Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem has admitted that the group gravely misjudged the scale and sophistication of Israel’s intelligence capabilities, following a covert Israeli operation last September in which thousands of booby-trapped pagers detonated across Lebanon, killing dozens and injuring thousands of Hezbollah terrorists. In a rare interview with the pro-Hezbollah Al-Mayadeen news outlet, Qassem confirmed that an internal investigation revealed serious lapses in the group’s procurement and security protocols, allowing Israel to infiltrate the supply chain undetected. “We didn’t know the supply chain had been exposed,” Qassem said, referring to the pagers, which were believed to have been distributed to operatives over the course of the previous year. The devices, rigged with miniature explosives, were activated remotely by Israeli intelligence. According to Qassem, some Hezbollah members had begun to question the pagers shortly before the explosions, citing “anomalies” in their performance. He suggested that Israeli forces may have accelerated the detonation timeline once they realized Hezbollah was beginning to investigate the devices more closely. The operation — one of the most sophisticated attributed to Israeli intelligence in history — has prompted Hezbollah to reassess its internal security measures. Qassem conceded that his organization had severely underestimated Israeli surveillance. “We were aware of possible wiretapping,” he said, “but did not realize the extent — that it was near-total and very extensive.” Qassem, who assumed leadership of Hezbollah after the assassination of longtime chief Hassan Nasrallah, estimated that Israel has been collecting aerial surveillance data on Hezbollah targets for the past 17 years, dating back to the end of the Second Lebanon War. “We couldn’t grasp how deep it went,” he said. Despite the sweeping nature of the breach, Qassem denied reports that Israeli intelligence had succeeded in planting human assets within Hezbollah’s senior ranks, insisting that no credible evidence had emerged of such infiltrations. (YWN World Headquarters – NYC)