2024-09-18 21:47:06
Lebanon was stunned on Tuesday by completely unprecedented pager explosions belonging to members of the Hezbollah organization. Former Israeli Mossad intelligence officer Gad Shimron compares the targeted explosions of these communication devices to a kind of modern version of the beginning of a war in the 21st century.
The device explosions injured more than two thousand members of the organization that is at war with Israel. At least twelve are dead, according to reports from Lebanon, but dozens of people are in critical condition. Some have serious injuries.
Those looking at the beeping pager lost sight or part of their face. People who had the device in their pockets or attached to their pants are injured on their lower limbs or have had their testicles and penis torn off by the explosion.
Former Mossad officer Gad Shimron. | Photo: Martin Novák
“It’s a so-called first and only chance weapon. You can’t use it a second time because the enemy will prepare for it. It’s a strategic strike, but I believe that Israeli intelligence has received information that Hezbollah will detect this weapon. That someone found the operation of the pager strange and there was a threat that they would find out that something was wrong. This may have led the Israelis to launch the action, but it is only my assumption,” Gad Šimron explains to Aktuálně.cz.
The former Mossad officer did not want to speculate yet on what caused the explosions. If someone put explosives in the pagers, or if it was a change in the software, for example. “We will know in the coming days. No doubt there will be some credible analysis of the hit pagers,” says the man, who was involved in an operation to save Ethiopian Jews in the 1980s and also negotiated a peace deal between Israel and Egypt in 1979.
According to an AP analysis, a small lithium battery cannot cause such a powerful explosion, and it is almost certain that someone placed several grams of explosives in the pagers. Hezbollah ordered the shipment from the Taiwanese company Gold Apollo. According to that, the products were manufactured and distributed by a company that has a license for these devices and is based in Budapest.
Drastic footage: Exploding pagers caught on camera in Lebanon | Video: Reuters
“A few months ago, the leadership of Hezbollah ordered members not to use mobile phones because the Israelis managed to track people’s movements thanks to them, and several hundred members of Hezbollah died in a targeted Israeli attack. In the past eleven months, approximately six hundred members of Hezbollah were killed in this way. Therefore, the leadership ordered the transition to pagers, which he thought were safer,” claims Šimron.
After the explosions, Hezbollah threatens Israel with “retribution the likes of which it has never experienced before”. The organization’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, is scheduled to deliver a speech tomorrow. “I see the pager operation as a prelude to the coming war. At the beginning of the Six-Day War with the Arab countries in 1967, the Israeli Air Force bombed enemy targets and airports for three hours. This pager operation is a prelude to a modern-style war in the 21st century,” says Shimron.
More explosions followed in Lebanon on Wednesday. This time in walkie-talkies that Hezbollah bought at the same time as the pagers. Nine people died, dozens more ended up in hospital.
Hezbollah and Israel have been firing at each other since last October, when the Israeli military launched a ground operation in the Gaza Strip following a Hamas attack on southern Israel that killed more than 1,200 Israelis. Tens of thousands of people left their homes in the north of the country due to shelling.
Tuesday’s explosions in Lebanon are reminiscent of the killing of one of the leaders of Hamas, Yahya Ayyash, in Gaza in 1996. Israeli agents managed to get a small amount of explosives into a mobile phone, which was planted by his relative for a financial reward. During the call, Ayáš’s cell phone exploded in his face and killed him.
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