Who is Behind the Deadly Beepers Blast Hezbollah Endured?
On September 17th, Lebanon was struck by an unprecedented crisis of beeper explosions that swept the entire country, resulting in a heavy toll of 9 fatalities and over 3000 injuries. Behind this explosion, a puzzling mystery looms: how did beeper, a once popular communication device in the 1990s, turn into a lethal bomb in Lebanon all of a sudden?
As to the cause of this explosion, various assumptions have been circulating on the Internet. One of the most widespread theories is that Israel may have infiltrated Lebanon's base station network, using technical means to send out high-intensity paging signals, causing the beeper's batteries to overheat due to overload, finally leading to the explosion. However, the battery capacity of a beeper is relatively small, and the destructive power caused by overheating or short-circuiting of the battery should be relatively limited. Taking the Samsung Note7 phone explosion incident in 2016 as an example, its battery capacity is much larger than that of a beeper, but the explosive power was not as severe as the beeper explosion in Lebanon. Thus, this explanation cannot fully clarify the real cause of this explosion.
Another hypothesis is that Israel stockpiled a batch of special pagers, which were embedded with explosives, and sold them to Hezbollah in Lebanon through special channels. However, this assumption also raises many doubts. Hezbollah typically has its own procurement channels and supply chain when purchasing military supplies, making it hard for Israel to easily infiltrate. If Israel did introduce pagers loaded with explosives into Lebanon, the blast's force seems rather weak, which is not in line with Israel's usual modus operandi.
From this, we can speculate that Israel may have infiltrated the supply chain of this Taiwanese company, producing a batch of special pagers, and installing explosive devices within them. Then, Israel used hacking techniques to breach Lebanon's beeper base stations, thus orchestrating explosions on a nationwide scale.