The Hezbollah terrorist organization was still handing new Gold Apollo branded pagers to its members, hours before thousands of the devices blew up this week, two security sources said on Friday, according to Reuters.
One member of the group received a new pager on Monday that exploded the next day while it was still in its box, said one of the sources.
A pager given to a senior member just days earlier injured a subordinate when it detonated, a second source told Reuters.
A day after the explosions of the pagers, hundreds of Hezbollah walkie-talkies exploded in Beirut.
The batteries of the walkie-talkies were laced with a highly explosive compound known as PETN, a Lebanese source familiar with the device's components told Reuters on Friday. Up to three grams of explosives hidden in the pagers had gone undetected for months by Hezbollah, Reuters reported earlier this week.
One of the security sources said it was very hard to detect the explosives "with any device or scanner." The source did not specify what type of scanners Hezbollah had run the pagers through.
Hezbollah examined the pagers after they were delivered to Lebanon, starting in 2022, including by travelling through airports with them to ensure they would not trigger alarms, two additional sources told Reuters.
The sources did not specify the name of the airports where they conducted the tests.
Rather than a specific suspicion of the pagers, the checks had been part of a routine "sweep" of its equipment, including communications devices, to find any indications that they were laced with explosives or surveillance mechanisms, one of the security sources said.
After the pagers detonated on Tuesday, Hezbollah suspected more of its devices may have been compromised, two of the security sources, as well as an intelligence source, told Reuters.
In response, it intensified the sweep of its communications systems, carrying out careful examinations of all devices. It also began investigating the supply chains through which the pagers were brought in, the two security sources said.
But the review had not been concluded by Wednesday afternoon, when the hand-held radios exploded.
On Thursday, a US intelligence source told ABC News that Israel, which has not commented on the explosions, had a hand in the manufacturing of the pagers that exploded and had planned the operation for at least 15 years.
The New York Times reported on Wednesday night that BAC, the company which manufactured the pagers, was set up by Israel specifically as part of an operation to sabotage Hezbollah.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah spoke out on Thursday for the first time about the pager and communication device explosions that killed and wounded thousands of terrorists in Lebanon.
"Israel crossed all the red lines by detonating thousands of pagers. This could be called a declaration of war," Nasrallah stated. He added that "the devices exploded in unison, in the hospitals as well. As a result of the aggression, dozens were killed, including women and children, and thousands were injured. The true numbers will come with time. This is an act of terror, massacre, genocide. More than 4,000 pagers were distributed to the organization's operatives.
"We undoubtedly suffered a major security and humanitarian blow, unprecedented in the history of man and maybe in the history of the conflict. We were hit hard, but that's the situation in war. We understand that the enemy has technological supremacy. Especially since it is supported by the US and the West. When we are in conflict we bet on Jihad, on attrition. We had many victories until now."
With this, he insisted: "The heavy blow that we suffered won't knock us down. From experience, we will become stronger, smarter, and more determined. We will be ready to overcome all of the threats and attempts in the future."
Meanwhile, Iranian Revolutionary Guards Commander Hossein Salami promised Nasrallah that the "axis of resistance" would have a "crushing response" to the explosion of the communication devices this week.
“Such terrorist acts are undoubtedly the result of the Zionist regime’s despair and successive failures. This will soon be met with a crushing response from the axis of resistance and we will witness the destruction of this bloodthirsty and criminal regime," Salami said, according to Lebanese media.
(Israel National News' North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Israel National News articles, however, is Israeli time.)