LONDON: The mass pager attack against Hezbollah in Lebanon has put Israel’s secretive Unit 8200, the Israel Defense Forces’ intelligence unit under the spotlight as a Western security source said it was involved in planning the operation.
Israeli officials are silent on the audacious intelligence operation that killed 12 people on Tuesday and injured thousands of Hezbollah operatives.
According to reports Israel’s Mossad spy agency was responsible for a sophisticated operation to install a small quantity of explosives inside 5,000 pagers ordered by Hezbollah.
Reports quoting security sources said that Unit 8200, a military unit that is not part of the Israeli spy agency, was involved in the development stage of the operation against Hezbollah.
As per reports Unit 8200 was involved in the technical side of testing how they could insert explosive material in the manufacturing process of the pagers.
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Yossi Kuperwasser, a former military intelligence official and now research director at the Israel Defense and Security Forum, said there was no confirmation that the military intelligence unit was behind the attack.
Unit 8200 and its hand-picked soldiers operate and develop intelligence gathering tools and are often affiliated with the U.S. National Security Agency.
