Israel braces for retaliation after 9 killed as Hezbollah pagers explode in Lebanon

Taiwanese company Gold Apollo says it authorised its brand on the pagers that exploded in Lebanon and Syria, but they were manufactured by a company based in Budapest.

The pagers were manufactured by BAC Consulting KFT, based in Hungary’s capital, according to a statement by Gold Apollo.

Gold Apollo said the pagers used by the Hezbollah militant group were produced by BAC, which was authorised to use Gold Apollo’s trademark in some regions.

“Regarding the recent media reports about the AR-924 pager, we clarify that this model is produced and sold by BAC,” the Gold Apollo statement read.

“We only provide brand trademark authorisation and have no involvement in the design or manufacturing of this product.”

Taiwanese authorities have found no evidence of Gold Apollo pagers being shipped to Lebanon or the Middle East, a senior Taiwanese security official revealed to CNN.

It comes after officials said the firm’s devices were used in the deadly attack targeting Hezbollah across Lebanon and Syria.

Gold Apollo’s founder and chairperson, Hsu Ching-kuang, said that a European distributor with a contract to use Gold Apollo’s trademark was responsible for manufacturing the pagers used in the attack.

Gold Apollo did ship approximately 260,000 pagers from Taiwan between 2022 and August 2024, but the majority of these were destined for the United States and Australia.

Israel’s Mossad spy agency planted explosives inside 5,000 pagers imported by the group months before Tuesday’s detonations, a senior Lebanese security source has claimed.

Hezbollah and the Lebanese government were quick to blame Israel for the nearly simultaneous detonation of hundreds of pagers used by the militant group’s members in an attack Tuesday that killed at least nine people and wounded nearly 3,000 others, according to officials.

Many of those hit were members of militant group Hezbollah, but it wasn’t immediately clear if others also carried the pagers. Among those killed were the son of a prominent Hezbollah politician and an 8-year-old girl, according to Lebanon’s health minister.

The attack came amid rising tensions between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah, which have exchanged fire across the Israel-Lebanon border since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas that sparked the war in Gaza. Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon was among those injured by the pager explosions.

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The group claimed the attack, which struck at 3.30pm local time, was perpetrated by Israel, an allegation that Israel refused to address, in keeping with its policy on assaults happening outside of its own territory.

The Lebanese health minister Firas al-Abyad said nine people had been killed, including an eight-year-old girl, after the pagers exploded across Lebanon and in the Syrian capital of Damascus, where Hezbollah have stationed some of its members. Another 2,800 were wounded, the minister said, including 400 who were critically injured.

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Gold Apollo, a Taiwanese electronics company, has denied involvement in the recent pager bombings targeting Hezbollah members in Lebanon.

The company’s chairperson, Hsu Ching-kuang, clarified that the pagers were actually manufactured by a European distributor that had a contract with Gold Apollo to use their brand.

This contract was established about three years ago, initially for importing Gold Apollo’s other communication products, but later the distributor requested permission to produce their own pagers under the Gold Apollo brand.

Gold Apollo reported an anomaly in their dealings with the distributor, specifically a wire transfer that took longer than expected to clear, reported CNN.

A senior Taiwanese security official told the outlet that Gold Apollo shipped around 260,000 pagers from Taiwan, primarily to the US and Australia, with no records of shipments to Lebanon or the Middle East.

Air France is suspending services from the French capital’s Charles de Gaulle airport to Beirut and Tel Aviv up to and including on 19 September due to escalating security concerns in the Middle East, the airline said on Tuesday.

The operations will resume following an assessment of the situation, Air France added.

Earlier in the day, Lufthansa Group said it is suspending all connections to and from Tel Aviv and Tehran and will bypass Israeli and Iranian airspace up to and including 19 September.

Taiwan’s Gold Apollo said on Wednesday the pagers that were used in the detonations in Lebanon on Tuesday were not made by it but by a company called BAC which has a licence to use its brand.

“The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it,’ Gold Apollo founder and president, Hsu Ching-Kuang, told reporters at the company’s offices in the northern Taiwanese city of New Taipei on Wednesday.

The company said in a statement that the AR-924 model was produced and sold by BAC.

“We only provide brand trademark authorisation and have no involvement in the design or manufacturing of this product,” the statement said. Mr Hsu earlier said that the firm with the licence was based in Europe but later declined to comment on BAC’s location.

While Mr Hsu was meeting with reporters, police officials arrived at the company.

Hezbollah fighters began using pagers in the belief they would be able to evade Israeli tracking of their locations, two sources familiar with the group’s operations told Reuters this year.

Mr Hsu said he did not know how the pagers could have been rigged to explode.

Israel has added the safe return of its citizens to their homes near the border with Lebanon to its formal war goals, as it considers a wider military operation in Lebanon that could ignite an all-out conflict.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s office said he laid out the war aim in a security cabinet meeting.

Tens of thousands of people have been displaced from towns and villages on both sides of the border by near-daily exchanges of fire between Israeli forces and the Lebanese Hezbollah.

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Taiwan-based electronics manufacturer Gold Apollo has categorically denied producing explosive-laden pagers linked to the recent Hezbollah bombings in Lebanon, reported AFP.

The pagers that were used in the detonations in Lebanon were not made by it but by a company called BAC which has a licence to use its brand, the firm said, according to Reuters.

The company’s statement comes amidst escalating tensions between Israel and Hezbollah, with multiple reports suggesting that Israel’s Mossad spy agency had planted explosives inside the pagers.

The pagers, used by Hezbollah operatives to evade Israeli tracking, were allegedly modified “at the production level” to include a hidden explosive device, Reuters reported citing Lebanese security sources.

“The Mossad injected a board inside of the device that has explosive material that receives a code. It’s very hard to detect it through any means. Even with any device or scanner,” the source said.