A massive strike targeting hundreds of Hezbollah operatives and their associates via exploding was likely the culmination of a complex intelligence operation that took months to execute, according to a Rolling Stone analysis of images and videos related to the attack.
More than 2,800 people have been reported injured in the wave of blasts, with at least eight confirmed deaths, Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad said in a televised press conference. At least one child was injured, he said, adding that hospitals were overwhelmed. Hezbollah has blamed Israel for the attacks.
As news of injuries related to exploding pagers across Beirut and southern Lebanon began to spread, so too did rumors that Hezbollah operatives were being targeted in a cyberwarfare operation designed to make batteries used in secure communications devices “explode.”
Videos of the exploding devices indicate the effect was unlikely to have been achieved due to a “hack” or cyberwarfare operation, a U.S. source tells Rolling Stone — an assertion consistent with this reporter’s prior experience with munitions, and advanced military training in both explosives and electrical engineering.
Instead, it is far more likely that an intelligence organization intercepted the devices — remnants of which match a type of Motorola pager — at some point prior to delivery and retrofitted them with internal explosives designed to be triggered remotely. Hezbollah operatives use pagers because, in theory, encrypted messages sent to and from such devices can be more difficult to intercept and decipher than voice communications or smartphone-based app messaging services.
Reuters reported that the exploding devices were brought into Lebanon within the last several months, citing three security sources. Rolling Stone has not independently confirmed those reports.
The Israeli intelligence services are the most likely source of such an operation, possessing the resources, motivation, and requisite experience to carry it out.
“The Israelis would have had to refit actual pagers with a small piece of DetaSheet [a plastic explosive] and a flat bridge-wire detonator, and then gotten them into Hezbollah’s supply chain,” says the U.S. source, who has expertise in explosives and special operations, after reviewing video of the explosions and photos of the remnants of pagers alleged to be the source of the blasts. “Even just an exploding bridge-wire detonator alone could cause damage — it’s like a blasting cap, just small and flat.”
While pagers and other small communications devices do have internal batteries, either of a standard AA or AAA type or a small rechargeable lithium-ion cell, by themselves these do not possess the physical characteristics required to produce explosions of the type seen in the videos — no matter how advanced a “hacker” might be.
The difference between an “explosion” caused by thermal runaway of a lithium-ion battery and the rapid detonation of even a small amount of a military grade plastic explosive is significant: The first is a sudden burst of flame, whereas the second is more akin to the bang of a large firecracker.
There’s a reason you can take a smartphone on a plane despite the (rare) potential for thermal runaway: It is because lithium-ion comes nowhere near having the explosive characteristics of Pentaerythritol tetranitrate or hexogen (RDX), two of the most common ingredients used in industrial and military-grade explosives. Such explosives experience “high-order detonations,” sending out blast waves that expand at velocities measured in the thousands of meters per second.
Although thermal runaway of a battery can be dangerous, and the resultant sudden and energetic conflagration can cause injury and property destruction, the process is not similar to the type of detonation seen in videos of the blasts in Lebanon.
Israel does have the capability to carry out cyberwarfare attacks aimed at crippling infrastructure or damaging physical devices, most notably demonstrated in the U.S.-Israeli joint Stuxnet malware operation from 2009 to 2010. Stuxnet was aimed at Iran’s nuclear program, and appears to have been specifically targeted at centrifuges used in an uranium enrichment facility in Natanz.
But Israel also has a history of conducting targeted strikes against its enemies using discreet explosive devices. Notable among these was the January 1996 assassination of Hamas bomb-maker Yahya Ayyash — known as “The Engineer,” an honorific nom de guerre commonly applied to prolific bomb-makers in the Arabic-speaking world — in the West Bank.
Ayyash was killed when Shin Bet, one of Israel’s intelligence services, detonated 15 grams of the explosive RDX it had planted in a cellphone he was using. The blast, triggered remotely once Ayyash was confirmed to be speaking on the phone, killed him instantly.
As a matter of policy, Israel neither confirms nor denies responsibility for targeted assassinations.
As of writing, no one had claimed responsibility for the wide-ranging attacks on Hezbollah operatives and their associates in Lebanon.
