Several thousand people were injured and at least 12 killed when pagers exploded in Lebanon in an attack against the militant group Hezbollah on Tuesday. Israel has not publicly claimed or denied responsibility for the attack. In February, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah asked fighters to do away with smartphones as they could be used for surveillance. (At least 20 people were killed and several hundred wounded when dozens of walkie-talkies blew up in Lebanon on Wednesday.) Why are pagers still being used and how did they explode?

Where did Hezbollah get the pagers from?

Early reports suggested that the affected pagers were manufactured by Gold Apollo in Taiwan but the company’s president, Hsu Ching-kuang, said the pagers were made by a firm that had licensed his company’s brand.

It now appears that Budapest-registered BAC Consulting KFT had designed and made the pagers.

According to BAC’s website, the firm, registered in 2022, develops “international technology cooperation among countries for the sale of telecommunication products” and the cooperation involves “scaling up a business from Asia to new markets e.g. developing countries”.

BAC appears to be part of an Israeli front, according to 3 intelligence officers briefed on the operation. They said at least two other shell companies were created as well to mask the real identities of the people creating the pagers: Israeli intelligence officers.

BAC did take on ordinary clients, for which it produced a range of ordinary pagers.

But the only client that really mattered was Hezbollah, and its pagers were far from ordinary. Produced separately, they contained batteries laced with the explosive PETN, according to the three intelligence officers.

The pagers began being shipped to Lebanon in the summer of 2022 in small numbers, but production was quickly ramped up after Nasrallah denounced cellphones.

Hungarian government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs said in a statement on X: “Authorities have confirmed that the company in question is a trading intermediary, with no manufacturing or operational site in Hungary. It has one manager registered at its declared address.”

How did the pagers explode?

Many of the affected pagers were part of a new shipment Hezbollah received recently. Security experts, who have studied footage of the explosions in Lebanon, believe that an explosive device was planted in the new models. There is a possibility that the shipment was intercepted and a malicious code was placed. It’s unlikely the average pager user is at risk, according to Vir Phoha, a professor of computer science and cybersecurity researcher at Syracuse University, in a statement to The Wall Street Journal.

Powered by just a few ounces of an explosive compound concealed within the devices, the blasts sent grown men flying off motorcycles and slamming into walls, according to witnesses and video footage. People out shopping fell to the ground, writhing in agony.

Mohammed Awada, 52, said he and his son were driving by a man whose pager exploded. “My son went crazy and started to scream when he saw the man’s hand flying away from him,” he said.

Over the summer, shipments of the pagers to Lebanon increased, with thousands arriving in the country and being distributed among Hezbollah officers and their allies, according to two US intelligence officials. To Hezbollah, they were a defensive measure, but in Israel, intelligence officers referred to the pagers as “buttons” that could be pushed when the time seemed ripe. That moment, it appears, came this week.

Who still uses a pager?

According to Spok, which is the largest paging network in the US, based in Plano, Texas, several hospitals still use pagers. It has a “closed supply chain” for its paging devices, meaning manufacturing happens at secure facilities.

The number of pagers in use is nowhere close to the 61 million pagers that were in circulation globally in 1994. A study published (in 2017) in the Journal of Hospital Medicine said nearly 80 per cent of hospital doctors surveyed used pagers and half of the messages received on the device had to do with patient care.

In the UK, the government said in 2019 that the NHS used around 130,000 of the devices. Since then, it has moved away from using the device.

In India, pagers beeped out years ago. Soon after the Indian economy opened up in 1991 with liberalisation, pagers arrived around 1995. Offerings from companies like Motorola, Mobilink and BPL became popular as the pager became a status symbol among the corporate crowd. The subscriber base made it to 2 millionin 1998 but by 2003-04, the technology had fallen out of favour because of cuts in cellphone tariffs and the availabilityof cheaper phone handsets.

Why are pagers still used?

In some countries, hospitals, for example, use pagers powered by their own communications system and can be more reliable in emergencies because Wi-Fi networks can fail. The signals of pagers can get through concrete and steel, at times more effectively than smartphones.

The lesson learnt:

For the Lebanese, the second wave of explosions was confirmation of the lesson from the day before: They now live in a world in which the most common of devices can be transformed into instruments of death.

One woman, Um Ibrahim, stopped a reporter in the middle of the confusion and begged to use a cellphone to call her children.

Her hands shaking, she dialled a number and then screamed a directive: “Turn off your phones now!”

Additional reporting by New York Times News Service