How Israel Planted Explosives in Thousands of Hezbollah Pagers

Israel’s intelligence service planted explosives in several thousand pagers that Hezbollah had ordered from Taiwan, Reuters has reported in the wake of deadly pager explosions that killed nine in Lebanon earlier this week.

Among those injured in the Tuesday explosions was Iran’s envoy to Lebanon, which might prompt another threat from Iran to Israel in what would be the latest step in a long escalation dance and one more bullish factor for oil amid a scarcity of bullish factors.

According to Reuters sources who remained unnamed, “The Mossad injected a board inside of the device that has explosive material that receives a code. It's very hard to detect it through any means. Even with any device or scanner.”

Such a code was sent to 3,000 of the low-tech devices that Hezbollah uses for communication and those exploded simultaneously, the Reuters sources said, with one noting that Mossad had concealed up to 3 grams of explosive material in each pager.

“This would easily be the biggest counterintelligence failure that Hezbollah has had in decades,” a former U.S. deputy national intelligence officer for the Middle East told Reuters.

Following the attack, Lebanese authorities and Hezbollah itself blamed it on Israel, even before the information about the pagers emerged, and Hezbollah said it would retaliate. The Lebanese authorities noted that there were civilians among the victims.

“It sends a significant message to Hezbollah leadership that, ‘We can get you anywhere,’” Randa Slim, a director at the Middle East Institute think tank in Washington, told the Wall Street Journal. “And it very much affects morale.”

“The war on the border is no longer on the border—with this attack it has expanded into their homes and shopping places around Lebanon,” Slim also said.

Israel has already signaled it does not mind using forceful means to return people evacuated from the northern part of the country, which borders Lebanon, to their homes, to which end Hezbollah attacks in the area must be stopped.

By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com

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