Thousands are injured and at least nine, including a child, dead in Lebanon after a mass pager explosion apparently targeting members of Hezbollah.
Lebanon and Hezbollah have both blamed Israel for the attack, while Israel’s military has withheld comment.
Now, experts are puzzling out how the attack might have been carried out.
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The wave of explosions affected several areas in Lebanon, particularly the southern suburbs of Beirut, according to Lebanon’s Internal Security Forces.
State media NNA reported that “hacked” pager devices exploded in the towns of Ali Al-Nahri and Riyaq in Lebanon’s central Beqaa valley, resulting in a significant number of injuries.
The locations are Hezbollah strongholds.
Experts have shared two competing theories as to how hundreds of pagers could have exploded simultaneously.
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One theory is that there was a cybersecurity breach, causing the pagers’ lithium batteries to overheat and detonate.
Another is that this was a “supply chain attack,” where the pagers were tampered with during the manufacturing and shipping process.
David Kennedy, a former US National Security Agency intelligence analyst, told CNN that the explosions seen in videos shared online appear to be “too large for this to be a remote and direct hack that would overload the pager and cause a lithium battery explosion.”
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Kennedy said he found the second theory to be more plausible.
“It’s more likely that Israel had human operatives… in Hezbollah… The pagers would have been implanted with explosives and likely only to detonate when a certain message was received,” he said.
“The complexity needed to pull this off is incredible. It would have required many different intelligence components and execution. Human intelligence (HUMINT) would be the main method used to pull this off, along with intercepting the supply chain in order to make modifications to the pagers.”
Lebanese officials have urged citizens who possess pagers to discard them and warned hospitals to be on “high alert,” and asked health workers to urgently report to work to assist with the “large number of injured people.”
A Hezbollah official told The Associated Press the pagers were a new brand, but declined to say how long they had been in use.
The Hezbollah official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to talk to the press.
With CNN, Associated Press.
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