Reuters reveals new information on the pager explosions

Reuters shared a new report Wednesday regarding the pager explosions in the possession of Hezbollah members on September 17.

The report noted that the batteries inside the weaponized pagers that arrived in Lebanon at the start of the year, part of an Israeli plot to decimate Hezbollah, had powerfully deceptive features and one weakness.

The agents who built the pagers designed a battery that concealed a small but potent charge of plastic explosive and a novel detonator invisible to X-ray, according to a Lebanese source with first-hand knowledge of the pagers and teardown photos of the battery pack seen by Reuters.

To overcome the weakness - the absence of a plausible backstory for the bulky new product - they created fake online stores, pages, and posts that could deceive Hezbollah due diligence, a Reuters review of web archives shows.

Reuters mentioned that the stealthy design of the pager bomb and the battery's carefully constructed cover story, both described here for the first time, shed light on the execution of a years-long operation that has struck unprecedented blows against Israel's Iran-backed Lebanese foe and pushed the Middle East closer to a regional war.

According to the Lebanese source and photos, a thin, square sheet with six grams of white pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) plastic explosive was squeezed between two rectangular battery cells.

The source said the remaining space between the battery cells could not be seen in the photos but was occupied by a strip of highly flammable material that acted as the detonator.

The photos showed that this three-layer sandwich was inserted in a black plastic sleeve and encapsulated in a metal casing roughly matchbox-sized.

The assembly was unusual because it did not rely on a standard miniaturized detonator, typically a metallic cylinder, the source and two bomb experts said. All three spoke on conditions of anonymity.

Without any metal components, the material used to trigger detonation had an edge: like the plastic explosives, X-ray did not detect it.

Upon receiving the pagers in February, Hezbollah looked for the presence of explosives, two people familiar with the matter said, putting them through airport security scanners to see if they triggered alarms. Nothing suspicious was reported.

The devices were likely set up to generate a spark within the battery pack, enough to light the detonating material and trigger the sheet of PETN to explode, said the two bomb experts to whom Reuters showed the pager-bomb design.

Since explosives and wrapping took about a third of the volume, the battery pack carried a fraction of the power consistent with its 35-gram weight, two battery experts said.

"There is a significant amount of unaccounted-for mass," said Paul Christensen, an expert in lithium batteries at Britain's Newcastle University.

At some point, Hezbollah noticed the battery was draining faster than expected, the Lebanese source said. 

However, the issue did not appear to raise significant security concerns - the group was still handing its members the pagers hours before the attack.

Two Western security sources said Israeli intelligence agency Mossad spearheaded the pager and walkie-talkie attacks.


Reuters