Hezbollah official calls it the group’s ‘biggest security breach’ in nearly a year of cross-border fire with Israel
Hundreds of Hezbollah members have been seriously wounded across Lebanon when the handheld pagers they use to communicate exploded, security sources told Al Jazeera.
Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, was among those injured on Tuesday by the pager explosions, Iran’s Mehr news agency reported.
A Hezbollah official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the explosion of the pagers was the “biggest security breach” the group has experienced in nearly a year of almost daily cross-border fire with Israel.
Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr, reporting from Beirut, said it appears the devices were hacked and detonated in a coordinated attack, which represented a “major development” in the hostilities between Israel and the Iran-backed Lebanese group.
“This is a major security breach. Hezbollah’s communications device has been compromised. We have seen pictures from across Lebanon of men lying on the floor wounded, bleeding. We have seen reports of hospitals asking for blood,” she said.
She said “near simultaneous explosions” were reported in southern Lebanon, in the east of the country and in Beirut’s southern suburbs, where there was widespread panic.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had called on his fighters a few months ago to stop using smartphones because Israel has the technology to infiltrate those devices, Khodr said.
“So now they’ve resorted to this different communications system using pagers, and it seems they have been penetrated,” she said.
Source: Aljazeera
