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ISRAEL’S NEW CAMPAIGN OF “TERRORISM WARFARE” ACROSS LEBANON  
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Jeremy Scahill, Murtaza Hussain, and Sharif Abdel Kouddous
September 18, 2024
Drop Site
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_ "Customary international humanitarian law prohibits the use of
booby traps to avoid putting civilians at grave risk and produce the
devastating scenes that continue to unfold across Lebanon." _

A civil defence first responder carries a wounded man whose hand-held
pager exploded, at al-Zahraa hospital in Beirut. [Hussein Malla/AP
Photo],

 

For the second day in a row, electronic devices across Lebanon,
including walkie talkies, exploded on Wednesday, killing 14 people and
injuring over 450, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.

The attack came one day after thousands of pagers across the country
exploded at the same time, killing eleven people—including a
9-year-old child—and wounding nearly 3,000, including many civilians
and government and hospital workers. Hezbollah and the Lebanese
government blamed Israel for the attacks.

“Everyone's scared to send text messages, to make calls, and they're
afraid to open laptops. It's definitely led to some level of complete
disorientation, fear, confusion, paranoia. It has huge psychological
effects,” said Amal Saad, a leading expert on Hezbollah. “People
have started to say, ‘Okay, this is going to be the new type of
warfare. This is going to be how they're going to fight. It's going to
be terrorism warfare. So this is the new normal now.’ People are
preparing themselves for more of this.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a brief video
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Wednesday after the second round of attacks. “I have said it before:
We will return the citizens of the north to their homes in security,
and that’s exactly what we are going to do.”

“We have many capabilities that we have not yet activated,”
Israeli lieutenant general Herzi Halevi said, regarding Israel’s
plans for military operations at the northern border with Lebanon. 

The second attack appeared timed to cause total panic among the
civilian population and to undermine confidence in Hezbollah’s
ability to control and contain Israel’s assault. On Wednesday,
multiple explosions went off at a funeral for some of those killed on
Tuesday, according to the AP 
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reporters witnessed the attack. 

"I'm starting to realize,” Saad said, “the objective behind this
was to terrorize and paralyze and demoralize.”

Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah is scheduled to give a public
speech Thursday where he is expected to address how these attacks were
conducted and to lay out the group's plans for a military response.
“Hezbollah has to respond and will respond,” Saad said. Israel,
she said, has at times denied or downplayed the effectiveness of
Hezbollah’s attacks. To restore morale, "you need it to be
indisputable that Hezbollah did this," she said. "If it's a different
type of response that Israel can conceal and hide, I'm not sure how
effective that's going to be."

At approximately 3:30 p.m. local time on Tuesday, thousands of pagers
across Lebanon sprang to life, beeping and vibrating. The message on
the screen indicated an error. “The message was: Fault. Fault. And
it continued to beep and heat up before the explosion of the pager,”
said Ali Jezzini, a security analyst and journalist in Lebanon who has
been speaking to hospital workers treating the wounded. 

Many victims, he said, lifted the devices to examine the pagers and as
they did so, they exploded, causing injuries to their faces and hands.
“It did give a code and it continued to ring and vibrate. So that's
why they had to hold it in their hands to check what's happening. It
was faulty, it was not responding, so that's why they kept it in front
of their faces and the palms of their hands, because they're trying to
figure out what's wrong with it. That's why most of the injuries are
like that. It didn't explode right away.”

The widespread physical injuries are intended to have a larger
psychological effect, according to Jezzini. "I would compare it to an
operation made by the Americans in Vietnam where they actually planted
faulty ammunition that made the guns explode for the Viet Cong on the
NVA and during the Vietnam war,” said Jezzini, referring to an
operation called Project Eldest Son.

“Psychologically, it does actually help to, you know, make the
fighter lose confidence in his equipment. That's the aim." He compared
it to a psyop, intended to "alter the perception of Hezbollah's
leadership" and perhaps force it into a ceasefire.

Speaking to Israeli troops at the Ramat David Airbase on Wednesday,
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant made no mention of the
explosions but he did declare “the start of a new phase in the
war” saying, “the center of gravity is moving north. We are
diverting forces, resources, and energy toward the north.”

The United Nations Security Council will meet on Friday over the
attacks following a request by Algeria on behalf of Arab states.

Experts are still searching for the precise mechanism that triggered
the explosions in the pagers yesterday. The most likely scenario,
based on available evidence, is that the pagers were rigged with some
form of explosive material or mechanism before being delivered to
Lebanon. That would mean Israeli agents were able to access the
devices at the point of manufacture or to interdict the supply chain.
Officials in Lebanon have said they believe the pagers contained 10-20
grams of explosive material. The devices were then detonated through a
message, code, or pulse pushed to the devices, which triggered
whatever mechanism had been installed.

“I have to give credit to those that fabricated those pagers, very
ingenious,” said Mike Vining, a legend in the world of U.S. covert
operations, one of the first members of Delta Force and an expert on
explosives. “When I was in the military at my old job we developed a
lot of tricks. I am saddened about the fact that innocent people were
injured. The goal is never to hurt the innocent.” 

Vining told Drop Site News that he had no inside knowledge of the
operation in Lebanon, but offered some plausible theories on how the
pagers were rigged and detonated. “Probably had some pure PETN
explosives in the pagers,” he said, referring to pentaerythritol
tetranitrate, a highly explosive substance. “I believe from what I
see, first the lithium battery is shorted and explodes and that causes
the PETN to detonate. What makes me think this is that the pager got
hot and smoked first. A single signal must have been what triggered
the reaction.” 

 “Sources today in Lebanon were saying that the [pagers] have
passed the inspections on multiple airports, such as X-rays,” said
Jezzini, making it difficult to place blame on one single agency for
allowing the attack to happen.

Reporting by Al-Monitor and Axios has suggested that Israel decided to
move forward with the attack out of concerns that Hezbollah was on the
brink of discovering the rigged pagers, but this remains unconfirmed.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also echoed the
point at a briefing at UN headquarters: “What has happened is
particularly serious, not only because of the number of victims that
it caused, but because of the indications that exist that this was
triggered, I would say, in advance of a normal way to trigger these
things, because there was a risk of this being discovered.”

Multiple news outlets
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reported that Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant informed U.S.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin that Israel was going to carry out an
operation in Lebanon, but offered no specifics. The U.S. has
officially denied any involvement or foreknowledge of the plot. "We
were not aware of this operation and we were not involved in it," said
U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller on Tuesday. 

The model of the pagers matches that of a model manufactured by a
Taiwanese company called Gold Apollo. Images of damaged devices shared
online after the blasts showed labeling matching the AR-924 model
built by the company, along with the company name. 

The AR-924 was listed on the company’s website prior to its removal
this week. In statements issued by the company after the attacks, Gold
Apollo denied manufacturing the product and said the model in question
is produced and sold by BAC Consulting KFT, a Hungarian company that
had been authorized to use its branding. In public comments,
Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs said that its records showed
no direct exports to Lebanon by Gold Apollo.

The president of Gold Apollo, Hsu Ching-Kuang, told the press that a
year after signing their partnership, BAC made the unusual request to
design its own products but with Gold Apollo’s trademark. According
to Hsu, payments to Gold Apollo from BAC reportedly came from a bank
account registered to an unnamed country in the Middle East, causing
occasional delays and freezes in payment, despite BAC being based in
Hungary, an arrangement he called “strange.”

BAC is based in Budapest and was established in 2022, publicly
available information shows. A company website, since taken offline
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describes the role of BAC in developing, “international technology
cooperation among countries for the sale of telecommunication
products,” and “scaling up a business from Asia to new
markets.” 

Business records listed for the company in Hungary show around
$584,000 in revenue for the company in 2023 along with only $320 in
fixed assets. Reporters from the Associated Press who visited the
building listed as the headquarters of BAC in a residential
neighborhood of Budapest found a building used as a site for
headquarter addresses of multiple companies. 

The CEO of the company is listed as Cristiana Bársony-Arcidiacono. A
LinkedIn page for Bársony-Arcidiacono indicates that, prior to her
role at BAC she had previously worked for the European Commission, as
well as a “strategic advisor” for consulting firms in various
countries. (The EU Commission denied she was ever a staff member, but
could not rule out the possibility she worked as a contractor.) After
the attacks, Bársony-Arcidiacono was quoted in press reports
confirming her company’s licensing arrangement with Gold Apollo, but
stating, “I don’t make the pagers. I am just the intermediate. I
think you got it wrong.”

In a statement posted
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Wednesday, Zoltan Kovacs, a spokesperson for the government of
Hungary, also called BAC “a trading intermediary, with no
manufacturing or operational site” in the country. “The referenced
devices have never been in Hungary,”  he added.

Globally, many condemned Israel’s use of such a widespread tactic
that, by design, would clearly harm and kill civilians. "It's not just
fighters" being maimed, Saad said. "Hezbollah is such a huge
grassroots organization, there are so many people who work [in its
civil institutions]. My friend's cousin lost his eyes and his fingers
yesterday because he's a nurse in Al Rassoul Al Azam Hospital. He's a
part time nurse in that hospital, but he's a student. And there are
many, many people who are connected to Hezbollah in this way just
through part time work."

"Customary international humanitarian law prohibits the use of booby
traps – objects that civilians are likely to be attracted to or are
associated with normal civilian daily use – precisely to avoid
putting civilians at grave risk and produce the devastating scenes
that continue to unfold across Lebanon,” Lama Fakih, Middle East and
North Africa Director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for information from the U.S.
State Department as to whether any funding from the U.S. went into the
attack. “This attack clearly and unequivocally violates
international humanitarian law and undermines US efforts to prevent a
wider conflict,” she posted on Twitter
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full accounting of the attack, including an answer from the State
Department as to whether any US assistance went into the development
or deployment of this technology.”

“It's the only way to wage war for the Israelis, the dirty war,”
said Jezzini. “They are aiming to change the whole perspective of
the world on how to wage war and what is legitimate or not to survive.
So instead of complying with international law, they are trying to
change the whole concept of international law. That is real danger
here.”

_Jeremy Scahill:  Journalist at Drop Site News, co-founder of The
Intercept, author of the books Blackwater and Dirty Wars. Reported
from Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, etc._

_Murtaza Hussain: Journalist, book reviews, interviews and social
commentary._

_Sharif Abdel Kouddous:  Independent journalist based in New York and
Cairo._

 

_Drop Site is not simply another non-partisan news organization. It is
completely independent journalism dedicated to principles of accuracy
and accountability. We are never afraid to take a stand for truth,
regardless of the partisan consequences or the risk of political or
personal unpopularity.  Independent news on politics and war.
Founded by Ryan Grim, Jeremy Scahill, and veterans of The Intercept._

_Thanks for reading Drop Site News! This post is public so feel free
to share it._

* Lebanon
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* Israel
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* international law
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