Israeli Cyber Expert: Explosives Planted in Hezbollah Pagers in Op Planned Months Before War

by Debbie Weiss

An Israeli cyber and national security expert has claimed that the exploding pagers carried by Hezbollah members in Lebanon, which left thousands wounded and killed at least nine people on Tuesday, were part of a sophisticated attack that was planned at least half a year before the war in Gaza erupted.

Dr. Eyal Pinko, a former navy commander and senior research fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, dismissed theories that the blasts were caused by lithium batteries that were hacked to become overheated, and said that the nature of the wounds seen in footage emerging from Lebanon was consistent with those caused by explosives such as TNT and HTB.

“To get this kind of wound you need to have between one to two grams of type of explosives, which is not a big technological issue — you just need to open the beeper,” Pinko said during a briefing with reporters on Tuesday evening. He added that a stable explosive that wouldn’t detonate accidentally would have been inserted into the device, along with a small control mechanism capable of receiving remote commands via a call or page.

Such an operation would have required significant infiltration of Hezbollah’s communication systems, according to Pinko, and planting explosives in pagers would necessitate a serious breach of the supply chain. “This is an intelligence operation that was very well planned, prepared for more than one and a half years,” Pinko said.

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