Hezbollah handed out pagers hours before blasts — even after checks

Hezbollah handed out pagers hours before blasts — even after checks
An injured man undergoes an operation, following pager detonations across Lebanon, at a hospital in Beirut (REUTERS)
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Updated 20 September 2024
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Hezbollah handed out pagers hours before blasts — even after checks

Hezbollah handed out pagers hours before blasts — even after checks
  • Hezbollah had scanned, tested pagers for safety, sources say
  • Batteries of walkie-talkies laced with explosive known as PETN: source

BEIRUT: Lebanon’s Hezbollah was still handing its members new Gold Apollo branded pagers hours before thousands blew up this week, two security sources said, indicating the group was confident the devices were safe despite an ongoing sweep of electronic kit to identify threats.
One member of the Iranian-backed militia received a new pager on Monday that exploded the next day while it was still in its box, said one of the sources.
A pager given to a senior member just days earlier injured a subordinate when it detonated, the second source said.
In an apparently coordinated attack the Gold Apollo branded devices detonated on Tuesday across Hezbollah’s strongholds of south Lebanon, Beirut’s suburbs and the eastern Bekaa valley.
On Wednesday, hundreds of Hezbollah walkie-talkies exploded. The consecutive attacks killed 37 people, including at least two children, and injured more than 3,000 people. The batteries of the walkie-talkies were laced with a highly explosive compound known as PETN, another Lebanese source familiar with the device’s components told Reuters on Friday. Up to three grams of explosives hidden in the pagers had gone undetected for months by Hezbollah, Reuters reported earlier this week.
One of the security sources said it was very hard to detect the explosives “with any device or scanner.” The source did not specify what type of scanners Hezbollah had run the pagers through.
Hezbollah examined the pagers after they were delivered to Lebanon, starting in 2022, including by traveling through airports with them to ensure they would not trigger alarms, two additional sources told Reuters. In total, Reuters spoke to six sources familiar with the details of the exploding devices for this story.
The sources did not specify the name of the airports where they conducted the tests.
Lebanon, Hezbollah and Western security sources say Israel was behind the attacks. Israel, which has since stepped up airstrikes on Lebanon, has neither denied or confirmed involvement.
Rather than a specific suspicion of the pagers, the checks had been part of a routine “sweep” of its equipment, including communications devices, to find any indications that they were laced with explosives or surveillance mechanisms, one of the security sources said. The attacks, and the distribution of the devices despite the routine sweep and checks for breaches, have struck at Hezbollah’s reputation as the most formidable of Iran’s allied ‘Axis of Resistance’ umbrella of anti-Israel irregular forces across the Middle East.
In a televised speech on Thursday, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah said the attacks were “unprecedented in the history” of the group.
Hezbollah’s media office and Israel’s armed forces did not immediately respond to requests for comment for this story. Taiwan-based Gold Apollo has said it did not manufacture the devices used in the attack, saying they were made by a company in Europe licensed to use the firm’s brand. Reuters has not been able to establish where they were made or at what point they were tampered with. A batch of 5,000 of the pagers were brought into Lebanon earlier this year. Reuters previously reported that Hezbollah turned to pagers in an attempt to evade Israeli surveillance of its mobile phones, following the killing of senior commanders in targeted airstrikes over the past year. Hezbollah’s conflict with Israel dates back decades but has flared up in the past year in parallel with the Gaza war, heightening worries of a full-blown regional war.
Too little, too late
After the pagers detonated on Tuesday, Hezbollah suspected more of its devices may have been compromised, two of the security sources, as well as an intelligence source, told Reuters.
In response, it intensified the sweep of its communications systems, carrying out careful examinations of all devices. It also began investigating the supply chains through which the pagers were brought in, the two security sources said.
But the review had not been concluded by Wednesday afternoon, when the hand-held radios exploded.
Hezbollah believes that Israel opted to detonate the group’s hand-held radios because it feared Hezbollah would soon find that the walkie-talkies were also rigged with explosives, one of the sources told Reuters.
The walkie-talkie explosions left 25 people dead and at least 650 injured, according to Lebanon’s health ministry — a much higher fatality rate than the previous day’s pager blasts, which killed 12 and wounded nearly 3,000.
That is because they carried a higher payload of explosives than the beepers, one of the security sources and the intelligence source said.
The group’s probe into precisely where, when and how the devices were laced with explosives is ongoing, three of the sources said. Nasrallah later said the same in the speech on Thursday.
One of the security sources said Hezbollah had foiled previous Israeli operations targeting devices imported from abroad by the group — from its private landline telephones to ventilation units in the group’s offices.
That includes suspected breaches in the past year.
“There are several electronic issues that we were able to discover — but not the pagers,” the source said. “They tricked us, hats off to the enemy.”


Iranian internal debate key to next phase in Israel stand-off

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Iranian internal debate key to next phase in Israel stand-off

Iranian internal debate key to next phase in Israel stand-off
  • Newly-elected reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian extended an apparent olive branch to the West at the UN
  • Khamenei vowed that Iran’s militant allies, primarily the Palestinian Hamas and Lebanese Hezbollah, would not “back down”
PARIS: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is Iran’s undisputed number one, but in the pecking order beneath the supreme leader are different factions competing for influence as the country maps out how to react to growing setbacks and escalating confrontation with Israel, experts say.
While some insiders are seen as favoring negotiation, others believe in using force, with the outcome of the behind-the-scenes debate helping to determine whether the current tit-for-tat cycle spirals into a full-blown war.
In a rare public sermon last week, Khamenei vowed that Iran’s militant allies, primarily the Palestinian Hamas and Lebanese Hezbollah, would not “back down” in their war against Israel, the Islamic republic’s sworn enemy which he said “does not have long to live.”
Yet last month, newly-elected reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian extended an apparent olive branch to the West at the UN, proposing the revival of the 2015 international nuclear deal that was unilaterally abandoned in 2018 by then-US president Donald Trump.
Experts say that as Israel prepares its response to Iran’s October 1 missile attack, Khamenei remains keen to avoid all-out war while showing the Islamic republic can still stand up to its enemies.
The supreme leader, who is chosen for life and has been in power since the death of Iran’s revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989, has long been seen as seeking to balance out the various factions in Iran before deliberately and, sometimes slowly, coming to a decision.
“There were certainly dozens of hours of meetings and analysis before deciding on the details of the strike against Israel,” said Pierre Razoux, research director at the Mediterranean Foundation for Strategic Studies (FMES).
“It’s similar to a chess champion studying all possible moves and openings with their team before making a play.”
While Khamenei is the ultimate decision-maker, Iran’s power structure is deeply complex with the president often only having a limited influence in foreign policy decisions.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the regime’s ideological army which maintains links with Iran’s regional proxies, plays a crucial role, as do low-profile but powerful figures within the office of the supreme leader including his son Mojtaba who is sometimes seen as a successor.
“Despite its authoritarian nature, the Islamic Republic has always had fractious factions that disagreed over the way in which they (Iran) should interact with the outside world,” Behnam Ben Taleblu, an Iran expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) in Washington, told AFP.
The president “does not control or set foreign and security policy. Rather, he is there to offer a change in style and not substance,” he added.
While there may be intense debates behind closed doors over strategy, it would be extremely unusual for such splits to be revealed in public.
“Khamenei adopts his decisions after consulting with members of the Iranian Supreme National Council, which, under the leadership of the reformists of the Iranian government, includes both conservative and reformist officials,” explained Eva Koulouriotis, an independent expert on the region.
Positions change with events.
When Israel assassinated Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July, Khamenei initially supported “a tactical retreat, which was the opinion of the reformists,” says Koulouriotis.
However, when Israel killed Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut in late September, Khamenei decided that a stronger response was necessary.
“So he adopted the opinion of the conservatives in the IRGC, who called on him to respond to the assassination of Haniyeh to deter Israel,” said Koulouriotis.
This led to the launch of some 200 Iranian missiles on Israel on October 1. Were Israel to now launch a major attack in response, pressure would mount on Khamenei to respond more than just in kind.
Lebanon’s Hezbollah is not just an ally for Iran. It is considered Tehran’s most crucial asset, a so-called “crown jewel” boasting a formidable arsenal of drones, rockets, and missiles of various ranges, and claiming 100,000 fighters.
Some experts suggest that Hezbollah’s long-range missiles are tasked with defending Iran’s nuclear facilities, effectively serving as a sort of remote defense shield.
Iran’s strategy in the coming months and years is therefore likely to depend on a complex mix of regional dynamics, pressure from global powers, and internal factional battles.
“Given Iran’s repeated setbacks abroad, especially the loss of Hezbollah, considered its foreign policy linchpin, the radical wing succeeded in convincing the supreme leader that restoring Iran’s credibility was essential,” said analyst Hasni Abidi, director of the Center for Arab and Mediterranean World Studies (CERNAM) in Geneva.

Lebanon PM urges UN resolution on ceasefire with Israel

Lebanon PM urges UN resolution on ceasefire with Israel
Updated 32 min 11 sec ago
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Lebanon PM urges UN resolution on ceasefire with Israel

Lebanon PM urges UN resolution on ceasefire with Israel
  • Lebanon’s foreign ministry would ask the UN Security Council to issue a resolution calling for a ‘full and immediate ceasefire’

BEIRUT: Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati on Friday urged the United Nations to pass a resolution calling for an “immediate” ceasefire between Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah group.
In a televised address, Mikati emphasized his government’s commitment to deploy the army on the border with Israel as part of a cessation of hostilities, and said Hezbollah agreed on the matter.
Mikati said Lebanon’s foreign ministry would ask the UN Security Council to issue a resolution calling for a “full and immediate ceasefire.”
He said his government was committed to “the full application of Resolution 1701,” which was adopted in 2006 and called for the Lebanese army and peacekeepers to be the only armed forces deployed in the south of the country.
Lebanon is committed to “the deployment of the army in the south and the bolstering of its presence along the border,” he said.
“Hezbollah is in agreement on this issue,” he added.
A government source had previously said that Hezbollah informed Lebanese authorities it had accepted a ceasefire with Israel on September 27, the day an Israeli strike killed its leader Hassan Nasrallah.
Previously, the Iran-backed militant group had said it would only accept a truce if there was also one with its Palestinian ally Hamas in Gaza.
Mikati also condemned attacks on the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon as a “crime,” with peacekeepers targeted two days in a row by Israeli forces, according to Lebanese official media and the foreign ministry.
A year of hostilities has killed more than 2,100 people in Lebanon and forced more than one million people to flee, according to Lebanese authorities.


Iranian president says Israel, backed by West, is ‘killing innocent people’

Iranian president says Israel, backed by West, is ‘killing innocent people’
Updated 11 October 2024
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Iranian president says Israel, backed by West, is ‘killing innocent people’

Iranian president says Israel, backed by West, is ‘killing innocent people’
  • Masoud Pezeshkian: ‘I would like to say to Israel: stop killing innocent people. Stop bombing residential buildings, people who have nothing anyway’

MOSCOW: Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said on Friday that Israel should “stop killing innocent people,” and that its actions in the Middle East were backed by the United States and the European Union.
Pezeshkian was speaking to a Russian state TV reporter on the sidelines of an international meeting in Turkmenistan.
Israel in recent weeks has sharply escalated its assault on Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah movement, including by killing its top leaders, sending ground troops into southern Lebanon and bombing the capital Beirut.
An Israeli strike late on Thursday in the heart of Beirut killed 22 people and injured more than 100, Lebanese authorities said.
Israel says the operations in Lebanon aim to allow tens of thousands of its residents to return home after being forced to leave northern Israel due to Hezbollah rocket fire over the past year.
Hezbollah is firing at Israel in support of its ally Hamas, which triggered Israel’s ground offensive in Gaza following an Oct. 7 attack on communities in southern Israel.
“I would like to say to Israel: stop killing innocent people. Stop bombing residential buildings, people who have nothing anyway,” said Pezeshkian, accusing Israel of violating every kind of international agreement.
“It does this because it knows that the US and the European Union are behind it,” he said.
The Middle East remains on high alert for further escalation in the region, awaiting
Israel’s response to an Iranian missile strike on Oct. 1.


Leaders of Jordan and southern Europe meet in a bid to help de-escalate Middle East crisis

Leaders of Jordan and southern Europe meet in a bid to help de-escalate Middle East crisis
Updated 11 October 2024
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Leaders of Jordan and southern Europe meet in a bid to help de-escalate Middle East crisis

Leaders of Jordan and southern Europe meet in a bid to help de-escalate Middle East crisis
  • Jordan’s King Abdullah will join the leaders of the so-called MED9 — including Italy, Spain, France, Greece, Cyprus, Malta, Slovenia, Portugal and Croatia
  • Leaders will also focus on helping clinch a ceasefire deal between Israeli forces and Hamas in the Gaza strip

PAPHOS: The leaders of nine southern European Union countries and Jordan are meeting in Cyprus on Friday to come up with ways to de-escalate the crisis in the Middle East that is threatening to engulf Lebanon and trigger a wider humanitarian crisis.
Jordan’s King Abdullah will join the leaders of the so-called MED9 — including Italy, Spain, France, Greece, Cyprus, Malta, Slovenia, Portugal and Croatia — as well as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to brainstorm initiatives aimed at protecting Lebanese civilians caught in the crossfire between Israel and Hezbollah.
The leaders will also focus on helping clinch a ceasefire deal between Israeli forces and Hamas in the Gaza strip in line with a UN Security Council resolution adopted unanimously in June.
Cyprus’ government spokesman Konstantinos Letymbiotis said Thursday the Jordanian monarch’s presence at the meeting lends additional weight to the proceedings given his country’s role in helping peace efforts in the region.
The meeting comes amid reports of an international diplomatic effort to degrade Hezbollah’s political hold in Lebanon.
“We want the Lebanese people to decide who their leaders ought to be, bottom line, and that has been our position,” US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Wednesday. “We certainly don’t want to dictate to the people of Lebanon who their leader is, and we’re not going to ... we want them to be able to do it absent a terrorist organization putting a gun to their head, which is the situation that Lebanon has been in for decades now.”
“Ultimately, we hope that Hezbollah is degraded enough that they are less of a force in Lebanese politics,” he added.
According to Letymbiotis, King Abdullah will also discuss with the leaders way of further bolstering his country’s relations with the EU. The Jordanian monarch and Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides will put forward a joint proposal to create a regional firefighting hub in Cyprus through the permanent deployment of fire-fighting aircraft on the island nation to respond to regional emergencies.
Christodoulides will also raise EU efforts to deal with migration flows through the adoption a new asylum policy that would more evenly share the distribution of asylum seekers through all EU members. Cyprus is considered a front-line country that receives a significantly high numbers of asylum seekers relative to its population.
Climate change is also on the agenda as the east Mediterranean and the Middle East are considered particularly vulnerable areas to temperatures changes.
Christodoulides will also highlight Cyprus’ role in helping deliver humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza via a maritime corridor as well as a waystation for the repatriation of third-country nationals evacuated from Lebanon.
According to Letymbiotis, more than 2,400 third-country nationals from 20 countries have so far used Cyprus as a transfer point to their homeland.


Lebanon says new Israel attack wounds UN peacekeepers

Lebanon says new Israel attack wounds UN peacekeepers
Updated 11 October 2024
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Lebanon says new Israel attack wounds UN peacekeepers

Lebanon says new Israel attack wounds UN peacekeepers
  • Lebanese caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati denounces attack as a crime
  • Watchtowers and main UNIFIL base in Ras Naqura and Sri Lankan battalion’s base targeted

BEIRUT: Lebanon on Friday condemned an Israeli attack that it said wounded United Nations peacekeepers in the country’s south, after state media reported a second such attack in as many days.

In a statement, the foreign ministry condemned “the targeting... carried out by the Israeli army” on the UN Interim Force in Lebanon.

It said the bombing targeted “watchtowers and the main UNIFIL base in Ras Naqura, and on the Sri Lankan battalion’s base, which led to a number of wounded.”

Lebanese caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati denounced what he said was an attack on the UNIFIL peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon on Friday as a crime.

He also said he had discussed efforts to reach a ceasefire in Lebanon with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

The official National News Agency said an Israeli “Merkava tank targeted one of the UNIFIL towers on the main road linking Tyre and Naqura,” wounding personnel from a Sri Lankan battalion.

It added that “enemy forces” also “fired an artillery shell, targeting the main entrance of the UNIFIL command center in Naqura, leading to damage to the entrance.”

UNIFIL did not immediately respond to AFP requests for comment.

On Thursday, UN peacekeepers said Israeli fire on their headquarters in south Lebanon wounded two Blue Helmets, sparking condemnation from European members of the mission.

Israel acknowledged its forces had opened fire in the area, saying the Hezbollah militants on whom it is waging an escalating war operate near UN posts.

UNIFIL, which has about 10,000 peacekeepers stationed in south Lebanon, has called for a ceasefire since an escalation between Israel and Lebanese militant group Hezbollah on September 23, after almost a year of cross-border fire.

The peacekeepers did not suffer serious injuries Thursday “but they remain in hospital,” UNIFIL had said, while a spokeswoman said those wounded were from Indonesia, a major contributor of troops to the force.