Hezbollah official calls it the group’s ‘biggest security breach’ in nearly a year of war with Israel.
Dozens of members of Hezbollah were seriously wounded on Tuesday in southern Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut when the pagers they use to communicate exploded, the National News Agency has reported.
“Tens of injuries have been taken to hospital after pagers exploded through the use of high technology,” the NNA said.
Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr, reporting from Beirut, said it was a “major development” in the war between Israel and the Iran-backed group and said it appears that the devices were penetrated and hacked in a coordinated attack.
“This is a major security breach – Hezbollah’s communications device has been compromised. We have seen pictures from across Lebanon of men lying on the floor wounded, bleeding. We have seen reports of hospitals asking for blood,” she said.
A Hezbollah official, speaking to Reuters news agency on condition of anonymity, said the detonation of the pagers was the “biggest security breach” the group had been subjected to in nearly a year of war with Israel.
Khodr said that Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah called on his fighters a few months ago to stop using smartphones because Israel has the technology to infiltrate and penetrate those devices.
“So now they’ve resorted to this different communications system using pagers and it seems they have been penetrated,” she said.
“We are getting reports that there were near simultaneous explosions in southern Lebanon, in east of the country and in Beirut’s southern suburbs.”
Khodr reported that there was widespread panic in Beirut and ambulances were rushing through the southern suburbs of the capital. Reuters reported residents as saying that explosions were taking place even 30 minutes after the initial blasts.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military, which has been exchanging fire with Hezbollah since last October in parallel with its war on Gaza.
Elijah Magnier, a military analyst, told Al Jazeera that Hezbollah relies heavily on pagers to prevent Israel intercepting their communications and he speculated that the pagers would have been tampered with before being distributed to Hezbollah members.
“This is not a new system. It has been used in the past … so in this case there has been involvement of a third party … to allow access …to remotely activate the explosions,” he said.
“These explosions … are powerful enough to [severely] hit the psychology of Hezbollah.”