As part of Hezbollah’s low-tech efforts to evade Israeli espionage, communication devices have reached operative – but questions are raised over why they suddenly exploded at the same time
i24NEWS
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A series of explosions shook different areas in Lebanon Tuesday, mainly the Dahieh district controlled by Hezbollah, with local reports indicating that over a thousand people were injured. According to publications on Arab networks, the exploding devices were beepers, outdated devices in low-tech technology used by the terrorist organization Hezbollah to avoid Israeli surveillance, which were distributed to operatives in recent days.
Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon was reportedly among those wounded in the blasts, which have been blamed on Israel.
According to an article published last May by Reuters, Hezbollah has adopted low-tech technologies to counter the advanced Israeli technological capabilities. Among the use of couriers, a ban on the use of mobile phones, and the encrypted communication system, pagers are also employed.
Although outdated technology popular in the 1980s and 1990s, pagers (also known as beepers) are able to receive short messages.
Reports said that the model that explosion was the Taiwan-made Gold Apollo AR-924 model.
The nature of the attack is still unclear, with the explosions seen in footage appearing to be significantly different than overheated batteries blowing up. Whether this indicates that the pagers were tampered with in production, transit, or storage of the devices remains to be seen.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has warned in his speeches that “The mobile phone is the enemy’s deadly spy.”