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This report is part of ongoing coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. Visit our dedicated page for more on this topic.
A second wave of wireless devices — including walkie-talkies and handheld radios — exploded across Lebanon on Wednesday, killing at least 15 people and injuring more than 450.
The attacks come a day after thousands of pagers owned by members of the militant group Hezbollah exploded across parts of Lebanon and Syria. According to published reports, those devices had been modified with explosions by Israeli spy organization Mossad at the “production level.”
Gold Apollo, the Taiwanese company that Hezbollah bought the pagers from, has distanced itself from the attacks — noting that the pagers were made by a Hungarian manufacturer that used Gold Apollo’s branding as part of a licensing deal.
Meanwhile, Hungarian authorities denied that claim, saying the Budapest-registered company “is a trading intermediary” with no manufacturing sites in the country.
Shawn Bhimani, a Northeastern University professor of supply chain and information management, says this type of warfare — in which components are modified somewhere along the supply chain — has been a method of attack for decades.
“This isn’t something new,” Bhimani says. “In other wars, this was a key way for different militaries to hurt each other.”
He used the Falkland Islands War, a 10-week land war between the United Kingdom and Argentina in 1982, as an example.
“The Argentinian government didn’t want to relinquish control, so they bought missiles to protect the Falkland Islands,” he says. “The British government intercepted the missiles on the way to Argentina and made them inoperable so they couldn’t actually attack the British ships when they came.
“So if the news that we are hearing is true — that Israel did this — it wouldn’t be something new,” he adds. “It would just be a continuation of a strategy that has existed in war for the better part of a century.”
There are many points along the supply chain where these types of interceptions may happen, Bhimani explains.
“First of all you have all the subcomponents that came into the ultimate assembly,” he says. “It could have happened at the subcomponent level. If that was the case, it could have happened even before the final pagers were produced.”
Once the pagers were made and were en route to Lebanon, they would likely make multiple stops along the way, Bhimani says.
“It would have third-party logistics providers who are shipping the product from the point of manufacturing to the final destination,” he says.
Because these products change so many hands throughout their journey — whether they are delivered via ship, plane or truck — there are many opportunities for them to be mishandled by a third party, Bhimani explains.
Tracing exactly where a disruption like this may have occurred in the supply chain may be difficult to pinpoint because military operations tend to cover their supply chain movements out of public view, he says.
“If a company shipped a product, for example from supplytrace.org,” Bhimani says, “we can trace where it came from. But if a military ships a product, those records are not public and it makes it much more difficult for an interested party to do a full trace unless they are able to get the shipping records at each leg of the journey though each tier of the supply chain.”