According to a report from Israel’s Channel 12, each Hezbollah pager that exploded was individually set to detonate, with those behind the attack having precise knowledge of their targets’ locations and movements to minimize collateral damage.
“Each pager had its own arrangements. That’s how it was possible to control who was hit and who wasn’t,” an unnamed foreign security source told the TV station. The attackers reportedly ensured that only the person carrying the pager was harmed, sparing civilians who may have been nearby at the time of the blasts.
Footage from the incident showed one man being killed by his pager while standing next to a fruit and vegetable stand, but, as Channel 12’s report notes, great care was taken to prevent injuries to bystanders. “They knew who he was with and where he was, so that the vegetable seller in the supermarket would not be hurt,” the report explained, citing foreign sources.
The attack, which Hezbollah has blamed on Israel, marks an unprecedented event in the ongoing conflict between the two. While Israel has not officially claimed responsibility, the report adds new details to an already complex situation, revealing that tens of thousands of pagers had been manufactured with explosives specifically for this operation.
According to the Channel 12 report, Hezbollah had increased its use of pagers after its military chief Fuad Shukr was killed in a targeted Israeli airstrike in Beirut in July. Growing wary of using mobile phones, which could be intercepted, Hezbollah operatives had relied more heavily on pagers, unaware that they were carrying Trojan Horse devices.
Ronen Bergman, an investigative journalist for The New York Times and Yediot Achronot, was also interviewed for the report. He described how a brilliant female intelligence operative, under the age of 30, somewhere in the Middle East, had masterminded the entire scheme. “It was decided to set up a factory to build the devices from scratch so that ‘it won’t be a device that we will tamper with; it will be a device that we will produce,’” Channel 12 reported.
The decision to detonate the pagers this week may have been driven by concerns that Hezbollah was about to discover the Trojan Horse devices, though a foreign security source disputes this claim. The report also suggests the attack was strategically timed, with former IDF intelligence chief Amos Yadlin emphasizing that the goal is to send a message to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah that his ongoing attacks on northern Israel are costing him dearly, both in manpower and public support within Lebanon.
The coordinated attack is not considered a strategic strike, however, with sources indicating that Israel possesses far more sophisticated capabilities for dealing with Hezbollah and Iran. According to the report, these capabilities have been in development for years, but their potential was not fully utilized against Hamas, which partly explains the failure to prevent the October 7 attacks.
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This claim that great care was taken to prevent injuries to bystanders “they knew who he was with and where he was” is clearly something they made up because experts, including representatives of nations who are currently on the UN Security Council, are accusing Israel that this type of attack was against the law because it placed innocent people in an unacceptable risk of injury and death. So they are now claiming that they knew where each person with a beeper was and who they were with, something that is clearly and obviously impossible for them to know. The most they could have possibly known was the location of the beeper through real time access to its GPS, which would be extremely hard for them to do. But the only way they could know who else was next to the beeper was either through a camera, something a beeper does not have, or that agents were observing each of the 4000 people with the beepers at the time they were set to explode, which they obviously didn’t happen. That said, legal experts have said Israel’s best defense is that there’s no direct evidence they were behind it at all, let alone which individuals were responsible for it.