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Hezbollah Handed Out Pagers Hours Before Blasts — Even After Checks
People gather as smoke rises from a mobile shop in Sidon, Lebanon as Hezbollah communication devices explode across the country on Sept. 18, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Hassan Hankir
Lebanon’s Hezbollah was still handing its members new Gold Apollo branded pagers hours before thousands of the devices blew up this week, two security sources said, indicating the group was confident they were safe despite an ongoing sweep of electronic equipment to identify threats.
One member of the Iranian-backed terrorist group received a new pager on Monday that exploded the next day while it was still in its box, said one of the sources.
A pager given to a senior member just days earlier injured a subordinate when it detonated, the second source said.
In an apparently coordinated attack, the Gold Apollo branded devices detonated on Tuesday across Hezbollah‘s strongholds of south Lebanon, Beirut’s suburbs, and the eastern Bekaa valley.
On Wednesday, hundreds of Hezbollah walkie-talkies exploded. The consecutive attacks killed 37 people, including at least two children, and injured more than 3,000 people.
Lebanon and Hezbollah say Israel was behind the attacks. Israel’s secretive military intelligence Unit 8200 was involved in the planning, a Western security source told Reuters this week. Israel, which has since stepped up airstrikes on Lebanon, has neither denied or confirmed involvement.
The batteries of the walkie-talkies were laced with a highly explosive compound known as PETN, another Lebanese source familiar with the device’s components told Reuters on Friday. Up to three grams of explosives hidden in the pagers had gone undetected for months by Hezbollah, Reuters reported earlier this week.
One of the security sources said it was very hard to detect the explosives “with any device or scanner.” The source did not specify what type of scanners Hezbollah had run the pagers through.
Hezbollah examined the pagers after they were delivered to Lebanon, starting in 2022, including by traveling through airports with them to ensure they would not trigger alarms, two additional sources told Reuters. In total, Reuters spoke to six sources familiar with the details of the exploding devices for this story.
The sources did not specify the name of the airports where they conducted the tests.
Rather than a specific suspicion of the pagers, the checks had been part of a routine “sweep” of its equipment, including communications devices, to find any indications that they were laced with explosives or surveillance mechanisms, one of the security sources said.
The attacks, and the distribution of the devices despite the routine sweep and checks for breaches, have struck at Hezbollah‘s reputation as the most formidable of Iran’s allied “Axis of Resistance” umbrella of anti-Israel terrorist forces across the Middle East.
In a televised speech on Thursday, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah said the attacks were “unprecedented in the history” of the group.
Hezbollah‘s media office and Israel’s armed forces did not immediately respond to requests for comment for this story.
Taiwan-based Gold Apollo has said it did not manufacture the devices used in the attack, saying they were made by a company in Europe licensed to use the firm’s brand. Reuters has not been able to establish where they were made or at what point they were tampered with.
A batch of 5,000 of the pagers were brought into Lebanon earlier this year. Reuters previously reported that Hezbollah turned to pagers in an attempt to evade Israeli surveillance of its mobile phones, following the killing of senior commanders in targeted airstrikes over the past year.
Hezbollah‘s conflict with Israel dates back decades but has flared up in the past year in parallel with the Gaza war, heightening worries of a full-blown regional war.
TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE
After the pagers detonated on Tuesday, Hezbollah suspected more of its devices may have been compromised, two of the security sources, as well as an intelligence source, told Reuters.
In response, it intensified the sweep of its communications systems, carrying out careful examinations of all devices. It also began investigating the supply chains through which the pagers were brought in, the two security sources said.
But the review had not been concluded by Wednesday afternoon, when the hand-held radios exploded.
Hezbollah believes that Israel opted to detonate the group’s hand-held radios because it feared Hezbollah would soon find that the walkie-talkies were also rigged with explosives, one of the sources told Reuters.
The walkie-talkie explosions left 25 people dead and at least 650 injured, according to Lebanon’s health ministry — a much higher fatality rate than the previous day’s pager blasts, which killed 12 and wounded nearly 3,000.
That is because they carried a higher payload of explosives than the beepers, one of the security sources and the intelligence source said.
The group’s probe into precisely where, when, and how the devices were laced with explosives is ongoing, three of the sources said. Nasrallah later said the same in the speech on Thursday.
One of the security sources said Hezbollah had foiled previous Israeli operations targeting devices imported from abroad by the group — from its private landline telephones to ventilation units in the group’s offices.
That includes suspected breaches in the past year.
“There are several electronic issues that we were able to discover — but not the pagers,” the source said. “They tricked us, hats off to the enemy.”
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Tourists Stranded in Israel as Sirens Sound, Missiles Fly, Planes Grounded
FILE PHOTO: A worker at Ben Gurion International Airport in Israel sits at the arrivals terminal as all flights from and to the airport are indicated cancel, following an Israeli attack on Iran. June 13, 2025 Photo: REUTERS/Tomer Appelbaum
Woken by air raid sirens, hurrying to bomb shelters, scouring travel sites for escape routes — thousands of tourists in Israel have found their holiday plans upended by the country’s conflict with Iran.
Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran in the early hours of Friday, shutting down the national airspace and telling people to remain where they were as the arch Middle East foes traded deadly blows.
The violence has left around 40,000 tourists blocked in Israel, according to the Ministry of Tourism. Airlines are cancelling flights until further notice, leaving travelers to decide whether to wait it out or seek costly detours through neighboring countries.
Justin Joyner, from California, is on holiday in Jerusalem with his father John, who lives in Nevada, and his son. They had expected some possible disruption, with Israel locked in a months-long conflict against Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip.
But, like most locals, they did not foresee a whole new war.
“We didn’t expect Israel to attack Iran. That is a completely different level of escalation,” Joyner said from his hotel in East Jerusalem, which, for the past two nights, has seen Iranian ballistic missiles flash overhead like a rain of meteorites.
“It’s unsettling to feel the shockwaves of intercepted missiles above you, and to take your family down to a bomb shelter. That’s just something we don’t think about in America,” he said.
Dr. Greer Glazer, who lives in Cleveland and was in Jerusalem for a nursing training program, faces a race down 10 flights of stairs in her hotel to reach the shelter when sirens sound — as they have done regularly since Friday night.
“I feel safe,” she said, “but waking from a dead sleep and running to the safe room, that’s been the hardest. My family is scared to death … They think it’s 24/7 destruction, but it’s not like that.”
THE JORDAN ROUTE
Glazer had been due to return home on June 29, but is looking to bring forward her departure. The easiest exit route is via land crossings into neighboring Jordan and then a flight out of Amman airport which has been operating in daylight hours.
Israeli media reported that the transgender US influencer Caitlyn Jenner, who only flew into Israel on Thursday for Tel Aviv’s since-canceled Gay Pride Parade, had left through Jordan.
Hours earlier, she had been photographed drinking a glass of red wine in a bomb shelter. “What an incredible way it has been to celebrate Shabbat,” she wrote on X.
Not everyone is rushing to leave.
Karen Tuhrim is visiting from London to see her daughter, who lives in Tel Aviv. “Within two days of being here, Israel attacked Iran. So now I’m stuck,” she said.
Unlike Jerusalem, Tel Aviv has taken direct hits from the Iranian missiles and Tuhrim has had to dip in and out of her hotel’s shelter. But she said she felt safe and was happy to be near her daughter.
“For me, personally, at the moment, I feel better being here than in London, watching it all on the news, knowing my daughter is here. So, for now, we’re good.”
Israel’s Ministry of Tourism has set up a round-the-clock virtual help desk in English and Hebrew for stranded travelers.
But for anyone stuck here, all the museums are closed until further notice, entrance to the Old City of Jerusalem is barred to non-residents and many shops remain shuttered.
“The streets and shops are empty,” said Jerusalem resident Anwar Abu Lafi, who saw no quick end to the gloom.
“People are yearning for a break, to find something good in this existing darkness. We are deluding ourselves into thinking that the future will be better,” he said.
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4 Killed by Missile in Arab Town of Tamra, Including a Mother and Her Two Daughters
Illustrative: A Magen David Adom ambulance. Photo: David King via Wikimedia Commons.
i24 News – In the early hours of Sunday morning, the Arab town of Tamra in northern Israel was struck by an Iranian missile, tragically claiming the lives of four women from the same family, including a mother and her two daughters, aged 13 and 20.
The missile caused severe damage, nearly collapsing the three- to four-story building where they lived.
Emergency services responded quickly, evacuating 14 injured individuals and providing care for eight others suffering from shock at Rambam Hospital in Haifa.
Despite the devastation, the community and first responders showed remarkable resilience and solidarity, working tirelessly to assist those affected.
Eli Bin, director general of Magen David Adom, described the scene as one of severe destruction but praised the swift and professional response of rescue teams. Paramedic Adnan Abu Rumi, one of the first on site, emphasized the dedication of emergency personnel in managing the crisis.
Residents like Hamudi, who was injured but survived, shared heartfelt accounts of the sudden impact, underscoring the strength of families and neighbors coming together in difficult times.
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Trump Sees Peace Between Iran and Israel Soon, Eyes Putin Role
Russian President Vladimir Putin delivers a speech during a session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. Photo: Reuters/Maxim Shemetov
Despite evidence that the conflict between Israel and Iran is escalating, US President Donald Trump expressed optimism on Sunday that peace would come soon and cited the possibility that Russia’s Vladimir Putin could help.
In a social media post, Trump said there were many unspecified meetings about the issue happening and encouraged the two countries to make a deal. And in an interview with ABC News, he said he was open to Putin, whose forces invaded Ukraine and who has resisted Trump’s attempts to broker a ceasefire with Kyiv, serving as a mediator.
Israel and Iran launched fresh attacks on each other overnight into Sunday, killing scores.
“Iran and Israel should make a deal, and will make a deal,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social site. “We will have PEACE, soon, between Israel and Iran! Many calls and meetings now taking place.”
Trump did not offer any details about the meetings or evidence of progress toward peace. His assertion contradicted comments by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said on Saturday that Israel’s campaign against Iran would intensify.
A White House spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on how Trump and the White House were working to de-escalate the situation in the Middle East.
Trump told ABC News that Iran wanted to make a deal and indicated something like the Israel strikes would accelerate that. “Something like this had to happen because I think even from both sides, but something like this had to happen. They want to talk, and they will be talking,” Trump said, according to ABC reporter Rachel Scott. “May have forced a deal to go quicker, actually.”
The United States has engaged in talks with Iran about its nuclear program and Trump has told reporters previously that the talks were going well. But another round of discussions scheduled for Sunday in Oman was canceled after the Israeli and Iranian strikes.
Trump said he and Putin had discussed the situation in the Middle East on Saturday in a call that focused more on that conflict than the Russian war in Ukraine.
“He is ready. He called me about it,” Trump said about Putin serving as a mediator, according to Scott. “We had a long talk about it. We talked about this more than his situation. This is something I believe is going to get resolved.”
Trump, who portrays himself as a peacemaker and has drawn criticism from his political base for not being able to prevent the Israel-Iran conflict, cited other disputes that he took responsibility for solving, including between India and Pakistan, and lamented not receiving more praise for doing so.
“I do a lot, and never get credit for anything, but that’s OK, the PEOPLE understand. MAKE THE MIDDLE EAST GREAT AGAIN!” he wrote on Truth Social.
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