The explosions of Hezbollah’s beepers and other devices last week, which injured around 3,000-4,000 operatives, were not the result of the group’s discovery of sabotage. Rather, the timing was deliberate, The Jerusalem Post is reporting.

Following the series of blasts that rocked Lebanon last Tuesday and Wednesday, some reports emerged suggesting that those responsible for the explosions – widely believed to be Israel, according to multiple foreign media outlets – had initially hoped for a later, more coordinated strike. The Post corroborated this narrative through Western sources.

According to this account, Israeli intelligence urgently informed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu early last week – with the entire Israeli media referencing a significant but vague “security event” – that the window to detonate the devices was closing. In other words, some Hezbollah members had begun to uncover parts of the sabotage effort, and if Hezbollah publicly exposed it, they might have removed the devices before they could be detonated.

This version of events aligned with how both Israeli and Lebanese audiences were caught off guard, especially considering Israel had allowed Hezbollah to fire rockets across the northern border for 11 months with only limited retaliation.

However, the Post learned that the timing of the sabotage was chosen strategically and not as a reaction to any sudden Hezbollah discoveries.

In the days leading up to last Tuesday, both Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant emphasized that bringing northern Israel’s residents back home had become a central focus of Israel’s current war efforts.

This shift followed Gallant’s announcement on August 21 that Hamas’s last 24 battalions in Rafah had been defeated.

For weeks, Israel had been redirecting its military forces from Gaza to the northern border, preparing for a confrontation with Hezbollah. The device explosions seemed to serve as the prelude to a larger Israeli campaign, culminating in the major attacks that the IDF acknowledged later in the week.

Without access to beepers or cell phones, Hezbollah’s Radwan special forces commander, Ibrahim Aqil, and about 20 of his top deputies were forced to meet in person to organize their response. During this meeting on Friday, the IDF struck, killing Aqil along with 13 to 15 key sub-commanders.

Between Thursday and Sunday, Israel launched a series of four major strikes, depleting Hezbollah’s rocket arsenal by destroying over 500 launchers and thousands of rockets.

On Tuesday, Israel also lifted the gag order on a Hezbollah plot to assassinate former Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon. Although the case against those behind the plot had been ongoing for a year, the announcement was strategically timed to coincide with Israel’s escalation against Hezbollah.

The Post also learned that the planning of the beeper and device sabotage had been in motion for years, with different media outlets reporting both long-term and more recent stages of preparation.

The varying timelines reflect a common intelligence challenge. For instance, in the book Target Tehran, it was revealed that Mossad began planning the seizure of Iran’s nuclear archives in 2016, but had to modify the operation in 2017 due to shifting circumstances.

The Post reports that various stages of the sabotage plan required key adjustments, including some made as recently as five months ago, according to foreign reports.

Discrepancies also exist about how the explosions were executed. Many foreign reports claim that small amounts of explosives were covertly placed in the devices by agents working through a shell company that posed as part of a Hungarian firm, which was in turn licensed by a Taiwanese company to manufacture and distribute the devices.

However, some sources informed the Post that the sabotage may have been carried out by manipulating the lithium inside the devices, a task achievable by any skilled engineer without needing advanced cyber hacking.

These devices operate with a delicate balance of electrical resistance between two poles. If the current is manipulated, it could eventually trigger a short circuit between the positive and negative sides of the battery, leading to an explosion.

Sources noted that the methods used against Hezbollah are not new.

Asked whether Israel should be concerned about its enemies replicating such attacks, sources acknowledged that this is always a possibility once a new capability is publicly demonstrated. It is widely recognized that Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas have used Israel’s once-dominant drone technology against it by reverse-engineering their own drone fleets. Sources emphasized the importance of staying several steps ahead of adversaries, ensuring that defenses or counter-attacks are always ready in case enemies attempt to replicate an attack used against them.

{Matzav.com Israel}