. However, Hezbollah has not fully disarmed, asserting that it will do so only when Israel is no longer a threat to Lebanon and when Palestinians achieve freedom. The Iran-backed terrorist proscribed group rebranded its military wing as an “Islamic Resistance Force” dedicated to the end of Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories thus allowing it to retain its arsenal.
Firas Maksad, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute said UN Resolution 1701, which was intended to resolve the 2006 conflict, bars Israel from conducting military operations in Lebanon, but Israel has repeatedly accused Hezbollah of violating the resolution by smuggling arms into southern Lebanon. “Hezbollah is the first line for deterrence and defence for the Iranian regime and its nuclear program should Israel decide to strike Iran, and it is not going to waste that to try and save Hamas.”
Hezbollah was supposed to pull back from the Lebanon-Israel border by a distance of between five and ten kilometres. This measure aimed to reduce tensions and prevent further escalation in the region
Recent Border Disputes Between the State of Israel and Lebanese Hezbollah
On the 1st July 2023 there was a stand-off on the Israeli/Hezbollah border. Hezbollah was refusing Israeli demands that it dismantles an outpost set up in the disputed hills of Kfarshouba on the border between Lebanon and Israel.
Israeli news sites recently claimed that “Israel is preparing to forcibly remove military points established by Hezbollah on the border with Lebanon.”
MP Mohammed Raad, head of Hezbollah’s parliamentary bloc, said that “the time has passed when the Israelis bombed Osirak nuclear reactor (Operation Opera also known as Operation Babylon an Israeli airstrike conducted by the Israeli Air Force on the 7th June 1981, which destroyed an unfinished Iraqi nuclear reactor located 17 kilometres (11 miles) southeast of Baghdad, Iraq) without batting an eyelid. “Now the Israelis cannot remove two tents because there is strong resistance, strong men, and believers in this country.” In a remark directed at Israel, Raad said: “If you do not want a war, then be quiet.” He added: “Neither you nor anyone else can demand that the resistance removes what belongs to Lebanon.”
The 9th July 2023, Israel stated that Hezbollah had set up more than two dozen military outposts along the countries’ border in violation of international agreements, a development it says risks increasing confrontation.
United Nations Security Council resolution following the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war, armed fighters from Hezbollah are not permitted to enter the border area. Troops from the UN Interim Force in Lebanon — or UNIFIL — are stationed there to make sure both sides keep to the rules. Yet in the past year, Israeli military officials say, those outposts have sprung up along the Blue Line. Israeli officials have said that Hezbollah fighters have long entered the area disguised as civilians, some now wear uniforms and openly carry weapons.
The United Nations operating in the country and along the Blue Line are powerless to enforce any form of authority and have on occasions been attacked by Hezbollah forces.
The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) reported on the 28th December 2023 that they urged Lebanese authorities to conduct a thorough investigation into an assault on one of its peacekeepers in the southern Lebanese village of Taybeh. The incident, reported by UNIFIL on social media platform X, occurred during a patrol when a group of young men attacked the peacekeeper, resulting in injury. The small village is in the Baalbek district an operational area which is controlled by Hezbollah.
In a statement, UNIFIL emphasized the severity of the situation, calling for swift justice against all involved in the attack. The organization highlighted that such assaults on peacekeepers not only defy UN Resolution 1701 but also violate Lebanese law. This incident is part of a troubling pattern of hostility toward UNIFIL peacekeepers in southern Lebanon.
Despite these challenges, UNIFIL affirmed its commitment to maintaining its operations in the region. The statement underscored the importance of peacekeepers’ freedom of movement, which is essential for upholding security and stability along the Blue Line.
United Nations observers were attacked again in March 2024. A translator and UN soldiers were wounded when a shell exploded near them as they were carrying out a foot patrol in south Lebanon. One of the observers was a Norwegian citizen, who was slightly injured, the Nordic country’s defence ministry reported. Lebanon’s National News Agency said the other two wounded observers were Chilean and Australian.
Requests for comment from Hezbollah and the Lebanese Armed Forces went unanswered.
On the 8th October 2023 the day after Hamas and other terrorist organisations massacred hundreds of Israeli’s and took illegal hostages Hezbollah, the armed party backed by Iran, said it had launched guided rockets and artillery onto three posts in the Shebaa Farms “in solidarity” with the Palestinian people. Israeli residents of the areas parallel to the Blue Line, which is 85 km long, were forced to leave their homes and move to safer areas.
The Shebaa Farms, also spelled Sheba'a Farms, also known as Mount Dov, is a strip of land on the Lebanese–Syrian border and currently occupied by Israel. Lebanon claims the Shebaa farms as its own territory, and Syria, not surprisingly, agrees with this position.
The Islamic Republic of Iran decided to step in by claiming that the Israeli regime was exploring new measures in a desperate attempt to distract the world from its bloodbath against children in Gaza and lower the rising international pressure to cease the war. The Tehran Times claimed since the 8th October, one day after Hamas staged Operation al-Aqsa Storm, the Hezbollah resistance movement and the Israeli military had been exchanging fire on a daily basis across the Blue Line.
Randa Slim, Senior Fellow at the Washington-based Middle East Institute said Hezbollah’s two objectives, as stated by Nasrallah (Hassan Nasrallah), will be to put pressure on Israel to stop the war and to assist people in Gaza by forcing Israel to divert some of its resources to the northern border.
Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah said on the 5th January 2024 that his group’s attacks were an “opportunity” for “Lebanon… to liberate every inch of our Lebanese land” along thirteen points of contention on the Blue Line, “from point B1 in Naqoura to Ghajar, to the Shebaa Farms and Kfar Chouba Hills.”
On the 20th September 2024 Fouad Siniora the former Prime Minister of Lebanon claimed that the State of Israel was trying to drag Lebanon and the entire region into a full scale war.
The Lebanese are inadequate to do anything about Hezbollah in case another civil war (1975 -1990) breaks out. The former Lebanese PM really needs to look inward rather than outward. Because of the Lebanese own inadequacies to control Hezbollah operating openly and failing to comply with United Nations resolutions, the Iranian-backed group are able to do as they please. This is the wider threat to the country.
A country where all decisions are made by sectarian consensus and where Hezbollah is the most sizable representative of the Shias—likely Lebanon’s largest single demographic—any restraining mechanism on Hezbollah would require the group’s approval. Hezbollah would unlikely approve any arrangement that would see it restrained, let alone distanced from the Israeli border or disarmed.
Preparation?
Israel for its part have said on numerous occasions since the evacuation of its citizens that it wants its people to return to their homes in the north and will give talks a chance. But if no resolution was to be found to the United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1701 whereby Hezbollah failed to comply, then they would use force to push Hezbollah back and allow those Israelis who live in the north to do so in safety.
Hezbollah on the 8th October 2023 openly came out in support of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group and increased the frequency of missiles and rockets into the north of Israel. Over 60,000 Israeli’s were evacuated from the area and have been displaced since.
The United States issued a travel warning on the 21st September 2024 urging Americans to leave Lebanon as Israel-Hezbollah border attacks intensifies. A number of other countries followed suit.
France on the 12th February 2024 delivered a written proposal to Beirut with the aim of halting hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel. The document requested that Hezbollah fighters’ withdrawal 10km away from the border.
According to Reuters, who stated that the document, the first written proposal brought to Beirut during weeks of Western mediation, was delivered to top Lebanese state officials including Prime Minister Najib Mikati by French Foreign Minister Stephane Sejourne and four senior Lebanese.
Hezbollah rejected formally negotiating a de-escalation until the war in Gaza ends, a position reiterated by a Hezbollah politician in response to questions told Reuters. Obviously, the Iran-backed Hezbollah had other ideas and have continued their barrage of rockets, drones and missiles on Israel.
Why Were the Hezbollah Pagers Detonated?
There are currently several trains of thought regarding why Israel triggered over three thousand Hezbollah pagers.
The first is that there was a possibility that someone in Hezbollah had stumbled on the plot that explosives had been placed in the communication pager. Axios, an American news website said, that Israel had planned to use the exploding pagers as an opening blow in an all-out war against the terror group, but had become concerned in recent days that the booby-trapped devices could be discovered.
The second was that Israel uncovered a plot to attack Israel at the Sea of Galilee. Hezbollah planned to raid Israeli territory, occupy the communities in the Galilee, murder and kill innocents, similar to what the Hamas terror organization carried out in the murderous massacre on the 7th October 2023.” A senior Hezbollah commander, Ibrahim Aqil, was killed in a targeted IDF strike in Lebanon on the 20th September 2024.
IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi said Aqil’s assassination would “shake up” Hezbollah, noting that the terror leader and his commanders had “planned for years to occupy the Galilee, they are responsible for the murder of many Israelis, including soldiers, over the years.”
Echoing comments made by President Isaac Herzog earlier in the day, Halevi said the terror leaders had been “planning how to carry out the next attack — this may be what they were dealing with in that meeting on Friday afternoon — how to infiltrate the State of Israel, murder civilians and kidnap IDF soldiers.”
Aqil, also known as Al-Hajj Abdul Khader, was a member of Hezbollah’s top “military” body, the Jihad Council, which is subordinate to the Shura Council and under the direct control of terrorist leader Hassan Nasrallah. Aqil was also responsible for the Radwan Force commandos in the Sword of Iron war (the war declared by the State of Israel against the Hamas terrorist organization) and led Hezbollah’s tunnel project in Lebanon.
The United States had offered a $7 million bounty for Aqil. In the 1980s, Aqil was a senior member in Hezbollah's cell responsible for the 1983 US embassy bombing and the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings.
The third possible reason could have been a Hezbollah terror attack targeting a senior Israeli defence official using a remotely detonated explosive device. The threat was believed to be carried out within a couple of days of the threat being discovered. The Shin Bet had foiled the recent attempt by Hezbollah to assassinate the former senior Israeli security official using a remotely detonated explosive device. The bomb had a remote detonation system, including a camera and a cellular connection, which would have allowed Hezbollah to activate it from Lebanon according to the Times of Israel.
A fourth motive to initiate the explosives in the pagers and therefore destroying Hezbollah’s ability to communicate making an Israeli invasion into Hezbollah territory easier. Israel has made it a war objective to ensure those who are displaced from the north of Israel should be allowed home. There are over 60,000 displaced Israelis due to rocket, drone and missile attacks by Hezbollah in the north.
17th September 2024 Pager Attack on Hezbollah (The Party of God)
On the 17th September 2024 various outlets reported a breaking news story stating that hundreds of Hezbollah operatives had been wounded because the pagers they were carrying detonated causing deaths and severe injuries. It was also reported that the Iranian ambassador to Beirut, Mojtaba Amani, had been injured. The ambassador's wife said, “My husband has suffered a minor injury. Thank God, he is in a good condition.” Later the New York Times wrote that Amani had, “lost one eye and his other was seriously wounded when a pager he was carrying exploded.”
A Hezbollah official, speaking on condition of anonymity told Al-Arabiya News that the detonation of the pagers was the “biggest security breach” the group had been subjected to in nearly a year of war with Israel. At the time of reporting the pager explosions had been responsible for 2,800 people injured some seriously and there were some fatalities.
The immediate action by Hezbollah and others was to point the finger at the State of Israel with speculation as to why and how this was achieved. Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, said the pagers belonged “to employees of various Hezbollah units and institutions” and confirmed the deaths of eight fighters.
In normal fashion, Israel did not respond.
Hezbollah said an unspecified number of pagers - which the group relies on heavily for communications due to the risk of mobile phones being hacked or tracked - exploded at approximately 1530 hrs local time (1230 hrs GMT) in the capital Beirut and many other areas. Wounds and injuries ranged between the head to the waist and included the face, eyes and hands, a staff member from the LAU Medical Centre in Beirut's Ashrafieh district said, adding: “A lot of casualties have lost fingers, in some cases all of them.” Thousands were left injured, some left blinded with others missing limbs.
The official Hezbollah media office declared eight fighters were dead. It just stated that they were “martyred on the road to Jerusalem,” providing no information about the places or circumstances.
Fourteen people were also wounded by exploding pagers in neighbouring Syria, where Hezbollah is fighting alongside government forces in the country's civil war, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and reported by the BBC.
Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati also blamed Israel for the explosions, saying that they represented a “serious violation of Lebanese sovereignty and a crime by all standards.” Obviously, the launching of rockets, drones and missiles from Lebanon into Israel by Hezbollah is not a crime.
Procurement of the Pagers
Professor Andreas Krieg, Middle East expert, senior lecturer at the School of Security Studies at King's College London, said: 'Regardless of how they sourced it or how they procured this device, Israel has been able to infiltrate and compromise the supply chain.
The bigger picture suggests that the security forces of Israel have managed to penetrate Hezbollah and Iran at a deep level. Israel has had some very successful outcomes against their two enemies. The assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on the 31st July 2024. Fuad Shukr was believed to be a key military adviser to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. On the 30th July 2024, Shukr was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Beirut for his alleged responsibility for the Majdal Shams attack on 27th July that killed 12 Druze children.
Being afraid that the phones used by Hezbollah members to communicate presented a massive security risk, Hezbollah's Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah in February 2024 declared the devices were 'more dangerous than Israeli spies' and his officials began drawing up plans to address gaps in the group's intelligence infrastructure.
In a televised speech on the 13th February 2024, Nasrallah sternly ordered his followers and supporters to break, bury or lock their phones in an iron box.
The group opted to replace the phones its members had previously used to communicate, with pagers - one-way receivers that are more secure than smartphones and do not operate on the same network.
They also have an extremely long battery life, with some models able to last up to three months on one charge - a key advantage given Lebanon's economic crisis and unreliable electricity supply.
Open-source outlets provided some ideas of how the pagers had been procured. The procurement of the message device would also give an idea of how explosives would have been placed in the device without being discovered. But there was a great deal of unknown speculation.
Some reports claimed that the devices had been intercepted prior to delivery while others claimed that the explosives were placed in the pagers by whoever had constructed them. Others believed that the lithium batteries had overheated causing the pagers to explode. But in reality, to have over three thousand pager batteries explode all at the same time through being overheating would be a little farfetched.
There was also talk that Mossad had set up a complexity of shell companies across Europe. Hezbollah would not have been able to purchase pagers due to American sanctions against them and so were limited in their choice.
Lebanon’s United Nations mission after a preliminary investigation by the Lebanese authorities found that the pagers, “were implanted with explosives before arriving in the country.”
Carlos Perez, director of security intelligence at TrustedSec.an American cybersecurity company said, “by the time of the attack, 'the battery was probably half-explosive and half-actual battery.”
A former British Army munitions expert, who asked not to be named, told the BBC the pagers would have likely been packed with between 10g and 20g of military-grade high explosive, hidden inside a fake electronic component.
“Mossad infiltrated the supply chain,” said Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute, referring to Israel’s intelligence agency.
SMEX, a Lebanese digital rights organization, told Reuters that Israel could have exploited a weakness in the device to cause it to explode. It said the pagers could also have been intercepted before reaching Hezbollah and either tampered with electronically or implanted with an explosive device.
Gold Apollo explained that the devices were made by BAC, a Budapest-based firm that has the right to use the Gold Apollo’s brand but is otherwise independent. Gold Apollo authorized “BAC to use our brand trademark for product sales in specific regions, but the design and manufacturing of the products are entirely handled by BAC,” it said in a statement. “The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it,” Gold Apollo’s founder and president, Hsu Ching-kuang, told reporters at the company’s offices in the northern Taiwanese city of New Taipei on the 18th September 2024.
In the end they were all wrong
The Times of Israel ran a story about the pagers on the 22nd September 2024. The pagers had been detonated individually with the attackers knowing who was being targeted and where they were. In a lengthy report quoting Israeli and foreign sources, Israeli Channel 12 News said that those behind the attacks were determined to ensure that only the person carrying the device would be hurt by the blast. “Each pager had its own arrangements. That’s how it was possible to control who was hit and who wasn’t.”
The newspaper report said that at least 30 people had been killed with thousands being injured.
As Nicholas Blanford, a Beirut-based senior fellow of the American think tank, the Atlantic Council, said: “Israel in one fell swoop has rendered combat ineffective hundreds if not thousands of Hezbollah fighters, in some cases permanently.”
The Times continued, quoting an unnamed foreign security source, the report said that “tens of thousands of pagers” were produced and manufactured with the knowledge that they would be checked carefully by the client, Hezbollah.” Interviewed in the report, Ronen Bergman, an investigative reporter for The New York Times and Yedioth Ahronoth, explained that the pagers therefore had to work properly and betray no indication that they had been primed with explosives. Their appearance and weight had to be unchanged, and they needed to be able to pass detection by sniffer dogs.
Ronen Bergman, an investigative reporter for The New York Times and Yedioth Ahronoth said that the whole scheme was dreamed up by a brilliant female intelligence operative, aged less than 30, somewhere in the Middle East.
Whoever was responsible, the report said, decided to set up a factory to build the devices from scratch — so that “it won’t be a device that we will tamper with; it will be a device that we will produce.” The New York Times came to the same conclusion in a report.
The ability to supply the device to Hezbollah was helped by the fact that the terror group is not able to make purchases on the open market, because of suppliers’ fears of sanctions from the United States, and therefore must routinely work with intermediary suppliers.
Amos Yadlin, a former IDF intelligence chief, said more broadly that Israel’s goal was to cause Nasrallah to realize that his attacks on the north of Israel “are costing him more than he’s gaining,” including in terms of support within Lebanon.
According to Michael Doran’s article in the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs, the great genius of the operation was that the Israelis relied on Hezbollah to select their targets for them. If we map the attacked men, we map Hezbollah’s organizational chart, including the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon who is an IRGC officer. The large ratio of maiming to deaths is a sign of success. In military terms, a maiming is preferable because it ties up more resources and stresses enemy systems to a much greater degree.
Hand-Held Radios
After the shock of the pagers exploding the next blow to the Hezbollah communications system was the blast from their hand-held radios. On the 18th September 2024 news outlets announced that Lebanon’s health ministry said 20 people were killed and more than 450 injured on in Beirut’s suburbs and the Bekaa Valley. The Bekaa Vally is a Hezbollah strong hold to the north of Israel and closer to the Syrian border than Israel.
Known as the “reservoir of the resistance,” the Beqaa Valley is Hezbollah’s stronghold of support and a storage location due to its proximity to Syria, a main route for Iran to supply its proxies in the Levant for weapons.
The Guardian wrote, “We consider the south to be the first line of defence for Lebanon, and we in the Beqaa are the second line of defence,” said the mayor of Nabi Chit’s Hezbollah-run municipality, Hassan al-Moussawi. Hezbollah enjoys backing from the Beqaa’s powerful tribes and draws its fighters from the area’s predominantly Shia population.
A Reuters reporter in the southern suburbs of Beirut said he saw Hezbollah members frantically taking batteries out of any walkie-talkies that had not exploded, tossing the parts in metal barrels. Hezbollah turned to pagers and other low-tech communication devices in an attempt to evade Israeli surveillance of mobile phones.
Israel again provided no comment regarding the incident.
The Party of God, Hezbollah, now had no mobile/cell phones, no pagers and no hand-held communication devices while Israel launched an air assault against them. At this stage it is more than likely that ‘runners’ were used to convey messages.
By not being able to use modern technology to communicate with Hezbollah leaders and units would prove to be extremely difficult and using decades old technology to communicate with their fighters. Israel, if they did conduct the pager and hand-held devices, had not only sent the Iranian-backed terrorist group back by decades and rendered any effective modern way of communication distrustful.
Should Iran send Hezbollah any type of advanced communications equipment, it would take weeks, if not months, for a new system to become operational. The attack on Hezbollah communications systems had been thought out and implemented well.
Japanese firm Icom said on the 19th September 2024 that it had stopped producing the model of radios reportedly used in recent blasts in Lebanon around 10 years ago.
“The IC-V82 is a handheld radio that was produced and exported, including to the Middle East, from 2004 to October 2014. It was discontinued about 10 years ago, and since then, it has not been shipped from our company,” Icom said in a statement.
“The production of the batteries needed to operate the main unit has also been discontinued, and a hologram seal to distinguish counterfeit products was not attached, so it is not possible to confirm whether the product shipped from our company,” it said.
“All of our radios are manufactured at our production subsidiary, Wakayama Icom Inc., in Wakayama Prefecture, under a strict management system... so no parts other than those specified by our company are used in a product. In addition, all of our radios are manufactured at the same factory, and we do not manufacture them overseas,” the statement said.
Speaking to Reuters outside the company’s headquarters in Osaka, Yoshiki Enomoto a director at ICOM, said that “there’s no way a bomb could have been integrated into one of our devices during manufacturing. The process is highly automated and fast-paced, so there’s no time for such things.”
Hezbollah Reaction
In a high-profile speech on the 19th September 2024 through the Iranian government-controlled Tehran Times quoted Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah who said the Israeli regime intended to kill thousands of Lebanese people within minutes by exploding pagers and walkie talkies on Tuesday (17 Sep 24) and Wednesday (18 Sep 24).
Nasrallah called the back-to-back attacks “a terrorist act” and a “massacre”.
He also said they were "severe" and "unprecedented" acts and a declaration of war against the people of Lebanon and the country’s sovereignty.
The Times of Israel also quoted the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah who conceded on 19th September that the terror group had suffered a “major and unprecedented” blow this week when thousands of its communications devices suddenly exploded, but vowed that the Lebanon-based terror organization would recover and not lay off its attacks on Israel after months of cross-border fire.
He continued with “they were "severe" and "unprecedented" acts and a declaration of war against the people of Lebanon and the country’s sovereignty.”
Lebanese health minister Firass Abiad added that the death toll from the two waves of pager and walkie-talkie attacks across the country has risen to 37 while 287 people are in a critical condition.
Nasrallah was now claiming to be the victim whereas it was he who started to attack Israel on the 8th October 2023. The Israeli’s up until this point had been patient.
The Islamic Republic of Iran Steps In
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) warned Israel on the 19th September 2024 that it will face a “crushing response from the resistance front” after thousands of communication devices used by Hezbollah in Lebanon had exploded.
IRGC head Hossein Salami said in a message to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, quoted by state media said, “Such terrorist acts, that are undoubtedly due to the desperation and successive failures of the Zionist regime, will soon be met with a crushing response from the resistance front.”
You will notice that Salami had said, “resistance front” and not from Iran itself.
The same rhetoric that the IRGC General said when Ismail Haniyeh the Political leader of Hamas was assassinated on the 31st July 2024. Israel is still waiting for that ‘crushing response’.
The Tehran Times wrote, “Israel is once more escalating tensions towards a potential large-scale conflict with Lebanon’s Hezbollah amid the regime’s desperate attempts to distract attention from its unsuccessful nearly yearlong war in Gaza.” The paper also went on to accuse Lebanon’s pager bombings on the CIA working hand in glove with Mossad.
Amir Saeid Iravani, Iran’s Ambassador to the UN, told United Nations that it reserves the right to respond to the recent act of sabotage and terrorism by the rogue Israeli regime in Lebanon, after Tehran’s ambassador was injured in one of the explosions in Beirut. “The Islamic Republic of Iran will duly follow up on the attack against its ambassador in Lebanon, which resulted in his injury, and reserves its rights under international law to take required measures deemed necessary to respond to such a heinous crime and violation,” Iravani wrote, Iranian government-controlled Press TV reported. There was no indication as to how Iran was going to achieve the right to respond.
Iravani continued, “The UN Secretary General and the Security Council must condemn unequivocally Israel’s terrorist action and heinous crime against the head of Iran's diplomatic mission in Lebanon.”
Rich coming from the world’s number one in state sponsored terrorist country and the supplier of weapons, training and funding to terrorist designated groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and the Yemeni Ansarullah, of which at least three of the terror groups have vowed to destroy Israel by year 2041.
On the 20th September 2024, the Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister for Legal and International Affairs Kazem Gharibabadi had been weighing up plans for political and legal action against the Israeli regime in response to its most recent terrorist attack in Lebanon, which injured Iran’s ambassador to Beirut Tasnim News Agency reported.
On the 23rd September 2024 the Jerusalem Post reported that Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards had banned communication devices after the strikes on Hezbollah, Iranian security officials said.
One of the security officials said a large-scale operation is underway by the IRGC to inspect all devices.
Iran's military uses a range of encrypted communication devices, including walkie-talkies, for secure communication, said the first Iranian source. While specific models and brands might vary, Iranian military communications equipment was often developed domestically or sourced from a combination of local and foreign suppliers, he said.
He said Iran's armed forces had stopped using pagers for over two decades.
Tehran has developed its own military-grade radio transmissions through its defence industry to avoid reliance on foreign imports, especially due to Western sanctions imposed on Tehran over its nuclear program.
Iran conducted a paranoia hunt for anyone that may have been involved in collaborating with Israel. On the 22nd September 2024 reports of twelve people who had been arrested for having alleged dealings with Israel started to surface. Iran had already declared it was going to start and look to see if anyone was living a style above their means and checking certain bank accounts.
Iran was concerned that some of the populations were on Israeli’s payroll while checking mid to high-ranking IRGC officials. “This includes scrutiny of their bank accounts both in Iran and abroad, as well as their travel history and that of their families,” the security official says. How they will distinguish between being on a payroll, corruption and theft will be for the Iranian judicial apparatus to decide.
A security official declined to give details on how the IRGC force, comprising 190,000 personnel, are communicating. "For now, we are using end-to-end encryption in messaging systems," he said.
Conclusion
Paranoia has now set in for all electrical and communication apparatus that Hezbollah, Iran and other Iranian-backed terrorist groups use. There communications network will now probably be down to runners delivering hand held possibly coded messages. This would work totally in Israeli’s favour as runners take time to reach a destination, wait for an answer and return back to the originator. In a war they would risk being shot or bombed resulting in the message not being delivered. This also takes valuable time for any quick decision that would need to be made.
Every electronic device will be mistrusted and stripped down to ensure that it does not contain a Mossad device taking a great deal of time. Even then, they will not trust the device.
As for the threat from Iran and their ‘crushing response’ Israel is still waiting for the same action After they assassinated Hamas’s political leader in Tehran, Ismail Haniyeh and Mohsen Fakhrizadeh the alleged head of Iran's nuclear weapons program who was assassinated on the 27th November 2020 in what was a brilliant operation.
Command and Control (C2) of the Hezbollah terrorist organisation is now devastated until a suitable solution can be found which will take a great deal of time leaving Hezbollah weak, vulnerable and at a disadvantage when attempting to defend itself or retaliate against Israeli forces.
Whilst Hezbollah and other Iranian-backed terrorist groups boast of their drone capabilities Israel remains silent of their skills leading to distrust and paranoia amongst Israels enemies. Even the Iranian security apparatus is a shoddy organisation compared to the Israeli intelligence operation.
The Islamic Republic of Iran and their proxies do not play by any rules or international laws, only by their own and if the opposition gets the better of them, then they turn the tables and claim to be the victim. Hezbollah will now claim to be the victim in an attempt to gain sympathy and turn others against Israel.
Iran and the distance between themselves and Israel have to solely rely on others to conduct their dirty work for them. Without a responsive and active unit or units to fight against Israel they will not be capable of conducting operations to destroy Israel effectively.
Communications at all levels has to be a 100% safe, secure and reliable.
Hezbollah and the Iranian military will be in fear as to what else Israel has tampered with. They will distrust some equipment, production, suppliers and electronic devices. If the pagers can get by scrutiny and sniffer dogs then what has been intercepted with the possibility of being used in the future.
They will suspect anything and everything. Not only will these two terrorist groups be at an immense disadvantage when attempting to carryout their own war against Israel they will be for some time to come wonder how they can achieve a level playing field but how long will it take.
Michael Doran wrote in the Hudson Institute an American non-partisan think tank based in Washington, D.C called the Israeli operation, “Operation Grim Beeper.” Amusing but apt.
Paul Ashley
(Napoleon Bonaparte)
Pagers and Radios, Hezbollah, The Islamic Republic of Iran and The State of Israel
Introduction
The communication system of Iran-backed Hezbollah suffered a huge setback for the terrorist organisation when numerous pagers and hand-held communication systems used by the group exploded causing deaths and numerous casualties.
On the 17th September 2024 pagers used by the group exploded. The Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had some time ago declared the group not to use of mobile phones for fear of being tracked and had resorted to pagers in order to communicate with the group. Pagers although limited in use could still receive data or a message to contact another member of the group. This would be effective against anyone attempting to find the location of an individual or any other compromising information.
Previously the Hezbollah leader Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah had ordered his followers to lock their mobile phones into an iron box. He was paranoid that Israeli secret services would be able to track his followers. The next best method were pagers.
Mossad, the national intelligence agency of the State of Israel has a history of planning elaborate assassinations. Some have been up close and personal while some have been through bombs and missile strikes on targeted individuals, while others have been a little more sophisticated. The first case of using a communications device to target and kill an enemy was on the 6th January 1996. Yahya Ayyash (the Engineer) a Hamas bomb maker had his head blown off by cell phone bomb responding to a call from his father.
Background Prior to the Communications Attack
The Blue Line
The Blue Line serves as a demarcation line dividing Lebanon from Israel and the Golan Heights. It was established by the United Nations on the 7th June 2000, with the purpose of determining whether Israel had fully withdrawn from Lebanon after its occupation. The Blue Line is not a formal border but rather a “line of withdrawal.” It remains the subject of an ongoing border dispute involving Israel, Lebanon, and Hezbollah1. The conflict over this line has historical roots and geopolitical implications, making it a significant point of contention in the region.
Hezbollah Disarm
Hezbollah was required to disarm after the 2006 Israel-Lebanon War by United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1701. This resolution aimed to maintain peace along the Israel-Lebanon border, known as the Blue Line. However, Hezbollah has not fully disarmed, asserting that it will do so only when Israel is no longer a threat to Lebanon and when Palestinians achieve freedom. The Iran-backed terrorist proscribed group rebranded its military wing as an “Islamic Resistance Force” dedicated to the end of Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories thus allowing it to retain its arsenal.
Firas Maksad, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute said UN Resolution 1701, which was intended to resolve the 2006 conflict, bars Israel from conducting military operations in Lebanon, but Israel has repeatedly accused Hezbollah of violating the resolution by smuggling arms into southern Lebanon. “Hezbollah is the first line for deterrence and defence for the Iranian regime and its nuclear program should Israel decide to strike Iran, and it is not going to waste that to try and save Hamas.”
Hezbollah was supposed to pull back from the Lebanon-Israel border by a distance of between five and ten kilometres. This measure aimed to reduce tensions and prevent further escalation in the region
Recent Border Disputes Between the State of Israel and Lebanese Hezbollah
On the 1st July 2023 there was a stand-off on the Israeli/Hezbollah border. Hezbollah was refusing Israeli demands that it dismantles an outpost set up in the disputed hills of Kfarshouba on the border between Lebanon and Israel.
Israeli news sites recently claimed that “Israel is preparing to forcibly remove military points established by Hezbollah on the border with Lebanon.”
MP Mohammed Raad, head of Hezbollah’s parliamentary bloc, said that “the time has passed when the Israelis bombed Osirak nuclear reactor (Operation Opera also known as Operation Babylon an Israeli airstrike conducted by the Israeli Air Force on the 7th June 1981, which destroyed an unfinished Iraqi nuclear reactor located 17 kilometres (11 miles) southeast of Baghdad, Iraq) without batting an eyelid. “Now the Israelis cannot remove two tents because there is strong resistance, strong men, and believers in this country.” In a remark directed at Israel, Raad said: “If you do not want a war, then be quiet.” He added: “Neither you nor anyone else can demand that the resistance removes what belongs to Lebanon.”
The 9th July 2023, Israel stated that Hezbollah had set up more than two dozen military outposts along the countries’ border in violation of international agreements, a development it says risks increasing confrontation.
United Nations Security Council resolution following the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war, armed fighters from Hezbollah are not permitted to enter the border area. Troops from the UN Interim Force in Lebanon — or UNIFIL — are stationed there to make sure both sides keep to the rules. Yet in the past year, Israeli military officials say, those outposts have sprung up along the Blue Line. Israeli officials have said that Hezbollah fighters have long entered the area disguised as civilians, some now wear uniforms and openly carry weapons.
The United Nations operating in the country and along the Blue Line are powerless to enforce any form of authority and have on occasions been attacked by Hezbollah forces.
The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) reported on the 28th December 2023 that they urged Lebanese authorities to conduct a thorough investigation into an assault on one of its peacekeepers in the southern Lebanese village of Taybeh. The incident, reported by UNIFIL on social media platform X, occurred during a patrol when a group of young men attacked the peacekeeper, resulting in injury. The small village is in the Baalbek district an operational area which is controlled by Hezbollah.
In a statement, UNIFIL emphasized the severity of the situation, calling for swift justice against all involved in the attack. The organization highlighted that such assaults on peacekeepers not only defy UN Resolution 1701 but also violate Lebanese law. This incident is part of a troubling pattern of hostility toward UNIFIL peacekeepers in southern Lebanon.
Despite these challenges, UNIFIL affirmed its commitment to maintaining its operations in the region. The statement underscored the importance of peacekeepers’ freedom of movement, which is essential for upholding security and stability along the Blue Line.
United Nations observers were attacked again in March 2024. A translator and UN soldiers were wounded when a shell exploded near them as they were carrying out a foot patrol in south Lebanon. One of the observers was a Norwegian citizen, who was slightly injured, the Nordic country’s defence ministry reported. Lebanon’s National News Agency said the other two wounded observers were Chilean and Australian.
Requests for comment from Hezbollah and the Lebanese Armed Forces went unanswered.
On the 8th October 2023 the day after Hamas and other terrorist organisations massacred hundreds of Israeli’s and took illegal hostages Hezbollah, the armed party backed by Iran, said it had launched guided rockets and artillery onto three posts in the Shebaa Farms “in solidarity” with the Palestinian people. Israeli residents of the areas parallel to the Blue Line, which is 85 km long, were forced to leave their homes and move to safer areas.
The Shebaa Farms, also spelled Sheba'a Farms, also known as Mount Dov, is a strip of land on the Lebanese–Syrian border and currently occupied by Israel. Lebanon claims the Shebaa farms as its own territory, and Syria, not surprisingly, agrees with this position.
The Islamic Republic of Iran decided to step in by claiming that the Israeli regime was exploring new measures in a desperate attempt to distract the world from its bloodbath against children in Gaza and lower the rising international pressure to cease the war. The Tehran Times claimed since the 8th October, one day after Hamas staged Operation al-Aqsa Storm, the Hezbollah resistance movement and the Israeli military had been exchanging fire on a daily basis across the Blue Line.
Randa Slim, Senior Fellow at the Washington-based Middle East Institute said Hezbollah’s two objectives, as stated by Nasrallah (Hassan Nasrallah), will be to put pressure on Israel to stop the war and to assist people in Gaza by forcing Israel to divert some of its resources to the northern border.
Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah said on the 5th January 2024 that his group’s attacks were an “opportunity” for “Lebanon… to liberate every inch of our Lebanese land” along thirteen points of contention on the Blue Line, “from point B1 in Naqoura to Ghajar, to the Shebaa Farms and Kfar Chouba Hills.”
On the 20th September 2024 Fouad Siniora the former Prime Minister of Lebanon claimed that the State of Israel was trying to drag Lebanon and the entire region into a full scale war.
The Lebanese are inadequate to do anything about Hezbollah in case another civil war (1975 -1990) breaks out. The former Lebanese PM really needs to look inward rather than outward. Because of the Lebanese own inadequacies to control Hezbollah operating openly and failing to comply with United Nations resolutions, the Iranian-backed group are able to do as they please. This is the wider threat to the country.
A country where all decisions are made by sectarian consensus and where Hezbollah is the most sizable representative of the Shias—likely Lebanon’s largest single demographic—any restraining mechanism on Hezbollah would require the group’s approval. Hezbollah would unlikely approve any arrangement that would see it restrained, let alone distanced from the Israeli border or disarmed.
Preparation?
Israel for its part have said on numerous occasions since the evacuation of its citizens that it wants its people to return to their homes in the north and will give talks a chance. But if no resolution was to be found to the United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1701 whereby Hezbollah failed to comply, then they would use force to push Hezbollah back and allow those Israelis who live in the north to do so in safety.
Hezbollah on the 8th October 2023 openly came out in support of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group and increased the frequency of missiles and rockets into the north of Israel. Over 60,000 Israeli’s were evacuated from the area and have been displaced since.
The United States issued a travel warning on the 21st September 2024 urging Americans to leave Lebanon as Israel-Hezbollah border attacks intensifies. A number of other countries followed suit.
France on the 12th February 2024 delivered a written proposal to Beirut with the aim of halting hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel. The document requested that Hezbollah fighters’ withdrawal 10km away from the border.
According to Reuters, who stated that the document, the first written proposal brought to Beirut during weeks of Western mediation, was delivered to top Lebanese state officials including Prime Minister Najib Mikati by French Foreign Minister Stephane Sejourne and four senior Lebanese.
Hezbollah rejected formally negotiating a de-escalation until the war in Gaza ends, a position reiterated by a Hezbollah politician in response to questions told Reuters. Obviously, the Iran-backed Hezbollah had other ideas and have continued their barrage of rockets, drones and missiles on Israel.
Why Were the Hezbollah Pagers Detonated?
There are currently several trains of thought regarding why Israel triggered over three thousand Hezbollah pagers.
The first is that there was a possibility that someone in Hezbollah had stumbled on the plot that explosives had been placed in the communication pager. Axios, an American news website said, that Israel had planned to use the exploding pagers as an opening blow in an all-out war against the terror group, but had become concerned in recent days that the booby-trapped devices could be discovered.
The second was that Israel uncovered a plot to attack Israel at the Sea of Galilee. Hezbollah planned to raid Israeli territory, occupy the communities in the Galilee, murder and kill innocents, similar to what the Hamas terror organization carried out in the murderous massacre on the 7th October 2023.” A senior Hezbollah commander, Ibrahim Aqil, was killed in a targeted IDF strike in Lebanon on the 20th September 2024.
IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi said Aqil’s assassination would “shake up” Hezbollah, noting that the terror leader and his commanders had “planned for years to occupy the Galilee, they are responsible for the murder of many Israelis, including soldiers, over the years.”
Echoing comments made by President Isaac Herzog earlier in the day, Halevi said the terror leaders had been “planning how to carry out the next attack — this may be what they were dealing with in that meeting on Friday afternoon — how to infiltrate the State of Israel, murder civilians and kidnap IDF soldiers.”
Aqil, also known as Al-Hajj Abdul Khader, was a member of Hezbollah’s top “military” body, the Jihad Council, which is subordinate to the Shura Council and under the direct control of terrorist leader Hassan Nasrallah. Aqil was also responsible for the Radwan Force commandos in the Sword of Iron war (the war declared by the State of Israel against the Hamas terrorist organization) and led Hezbollah’s tunnel project in Lebanon.
The United States had offered a $7 million bounty for Aqil. In the 1980s, Aqil was a senior member in Hezbollah's cell responsible for the 1983 US embassy bombing and the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings.
The third possible reason could have been a Hezbollah terror attack targeting a senior Israeli defence official using a remotely detonated explosive device. The threat was believed to be carried out within a couple of days of the threat being discovered. The Shin Bet had foiled the recent attempt by Hezbollah to assassinate the former senior Israeli security official using a remotely detonated explosive device. The bomb had a remote detonation system, including a camera and a cellular connection, which would have allowed Hezbollah to activate it from Lebanon according to the Times of Israel.
A fourth motive to initiate the explosives in the pagers and therefore destroying Hezbollah’s ability to communicate making an Israeli invasion into Hezbollah territory easier. Israel has made it a war objective to ensure those who are displaced from the north of Israel should be allowed home. There are over 60,000 displaced Israelis due to rocket, drone and missile attacks by Hezbollah in the north.
17th September 2024 Pager Attack on Hezbollah (The Party of God)
On the 17th September 2024 various outlets reported a breaking news story stating that hundreds of Hezbollah operatives had been wounded because the pagers they were carrying detonated causing deaths and severe injuries. It was also reported that the Iranian ambassador to Beirut, Mojtaba Amani, had been injured. The ambassador's wife said, “My husband has suffered a minor injury. Thank God, he is in a good condition.” Later the New York Times wrote that Amani had, “lost one eye and his other was seriously wounded when a pager he was carrying exploded.”
A Hezbollah official, speaking on condition of anonymity told Al-Arabiya News that the detonation of the pagers was the “biggest security breach” the group had been subjected to in nearly a year of war with Israel. At the time of reporting the pager explosions had been responsible for 2,800 people injured some seriously and there were some fatalities.
The immediate action by Hezbollah and others was to point the finger at the State of Israel with speculation as to why and how this was achieved. Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, said the pagers belonged “to employees of various Hezbollah units and institutions” and confirmed the deaths of eight fighters.
In normal fashion, Israel did not respond.
Hezbollah said an unspecified number of pagers - which the group relies on heavily for communications due to the risk of mobile phones being hacked or tracked - exploded at approximately 1530 hrs local time (1230 hrs GMT) in the capital Beirut and many other areas. Wounds and injuries ranged between the head to the waist and included the face, eyes and hands, a staff member from the LAU Medical Centre in Beirut's Ashrafieh district said, adding: “A lot of casualties have lost fingers, in some cases all of them.” Thousands were left injured, some left blinded with others missing limbs.
The official Hezbollah media office declared eight fighters were dead. It just stated that they were “martyred on the road to Jerusalem,” providing no information about the places or circumstances.
Fourteen people were also wounded by exploding pagers in neighbouring Syria, where Hezbollah is fighting alongside government forces in the country's civil war, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and reported by the BBC.
Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati also blamed Israel for the explosions, saying that they represented a “serious violation of Lebanese sovereignty and a crime by all standards.” Obviously, the launching of rockets, drones and missiles from Lebanon into Israel by Hezbollah is not a crime.
Procurement of the Pagers
Professor Andreas Krieg, Middle East expert, senior lecturer at the School of Security Studies at King's College London, said: 'Regardless of how they sourced it or how they procured this device, Israel has been able to infiltrate and compromise the supply chain.
The bigger picture suggests that the security forces of Israel have managed to penetrate Hezbollah and Iran at a deep level. Israel has had some very successful outcomes against their two enemies. The assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on the 31st July 2024. Fuad Shukr was believed to be a key military adviser to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. On the 30th July 2024, Shukr was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Beirut for his alleged responsibility for the Majdal Shams attack on 27th July that killed 12 Druze children.
Being afraid that the phones used by Hezbollah members to communicate presented a massive security risk, Hezbollah's Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah in February 2024 declared the devices were 'more dangerous than Israeli spies' and his officials began drawing up plans to address gaps in the group's intelligence infrastructure.
In a televised speech on the 13th February 2024, Nasrallah sternly ordered his followers and supporters to break, bury or lock their phones in an iron box.
The group opted to replace the phones its members had previously used to communicate, with pagers - one-way receivers that are more secure than smartphones and do not operate on the same network.
They also have an extremely long battery life, with some models able to last up to three months on one charge - a key advantage given Lebanon's economic crisis and unreliable electricity supply.
Open-source outlets provided some ideas of how the pagers had been procured. The procurement of the message device would also give an idea of how explosives would have been placed in the device without being discovered. But there was a great deal of unknown speculation.
Some reports claimed that the devices had been intercepted prior to delivery while others claimed that the explosives were placed in the pagers by whoever had constructed them. Others believed that the lithium batteries had overheated causing the pagers to explode. But in reality, to have over three thousand pager batteries explode all at the same time through being overheating would be a little farfetched.
There was also talk that Mossad had set up a complexity of shell companies across Europe. Hezbollah would not have been able to purchase pagers due to American sanctions against them and so were limited in their choice.
Lebanon’s United Nations mission after a preliminary investigation by the Lebanese authorities found that the pagers, “were implanted with explosives before arriving in the country.”
Carlos Perez, director of security intelligence at TrustedSec.an American cybersecurity company said, “by the time of the attack, 'the battery was probably half-explosive and half-actual battery.”
A former British Army munitions expert, who asked not to be named, told the BBC the pagers would have likely been packed with between 10g and 20g of military-grade high explosive, hidden inside a fake electronic component.
“Mossad infiltrated the supply chain,” said Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute, referring to Israel’s intelligence agency.
SMEX, a Lebanese digital rights organization, told Reuters that Israel could have exploited a weakness in the device to cause it to explode. It said the pagers could also have been intercepted before reaching Hezbollah and either tampered with electronically or implanted with an explosive device.
Gold Apollo explained that the devices were made by BAC, a Budapest-based firm that has the right to use the Gold Apollo’s brand but is otherwise independent. Gold Apollo authorized “BAC to use our brand trademark for product sales in specific regions, but the design and manufacturing of the products are entirely handled by BAC,” it said in a statement. “The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it,” Gold Apollo’s founder and president, Hsu Ching-kuang, told reporters at the company’s offices in the northern Taiwanese city of New Taipei on the 18th September 2024.
In the end they were all wrong
The Times of Israel ran a story about the pagers on the 22nd September 2024. The pagers had been detonated individually with the attackers knowing who was being targeted and where they were. In a lengthy report quoting Israeli and foreign sources, Israeli Channel 12 News said that those behind the attacks were determined to ensure that only the person carrying the device would be hurt by the blast. “Each pager had its own arrangements. That’s how it was possible to control who was hit and who wasn’t.”
The newspaper report said that at least 30 people had been killed with thousands being injured.
As Nicholas Blanford, a Beirut-based senior fellow of the American think tank, the Atlantic Council, said: “Israel in one fell swoop has rendered combat ineffective hundreds if not thousands of Hezbollah fighters, in some cases permanently.”
The Times continued, quoting an unnamed foreign security source, the report said that “tens of thousands of pagers” were produced and manufactured with the knowledge that they would be checked carefully by the client, Hezbollah.” Interviewed in the report, Ronen Bergman, an investigative reporter for The New York Times and Yedioth Ahronoth, explained that the pagers therefore had to work properly and betray no indication that they had been primed with explosives. Their appearance and weight had to be unchanged, and they needed to be able to pass detection by sniffer dogs.
Ronen Bergman, an investigative reporter for The New York Times and Yedioth Ahronoth said that the whole scheme was dreamed up by a brilliant female intelligence operative, aged less than 30, somewhere in the Middle East.
Whoever was responsible, the report said, decided to set up a factory to build the devices from scratch — so that “it won’t be a device that we will tamper with; it will be a device that we will produce.” The New York Times came to the same conclusion in a report.
The ability to supply the device to Hezbollah was helped by the fact that the terror group is not able to make purchases on the open market, because of suppliers’ fears of sanctions from the United States, and therefore must routinely work with intermediary suppliers.
Amos Yadlin, a former IDF intelligence chief, said more broadly that Israel’s goal was to cause Nasrallah to realize that his attacks on the north of Israel “are costing him more than he’s gaining,” including in terms of support within Lebanon.
According to Michael Doran’s article in the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs, the great genius of the operation was that the Israelis relied on Hezbollah to select their targets for them. If we map the attacked men, we map Hezbollah’s organizational chart, including the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon who is an IRGC officer. The large ratio of maiming to deaths is a sign of success. In military terms, a maiming is preferable because it ties up more resources and stresses enemy systems to a much greater degree.
Hand-Held Radios
After the shock of the pagers exploding the next blow to the Hezbollah communications system was the blast from their hand-held radios. On the 18th September 2024 news outlets announced that Lebanon’s health ministry said 20 people were killed and more than 450 injured on in Beirut’s suburbs and the Bekaa Valley. The Bekaa Vally is a Hezbollah strong hold to the north of Israel and closer to the Syrian border than Israel.
Known as the “reservoir of the resistance,” the Beqaa Valley is Hezbollah’s stronghold of support and a storage location due to its proximity to Syria, a main route for Iran to supply its proxies in the Levant for weapons.
The Guardian wrote, “We consider the south to be the first line of defence for Lebanon, and we in the Beqaa are the second line of defence,” said the mayor of Nabi Chit’s Hezbollah-run municipality, Hassan al-Moussawi. Hezbollah enjoys backing from the Beqaa’s powerful tribes and draws its fighters from the area’s predominantly Shia population.
A Reuters reporter in the southern suburbs of Beirut said he saw Hezbollah members frantically taking batteries out of any walkie-talkies that had not exploded, tossing the parts in metal barrels. Hezbollah turned to pagers and other low-tech communication devices in an attempt to evade Israeli surveillance of mobile phones.
Israel again provided no comment regarding the incident.
The Party of God, Hezbollah, now had no mobile/cell phones, no pagers and no hand-held communication devices while Israel launched an air assault against them. At this stage it is more than likely that ‘runners’ were used to convey messages.
By not being able to use modern technology to communicate with Hezbollah leaders and units would prove to be extremely difficult and using decades old technology to communicate with their fighters. Israel, if they did conduct the pager and hand-held devices, had not only sent the Iranian-backed terrorist group back by decades and rendered any effective modern way of communication distrustful.
Should Iran send Hezbollah any type of advanced communications equipment, it would take weeks, if not months, for a new system to become operational. The attack on Hezbollah communications systems had been thought out and implemented well.
Japanese firm Icom said on the 19th September 2024 that it had stopped producing the model of radios reportedly used in recent blasts in Lebanon around 10 years ago.
“The IC-V82 is a handheld radio that was produced and exported, including to the Middle East, from 2004 to October 2014. It was discontinued about 10 years ago, and since then, it has not been shipped from our company,” Icom said in a statement.
“The production of the batteries needed to operate the main unit has also been discontinued, and a hologram seal to distinguish counterfeit products was not attached, so it is not possible to confirm whether the product shipped from our company,” it said.
“All of our radios are manufactured at our production subsidiary, Wakayama Icom Inc., in Wakayama Prefecture, under a strict management system... so no parts other than those specified by our company are used in a product. In addition, all of our radios are manufactured at the same factory, and we do not manufacture them overseas,” the statement said.
Speaking to Reuters outside the company’s headquarters in Osaka, Yoshiki Enomoto a director at ICOM, said that “there’s no way a bomb could have been integrated into one of our devices during manufacturing. The process is highly automated and fast-paced, so there’s no time for such things.”
Hezbollah Reaction
In a high-profile speech on the 19th September 2024 through the Iranian government-controlled Tehran Times quoted Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah who said the Israeli regime intended to kill thousands of Lebanese people within minutes by exploding pagers and walkie talkies on Tuesday (17 Sep 24) and Wednesday (18 Sep 24).
Nasrallah called the back-to-back attacks “a terrorist act” and a “massacre”.
He also said they were "severe" and "unprecedented" acts and a declaration of war against the people of Lebanon and the country’s sovereignty.
The Times of Israel also quoted the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah who conceded on 19th September that the terror group had suffered a “major and unprecedented” blow this week when thousands of its communications devices suddenly exploded, but vowed that the Lebanon-based terror organization would recover and not lay off its attacks on Israel after months of cross-border fire.
He continued with “they were "severe" and "unprecedented" acts and a declaration of war against the people of Lebanon and the country’s sovereignty.”
Lebanese health minister Firass Abiad added that the death toll from the two waves of pager and walkie-talkie attacks across the country has risen to 37 while 287 people are in a critical condition.
Nasrallah was now claiming to be the victim whereas it was he who started to attack Israel on the 8th October 2023. The Israeli’s up until this point had been patient.
The Islamic Republic of Iran Steps In
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) warned Israel on the 19th September 2024 that it will face a “crushing response from the resistance front” after thousands of communication devices used by Hezbollah in Lebanon had exploded.
IRGC head Hossein Salami said in a message to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, quoted by state media said, “Such terrorist acts, that are undoubtedly due to the desperation and successive failures of the Zionist regime, will soon be met with a crushing response from the resistance front.”
You will notice that Salami had said, “resistance front” and not from Iran itself.
The same rhetoric that the IRGC General said when Ismail Haniyeh the Political leader of Hamas was assassinated on the 31st July 2024. Israel is still waiting for that ‘crushing response’.
The Tehran Times wrote, “Israel is once more escalating tensions towards a potential large-scale conflict with Lebanon’s Hezbollah amid the regime’s desperate attempts to distract attention from its unsuccessful nearly yearlong war in Gaza.” The paper also went on to accuse Lebanon’s pager bombings on the CIA working hand in glove with Mossad.
Amir Saeid Iravani, Iran’s Ambassador to the UN, told United Nations that it reserves the right to respond to the recent act of sabotage and terrorism by the rogue Israeli regime in Lebanon, after Tehran’s ambassador was injured in one of the explosions in Beirut. “The Islamic Republic of Iran will duly follow up on the attack against its ambassador in Lebanon, which resulted in his injury, and reserves its rights under international law to take required measures deemed necessary to respond to such a heinous crime and violation,” Iravani wrote, Iranian government-controlled Press TV reported. There was no indication as to how Iran was going to achieve the right to respond.
Iravani continued, “The UN Secretary General and the Security Council must condemn unequivocally Israel’s terrorist action and heinous crime against the head of Iran's diplomatic mission in Lebanon.”
Rich coming from the world’s number one in state sponsored terrorist country and the supplier of weapons, training and funding to terrorist designated groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and the Yemeni Ansarullah, of which at least three of the terror groups have vowed to destroy Israel by year 2041.
On the 20th September 2024, the Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister for Legal and International Affairs Kazem Gharibabadi had been weighing up plans for political and legal action against the Israeli regime in response to its most recent terrorist attack in Lebanon, which injured Iran’s ambassador to Beirut Tasnim News Agency reported.
On the 23rd September 2024 the Jerusalem Post reported that Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards had banned communication devices after the strikes on Hezbollah, Iranian security officials said.
One of the security officials said a large-scale operation is underway by the IRGC to inspect all devices.
Iran's military uses a range of encrypted communication devices, including walkie-talkies, for secure communication, said the first Iranian source. While specific models and brands might vary, Iranian military communications equipment was often developed domestically or sourced from a combination of local and foreign suppliers, he said.
He said Iran's armed forces had stopped using pagers for over two decades.
Tehran has developed its own military-grade radio transmissions through its defence industry to avoid reliance on foreign imports, especially due to Western sanctions imposed on Tehran over its nuclear program.
Iran conducted a paranoia hunt for anyone that may have been involved in collaborating with Israel. On the 22nd September 2024 reports of twelve people who had been arrested for having alleged dealings with Israel started to surface. Iran had already declared it was going to start and look to see if anyone was living a style above their means and checking certain bank accounts.
Iran was concerned that some of the populations were on Israeli’s payroll while checking mid to high-ranking IRGC officials. “This includes scrutiny of their bank accounts both in Iran and abroad, as well as their travel history and that of their families,” the security official says. How they will distinguish between being on a payroll, corruption and theft will be for the Iranian judicial apparatus to decide.
A security official declined to give details on how the IRGC force, comprising 190,000 personnel, are communicating. "For now, we are using end-to-end encryption in messaging systems," he said.
Conclusion
Paranoia has now set in for all electrical and communication apparatus that Hezbollah, Iran and other Iranian-backed terrorist groups use. There communications network will now probably be down to runners delivering hand held possibly coded messages. This would work totally in Israeli’s favour as runners take time to reach a destination, wait for an answer and return back to the originator. In a war they would risk being shot or bombed resulting in the message not being delivered. This also takes valuable time for any quick decision that would need to be made.
Every electronic device will be mistrusted and stripped down to ensure that it does not contain a Mossad device taking a great deal of time. Even then, they will not trust the device.
As for the threat from Iran and their ‘crushing response’ Israel is still waiting for the same action After they assassinated Hamas’s political leader in Tehran, Ismail Haniyeh and Mohsen Fakhrizadeh the alleged head of Iran's nuclear weapons program who was assassinated on the 27th November 2020 in what was a brilliant operation.
Command and Control (C2) of the Hezbollah terrorist organisation is now devastated until a suitable solution can be found which will take a great deal of time leaving Hezbollah weak, vulnerable and at a disadvantage when attempting to defend itself or retaliate against Israeli forces.
Whilst Hezbollah and other Iranian-backed terrorist groups boast of their drone capabilities Israel remains silent of their skills leading to distrust and paranoia amongst Israels enemies. Even the Iranian security apparatus is a shoddy organisation compared to the Israeli intelligence operation.
The Islamic Republic of Iran and their proxies do not play by any rules or international laws, only by their own and if the opposition gets the better of them, then they turn the tables and claim to be the victim. Hezbollah will now claim to be the victim in an attempt to gain sympathy and turn others against Israel.
Iran and the distance between themselves and Israel have to solely rely on others to conduct their dirty work for them. Without a responsive and active unit or units to fight against Israel they will not be capable of conducting operations to destroy Israel effectively.
Communications at all levels has to be a 100% safe, secure and reliable.
Hezbollah and the Iranian military will be in fear as to what else Israel has tampered with. They will distrust some equipment, production, suppliers and electronic devices. If the pagers can get by scrutiny and sniffer dogs then what has been intercepted with the possibility of being used in the future.
They will suspect anything and everything. Not only will these two terrorist groups be at an immense disadvantage when attempting to carryout their own war against Israel they will be for some time to come wonder how they can achieve a level playing field but how long will it take.
Michael Doran wrote in the Hudson Institute an American non-partisan think tank based in Washington, D.C called the Israeli operation, “Operation Grim Beeper.” Amusing but apt.
Paul Ashley
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