• Children among at least 26 dead, more than 3,000 hurt after walkie-talkies, pagers explode over two days across the country
• Security sources say pagers were ‘sabotaged at source’; Taiwanese firm claims it didn’t manufacture devices that exploded
• Hezbollah vows revenge; US cautions against any further escalation

BEIRUT: A day after exploding pager devices — thought to have been triggered by Israel — caused a wave of casualties across Lebanon, a second wave of explosions in hand-held communications devices hit the country on Wedne­sday, stoking fears of an all-out war in the region.

Lebanon’s health ministry said 14 people had been killed and 450 injured on Wednesday, while the death toll from the previous day’s explosions rose to 12, including two children, with nearly 3,000 injured.

A pager is a wireless telecommunications device that receives and displays messages, and were used for wireless communicat­ion in the 1990s, before mobile phones became cheap and widely available.

The latest wave of explosions is said to have targeted walkie-talkie devices being used by members of Hezbollah in Beirut and other parts of the country.

Hezbollah said Israel was “fully responsible for this criminal aggression” and reiterated it would avenge the attack, while vowing to continue its fight against Israel in support of Hamas in Gaza.

The peculiar wave of attacks, weaponising the very low-tech paging devices used by Lebanese groups to evade Israeli location-tracking, drew widespread global condemnation for threatening to inflame tensions in the simmering Middle East.

United Nations Secretary-General Ant­onio Guterres said that civilian objects should not be weaponised, while the Kremlin warned this could become a trigger for a wider regional conflict.

In Egypt to meet with officials participating in Gaza truce talks, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Washington was warned against “any actions that could escalate the conflict”.

The plot appears to have been many months in the making, several sources told Reuters.

Experts said Israeli ope­r­atives had likely planted explosives on the paging devices before they were delivered to Hezbollah.

A source close to Hezb­o­llah, asking not to be identified, told AFP the pagers were “recently imported” and appeared to have been “sabotaged at source”.

One Hezbollah official said the detonation was the group’s “biggest security breach” in its history.

Exploding walkie-talkies

Footage showed people running for cover when an explosion went off during a funeral for a Hezbollah member in south Beirut on Wednesday afternoon.

Lebanon’s health ministry said the initial casualty toll was one person killed and more than 100 injured. Earlier the state news agency said three people had died.

A Reuters reporter in the southern suburbs of Beirut said he saw Hezbollah members frantically taking out the batteries of any walkie-talkies on them that had not exploded, tossing the parts in metal barrels.

Images of the exploded walkie-talkies examined by Reuters showed an inside panel labeled “ICOM” and “made in Japan.” According to its website, ICOM is a Japan-based radio communications and telephone company.

The company has said that production of several models of the ICOM hand-held radio have been discontinued, including the IC-V82, which appeared to closely match those in images from Lebanon on Wednesday and which was phased out in 2014.

The hand-held radios were purchased by Hez­bollah five months ago, around the same time that the pagers were bought, a security source said.

Pager blasts

Israel’s Mossad spy agency planted explosives inside 5,000 pagers imported by Hezbollah months before Tuesday’s detonations, a senior Lebanese security official and another source told Reuters.

Some of the detonations took place after the pagers rang, causing the fighters to put their hands on them or bring them up to their faces to check the screens.

The blasts were relatively contained, according to footage reviewed by Reuters, and only appeared to wound the person wearing the pager or closest to them.

The explosions maimed many Hezbollah members, according to footage from hospitals reviewed by Reuters. Wounded men had injuries of varying degrees to the face, missing fingers and gaping wounds at the hip where the pagers were likely worn.

While Hezbollah said it was carrying out a “security and scientific investigation” into the causes of the blasts, diplomatic and security sources speculated that the explosions could have been caused by the devices’ batteries detonating, possibly through overheating.

But others said that Israel might have infiltrated the supply chain for Hezbollah’s pagers. The New York Times reported that Israel hid explosive material within a new batch of the pagers before they were imported to Lebanon.

The pagers bore brand markings of Taiwan-based firm Gold Apollo, but the company said in a statement it did not manufacture the devices. It claimed they were made by a company called BAC, which has a licence to use its brand, but gave no more details.

Published in Dawn, September 19th, 2024