[Graphic via Mohamed Azakir, Reuters]
I was planning to take today off for a mental health break, but this is getting totally out of hand. So here’s today’s Special Edition of Lockdown Times, all about the Israeli government’s all out terrorist rampage in Lebanon, as a new attack on Beirut has killed over 10, including civilians.
Israeli air attack on Beirut kills 12 as cross-border fire intensifies. Israeli army says it kills top Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Aqil, but the Lebanese group has yet to confirm his death. 9/20/24.
Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health says at least 12 people have been killed and 66 wounded in an Israeli air attack on a southern suburb of the capital, Beirut. The National News Agency (NNA) reported that five children were among the casualties from Friday’s attack on a building in Jamous Street. The agency said an F-35 jet hit the residential area with two attacks.
The Israeli military said it has carried out a “targeted strike” in the Lebanese capital, claiming to have killed top Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Aqil and other senior commanders of the Radwan special forces unit. Hezbollah has not confirmed whether Aqil has been killed. Aqil has a $7m bounty on his head from the United States over an alleged link to the deadly bombing of a US marines barracks in Lebanon in 1983, according to the US Department of State website.
The Israeli attack marks the second time in less than two months that Israel has targeted a leading Hezbollah military commander in Beirut. In July, an Israeli air strike killed Fuad Shukr, the group’s top military commander.
Friday’s strike hit the sprawling Dahiya district during rush hour as people were leaving work and children were heading home from school. Local networks broadcast footage that showed a high-rise building flattened just kilometres from downtown Beirut. First responders combed through the rubble of at least two collapsed apartment buildings to search for missing people. Health authorities said at least nine of the 66 wounded were in a critical condition. Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati said the attack “proves again that the Israeli enemy does not value any human, legal or moral considerations”.
Earlier on Friday, Hezbollah pounded northern Israel with about 170 rockets, a day after the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, promised to retaliate against Israel for two days of sabotage attacks that set off explosives in thousands of communications devices, killing at least 37 people and injuring nearly 3,000. But Hezbollah said the rockets were in retaliation for Israeli attacks on villages and homes in southern Lebanon overnight.
Rami Khoury, a professor at the American University of Beirut told Al Jazeera that Israel is on “a rampage”, emboldened by the unwavering US support to “do anything they want”. He said an escalation in the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah appears inevitable but added that he does not believe an all-out regional war to be imminent. Khoury said Israel has long sought to defeat Hezbollah, which is better equipped than Hamas and has closer ties with Iran. “The problem is it has tried this many times without success,” Khoury added.
Zein Basravi, reporting from Amman because Al Jazeera is banned in Israel by the government, said the army has put out warnings to the Israeli people after the attack, saying everything is on the table and to be prepared. “There are now renewed calls for people to stay near bomb shelters,” he added.
The Lebanese group fired about 150 rockets before Israel’s attack on Beirut while about 20 were launched after the air strike. Israel’s military said rockets came in multiple waves on Friday afternoon, targeting sites along the border with Lebanon. The Israeli military said the barrage of rockets caused no injuries and rescue services were working to put out fires sparked by falling debris. It listed the targeted areas as the occupied Golan Heights, the Upper Galilee region and the town of Safed. Videos from northern Israel posted online showed rockets being intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome system as sirens were heard in the background.
The military said its air defences took down some of the rockets while others fell in open areas. The incoming fire came after the Israeli military said it struck dozens of rocket launchers overnight that were ready for use against Israel. For nearly a year, Hezbollah has engaged in near-daily exchanges of fire with Israeli forces along the Lebanon-Israel border in support of Hamas. Tens of thousands of people on both sides of the border have been forced to flee their homes due to the fighting.
And a couple of items about the targeted personal devices explosions on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Lebanon explosions raise alarm about supply chain security, safety of tech. At least 32 people were killed when thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies detonated in attacks blamed on Israel.Videos embedded. 9/19/24.
The use of pagers and walkie-talkies in back-to-back coordinated explosions in Lebanon has drawn scrutiny to the security of global supply chains and their vulnerability to tampering by governments or other actors. The utilisation of thousands of electronic devices in the apparent attacks, which are widely believed to have been orchestrated by Israel as part of an operation targeting Lebanon’s armed group Hezbollah, has raised the spectre of everyday communications equipment being weaponised in the future.
Tech companies are likely to see the attacks as a powerful reminder of the importance of securing their supply chains, while the general public’s trust in technology may also take a hit, tech industry and supply chain analysts told Al Jazeera. “Every company that makes or sells physical devices will be worrying about the integrity of their supply chain,” said James Grimmelmann, Tessler Family professor of digital and information law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School in the United States. “They are likely to consider adding additional safeguards and verifications so that they can better detect and prevent moves like this.”
While Israel has been implicated in assassinations using tampered communications devices before – including the 1996 killing of Hamas bombmaker Yahya Ayyash via an explosives-rigged mobile phone – the scale of the attacks, involving thousands of simultaneous detonations, was unprecedented. At least 32 people were killed and more than 3,100 were injured in the explosions on Tuesday and Wednesday, including Hezbollah members and civilians, according to Lebanese authorities.
Brian Patrick Green, director of technology ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University in the US, described the attacks as a potential watershed for the public’s trust in their electronic devices. “Somehow thousands of devices were turned into weapons without anyone noticing it. How widespread are these explosive devices? How did the explosives get into the devices or the device supply chains? This attack raises terrifying questions that were never even considered before,” Green said.
Mariarosaria Taddeo, a professor of digital ethics and defence technologies at University of Oxford, said the attacks set a concerning precedent as they involved interference with the supply chain “not for a specific act of sabotage but for a distributed, highly impactful attack”. “This scenario has been considered by experts but less so by state actors. If something good comes out of them, this is going to a public debate on control of the supply chain, strategic autonomy over digital assets, and digital sovereignty,” Taddeo said.
While it is unclear exactly how the pagers and walkie-talkies were turned into explosive devices, Lebanese and US officials have told multiple media outlets that Israeli intelligence booby-trapped the devices with explosive materials. Israel has not commented to either confirm or deny responsibility.
Taiwanese company Gold Apollo, whose brand of pagers were used in the attacks, on Wednesday denied manufacturing the deadly devices, saying they had been made under licence by a company called BAC. Gold Apollo’s CEO Hsu Ching-kuang told US radio NPR that BAC had paid his company through a Middle Eastern bank account that was blocked at least once by his firm’s Taiwanese bank.
BAC, which is based in Hungary’s capital Budapest, has not responded to requests for comment. On Thursday, The New York Times, citing three unnamed intelligence officials, reported that BAC was an Israeli front set up to manufacture the explosive pagers. Icom, a radio equipment maker based in Japan, said it had stopped producing the model of radios reportedly used in the attacks about 10 years ago. “It was discontinued about 10 years ago, and since then, it has not been shipped from our company,” Icom said in a statement. “The production of the batteries needed to operate the main unit has also been discontinued, and a hologram seal to distinguish counterfeit products was not attached, so it is not possible to confirm whether the product shipped from our company.”
Patrick Lin, director of Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly), said there are important questions about where in the supply chain the devices were compromised. “Was it during the manufacturing process, or in transit, or at the system operator’s level right before the devices are assigned to individuals?” Lin said. “If it were done during the manufacturing process, then other technology manufacturers should be more concerned, as the other ways are outside their control. If the pager manufacturer wasn’t a willing accomplice in such a scenario, then their operational security was seriously compromised.”
However the devices may have been tampered with, the attacks could further accelerate moves towards technology that is “homegrown within a nation’s borders for tighter control of supply-chain security, whether it’s smartphones, drones, social media apps, whatever,” Lin said. Milad Haghani, a supply chain expert at the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of New South Wales in Australia, said he expects to see a “widespread reckoning” that will lead companies to tighten their supply chain security protocols.
“For tech companies in general, this situation is unprecedented in its scale, and many likely haven’t taken the security of their production processes as seriously before,” Haghani said. “Many companies may not have been fully equipped to handle such threats,” he said, adding that the explosions in Lebanon will lead to a significant ramp-up in security efforts within organisations.
Smartphone giants such as Apple, Samsung, Huawei, Xiomi and LG are viewed as less vulnerable to being compromised than smaller companies, analysts said, citing reasons including their greater attention to security, the relatively targeted nature of the operation against Hezbollah, and the more limited space in their devices in which to place substances such as explosives.
“There will be curiosity but their production and delivery chains are completely different to small-scale companies, including vendors of counterfeit transceivers. So at least now there’s no reason to consider that they may be affected,” said Lukasz Olejnik, a visiting senior research fellow of the Department of War Studies of King’s College London. “However, the big companies may be inclined to highlight the differences in their ways of doing things.”
Others expressed less confidence that Big Tech is immune from such concerns, pointing to the fact that companies rely on smaller suppliers that may make for easier targets or that they have cooperated with governments to target individuals in less deadly ways, most notably to spy on their communications. “The Israeli government has already been accused of essentially using the NSO group’s spyware as a privatised intelligence service, and indeed just this week Apple dropped its suit against NSO out of fear that its security secrets would leak,” Grimmelmann said. “This is deeply disturbing, and citizens should not allow their governments to literally weaponise consumer technology like this.”
Apple, Samsung, Huawei, Xiomi and LG did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Andrew Maynard, a professor at the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University (ASU), said the attacks are bound to shift perceptions of personal electronics “from devices that are absolutely safe, to devices that could possibly be co-opted and used to cause serious harm”. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see this leading to growing suspicion and anxiety over whether the devices people use on an everyday basis are safe, and serious efforts from major companies to assure their customers that they are,” Maynard said.
“There are also a number of broader ramifications to the attacks. Before September 17, the idea of using personal devices to take out a well-defined group of people wasn’t part of the global zeitgeist. Now it is.”
While supporters and critics of Israel have clashed over whether the attacks should be viewed as a discriminating blow against military targets or a reckless act that put civilians in harm’s way, the blasts have also raised the possibility of other actors taking inspiration from such tactics. Haghani said that while it would be difficult for most actors to pull off such attacks, they raised the need to ensure that “non-state actors, who might have fewer moral boundaries, don’t exploit supply chains in this way”.
Maynard, the ASU professor, said non-state armed groups could see such tactics as a “plausible way to create fear and push their agendas”. “In effect, a door has been opened to a new form of terror campaign – one where individuals face the possibility of the device in their pocket – or their child’s hand – becoming an agent of destruction,” he said. “The counterargument to this is that it is still likely to be exceptionally costly and challenging to take an off-the-shelf phone for instance and weaponize it. But now that the idea is out there, the possibility of this has likely increased.”
And, from Israel’s largest (by circulation) daily paper, Yehiot A’Hakhronot (Latest News),
Company implicated in pager strike uses fake CEO photo on website. Neighbors on the quiet street and nondescript building are upset at the unwanted publicity they are subjected to after their address was identified as the office of the BAC company that marketed the Taiwanese Gold Apollo pagers purchased by Hezbollah, Zeev Avrahami, 9/19/24.
The photo of Italian-Hungarian Christina Arcidiacono Barsony, the woman identified as CEO of the BAC company, implicated in the coordinated pager explosions in Lebanon, and who disappeared off the face of the earth, is not who she was claimed to be. “I know the woman from the photos, and I’ve heard there’s been trouble at the apartment where she lives in Budapest. I know her well. That’s not Christina,” a neibor of the company's offices said.
The Hungarian company BAC, which the Taiwanese brand "Gold Apollo" claims produced the pager that exploded in Lebanon, operated in a discreet, ideal location for secretive activities. The building from which BAC operated—allegedly used by Mossad for the pager operation, according to foreign reports—is tucked away on a side street in a quiet neighborhood, not far from a highway. The area consists of single-family homes with gardens, alongside office buildings and an industrial zone, including a garage. The BAC office is located near house number 33.
“I’ve had my business here for 12 years,” said the owner of the garage, who declined to give his name. “In all that time, this office building was always full of companies. They’d come for a few months or a year and then leave. We never saw or heard anyone.” He, like many other neighbors, appeared uneasy, baffled by the sudden attention.
The office building itself is an unremarkable two-story cream-colored structure, surrounded by a black iron fence with brown-tiled roof decorations between the gates. A parking lot on the right holds four bins for waste sorting, while a driveway on the left leads to an underground garage. Four steps lead up to the entrance, where a large white mailbox bears the names of two companies, next to an intercom with four buttons. The second button from the top reads "Claudia."
At 10:30 am, a couple stepped out onto the second-floor balcony of house number 33, chain-smoking cigarettes. “I just want them to leave us alone,” the woman said. “Yesterday morning, we had a quiet, normal life, and now the whole world wants to know who we are. It’s crazy, absolutely insane. We’re terrified. Our home and address are exposed to everyone, and for something like this? Today it’s journalists, but who knows who’ll come next week. We’ve never seen anyone from BAC—just a secretary who showed up occasionally, but we don’t know who she worked for. We just want to be left in peace.”
One day, you live in a forgotten corner where no one cares, and the next, you’re on the front pages worldwide. “It’s crazy and frightening. We’re scared,” she added, lighting a new cigarette with the previous one, her hands trembling.
An elderly couple from a nearby house got into their red Dacia and left for shopping. “There’s never been even a hint of noise here,” the man said in German before quickly disappearing down the street. The story of the pagers and communication devices that exploded on Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon is turning into a thriller even John le Carré couldn’t have dreamed up.
Christina herself, and her background, are shrouded in inconsistencies and suspicions. The places she claimed to have worked don’t exist, and their websites are nowhere to be found. She personally denied any connection to the production of pagers in a statement to NBC, also refuting the claim by the Taiwanese "Gold Apollo" brand that she had received permission only to use their trademark, while all manufacturing and design were handled by her company.
Before BAC’s website went offline, according to the German newspaper Bild, the company had also offered a jewelry line for sale, called “Nelkhael,” after the 21st angel from a list of 72 angels in Kabbalah. Meanwhile, the Hungarian site Telex reported that the pagers were actually sold to Hezbollah by a Bulgarian company named "Global NORTA Ltd.”
Telex further reported that Global NORTA, based in Sofia, Bulgaria, was responsible for manufacturing and exporting the pagers to Lebanon, while BAC merely served as a broker. This was supported by a Hungarian government spokesperson, who claimed the devices never physically passed through Hungarian territory. However, this statement should be taken with caution: if it is revealed that devices intended for terrorist groups were produced on Hungarian soil, it would constitute a serious violation of European Union laws.
The report added that BAC was merely a shell company facilitating the deal between Taiwan and Bulgaria, while "Global NORTA Ltd." handled the import of the devices from Taiwan and their shipment to Lebanon. Global NORTA, founded in April 2022, just a month before BAC, is owned by a Norwegian citizen. The address listed for the Bulgarian company is also home to 196 other registered businesses.
“I informed the tech company where I work as a project manager in the 11th district that I won’t be coming in. I have a six-month-old daughter. We lived very quiet lives, and now our address is everywhere, "the neighbor at number 33 said. "My instinct is to be afraid of any grieving family member who lost someone in these explosions and might come here. I know they probably understand this address is nothing, but I’m thinking rationally here—and there’s no rationale in this.”
“I’m not angry at Israel,” he added. “What do I care about Israel? If it weren’t for this house, I wouldn’t even know about the whole thing. I like to run and spend time with my family. How does this concern me? I took my kids to school and took public transportation to work. Then my wife called me and said I should probably come home. I asked why, and she said something happened—that the phones downstairs wouldn’t stop ringing. What truly astonished the neighbor, he said, “was the government’s statement denying any involvement. But what amazes me even more is that no one has raided the offices, collected documents, or seized computers. There’s no investigation. Hungary isn’t even trying to figure out what happened with these offices.”
Let us hope you are right. It is nightmarish even without such high numbers. Our leaders seem bound and determined to start as many wars as possible and then fan the flames.
Here's what I just read: Breaking: According to a leaked document from Hezbollah intelligence, 879 died in pager explosions, out of which 291 senior commanders. 509 were blinded, and 1735 “injured in their reproductive organs”, out of which 906 “total damage” and 613 “permanent function damage”.
https://citizenwatchreport.com/according-to-a-leaked-document-from-hezbollah-intelligence-879-died-in-pager-explosions/