Three Hezbollah operatives were killed Wednesday and hundreds more were injured as walkie-talkies or two-way radios exploded in Beirut and southern Lebanon, a day after exploding pagers killed 12 and wounded thousands.
The walkie-talkies may have seemed a safe alternative to the pagers, which media sources speculated were bought after Israel targeted Hezbollah operatives using their mobile phones. But the low-tech hardware was also deadly.
Reuters reported:
Hand-held radios used by Hezbollah detonated on Wednesday across Lebanon’s south and in Beirut’s southern suburbs, a security source and a witness said, further stoking tensions with Israel a day after similar explosions launched via the group’s pagers.
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The hand-held radios were purchased by Hezbollah five months ago, around the same time that the pagers were bought, said a security source.
Israel’s spy agency Mossad, which has a long history of sophisticated operations on foreign soil, planted explosives inside pagers imported by Hezbollah months before Tuesday’s detonations, a senior Lebanese security source and another source told Reuters.
Israel has not claimed credit or acknowledged responsibility for the pager attacks.
The Times of Israel reported, citing a source, apparently in Lebanon:“A number of walkie-talkies exploded in Beirut’s southern suburbs,” the source says, with Hezbollah-affiliated rescuers confirming devices had exploded inside two cars in the area.
Footage of the new explosions circulated on social media.
There were unconfirmed reports of other electronic devices exploding.
Hezbollah attacked Israel without provocation in October after Hamas invaded Israel on October 7 and murdered 1,200 people. Israel was forced to evacuate 60,500 people from 74 towns in the northern part of the country due to constant rocket, missile, and drone attacks from Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. The Iran-backed terror group is occupying the region close to the Israeli border in violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701 (2006).
Israel has warned repeatedly that it will act to defend its citizens, and that Hezbollah must be removed from the area, diplomatically if possible, but militarily if necessary. On Tuesday morning, before the pager attacks, the Israeli security cabinet officially adopted the return of Israel’s northern residents to their homes as a goal of the ongoing war.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
