Hezbollah was so confident that its brand new pagers were safe, it was still handing them out to members hours before thousands of the devices blew up this week, according to a new report.
One member of the Iranian-backed terror group received a new Gold Apollo pager on Monday that exploded the next day while it was still in its box, sources told Reuters.
A pager given to a senior member just days earlier injured a subordinate when it detonated, another source said.
The deadly blasts occurred despite Hezbollah routinely conducting security sweeps of its communication devices, including traveling through airports to see if the beepers would set off alarms.
But a security source told Reuters that it was tough to spot the explosives “with any device or scanner.” It’s not clear what type of scanners the Taiwan-based pagers were run through.
The small devices — and hundreds of walkie-talkies that blew up en masse the next day — were secretly loaded with tiny amounts of PETN, a highly explosive compound, that was made to overheat and blow up.
Both Hezbollah and Lebanese officials have blamed Israel for the explosions that erupted across the country in back-to-back attacks Tuesday and Wednesday that killed at least 22 people, including two children, and left more than 3,200 others injured.
The Jewish state allegedly tampered with a new shipment of pagers and walkie-talkies bound for Hezbollah five months ago, equipping the devices with explosive materials that were detonated when a message impersonating the terror group’s leadership was sent out.
Israel has declined to comment on the allegations.
The attack, which saw civilians caught up in the widespread blasts, raised concerns that a two-front war was inevitable as it represented a massive escalation in the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.
Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah said the alleged Israeli attack that caused thousands of the terror group’s pagers and walkie-talkies to explode was tantamount to “a declaration of war.”
In his first speech since the attacks, Nasrallah slammed the Jewish state for allegedly masterminding what he described as a “massacre.”
“What happened on Tuesday constitutes a violation of all laws and red lines, without regard for anything, neither humanitarian nor ethical,” the terror chief said, according to a Telegraph translation.
The terror group began attacking Israel on Oct. 8 in solidarity with Hamas, with daily missile strikes between the two intensifying ever since.
The conflict has forced tens of thousands to evacuate northern Israel and southern Lebanon, with IDF officials repeatedly stating they were prepared for a multi-front war against Iran’s terror proxies.
