ISLAMABAD: Three months after conducting the clandestine pager attacks against Hezbollah, two former Israeli operatives have finally opened the lid on exactly how they pulled off the plot.
The former Israeli agents disclosed details of the operation in an interview with US broadcaster CBS.
Dozens of people were killed and thousands injured in the attacks across Lebanon, according to BBC.
CBS reported when Mossad found that Hezbollah was buying pagers from a Taiwanese company called Gold Apollo, it set up a fake company which used the Gold Apollo name on pagers rigged with explosives, without the parent company realising.
“We have an incredible array of possibilities of creating foreign companies that have no way of being traced back to Israel,” one of the agents named Michael revealed to CBS.
“Shell companies over shell companies to affect the supply chain to our favour,” he narrated.
“We have an incredible array of possibilities of creating foreign companies that have no way of being traced back to Israel,” – Ex-Mossad agent Michael
He then goes on to say, “We create a pretend world. We are a global production company. We write the screenplay, we’re the directors, we’re the producers, we’re the main actors, and the world is our stage.”
Some security analysts dubbed the attacks more of a psychological warfare tactic than a maximum-damage campaign that intended to exaggerate Mossad’s intelligence capabilities.
Covert operation
CBS said the covert operation to compromise pagers began two years before, although the job on walkie-talkies spanned over 10 years.
The UN human rights chief called the attack a war crime.
At the time of the attack, Israel and Hezbollah were fighting a full-blown conflict.
The Israeli media reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted to the attacks two months later.
“When they are buying from us, they have zero clue that they are buying from the Mossad,” said another former agent identified as Gabriel. “We make like [movie] Truman Show, everything is controlled by us behind the scenes.”
5,000 booby-trapped pagers
Hezbollah had bought 5,000 of the booby-trapped pagers by September 2024, CBS reported.
Lebanon strongly condemned the pager and walkie-talkie attacks, while the UN’s human rights chief, Volker Turk, said they had left him “appalled”.
The method of attacks, he said, “violates international human rights law and, as applicable, international humanitarian law”.
