LIBAN

After the apparently coordinated attack in Lebanon, which blew up pagers belonging to members of the terrorist militia Hezbollah, the organization accused Israel of hacking into its communications system.

Pagers are small communication devices and were the forerunners of mobile phones. If someone wants to talk to someone, they send the other person a ring or short message on the pager. Pagers were widely used, especially in the 1980s. But the development of mobile phones made them largely unnecessary.

A Taiwanese maker of pagers denied on Wednesday that it produced the devices that injured thousands of Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon when they unexpectedly exploded. A bold attack that raised the possibility of a full-scale war between the Iran-backed group and Israel's archenemy.

Gold Apollo said the equipment was manufactured by a company called BAC, based in Hungary's capital, Budapest.
Israel's Mossad spy agency, which has a long history of carrying out sophisticated attacks on foreign soil, placed explosives inside pagers imported by Hezbollah months before Tuesday's blasts, a senior Lebanese security source and a other source.

Since the beginning of the war in Gaza, the leadership of Hezbollah has asked its members not to use mobile phones, but pager devices to make communication more secure. Three employees working for security agencies also told the Reuters news agency that the pagers were of the latest models and that Hezbollah had put them into use in recent months.