First Israel’s Exploding Pagers Maimed and Killed. Now Comes the Paranoia

When Nadim Kobeissi was a child growing up in Beirut in the early 2000s, sonic booms created by the Israel Defense Forces’ planes in the skies above Lebanon would occasionally rattle his home, generating enough noise and concussive force that he and his family would sometimes sleep in the hallways to avoid pieces of glass from shattered windows falling onto them in the night. The psychological effect—which he believes was intentional—was long-lasting. Even years later, after he’d left Lebanon, the sound of fireworks would make him start subconsciously sweating and shaking.

This week, the booms rippling across Lebanon came not from Israeli jets streaking across the sky, but from electronic devices exploding in people’s pockets and hands. Yet Kobeissi, now a security researcher based in Paris, says the lingering fear following the attack is familiar: When he speaks to his family members who are still in Lebanon, they tell him that their iPhones have been heating up, and ask whether they’re right to be worried.

“They’re wondering, is my phone being hacked? Is it going to blow up?” Kobeissi says. “It’s worse than the sonic booms, because it’s completely novel, and it’s almost impossible to explain to them.”

On Tuesday and Wednesday, explosives hidden in thousands of pagers—and later walkie-talkies and other electronic devices—detonated across Lebanon in an apparent attack targeting the membership of the militant group Hezbollah. The unprecedented, stunning operation, which has been widely attributed to Israel despite no claim of responsibility by any Israeli government agency, killed at least 32 people, including at least four children and several hospitals workers, and injured more than 3,300 others, according to the country’s health ministry. It flooded Lebanese hospitals with victims—members of Hezbollah and bystanders alike—who have in many cases lost eyes, fingers, and hands. In one instance Wednesday, walkie-talkies exploded at a funeral for three Hezbollah leaders and a child killed the day before, sending waves of panic through the crowd.

Exactly how Israel may have secreted explosive material into so many thousands of gadgets and remotely detonated those payloads remains far from clear. Theories about the operation have come to a consensus, though: that an Israeli intelligence agency likely carried out a supply chain attack that used a Hungarian front company to build devices with batteries laced with the explosive PETN—and even embedded metal ball bearings in pagers’ cases to increase the lethality of their payload—before impersonating a legitimate supplier and selling them in Lebanon.

The exact motivation behind the attack still remains the subject of speculation, beyond Israel’s escalating tensions with Hezbollah in the midst of its scorched-earth war in Gaza following Hamas’ October 7 attack on the country. But the fact that the explosions were largely carried out by weaponizing communication devices is no coincidence, says Bruce Schneier, a security- and surveillance-focused author and researcher who teaches cybersecurity policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Schneier points out that the psychological effect of the operation, following years of Israeli government and military hacking of its adversaries’ smartphones and computers, is to sow paranoia in every last remaining means of communication and coordination that the country’s enemies possess.