The plan by Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service that confronts foreign threats, to give Hezbollah pagers booby-trapped with explosives was years in the making, according to a new report.
Numerous Israeli, Arab, and U.S. security officials and politicians spoke with The Washington Post about how the operation — which only Israel knew about — was carried out in Lebanon and Syria.
In 2015, Israel began covertly selling Hezbollah with booby-trapped walkie talkies that featured hidden explosives that were virtually undetectable and a transmission system that allowed Israel total access to Hezbollah’s communications.
Several years later, Mossad decided to try to sell the Iranian-backed terrorist group pagers, also booby-trapped with explosives.
Because the terrorist group was already paranoid about Israeli infiltration, they would not purchase any products made in Israel, the U.S., or other allied nations.
Mossad decided to sell Hezbollah Apollo pagers, made by a Taiwanese company that was well established and had no knowledge of plan.
The sales pitch came from a woman two years ago who worked in the Middle East and had created her own company to sell Apollo products. She was already trusted by Hezbollah and was completely unaware of Mossad’s plot.
The terrorist group fell in love with the AR924 pager after she told them that it was a rugged model designed to survive battlefield conditions, was waterproof, had a battery that could last months, could be charged with a cable, and had an encryption feature that would protect communications from Israeli surveillance.
Hezbollah purchased 5,000 pagers and started giving them to mid-level operatives and logistics personnel in early 2024.
Unknown to Hezbollah and to their trusted sales rep, the devices were secretly manufactured in Israel by Mossad. The explosives were so well hidden that they were not detectable once disassembled or by X-ray.
One of the most ingenious features of the device was that its encryption feature required users to press buttons with both hands simultaneously to read the messages.
When Israel decided to detonate the devices on September 17, Mossad first sent out an encrypted message to the pagers. Terrorists who picked up the devices had to use both hands to push the buttons on the device to read the message and, when they did, their fingers and hands were blown off, rendering them useless on the battlefield.
Less than a minute later, Mossad sent out a signal that forced the detonation of all the remaining pagers whose owners had not yet pressed the buttons on the devices to read the devices. The result was hundreds of terrorists getting their genitals blown off by pagers that were inside their pant pockets.
Approximately 3,000 Hezbollah fighters were injured or killed by the exploding pagers.
By the next day, Hezbollah had switched to using only walkie talkies — the very ones that Israel had previously sold to the group nearly a decade earlier. Mossad detonated the walkie talkies, which carried a much larger explosive charge that blew up cars and rooms inside buildings.
