The firing of thousands of buzzers targeting Hezbollah in Lebanon left a mysterious trail from Taiwan to Hungary, while raising fears of another full-scale Middle East war between the Iran-backed group and Israel.
Mossad, Israel’s spy agency that has carried out complex attacks on foreign soil, planted explosives in buzzers imported by the Lebanese group Hezbollah months before yesterday’s bombings that killed 12 people, a senior Lebanese security source said. Reuters.
The move was an unprecedented security breach by Hezbollah, resulting in thousands of explosives detonating in various parts of Lebanon and injuring nearly 3,000 people, including several of the group’s fighters and Iran’s ambassador in Beirut.
A Lebanese security source said the buzzers were from Taiwan-based Gold Apollo, but the company said in a statement it did not manufacture the devices.
He said they were manufactured by BAC, a company based in the Hungarian capital and licensed to use its trademark.
Iran-backed Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate against Israel, which declined to comment on the bombing. Both sides have been engaged in cross-border fighting since the Gaza war broke out last October.
While the war in Gaza remains Israel’s main focus since the October 7 offensive by Hamas militants, hostilities on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon have fueled fears of a regional conflict involving the United States and Iran.
Strong response threats
“Hezbollah wants to avoid an all-out war. It still wants to avoid an all-out war. But given the scale, the impact on families, on civilians, there will be pressure for a strong response,” said Mohannath Hage Ali of the Carnegie Middle East Center.
Hezbollah said in a statement today, “Like any other day, Gaza, its people and its activities in support of its resistance will continue today, a unique path from the severe punishment that awaits the response of the criminal enemy (Israel) to the massacre it carried out on Tuesday.”
The plot appears to have been brewing for months, multiple sources told Reuters. This follows a series of assassinations of Hezbollah and Hamas commanders and leaders blamed on Israel since the start of the Gaza war.
Tracks lead to Budapest
A top Lebanese security source said the group had ordered 5,000 buzzers from Colt Apollo, which multiple sources said had been imported into the country earlier this year.
Gold Apollo founder Hsu Ching-kuang said the blasters used in the attack were made by a company in Europe, which Gold Apollo identified in a statement as BAC.
“The product was not ours. It only had our brand,” Hsu told reporters today at the company’s offices in the northern Taiwanese city of New Taipei.
BAC Consulting’s registered address in Budapest is a building on a suburban street that is mostly residential. The name of the company is written on an A4 sticker pasted on the glass door of the building.
A person in the building, who did not want to be named, said the PAC Consulting address was listed but there was no physical presence there. Cristiana Barsoni-Archidiacono, managing director of BAC Consulting, mentions on her LinkedIn profile that she has worked as a consultant for various organizations, including UNESCO. He did not respond to emails from Reuters.
BAC’s registered activities cover a wide range from video game production to IT consulting and oil extraction.
A senior Lebanese security source identified a photo of the AR-924, a model of the siren. Hezbollah fighters use buzzers as a low-tech communication device in an attempt to evade Israeli detection.
How Basars Worked
A senior Lebanese security source said the devices were modified by Israel’s spy agency “in production mode”.
“Mossad inserted a panel into the device that contained an explosive material that could be detonated with a code. It would be very difficult to trace in any way,” the source said.
The source said the detonation occurred when a coded message was sent to 3,000 buzzers.
Another security source told Reuters that three grams of explosives had been buried in the new bombers and had remained “undiscovered” by Hezbollah for months.
The Israeli Mossad was already “famous” for its complex operations in the 1960s with the daring kidnapping of Nazi Adolf Eichmann. More recently, the agency was allegedly responsible for cyber attacks and the 2020 assassination of a top Iranian scientist with a remote-controlled machine gun.
Israeli officials did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.
Security failure
Hezbollah was hit by the attack, which left militants and many others injured, hospitalized or killed. A Hezbollah official said the shooting was the biggest “security breach” in the organization’s history.
In a televised address on February 13, the group’s secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, warned supporters that they were more dangerous than Israeli spies, saying they should destroy them, bury them or lock them in iron cages.
Instead, Hezbollah chose to distribute the bombs to its members in various branches of the organization — from fighters to doctors working in its relief services.
The explosions maimed several Hezbollah members, according to footage from hospitals reviewed by Reuters. The injured men had multiple facial injuries, lost fingers and large cuts to their hips, possibly going off buzzers.
Hezbollah’s rocket barrage the day after October 7 opened the latest phase of the conflict, and since then there have been daily rocket, artillery and missile attacks, with Israeli fighters launching attacks deep into Lebanese soil.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallad told US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Monday that the window for a diplomatic solution to the conflict with Hezbollah was closing.
Source: RES-MPE
