“… Israel has neither confirmed nor denied any role in the explosions, but 12 current and former defense and intelligence officials who were briefed on the attack say the Israelis were behind it, describing the operation as complex and long in the making. They spoke to The New York Times on the condition of anonymity, given the sensitivity of the subject.
… In Lebanon, as Israel picked off senior Hezbollah commandos with targeted assassinations, their leader came to a conclusion: If Israel was going high-tech, Hezbollah would go low. It was clear, a distressed Hezbollah chief, Hassan Nasrallah, said, that Israel was using cellphone networks to pinpoint the locations of his operatives.
… He [ Hezbollah chief, Hassan Nasrallah] had been pushing for years for Hezbollah to invest instead in pagers, which for all their limited capabilities could receive data without giving away a user’s location or other compromising information, according to American intelligence assessments.
… Even before Mr. Nasrallah decided to expand pager usage, Israel had put into motion a plan to establish a shell company that would pose as an international pager producer.
… By all appearances, B.A.C. Consulting was a Hungary-based company that was under contract to produce the devices on behalf of a Taiwanese company, Gold Apollo. In fact, it was part of an Israeli front, according to three intelligence officers briefed on the operation. They said at least two other shell companies were created as well to mask the real identities of the people creating the pagers: Israeli intelligence officers.
B.A.C. did take on ordinary clients, for which it produced a range of ordinary pagers. But the only client that really mattered was Hezbollah, and its pagers were far from ordinary. Produced separately, they contained batteries laced with the explosive PETN, according to the three intelligence officers.
The pagers began shipping to Lebanon in the summer of 2022 in small numbers, but production was quickly ramped up after Mr. Nasrallah denounced cellphones.
… Speaking to his security cabinet on Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would do whatever was necessary to enable more than 70,000 Israelis driven away by the fighting with Hezbollah to return home, according to reports in
Israeli news outlets.Those residents, he said, could not return without “a fundamental change in the security situation in the north,” according to a statement from the prime minister’s office.
…
One woman, Um Ibrahim, stopped a reporter in the middle of the confusion and begged to use a cellphone to call her children. Her hands shaking, she dialed a number and then screamed a directive:
“Turn off your phones now!”“