How the plan to explode Hezbollah's pagers and walkie-talkies developed

“The collaborator [with the Israelis] is the cell phone in your hands and those of your wife and children. That cell phone is the collaborator and the murderer,” he added. “Do it in the interest of security and to protect people's blood and dignity.”

After months of near-daily shelling of the Israeli-Lebanese border, Hezbollah is concerned about Israeli tracking and spyware on mobile phones that could enable targeted attacks or disruption of operations.

Pagers became the norm. These low-tech boxes, which receive messages sent over their radio frequency from a transmitter, are used to display phone numbers where Hamas members can call back via an internal line.

The use of this largely unknown technology, which had its heyday in the 1980s and 1990s, was supposed to provide greater security. But Hezbollah's highly publicized elimination of mobile phones was to come to a bloody end.

At 3:45 p.m. on Tuesday, these pagers began exploding – it sounded like gunshots or fireworks. Over the next hour, they continued to detonate across Lebanon and parts of Syria.

Surveillance footage showed explosions in supermarkets and on the streets.

The pagers reportedly received a message that appeared to come from Hezbollah leadership and were programmed to beep for several seconds before exploding, U.S. officials told the New York Times.

But it did not stop there. On Wednesday afternoon, further explosions were reported from the south of the country, from Beirut and from the eastern Bekaa Valley, this time allegedly from exploding walkie-talkies.

The hospitals were once again flooded with patients.

Sources told Axios that the second attack was likely due to the risk that Hezbollah might discover the vulnerability in the walkie-talkies during its investigation into the first attack.

The threat of all-out war between Iran-backed Hezbollah and Israel had skyrocketed in the weeks before the attack, following nearly a year of clashes sparked by Israel's war against another Tehran ally, Hamas, in the Gaza Strip.

On Tuesday, Israel's Shin Bet intelligence agency said it had foiled a Hezbollah plot to assassinate a former senior Israeli security official with a remote-controlled explosive device. Hours later, pagers exploded across Beirut.

Hezbollah quickly blamed Israel. Security sources told several media outlets that Israel's Mossad intelligence agency – which has long been responsible for sophisticated attacks on foreign soil – had planted explosives in pagers imported by Hezbollah.

Israel has so far refused to comment – not unusual for actions outside its borders – and is now looking for answers to the question of how the operation was carried out. It is a trail that leads to Beirut, via Hungary, Bulgaria and a touch of Japan and Taiwan.

Anonymous U.S., Lebanese and Hezbollah officials painted a picture of an operation that took months to plan and execute and that ripped a hole in Hezbollah's security apparatus. One Hezbollah official told Reuters it was the largest such breach in Hezbollah's history.

The number of pagers ordered by Hezbollah was between 3,000 and 5,000 and was reportedly delivered to Lebanon several months ago. They were distributed to Hezbollah members, mostly in the Beirut area. Some also went to Hezbollah allies in Syria and Iran.

The ones that exploded were turned on and set to receive messages.

The walkie-talkies were purchased by Hezbollah five months ago, around the same time as the pagers, a security source told Reuters.

Damaged pagers displayed the branding of Gold Apollo, a company in Taiwan.

In a strange twist, the company's founder, Hsu Ching-Kuang, told reporters outside the company's offices in Taipei that the company had nothing to do with making the pagers – instead, a European company had used their name under license.

“The product was not ours. It just had our brand on it,” Mr. Hsu said. “We may not be a big company, but we are a responsible one,” he added. “This is very embarrassing.”

Gold Apollo named the company as BAC Consulting, which has an address in Budapest. The company is authorized to use Gold Apollo's logo for product sales in certain regions, “but the design and manufacture of the products are entirely in the hands of BAC,” the statement said.

This Budapest address is a peach-colored building on a residential street in the suburbs. The company name was written on an A4 sheet of paper on the glass door. When reporters spoke to a person inside, they said BAC Consulting was registered there but had no physical presence.

Mr. Hsu said his company was a victim of the incident, that he plans to sue BAC and that he does not know how the pagers could be rigged to explode. He also claimed there were problems with the company's wire transfers.

“The transfer was very strange,” he said, adding that the payments were made through the Middle East, but he said no more.

Mr. Hsu said the company has had a licensing agreement with BAC for three years. BAC Consulting KFT, a limited liability company, was registered in May 2022, according to company records, although the website appears to have been active for longer.

When contacted by NBC News, BAC Consulting CEO Cristiana Barsony-Arcidiacono confirmed that her company was working with Gold Apollo. However, when asked about the pagers and the explosions, she said, “I don't make the pagers. I'm just the middleman.”

BAC Consulting's website, which was online early Wednesday but was later unavailable, contains information about the company's activities, but it is vague.

“With over a decade of consulting experience, we are on an exciting and rewarding journey with our network of passionate experts with a hunger for innovation and discovery in the areas of environment, innovation & development and international affairs,” the company says on its LinkedIn page.

Ms Barsony-Arcidiacono says in her LinkedIn profile that she has worked as a consultant for various organizations, including UNESCO. BAC's registered activities are wide-ranging, ranging from publishing computer games to IT consulting and crude oil production.

Bulgaria announced yesterday that it would investigate a company linked to the sale of pagers to Lebanon's Hezbollah.

Bulgaria's state security service DANS said in a statement that it was working with the Interior Ministry to investigate the role of a company registered in Bulgaria, but did not name it. Hungarian media reports suggested the company was based in Sofia.

The walkie-talkies were marked “Made in Japan” and were traced to a company called ICOM. The company said it stopped producing the radio models identified in the attack ten years ago and that most of the devices still on the market are counterfeits.

“It is impossible that a bomb was built into one of our devices during production. The process is highly automated and fast, so there is no time for such things,” said Yoshiki Enomoto, a director of ICOM, outside the company's headquarters in Osaka, Japan.

“If it turns out to be a fake, we will have to investigate how someone made a bomb that looks like our product. If it is real, we will have to trace its distribution to find out how it ended up there,” Mr Enomoto said.

While the blame game continues, the focus is now on when exactly the pagers and walkie-talkies were modified. A senior Lebanese source said the pagers were tampered with by Israeli intelligence “at the production level.”

“The Mossad has built a circuit board with explosives into the device that receives a code. It is very difficult to detect this by any means,” the source said.

Another security source said up to three grams of explosives were hidden in the pagers and remained “undetected” by Hezbollah for months. Other officials said the explosives were placed next to the battery, next to a switch that could be triggered remotely.

As for the timing of the explosions, Israeli and U.S. officials have said Israeli intelligence wanted to mark the blasts as the first act of a full-scale war with Hezbollah, but acted early after Hezbollah became suspicious – and more than one member believed the bombs might have been tampered with.

“It was a moment of survival,” a US official told Axios, describing the reasoning Israel gave the US for the timing of the attack. However, officials said Washington had not been informed of the details of the attack.

What follows is expected to be a reaction from Hezbollah, which has vowed “revenge.” Israel's defense minister said on Wednesday that the military was turning its attention to the Lebanese border. Yoav Gallant did not mention the explosions, but praised the work of the Israeli army and security agencies, saying: “The results are very impressive.”

Western nations and Middle Eastern states will hope that this unprecedented attack will not trigger a full-scale war between Hezbollah and Israel.