This floored me. The Lebanese health minister reported earlier that 8 people died and 2,750 suffered injuries when thousands of pagers exploded this morning in Lebanon and Syria:
Lebanon’s health minister, Firass Abia, said the blasts killed eight people, including a girl. “About 2,750 people were injured ... more than 200 of them critically,” with injuries mostly reported to the face, hands and stomach, he told a press conference.
Hezbollah said in a statement that two of its fighters and a 10-year-old girl were among the dead.
Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, was one of those injured in the explosions, according to Iran’s Mehr news agency.
Some of the top Hezbollah leaders and their advisers were also injured, the Saudi-owned Al-Hadath news channel reported, quoting unnamed sources.
A Hezbollah official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters the detonation of the pagers was the “biggest security breach” the group had been subjected to in nearly a year of war with Israel.
Yossi Melman, a co-author of Spies Against Armageddon and other books on Israeli intelligence, said: “This absolutely has all the hallmarks of a Mossad operation. Somebody has planted minor explosives or malware from inside the pagers. I understand they were recently supplied as well.”
Melman said he understood that “a lot of people in Hezbollah carried these pagers, not just top echelon commanders”. They were used by the Lebanese group because they feared their mobile phones were being monitored by Israeli intelligence to surveil their communications and to pinpoint missile attacks.
That (a) someone managed to supply thousands of Hezbollah terrorists with booby-trapped pagers and (b) no one in Hezbollah conducted security checks on the pagers before handing them out blows my mind. Regardless of who perpetrated this attack, (a) I am very sorry the little girl died but (b) for the Hezbollah fighters and leaders injured in the attack, I will shed not one tear. It's simultaneously one of the most effective intelligence operations and one of the worst counter-espionage failures in decades. Wow.