Washington Post: The story of the pager designed by Mossad to cut off the hands of Hezbollah members

Initially presented to Hezbollah two years ago, the new Apollo line of pagers seemed perfectly suited to the needs of a militia group with a sprawling network of fighters and a hard-earned reputation for megalomania.

The AR924 pager was a bit bulky but rugged, built to withstand battlefield conditions, had a waterproof Taiwanese design and a large battery that could run for months without charging. Best of all, there was no risk of the pagers being tracked by Israeli intelligence.

Hezbollah leaders were so impressed with the device that they bought 5,000 of them and began distributing them to mid-level fighters and support personnel in February, and none of the users suspected they were carrying a beautifully crafted Israeli bomb.

After thousands of devices exploded in Lebanon and Syria, few people appreciated the most sinister feature of these pagers: the two-step decryption process ensured that most users would be holding the pager with both hands when it exploded.

Up to 3,000 Hezbollah officers and members — most of them ordinary generals in the party — were killed or wounded, along with an unknown number of civilians, according to Israeli, American and Middle Eastern officials, when Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency remotely activated the devices on September 17.

An Israeli political official, referring to the pager plot, summed up the concerns of Israeli officials in a joke told in a meeting with Mossad officials when one of the officials said: “We cannot make a strategic decision like escalation in Lebanon while relying on a game.”

Designed by Mossad and assembled in Israel

According to Israeli, Middle Eastern and American officials familiar with the events, the idea for the pager operation originated in 2022, and parts of the plan began to take shape more than a year before the Oct. 7 Hamas attack that set the region on the path to war, a relatively quiet time on Israel’s northern border with war-torn Lebanon.

Of the half-dozen Iranian-backed militias with weapons aimed at Israel, Hezbollah is by far the most powerful. Israeli officials have watched with growing concern as the Lebanese group has added new weapons to an arsenal already capable of hitting Israeli cities with tens of thousands of precision-guided missiles.

Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency responsible for combating foreign threats to the Jewish state, had worked for years to infiltrate the group through electronic surveillance and human informants.

Over time, Hezbollah leaders became concerned about the group's vulnerability to Israeli surveillance and penetration, fearing that even ordinary cellphones could be turned into eavesdropping and tracking devices controlled by Israel. And so the idea of creating some kind of fortified communications device was born, the officials said.

Hezbollah was looking for hack-resistant electronic networks to transmit messages, and Mossad came up with a pair of tricks that would lead the militant group to buy equipment that seemed ideal for such a job—equipment that Mossad had designed and assembled in Israel.

Mossad began smuggling the first part of the plan, booby-trapped walkie-talkies, into Lebanon nearly a decade ago, in 2015.

The portable two-way radios contain large battery packs, hidden explosives, and a transmission system that gives Israel full access to Hezbollah's communications.

The Israelis had been eavesdropping on Hezbollah for nine years, officials said, keeping the option of turning the walkie-talkies into bombs in the event of a future crisis. But then came a new opportunity and a shiny new product: a small walkie-talkie equipped with powerful explosives.

In an irony that only became clear months later, Hezbollah ended up indirectly paying the Israelis for small bombs that would kill or injure many of its members.

Because Hezbollah leaders were aware of the potential sabotage, the pagers could not have come from Israel, the United States, or any other Israeli ally. So, in 2023, the group began receiving orders for large quantities of pagers bearing the Taiwanese brand Apollo, a well-known brand and product line with global distribution and no apparent links to Israeli or Jewish interests.

The Taiwanese company was not aware of the plan, and the sales pitch came from a trusted Hezbollah marketing official with ties to Apollo, the officials said.

The marketing executive, a woman whose identity and nationality officials declined to disclose, was a former sales representative for the Taiwanese company in the Middle East who had set up her own company and obtained a license to sell a range of Apollo-branded pagers.

Sometime in 2023, she offered Hezbollah a deal on one of the products her company sells: the rugged and reliable AR924 .

“She was the one who contacted Hezbollah and explained to them why the larger pager with a bigger battery was better than the original model,” said an Israeli official familiar with the details of the operation.

One of the main selling points of the AR924 was that “it could be charged with a cable, and the batteries lasted longer,” the official said.

As it turned out, the production of the devices was outsourced and the marketing executive had no knowledge of the operation and was unaware that the pagers were actually assembled in Israel under Mossad supervision, according to officials familiar with the plot.

The Mossad pagers, each weighing less than three ounces, included a unique feature: a battery pack concealing a small amount of powerful explosives, according to officials familiar with the plot.

In a stunning feat of engineering, the bomb’s components were so carefully concealed that they would have been virtually undetectable, even if the device had been dismantled, Israeli officials said. Israeli officials believe Hezbollah dismantled some of the pagers and may have X-rayed them.

“It was clear that there were some risks,” an Israeli official said. Some, including senior officials in the Israel Defense Forces, warned of the possibility of a full-scale escalation with Hezbollah, even as Israeli soldiers continued their operations against Hamas in Gaza. But others, most notably the Mossad, saw an opportunity to shake up the status quo with “something more intense.”

The United States, Israel’s closest ally, was unaware of the booby-trapped pagers or the internal debate over whether to activate them, American officials said. Netanyahu eventually agreed to activate the devices when they could do maximum damage.

Over the next week, Mossad began preparations to blow up the pagers and walkie-talkies already in circulation, and at the same time, the discussion in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv about Hezbollah's campaign expanded to include another very important target: Nasrallah himself.

Mossad had known of the leader’s whereabouts in Lebanon for years and had been closely tracking his movements, the officials said. Yet the Israelis held off from opening fire, certain that the assassination would lead to all-out war with the militant group, and perhaps with Iran as well.

American diplomats have been pressing Nasrallah to agree to a separate ceasefire with Israel, unrelated to the fighting in Gaza, in the hope of reaching a deal that could lead to the withdrawal of Hezbollah fighters from southern Lebanese bases that threaten Israeli citizens in communities near the border.

As the debate raged in Israel’s top national security circles on September 17 over whether to strike the Hezbollah leader, thousands of Apollo-branded pagers rang or vibrated simultaneously across Lebanon and Syria, and a short Arabic sentence appeared on the screen: “You have received an encrypted message.” Hezbollah operatives carefully followed instructions to check the encrypted messages by pressing two buttons.

Explosions tore off hands and blew off fingers in homes and shops, in cars and on sidewalks. Less than a minute later, thousands more pagers exploded, regardless of whether the user had touched their device or not.

The next day, September 18, hundreds of radios exploded in the same way, killing and wounding users and bystanders, the first of a series of strikes aimed at the heart of one of Israel's most ardent enemies.

As Hezbollah reeled, Israel struck again, bombing the group's headquarters, arsenals and logistics centers with 2,000-pound bombs. The largest series of airstrikes came on September 27, ten days after the pagers exploded.

Netanyahu ordered the attack, which targeted a deeply buried command center in Beirut, while he was traveling to New York for a speech at the United Nations in which he declared, speaking to Hezbollah, “Enough.”

"We will not accept a terrorist army on our northern border, capable of committing another massacre similar to October 7," Netanyahu said in the speech.

The next day, September 28, Hezbollah confirmed what most of the world already knew: Nasrallah, the group’s fiery leader and sworn enemy of Israel, was dead.

Source: The Washington Post - Translated by: Zaid Benjamin