Hezbollah was handing over the booby-trapped bombers to its members hours before they were detonated, two security sources cited by Reuters said, suggesting the group was confident the devices were safe despite security checks.
As the agency reports in its report, citing one of the sources, a Hezbollah member received a new doorbell on Monday, which exploded the next day while still in its box. A doorbell delivered to a Hezbollah operative a few days earlier injured one person when the device exploded, the second source said.
In an apparently coordinated attack, bombs bearing the Gold Apollo logo exploded on Tuesday in Hezbollah strongholds in southern and eastern Lebanon, as well as in the suburbs of Beirut. On Wednesday, hundreds of Hezbollah walkie-talkies were blown up. The attacks killed 37 people, including at least two children, and wounded more than 3,000 others.
Up to 3 grams of explosives hidden in doorbells for months
A source in Lebanon with knowledge of the device’s components told Reuters that the walkie talkie batteries contained pentaerythritol nitrate (PETN). The way the explosive was embedded in the battery case made it extremely difficult to trace, the source said.
Up to three grams of explosives hidden in the doorbells remained there undetected by Hezbollah for months, one of the security sources told Reuters that it was very difficult to detect the explosives “with any device or scanner”.
After the sirens went off on Tuesday, Hezbollah suspected that more of its devices may have been hacked, it said in Reuters two security sources, as well as an intelligence source. However, the review was not complete on Wednesday afternoon, when the walkie-talkies went off.
Hezbollah believes Israel chose to detonate the group’s walkie-talkies because it feared it would soon be discovered that they too were rigged with explosives, one of the sources told Reuters.