{"id":104414,"date":"2024-09-19T01:58:59","date_gmt":"2024-09-19T06:58:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=104414"},"modified":"2024-09-19T01:59:23","modified_gmt":"2024-09-19T06:59:23","slug":"104414","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=104414","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon, sources say<\/a><\/p>\n

BEIRUT (Reuters) -Hand-held radios used by Lebanese armed group Hezbollah detonated on Wednesday across Lebanon’s south and in Beirut suburbs, further stoking tensions with Israel a day after similar explosions launched via the group’s pagers.<\/p>\n

Lebanon’s health ministry said nine people had been killed and more than 300 injured, while the death toll from Tuesday’s explosions rose to 12, including two children, with nearly 3,000 injured.<\/p>\n

At least one of Wednesday’s blasts took place near a funeral organised by Iran-backed Hezbollah for those killed the previous day when thousands of pagers used by the group exploded across the country and wounded many of its fighters.<\/p>\n

A Reuters reporter in the southern suburbs of Beirut said he saw Hezbollah members frantically taking out the batteries of any walkie-talkies on them that had not exploded, tossing the parts in metal barrels around them.<\/p>\n

Lebanon’s Red Cross said on X that it was responding with 30 ambulance teams to multiple explosions in different areas, including the south of Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley.<\/p>\n

Hezbollah, which was thrown briefly into disarray by the pager attacks, said on Wednesday it had attacked Israeli artillery positions with rockets, the first strike at its arch-foe since the blasts wounded thousands of its members in Lebanon and raised the prospect of a wider Middle East war.<\/p>\n

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Images of the exploded walkie-talkies examined by Reuters showed an inside panel labelled “ICOM” and “made in Japan.”<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

According to its website, ICOM is a Japan-based radio communications and telephone company.<\/p>\n

The company has said that production of several models of the ICOM hand-held radio have been discontinued, including the IC-V82, which appeared to closely match those in images from Lebanon on Wednesday and which was phased out in 2014.<\/p>\n

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There was no immediate reply from ICOM to a Reuters request for comment on Wednesday.<\/div>\n
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DEVICES BOUGHT FIVE MONTHS AGO<\/p>\n

The hand-held radios were purchased by Hezbollah five months ago, around the same time that the pagers were bought, said a security source.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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Israel’s military has declined to comment on the blasts.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Tuesday’s attack wounded many of the militant group’s fighters and Iran’s envoy to Beirut.<\/p>\n

Frontline workers described hellish scenes: victims of thousands of small explosions linked to pagers used by Hezbollah rushed into hospitals, some with organs protruding, others with missing eyes or fingers.<\/p>\n

The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk called for an independent investigation into the events surrounding exploding pagers.<\/p>\n

The United Nations Security Council will meet on Friday over the pager blasts after a request from Algeria on behalf of Arab states, said Slovenia’s U.N. Ambassador Samuel Zbogar, president of the 15-member council for September.<\/p>\n

Taiwanese pager maker Gold Apollo denied that it had produced the pager devices. It said the devices were made under licence by a company called BAC, based in Hungary’s capital Budapest.<\/p>\n

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Hungary on Wednesday said the devices had never been in the country and that authorities had established that BAC was a trading-intermediary company with no manufacturing or operations in Hungary.<\/div>\n
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RETALIATION<\/p>\n

Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate against Israel. The two sides have been engaged in cross-border warfare since the Gaza conflict erupted last October, fuelling fears of a wider Middle East war that could drag in the United States and Iran.<\/p>\n

A full-blown war with Israel could devastate Lebanon, which has lurched from one crisis to another in recent years, including a 2019 financial collapse and the 2020 Beirut port blast.<\/p>\n

Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi accused Israel of pushing the Middle East to the brink of a regional war by orchestrating a dangerous escalation on many fronts.<\/p>\n

“Hezbollah wants to avoid an all-out war. It still wants to avoid one. But given the scale, the impact on families, on civilians, there will be pressure for a stronger response,” said Mohanad Hage Ali of the Carnegie Middle East Center.<\/p>\n

Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful proxy in the Middle East, said in a statement it would continue to support Hamas in Gaza and Israel should await a response to the pager “massacre” which left fighters and others bloodied, hospitalised or dead.<\/p>\n

One Hezbollah official said the detonation was the group’s “biggest security breach” in its history.<\/p>\n

The plot appears to have been many months in the making, several sources told Reuters. It followed a series of assassinations of Hezbollah and Hamas commanders and leaders ascribed to Israel since the start of the Gaza war.<\/p>\n

Hezbollah had turned to pagers and other low-tech communications devices in an attempt to evade Israeli surveillance of mobile phones.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon, sources say BEIRUT (Reuters) -Hand-held radios used by Lebanese armed group Hezbollah detonated on Wednesday across Lebanon’s south and in Beirut suburbs, further stoking tensions with Israel a day after similar explosions launched via the group’s pagers. Lebanon’s health ministry said nine people had been killed and more than … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[86,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-just-desserts","category-moslems-jihadis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=104414"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104414\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":104416,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104414\/revisions\/104416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=104414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=104414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=104414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}