Iran Press/West Asia: 11 people martyred and more than 4,000 people wounded in a simultaneous blast of pagers used by Lebanese Resistance Movement Hezbollah member.
Israel's Mossad spy agency planted explosives inside 5,000 pagers imported by Hezbollah months before Tuesday's detonations, a senior Lebanese security source and another source told Reuters.
The operation was approved earlier this week during security meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's senior members of his cabinet and the heads of the security services, an Israeli source with knowledge told Axios.
Nevertheless, U.S. officials said they didn't consider Gallant's call a serious prior notice. "We were not aware of this operation and were not involved," U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters on Tuesday.
Austin spoke to Gallant twice on Tuesday and discussed the situation, Israeli and U.S. officials said.
It took place a day after U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein visited Israel and warned Netanyahu of the consequences of a major escalation in Lebanon.
The Lebanese security source said the pagers were from Taiwan-based Gold Apollo, but the company said it did not manufacture the devices. It said they were made by a company in Europe called BAC which has a license to use its brand, but gave no more details.
According to a report by CNN, the explosions were the result of a joint operation between Israel’s intelligence service, Mossad, and the Israeli military.
The Israeli military has said it will not comment on the explosions, both Lebanon and Hezbollah have blamed it for the attack. Hezbollah vowed to retaliate against Israel.
A source familiar with the matter told the New York Times that the pagers distributed by Hezbollah beeped for several seconds before they exploded yesterday. He said that the devices beeped for around 10 seconds so that the users would hold them close to their eyes and face to read the message.
Iran’s Ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, was among those wounded in Beirut, along with two embassy employees.
Amani has a superficial injury and is under observation in the hospital.
Lebanon’s Prime Minister Najib Mikati slammed the attack as “a serious violation of Lebanese sovereignty and a crime by all standards” in a cabinet meeting Tuesday.
The plot appears to have been many months in the making, several sources told Reuters.
The explosives were planted next to the battery in each pager, and a switch was embedded to detonate them remotely, according to The New York Times.
The senior Lebanese security source said the group had ordered 5,000 beepers from Gold Apollo, which several sources say were brought into the country earlier this year.
A senior Lebanese source said the devices had been modified by Israel's spy service at the production level.
"The Mossad injected a board inside of the device that has explosive material that receives a code. It's very hard to detect it through any means. Even with any device or scanner," the source said.
The source said 3,000 of the pagers exploded when a coded message was sent to them, simultaneously activating the explosives.
Another security source told Reuters that up to three grams of explosives were hidden in the new pagers and had gone "undetected" by Hezbollah for months.
The pager blasts came at a time of mounting concern about tensions between Israel and Hezbollah, which have been engaged in cross-border warfare since the Gaza conflict erupted last October.
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