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Last February Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the Lebanese Shiite pro-Iranian party Hezbollah, had ordered its members to get rid of any mobile phone: «they’re deadly agents». It seems like it was precisely a phone call that doomed Fuad Shukr, military leader of the Party of God, who was killed last July in an Israeli targeted strike in Beirut.
In order to elude Israeli sophisticated spying techniques, Hezbollah leaders resorted to more traditional means, as old Internet-free devices. But this wasn’t enough: on 17th and 18th September, two waves of explosions activated by pagers and walkie-talkies hit soldiers and civilians throughout all of Lebanon and Syria. Despite the small quantity of explosive each device held (1-2 ounces), there were more than thirty deaths and over two thousand injured.
According to reconstructions, the pagers’ explosion was caused by one message, which made them beep. This led many people to pick them up or bring them close to the face: this is why hospitals faced several damages to the limbs and blindness for approximately five hundred people. Israel didn’t claim the strike, but everything points towards them: they have the required intelligence capability for the operation, and they promised they would aggravate their attacks against Southern Lebanon to restore order and bring back home the over sixty thousand displaced people in Upper Galilee.
Lebanese authorities state that the pagers had been sabotaged before their distribution throughout the country.
So, at which point of the production chain did Israeli intelligence manage to infiltrate? The AR924 pagers that exploded come from Gold Apollo, a Taiwanese company which dissociated itself from the manufacturing, since it had been outsourced to the Hungarian company BAC Consulting.
Some Israeli officials told the New York Times that the Budapest-based company, founded in 2022, is actually a shell corporation created by Israeli secret services to produce sabotage pagers and hand them over to Hezbollah. Icom, the walkie-talkies company, in turn stated that IC-V28 prototypes (whose production has reached deadlock in 2014) are very frequently counterfeit.
This is not the first time the Mossad (the Israeli intelligence agency specialized in foreign operations) astonishes everyone. It was them that in 1960 found, arrested and moved to Israel Adolf Eichmann, a nazi official hiding in Germany under the name of Ricardo Klement. David Ben Gurion (Israel’s founder and prime minister) himself had required his arrest, while prime minister Golda Meir agreed to 1972 Operation “Wrath of God”, in response to the slaughter of Israel athletes at that year’s Olympic Games in Munich.
In that case, Mossad’s goal was to get rid of the leader of Palestinian terrorist organization Black September: the operation began with the killing of interpreter Wael Zwaiter in Rome, and ended in 1979 with the murder of leader Ali Hassan Salameh in Beirut. Meanwhile, author Mahmoud Hamshari was eliminated too in Paris, since he was believed to be the number-two man in Black September. He died because of a fake journalist’s phone call, which activated the remotely controlled bomb under his desk. Something similar happened several years later with Hamas prominent member Yahya Abd al Latif Ayyash (nicknamed “the Engineer” due to his skill in assembling bombs), who was killed in 1996 by nitrosamines hidden in his mobile phone.
Apart from targeting the leaders of Hamas, Mossad has lately been focusing on sabotaging the Iranian nuclear program.
In 2018, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu unveiled some of the 55 thousand classified documents and 183 CD-ROMs seized by Israeli intelligence from a storage in Teheran. In 2020, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh (the physicist and general in charge of Iran’s nuclear program) was killed by a machine gun, which was remotely controlled through artificial intelligence. Israel didn’t claim the murder, just like they never disclosed their involvement in the 2021 sabotage of the Natanz nuclear site: a cybernetic attack by the Mossad allegedly damaged and in some cases destroyed centrifuges in the underground nuclear site, which were essential to uranium enrichment.
While what happened in Lebanon to Hezbollah soldiers was unexpected, it wasn’t the first time the Israeli intelligence counterfeited and took advantage of technology for their purposes. Likewise, it’s not uncommon for the Mossad to neither confirm nor deny their involvement in the operation; and it isn’t uncommon the attention for the spectacular nature of it, either.
However, it’s the first instance of such an extended civilian-impacting scope. This follows a precise strategy: as history tells us, intelligence operations always comply with government needs, from Ben Gurion to Golda Meir, up to “Bibi” Netanyahu. The current prime minister has already commanded one of the intelligence most daring and disastrous operations, which is to say injecting lethal poison inside Hamas leader Khaled Meshal’s ear in Amman, Jordan. The two appointed agents were arrested and Israel had to give the antidote to the Jordanian king.
Nevertheless, now Netanyahu seems more resolute: as Iran rearranges the ranks of the Axis of Resistance, banning communication devices and verifying the safety of their military equipment, the IDF carried out air raids on Southern and Eastern Lebanon on 23rd September, hitting 1,300 Hezbollah targets and killing over 500 people, including at least 30 children. Perhaps, one could say that the originality of this operation in Lebanon isn’t to be found in its circumstances, instigators or goals; it’s the consequences that will make the latest Israeli intelligence strike one of a kind.
