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The government’s National News Agency reported that three people were killed in the town of Sohmor in the Beqaa Valley of east Lebanon. Hundreds more were said to have been wounded in the explosions.
At least one of the blasts took place in the vicinity of a funeral for terrorists killed on Tuesday, when thousands of Hezbollah pagers detonated all over the country, according to eyewitness reports.
The Hezbollah devices that exploded late Wednesday afternoon are hand-held walkie-talkies, a Lebanese security source told Reuters.
Axios cited sources familiar with the matter as saying that the radios, which were booby-trapped in advance by Israeli intelligence, were part of the terror group’s emergency communications systems that were supposed to be used during a conflict with the Israel Defense Forces.
On Tuesday, more than 2,700 Hezbollah operatives were wounded and at least 12 were killed in Lebanon and Syria when their pagers exploded, with the terrorist organization saying it held Israel “fully responsible.”
Hezbollah relied on encrypted pagers in the first place because older tech was considered immune from Israeli intercepts. Governments and intelligence services can more easily sweep up cell communications. However, it has become clear that Israel has deeply penetrated Hezbollah’s telecoms in a very direct way:
Jody Westby of Global Cyber Risk says Hezbollah relied on “old technology” because it thought it would make its members’ lines of communication more secure.
Speaking to Al Jazeera from Washington, DC, Westby said Hezbollah used the pagers because they are more difficult to intercept and it is harder to trace the communications passed through them.
“This is digital warfare. What they did was take out a line of communication for Hezbollah. Clearly, it was planted, planned and it was effective. I wouldn’t call it a weapon of mass destruction. I would just call it an autonomous weapon, an executed military action,” she said.
Axios’ Barak Ravid reported Wednesday, “Israel blew up thousands of personal radios (Walkie-Talkies) which were used by Hezbollah members in Lebanon in a second wave of its intelligence operation which started on Tuesday with the explosions of Hezbollah pager devices, per two sources with knowledge.”
Yaroslav Trofimov writes pretty much what everyone is thinking: “Blow up pagers, force the surviving Hezbollah cadres to rely on walkie talkies, and then blow up the much bigger explosive devices inside the walkie talkies. A TV spy series producers would rule out this twist plot as impossible to believe in.”
The Israel Defense Forces declined to comment on the incident, which came just hours after the Israeli Cabinet added the return of citizens displaced from their homes in the north to the country’s war goals, bringing a potential major clash with Hezbollah closer to reality.
