How Israels bulky pager fooled Hezbollah and even X-ray machines

The batteries inside the weaponized pagers that arrived in Lebanon at the start of the year, part of an Israeli plot to decimate Hezbollah, had powerfully deceptive features and an Achilles’ heel.The agents who built the pagers designed a battery that concealed a small but potent charge of plastic explosive and a novel detonator that was invisible to X-ray, according to a Lebanese source with first-hand knowledge of the pagers, and teardown photos of the battery pack seen by Reuters.To overcome the weakness – the absence of a plausible backstory for the bulky new product – they created fake online stores, pages and posts that could deceive Hezbollah due diligence, a Reuters review of web archives shows.The stealthy design of the pager bomb and the battery’s carefully constructed cover story, both described here for the first time, shed light on the execution of a years-long operation which has struck unprecedented blows against Israel’s Iran-backed Lebanese foe and pushed the Middle East closer to a regional war.A thin, square sheet with six grams of white pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) plastic explosive was squeezed between two rectangular battery cells, according to the Lebanese source and photos.The remaining space between the battery cells could not be seen in the photos but was occupied by a strip of highly flammable material that acted as the detonator, the source said.This three-layer sandwich was inserted in a black plastic sleeve, and encapsulated in a metal casing roughly the size of a match box, the photos showed.The assembly was unusual because it did not rely on a standard miniaturized detonator, typically a metallic cylinder, the source and two bomb experts said.All three spoke on conditions of anonymity.Without any metal components, the material used to trigger detonation had an edge: like the plastic explosives, it was not detected by X-ray.Upon receiving the pagers in February, Hezbollah looked for the presence of explosives, tw...