The Grim Beeper: Hezbollah’s Exploding Tech

On 5 January 1996, the Israeli security service, the Shin Bet, assassinated Hamas’s chief bomb-maker: Yahya Ayyash, codenamed “the Engineer.” The 29-year-old electrical engineer is believed to have been responsible for constructing sophisticated bombs and recruiting the suicide bombers who had killed some 90 Jews in buses and squares around Israel over the previous months.

His assassination was a clever piece of tradecraft. The Shin Bet delivered a telephone, with a hidden 15g explosive and triggering mechanism, to a nephew of a friend of Ayyash’s, who was known to supply the “Engineer” with disposable mobile phones. The phone eventually reached Ayyash, and when Shin Bet called him, he responded, “Yes, this is Ayyash.” The appropriate signal was then sent, and the phone exploded, shattering Ayyash’s skull and brain. (An unintended political side-effect of the operation, incidentally, was Benjamin Netanyahu’s emergence as Israel’s most prominent politician. Following the assassination, after the required 40-day mourning period, Ayyash’s disciples dispatched a series of suicide bombers into Israel, killing dozens in a wave of terror that undermined acting Prime Minister Shimon Peres’s election campaign (“he can’t deliver on security,” critics claimed), and Netanyahu was elected Israel’s prime minister, by a slim margin, for his first term in office. But that is another story.)

Last week, on 17–18 September, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, Mossad, together with the IDF, managed to take a leaf out of Shin Bet’s book and mount a devastating, industrial-grade targeted assassination campaign against Hezbollah, Hamas’s Lebanese sister organization, which has been rocketing northern Israel’s border-hugging settlements and IDF installations since 8 October 2023, in support of Hamas, which has been battling the IDF in and around the Gaza Strip since its 7 October invasion of southern Israel.

Some months ago, Mossad and the IDF produced or tampered with thousands of pagers that Hezbollah had ordered from a Taiwanese company. The Israelis planted a sleeping miniature bomb and triggering mechanism inside each pager. Hezbollah had switched to pagers following a series of assassinations of individual Hezbollah commanders carried out by Israeli jets and drones in pinpoint strikes around southern Lebanon. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, blamed the fighters’ mobile phones. He ordered his men to stop using them, arguing that Israel was able to exploit the phones to identify, track, and kill his fighters. So Hezbollah switched to more primitive pagers and walkie-talkies since these could not be tracked or used to identify their users’ locations.