Beirut.-The death toll from explosions in Lebanon involving communications equipment belonging to members of the Islamist movement Hezbollah is 37 and 2,931 injured, Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad announced on Thursday.
The minister said 12 people were killed in the first wave of pager explosions on Tuesday and another 25 in the second wave of walkie-talkie explosions on Wednesday, according to the latest toll.
Hours earlier, Hezbollah confirmed that 20 of the dead were from its ranks. In a series of statements, the terrorist group reported the deaths of around twenty of its members from different parts of the country, mainly from the southern region and the eastern Bekaa Valley, and also including a minor it identified as having been born in 2008.
The Shiite group did not provide details about the circumstances of their deaths, as is customary, but the number of casualties is believed to correspond to the official death toll from explosions in radio and communication equipment provided by the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health the day before.
A preliminary investigation has found that hundreds of pagers that exploded in Lebanon were booby-trapped, a security official said Wednesday.
Lebanon has opened an investigation into Tuesday’s blasts that is still “in its early stages,” a judicial official said, adding that security services were working to determine the cause of the explosions, which they blamed on Israel.
“The data indicates that the devices were pre-programmed to detonate and contained explosive materials placed next to the battery,” the official said of Tuesday’s blasts, requesting anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
The judicial official said the investigation is focused on identifying the type of explosive materials that were placed in the devices and finding out the “country of origin of the shipment and where the booby traps were placed.”
Some of the exploded devices were being inspected, the security official said, but “most of them were destroyed and burned.”
The official added that it was unlikely that the lithium batteries inside the devices had heated up and exploded. “The explosion of lithium batteries causes a fire-like incident… which can cause minor burns, but the explosion of these devices was caused by highly explosive materials,” he told AFP news agency.
A source close to Hezbollah, who asked not to be identified, had previously told AFP that “the pagers that exploded referred to a shipment recently imported by Hezbollah” that appears to have been “sabotaged at source.”
After The New York Times reported that the pagers had been ordered from Taiwanese manufacturer Gold Apollo, the company said they had been produced by its Hungarian partner BAC Consulting KFT.
The pager explosions represented a significant innovation in Israel’s history of shadow warfare, said Barak Gonen, a senior lecturer at the Jerusalem College of Technology and a former Israeli military cybersecurity official.
The basic idea is similar to a Chinese scheme from last decade that targeted American companies by “planting a new device the size of a grain of rice on the motherboards of the PCs they were using,” he said. But with “this operation… the payload was not just command and control, but also included a detonator.”Infobae.
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2024-09-24 09:30:42
