On Tuesday, 17th September 2024 around 15:30 local time, thousands of pagers exploded across southern Lebanon and Syria, killing 12 people, at least two of them children, and wounding over 3000. The next day, 18th September, another round of communication devices detonated, this time walkie-talkies, killing a further 20 people and injuring at least 450, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry. It quickly became apparent that these devices had been intercepted at some stage in the global supply chain, had small amounts of explosives inserted, and had been rigged to explode remotely. The target was Hezbollah, many of the victims were innocent bystanders, and the attackers were almost certainly Unit 504 of Israeli military intelligence and Mossad, the Israeli state intelligence agency.
The pagers received a message purporting to be from Hezbollah leadership seconds before they detonated, often in crowded areas. What followed were reports of horrific facial, hand and thigh injuries, the end result of an attack where even the placement of the device close to the face, at time of explosion, was meticulously planned to cause the most damage to the victim. The next day, hundreds of walkie-talkies exploded during crowded gatherings to mourn the dead and tend to the wounded. No regard was given to bystanders, and Human Rights Watch promptly released a statement on the illegality of booby traps.
In cybersecurity, they call this kind of operation a targeted hardware supply chain attack, and they are almost entirely the purview of nation state sponsored advanced persistent threats. The term “targeted attack” is doing a lot of heavy lifting, and conversely, one of the biggest problems faced by cybersecurity is identifying the attacker; certainty is rare, but everyone leaves footprints or fingerprints, and those can be tagged, analysed, collated, run through a database for similar signatures, and tracked.
The chain of events that led to this attack even being possible is convoluted. From Hezbollah using pagers and hand-held two-way radios after giving up cell phones due to targeted assassinations, to Israeli shell companies in Hungary and Bulgaria. ICOM Inc., the Japanese company that manufactured the walkie-talkies, made a statement claiming the model used in the attack, the IC-V82s, has not been produced by them for over 10 years, and Taiwanese manufacturer Gold Apollo’s founder Hsu Ching-Kuang claims the pager design and logo had been licensed to BAC, a Hungarian-based company, which turned out to be nothing more than a postal address and whose’ listed director is supposedly under Hungarian security service protection following the attack. A Norwegian-Indian man, owner of a Sofia based company reportedly linked to the pagers, walked out of a work conference in Boston and disappeared. What is almost certain is that military grade explosives were used.
What is even more damning is the phone call made by Israeli Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant to U.S. Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin minutes before the explosives were triggered, ostensibly to warn its ally of the impending attack and not leave them totally in the dark. How much truth there is to that statement I leave up to the reader.
All this comes just four years after the 4th August 2020 Beirut warehouse explosion, a horrifying day still fresh in the minds of many in Lebanon, in which 218 people died and over 7000 were injured. People have been urging each other to
throw away their phones, confused reports of solar installations exploding, and even laptops were claimed to have been booby trapped, all leading to an escalation of state sponsored terror on the local populace, and as many of these reports have proven to be false, this heavily indicates an opportunistic psyop, at the very least. In the days following the pager and radio attacks, the reason became clear: disrupt Hezbollah communications and leave them in disarray, priory to a full-on assault on northern Israel and Lebanon. This area is home to the majority of the 174,000 Palestinian refugees and their descendants who fled to Lebanon after the 1967 Naksa.
Over a month after the initial bombings and the death toll has skyrocketed, with no sign of a ceasefire. Israel has exported its genocide of the Palestinian people to neighbouring countries, not happy having already stolen their land and further hunting a marginalised yet, what must be galling to them, still defiant people, all while terrorising innocent civilians and starting a war with Iran. As the region further destabilises, one thing is sure: it’s the everyday people caught in the crossfire that are suffering and dying.
Comments