Israel planted explosives in a Taiwan-made Hezbollah fence, Reuters reported

Israel’s Mossad spy agency planted explosives inside 5,000 fences imported by the Lebanese group Hezbollah a month before Tuesday’s detonation that killed nine people, a senior Lebanese security source and other sources told Reuters.

The operation, which ran from Taiwan to Budapest, was an unprecedented security breach by Hezbollah, which caused thousands of fences to explode in Lebanon, killing nearly 3,000 people, including many of the group’s fighters and Iran’s envoy to Beirut.

A Lebanese security source said the pager was from Taiwan-based Gold Apollo, but the company said it did not manufacture the device. He said it was made by a company called BAC – based in the Hungarian capital – which has a license to use the brand, but gave no further details.

Iran-backed Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate against Israel, whose military declined to comment on the blast.

The fence blast comes at a time of growing concern over tensions between Israel and Hezbollah, which have been engaged in cross-border fighting since the Gaza conflict erupted last October.

While the war in Gaza has been Israel’s main focus since the October 7 attack by armed men led by Hamas, the precarious situation along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon has raised fears of a regional conflict that could drag in the United States and Iran.

“Hezbollah wants to avoid an all-out war. It still wants to avoid one. But given the scale, the impact on families, on civilians, there will be pressure for a strong response,” said Mohanad Hage Ali of Carnegie Middle East. center.

Hezbollah said in a statement on Friday that “the resistance will continue today, like any other day, the operation to support Gaza, the people and the resistance which is a separate path from the harsh punishment that the criminal enemy (Israel) must wait for in response to the massacre on Tuesday”.

The plot appears to have been going on for months, several sources told Reuters. It follows a series of assassinations of Hezbollah and Hamas commanders and leaders blamed on Israel since the Gaza war.

The trail leads to Budapest

A senior Lebanese security source said the group had ordered 5,000 fences from Gold Apollo, which some sources said were brought into the country earlier this year.

Gold Apollo founder Hsu Ching-Kuang said the fence used in the explosion was made by a company in Europe called Gold Apollo in a statement as BAC.

“The product is not ours. There is only our brand,” Hsu told reporters at the company’s office in the northern Taiwanese city of New Taipei on Wednesday.

The address for BAC Consulting in Budapest is a peach building on a mostly residential street in the outer suburbs. The company name is affixed to the glass door on an A4 sheet.

A person in the building who asked not to be named said BAC Consulting is registered at the address but is not physically there. Several other companies are also registered at the address although none responded to calls and physical inquiries from Reuters.

The CEO of BAC Consulting, Cristiana Barsony-Arcidiacono said on her LinkedIn profile that she has worked as a consultant for various organizations including UNESCO. He did not respond to an email from Reuters. The company’s website makes no reference to manufacturers.

A senior Lebanese security source identified a photo of the pager model, AP-924, which like other pagers wirelessly receives and displays text messages but cannot make calls.

Hezbollah fighters have been using pagers as a low-tech means of communication in an attempt to evade Israeli location tracking, two sources familiar with the group’s operations told Reuters this year.

But a senior Lebanese source said the device had been modified by Israel’s spy service “at a production level.”

“Mossad injected a place inside the device that has an explosive that receives a code. It is very difficult to detect it in any way. Even with a device or a scanner,” said the source.

The source said 3,000 fences exploded when a coded message was sent to them, simultaneously activating the explosives.

Another security source told Reuters that up to three grams of explosives were hidden in the new fence and “could not be detected” by Hezbollah for months.

Israel’s Mossad spy agency has a reputation for conducting sophisticated operations, has been blamed for cyber attacks and is suspected of being behind the assassination of a top Iranian scientist with a remote-controlled machine gun.

Israeli officials did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.

Security failure

Hezbollah reeling from the attack, which left fighters and others bloodied, hospitalized or dead. One Hezbollah official said the detonation was the group’s “biggest security breach” since the Gaza conflict began.

“This will easily be the biggest counterintelligence failure by Hezbollah in decades,” said Jonathan Panikoff, the former deputy US national intelligence official for the Middle East.

In February, Hezbollah drew up a war plan aimed at addressing gaps in the group’s intelligence infrastructure. About 170 fighters have been killed in targeted Israeli strikes in Lebanon, including one senior commander and a top Hamas official in Beirut.

In a televised address on February 13, the group’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah sternly warned supporters that their phones are more dangerous than Israeli spies, saying they should be destroyed, buried or locked in iron boxes.

Instead, the group chose to spread the fence to Hezbollah members in various branches of the group – from fighters to medics working in aid services.

The explosion killed many Hezbollah members, according to footage from the hospital seen by Reuters. The injured have injuries of various degrees on the face, missing fingers and gaping wounds on the hip where the fence was likely broken.

A missile attack by Hezbollah the day after October 7 opened the latest phase of the conflict and since then there has been a daily exchange of rockets, artillery fire and missiles, with Israeli jets striking Lebanese territory.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Friday that the window has closed for a diplomatic solution to the standoff with Hezbollah.

Concerns about a wider conflict in the Middle East have prompted international airlines to suspend flights to the region or avoid airspace.

However, experts said they did not see the fence explosion as a sign that an Israeli ground attack was imminent.

However, this is a sign of Israeli intelligence’s penetration of Hezbollah.

“It shows Israel’s ability to infiltrate the enemy in a dramatic way,” said Paul Pillar, a 28-year veteran of the US intelligence community, particularly at the CIA.