Ambulances are surrounded by people at the entrance of the American University of Beirut Medical Center, on 17 September 2024, after explosions hit locations in several Hezbollah strongholds around Lebanon amid ongoing cross-border tensions between Israel and Hezbollah fighters.
Israel's Mossad spy agency planted a small amount of explosives inside 5 000 Taiwan-made pagers ordered by Lebanese group Hezbollah months before Tuesday's detonations, a senior Lebanese security source and another source told Reuters. However, Gold Apollo's founder Hsu Ching-Kuang told reporters on Wednesday that the company did not make the pagers that were used in the detonations in Lebanon.
But the senior Lebanese source said the devices had been modified by Israel's spy service"at the production level." "This would easily be the biggest counterintelligence failure that Hezbollah has had in decades," said Jonathan Panikoff, the US government's former deputy national intelligence officer on the Middle East.In February, Hezbollah drew up a war plan that aimed to address gaps in the group's intelligence infrastructure. Around 170 fighters had already been killed in targeted Israeli strikes on Lebanon, including one senior commander and a top Hamas official in Beirut.