Israel has allegedly been preparing for years to attack Hezbollah using pagers and electronic mining devices. To do so, it set up a shell company in Hungary that posed as a European company.
According to information published in the New York Times, Israel allegedly financed a Hungarian company that produced various devices for several years.
This decision was motivated by concerns from Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah that Israel could use modern technology, such as mobile phones, to track and destroy targets in Lebanon. Hezbollah leaders insisted that their members use pagers, considering them more secure than mobile phones. This decision was also intended to prevent possible spying by Israeli intelligence services.
Journalists claim that the Hungarian company BAC Consulting has signed a contract with the Taiwanese company Gold Apollo to produce the devices. In addition to this, two other shell companies were created to conceal Israeli involvement in production. Although BAC produced pagers for general users, Hezbollah remained the company’s main customer, for which special copies were produced. The main feature of these pagers was that their batteries were filled with PETN explosives.
The first pagers began arriving in Lebanon in the summer of 2022 in limited numbers. Production quickly ramped up after Hassan Nasrallah publicly declared that mobile phones were unsafe.
Hezbollah leaders believed that Israel could spy on its members remotely through smartphone cameras and microphones, and that encrypted apps were no longer safe. Nasrallah ordered his subordinates to switch to simpler devices: pagers, which were purchased from the BAC company.
US intelligence services, cited by the New York Times, claim that the supply of pagers to Lebanon increased in the summer of 2024. Hezbollah saw them as a way to defend itself against Israeli hackers, while Israel already then called the pagers “buttons” that could be activated at the right moment.
On the eve of the attack, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would do everything possible to bring home the 70,000 Israelis forced from their homes due to fighting with Hezbollah. On September 17, the order was given to activate the pagers. According to the New York Times, Israel sent a message in Arabic to the devices of Hezbollah members that appeared to come from the group’s top leadership. After this, the pagers beeped that a message had been received and explosions immediately occurred.
Previously, Kursor reported how Israel assesses Hezbollah’s losses as a result of the pager explosions.
