By Laila Bassam and Maya Gebeily
BEIRUT (Reuters) – Israeli Mossad spy agents planted some explosives inside 5,000 Taiwanese-made fences ordered by the Lebanese group Hezbollah months before Tuesday’s detonation, a senior Lebanese security source and other sources told Reuters.
The operation was an unprecedented security breach by Hezbollah that caused thousands of fences to explode in Lebanon, killing nine people and wounding nearly 3,000 others, including the group’s fighters and Iran’s envoy to Beirut.
Iran-backed Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate against Israel, whose military declined to comment on the blast.
The plot appears to have been going on for months, several sources told Reuters.
A senior Lebanese security source said the group had ordered 5,000 beepers made by Taiwan-based Gold Apollo, which some sources said were brought to the country earlier this year.
A senior Lebanese security source identified a photo of the pager model, AP924, 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 effort 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.
Neither Israel nor Gold Apollo immediately responded to Reuters’ request for comment.
Images of the vandalized fence analyzed by Reuters show a format and stickers on the back consistent with fences made by Gold Apollo, based in Taipei.
Hezbollah reeling from the attack, which left fighters and others bloodied, hospitalized or dead. One Hezbollah official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the detonation was the group’s “biggest security breach” since the Gaza conflict between Israel and Hezbollah’s ally Hamas erupted on October 7.
“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.
BREAK YOUR PHONE, GROUP ORDER
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.
However, 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.
“We were really hit hard,” said a senior Lebanese security source, who has direct knowledge of the group’s investigation into the explosion.
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.
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.
Hezbollah says it does not seek a wider war but will fight if Israel launches it.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Friday that the window was closing for a diplomatic solution to the standoff with the Iran-backed Hezbollah movement in southern Lebanon.
However, experts said they did not see the fence explosion as a sign that an Israeli ground attack was imminent.
However, it was a sign of Israeli intelligence looking deep into 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.
