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Behind the Pager Attack Scheme
(Times of Israel) Israel's Channel 12 reported Saturday that "tens of thousands of pagers" were manufactured with the knowledge that they would be checked carefully by Hizbullah. Ronen Bergman, an investigative reporter for the New York Times, said in an interview that the pagers had to work properly and betray no indication that they had been primed with explosives. They needed to be able to pass detection by sniffer dogs. Bergman said the whole scheme was dreamed up by a brilliant female intelligence operative, aged under 30. A factory was set up to build the devices from scratch. The ability to supply the device to Hizbullah was helped by the fact that the group is not able to make purchases on the open market because of U.S. sanctions, and therefore must routinely work with intermediary suppliers. Bergman said that the operation began during a previous government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, under the direction of former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen. The report said that Hizbullah bought more pagers after its military chief Fuad Shukr was killed in a targeted IDF strike in Beirut in July, and used pagers even more widely because of its growing wariness about using cellphones. A foreign security source said Israel has spent years developing far more extensive capabilities for use against Hizbullah and Iran. The source said that Israel has much more dramatic capabilities and that those used thus far in Lebanon are "relatively low-level."