In one of the weirdest military headlines in memory, thousands of pagers belonging to members of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah exploded Tuesday afternoon, leading to countless injuries and at least nine deaths.
A Hezbollah official told the Wall Street Journal that the group had recently received a new shipment of pagers, which are old-school wireless devices — so retro that they were name-checked by NWA in the late 1980s — that generally only receive and display messages.
As Reuters reports, Hezbollah had been using one-way pagers to avoid Israeli forces from tracking their location.
Rumors quickly circulated that hackers may have spread malware to these devices that somehow caused them to heat up and explode.
According to the WSJ‘s source, some members felt the pagers heat up and threw them out before they detonated.
Pagers were blowing up from around 3:30 pm to 4:30 pm local time.
Videos circulating online show scenes of chaos, with local hospitals filling up with both injured Hezbollah members and civilians.
A voice message circulated among group members, as shared with the Washington Post, warning them to ditch the affected devices.
“Each one who received a new pager, throw it away,” the message said.
While the Israeli military refused to comment, Hezbollah has since blamed the country, with which it has been sparring for almost a year now.
We still don’t exactly know what caused the pagers to explode. Michael Horowitz, head of security and risk management consulting firm le Beck International, told the WSJ that malware likely caused the pagers’ batteries to overheat and explode. Alternatively, small amounts of explosives may have been placed inside the devices and detonated remotely.
“Either way, this is a very sophisticated attack,” Horowitz told the newspaper. “Particularly if this is a physical breach, as this would mean Israel has access to the producer of those devices. This may be part of the message being sent here.”
According to security footage obtained by Reuters, some detonations took place after the pagers rang. This caused Hezbollah members to lift them up to their faces, likely exacerbating their injuries.
Experts told the news agency that the batteries alone likely wouldn’t have caused large enough of an explosion, suggesting explosives may have been used.
In other words, it’s still unclear if this was an “Israeli cyberattack,” as Lebanese officials have since called it, or a concerted effort to take down many Hezbollah targets at once.
“What we’re talking about is a relatively small battery bursting into flames,” Newcastle University lithium-ion battery expert Paul Christensen told Reuters. “We’re not talking of a fatal explosion here. I’d need to know more about the energy density of the batteries, but my intuition is telling me that it’s highly unlikely.”
It wouldn’t be the first time Israeli intelligence booby-trapped a mobile device to target operatives. In 1996, the Israeli secret service reportedly remotely detonated a cellphone that belonged to a Palestinian who had allegedly masterminded several terror attacks.
Israel, however, has never confirmed or denied involvement.
A malicious computer virus dubbed Stuxnet, which was jointly developed by the US and Israel, was also used in 2010 to cause gas centrifuges in Iranian nuclear power plants to tear themselves apart — a plot to sabotage the nation’s uranium enrichment program.
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