Operation Grim Beeper | How Mossad Turned Hezbollah's Pagers Into Bombs

By early 2024, the leader of terrorist paramilitary group Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, knew he had a problem.

For months, Israeli drones had been picking off his commanders one by one, tracking their mobile phone signals, triangulating their positions, then firing.

Smartphones were getting his people killed.

So around February of 2024, Nasrallah issued an order to every member of his organization, "Get rid of your phones." He told them to bury the devices and lock them away in iron boxes, and he had a point.

A smartphone broadcasts its location constantly, pinging cell towers, connecting to GPS satellites, and running background apps that leak data in a dozen directions at once.

For an intelligence service like Mossad, tracking someone using their phone is almost too easy.

Hezbollah decided to go full 90s mode to manage their comms.

The pager, or a beeper as some call it, was the device of choice.

Surprisingly, pagers are still being manufactured today.

Hezbollah chose a model called the AR-924, which is branded by a Taiwanese company, Gold Apollo.

These are chunky, no-frills devices.

There's no camera, GPS, or microphone, and no internet connection.

The only capability is to receive short text messages over a UHF radio frequency.

It's not possible to track a pager in the same way as a cell phone.

Hezbollah's procurement officers liked the AR-924 because it could run for months on a single charge.

This matters when you're operating in remote parts of southern Lebanon or the Bekaa Valley, far from reliable power.

By mid-2024, around 5,000 pagers had been distributed to Hezbollah's membership.

From fighters to mid-level commanders, administrators, and medics, they all now had a safer means of communication, or so they thought.

What none of them knew was that every single one of those pagers had been built by Israeli intelligence.