Exactly a month ago, on September 17, a coordinated attack using weaponised pagers resulted in simultaneous explosions in the southern suburbs of Beirut and other Hezbollah strongholds. The devices detonated after beeping to signal incoming messages, lead to 39 deaths and over 3,400 injuries. Many victims suffered severe injuries, including eye damage, missing fingers, and gaping abdominal wounds, reflecting their close proximity to the devices at the time of explosions.
The explosives were concealed within the pagers, which had been delivered to Lebanon earlier that year as part of an Israeli strategy aimed to decimate Hezbollah. The agents who made the pagers developed a battery that concealed a small but powerful charge of plastic explosive, along with a novel detonator that was undetectable by X-ray, according to a Lebanese source with firsthand knowledge of the devices and teardown photos of the battery pack examined by news agency Reuters.
To address the issue of not having a believable backstory for the bulky new product, they set up fake online stores, pages, and posts that misled Hezbollah into thinking the devices were legitimate, as revealed by a Reuters review of web archives.
The hidden design and feature of the pager bomb and the carefully crafted cover story for the battery, described here for the first time, reveal details about a years-long operation that has dealt unprecedented blows to Israel’s Iran-backed enemy in Lebanon and has increased tensions in the Middle East, bringing it closer to a regional war.
A thin, square piece containing six grams of white pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) plastic explosive was sandwiched between two rectangular battery cells, according to a Lebanese source and photos.
The space between the battery cells, not visible in the photos, was filled with a highly flammable strip that acted as the detonator, the source said.
This three-layer assembly was placed in a black plastic sleeve and covered with a metal casing about the size of a matchbox, the photos showed.
The design was unusual because it didn’t use a standard miniaturized detonator, which is usually a metallic cylinder, according to the source and two bomb experts. All three spoke on condition of anonymity.
Without metal parts, the material used to trigger detonation had an advantage: like the plastic explosives, it couldn’t be detected by X-ray.
When Hezbollah received the pagers in February, they checked for explosives, two people familiar with the matter said, scanning them with airport security devices to see if they set off any alarms. Nothing suspicious was found.
The devices were likely designed to create a spark within the battery pack, which would ignite the detonating material and cause the PETN sheet to explode, the two bomb experts said after reviewing the pager-bomb design.
Since the explosives and packaging took up about a third of the volume, the battery pack contained only a small fraction of the power expected for its 35-gram weight, according to two battery experts.
“There is a significant amount of unaccounted for mass,” said Paul Christensen, an expert in lithium batteries at Britain’s Newcastle University.
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