Thousands of Hezbollah terrorists injured in pager attack
Simultaneous pager explosions across Lebanon with 2,700 Hezbollah terrorists reported to have been injured — 200 in critical condition
Jenni Frazer is a freelance journalist
Some 2,700 Hezbollah terrorists are reported to have been injured — 200 of those are in critical condition — after an extraordinary operation in which their personal pagers exploded simultaneously in towns all over Lebanon.
The impudent attack — blamed on Israel by the Lebanese Shia militia, but for which Israel has not commented publicly —is said to have been a response to a planned assassination attempt on a former senior Israeli defence official, thwarted by Israeli intelligence and security forces. The pager operation is also likely to have been in response to the large number of Hezbollah rockets fired at northern Israel in the past months.
The pager attack wounded so many men so severely because they routinely keep the pagers in the pockets of their jeans. The detonations lasted for about an hour on Tuesday. One report said that there were ambulances choking streets all over Lebanon as the dead and inured were rushed to hospital.
Social media was alight with speculation as to how the operation had been carried out — whether the pagers had been seized prior to distribution to the Hezbollah members, and tampered with, or if their batteries had been primed to overheat and remotely detonated.
Either way it is a massive breach of Lebanese intelligence and presumably will result in one sort of swingeing response as Hezbollah seeks to take revenge. Although, given the numbers of people who were victims of the surprise attack, it is hard to know just who would be carrying out Hezbollah’s response.
According to one report, the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, warned his men that smartphones were too susceptible to potential cyber attacks by Israeli forces — and urged them to use pagers to communicate with each other instead.
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