Pagers exploded across Lebanon yesterday as part of a coordinated attack against Hezbollah. The accident killed at least 12 people and injured thousands. Area hospitals are struggling to keep up.
The pager started beeping at 3:30 pm local time on Tuesday. Reports from the scene said people believed they had received a message from Hezbollah’s leadership. Seconds after the beep started, the buzzer exploded, injuring the vehicle owner and bystanders. According to Lebanese health officials, the explosion injured 1,850 people in Beirut, 150 in the Bekaa and 750 in southern Lebanon. A Syrian NGO said 14 people were injured in the area.
Fourth-year student Fatima Abdullah, a nine-year-old girl, was one of two children killed in the attack. According to the New York Times, she saw the pager go off and picked it up to show her father. She was holding it when it exploded. The explosion also injured the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amini, who lost an eye in the explosion.
Israel has neither confirmed nor denied involvement in the attack, but the world believes
Jerusalem is responsible. Hezbollah and Lebanese civilian leaders blame Israel and promise revenge. The United States said it had no involvement or knowledge of the attack.
What is a pager? Where did these come from?
A pager or buzzer is a small and simple telecommunications device. It’s usually a small plastic brick with an LCD screen and speakers. Most of them only receive messages, and often simple messages such as a string of numbers. They were popular throughout the 1980s and 1990s, eventually causing a moral panic in heyday America due to their links to drug traffickers.
As cell phones became ubiquitous, pagers, like any old technology, slowly disappeared. But there are still use cases for older devices. Pagers send and receive signals via radio frequencies. This means that if your phone or Wi-Fi fails, the pager will still work. They also don’t have GPS trackers, cameras, or any other technology that generates telemetry data.
For these reasons, pagers are considered more rugged and more secure than traditional communications devices. Pagers are common in U.S. hospitals, where doctors and caregivers use them every day to communicate.
“You can throw them in the toilet. You can throw them away. They run on AA batteries… like forever. And they’re cheap. They’re like communicative cockroaches,” one doctor told NPR in 2023.
“Also, pagers get better service. They operate on a different wireless network than cell phones, making them more reliable in emergencies.
Their qualities that are valuable to doctors also make them valued by transnational drug cartels, criminal organizations and militant groups such as Hezbollah. The Lebanese army has been at war with Israel on and off for fifty years. Israel’s intelligence services are very good at what they do, and any mobile phone or internet-connected device is considered vulnerable. In February, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah denounced cell phones in a speech.
Buzzers should be safer and more reliable.
The buzzer used in the attack was a Gold Apollo rugged pager AR-924. Its battery lasts 85 days on a single charge, and its LED-backlit screen is readable in direct sunlight and can survive being submerged in water, according to a YouTube video promoting the product.
AR-924 is a product of Taiwan’s Gold Apollo Company. Hours after the attack, as the model of the pager used was determined, Gold Apollo’s website crashed. Gizmodo attempted to contact the company but did not receive a response. Yet reporters from around the world came to Gold Apollo’s offices in Taiwan and heard bizarre stories of how pagers were used in attacks.
“It’s very embarrassing,” the company’s founder Xu Jingguang told reporters upon arrival on Wednesday.
According to Xu, his company does not produce these pagers at all. Hsu told NPR that three years ago, a mysterious woman named “Teresa” approached him on behalf of a company called BAC Consulting.
Terese negotiated a contract that allowed BAC Consulting to sell Gold Apollo pagers in other markets and, most importantly, use the company’s logo on the pagers it manufactured.
“They said they wanted to train a group of engineers,” Xu told NPR. “I told them, what you make doesn’t work well, and it doesn’t look good. Why not just use my product?
Hsu said dealing with Terese and BAC was cumbersome and that some payments were made through Taiwan-flagged Middle Eastern bank accounts. Reporters tracked BAC Consulting back to an office building in Hungary but were unsuccessful in contacting its alleged owner. Hungarian government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs issued a statement this morning.
️🇭🇺The Hungarian government’s position on the “pager issue”: The authorities have confirmed that the company involved is a trading intermediary company and does not have any production or business premises in Hungary. It registered a manager at its stated address and cited…
— Zoltan Kovac (@zoltanspox) September 18, 2024
If Israel was responsible, as seems likely, it was a sophisticated supply chain attack that took years to plan and execute. Experts noted that Apollo Gold’s batteries were not large enough to provide the kind of explosive power seen in the attack, and that explosives were likely added during the manufacturing process.
Hezbollah has been firing rockets into northern Israel since the attack on October 7 last year. On Wednesday, it announced another attack on artillery positions along the Israeli border.
