A trail of exploded Hezbollah pagers goes from Taiwan to Hungary

Wednesday, a Taiwanese company that makes pagers denied that it had made the devices that burst and hurt thousands of Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon. This was a bold attack that made a full-scale war between Iran-backed Hezbollah and Israel look more likely.

The devices were made under license by a company called BAC, which is based in Budapest, the city of Hungary.

A top Lebanese security source and another source told Reuters that Israel’s Mossad, which has a long history of carrying out complex attacks in other countries, put explosives in pagers that Hezbollah brought in months before the explosions on Tuesday.

Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad said on Wednesday that 12 people had died, two of them children. Almost 3,000 people were hurt in the attack, including many fighters for the group and Iran’s ambassador to Beirut.

Iran-backed Hezbollah has promised to fight back against Israel, but Israel’s forces wouldn’t say anything about the explosions. Since the conflict in Gaza started in October, the two sides have been fighting across borders. This has made people fear a bigger conflict in the Middle East that could involve the US and Iran.

Ayman Safadi, the foreign minister of Jordan, said that Israel was bringing the Middle East to the edge of a regional war by coordinating a dangerous rise in tensions on many fronts.

Hamas wants to stay out of a full-on war. It still wants to stay away from one. There will be calls for a stronger reaction, though, because of how big it is and how it affects families and civilians, said Mohanad Hage Ali of the Carnegie Middle East Center.

In a statement, Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful ally in the Middle East, said it would continue to back Hamas in Gaza and that Israel should wait for a reaction to the pager “massacre” that hurt more than 30 people and sent some to the hospital or killed them.

Someone from Hezbollah said the explosion was the “biggest security breach” in the group’s history.

Hospital video that Reuters looked at showed men with different kinds of injuries, including cuts on the face, missing fingers, and big holes in their hips where they probably wore their pagers.

Several people told Reuters that the plot has been planned for a long time. Since the start of the Gaza war, Israel has been blamed for killing a number of Hezbollah and Hamas officers and leaders.

The trail goes to Budapest.

A top security source in Lebanon said that the group had ordered 5,000 pagers from Gold Apollo. Several other sources say that the pagers were brought into the country earlier this year.

Gold Apollo’s founder, Hsu Ching-Kuang, said that the pagers that went off in the blast were made by BAC, a company in Europe.

“The item wasn’t ours. “It was just that it had our logo on it,” Hsu told reporters on Wednesday at the company’s offices in New Taipei, a city in northern Taiwan.

The address given for BAC Consulting in Budapest, Hungary’s capital, was a peach building on a street with mostly homes in an outer neighborhood. The name of the business was written on an A4 piece and stuck on the glass door.

Someone at the building who did not want to be named said that BAC Consulting was registered there but did not have a real location. Cristiana Barsony-Arcidiacono is the CEO of BAC Consulting. On her LinkedIn page, she says that she has been a consultant for UNESCO and other groups. Reuters sent her emails, but she didn’t answer them.

BAC is licensed to do a lot of different things, from making computer games to providing IT consulting services to extracting crude oil.

A top-level Lebanese security source recognized a picture of the pager model as an AR-924. Hezbollah soldiers have been trying to avoid being tracked by Israel by using pagers as a low-tech way to talk to each other.

The top Lebanese source said that Israel’s spy service had changed the devices “at the production level.” When Reuters asked Israeli officials for reaction, they didn’t answer right away.

“The Mossad put a board inside the device that can receive a code and has explosive material on it.” No matter what you do, it’s very hard to find,” the person said.

The person said that when a coded message was sent to about 3,000 of the pagers, they all went off at the same time.

Reuters also heard from a security source that the new pagers had up to three grams of explosives hidden inside them, and that Hezbollah had not “discovered” them for months.

There was a speech on TV on February 13 by the group’s Secretary General, Hassan Nasrallah. He told followers that their phones were more dangerous than Israeli spies and that they should break, bury, or lock them in an iron box.

As an alternative, Hezbollah chose to give pagers to all of its members, from soldiers to medics working in its relief services.

The Mossad in Israel has become famous for its complicated missions, starting with the risky capture of Adolf Eichmann in 1960. Recently, the spy agency has been blamed for cyberattacks and the use of a remote-controlled machinegun to kill a top Iranian scientist in 2020.