A com­pa­ny based in Hun­gary was re­spon­si­ble for man­u­fac­tur­ing the pagers that ex­plod­ed in an ap­par­ent Is­raeli op­er­a­tion tar­get­ing Hezbol­lah, an­oth­er firm said Wednes­day. The at­tack marked a new es­ca­la­tion in the con­flict be­tween the two foes that has of­ten threat­ened to es­ca­late in­to all-out war.

Pagers used by the mil­i­tant group Hezbol­lah ex­plod­ed near­ly si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly a day ear­li­er in Lebanon and Syr­ia, killing at least 12 peo­ple, in­clud­ing two chil­dren, and wound­ing around 2,800. Hezbol­lah and the Lebanese gov­ern­ment blamed Is­rael.

An Amer­i­can of­fi­cial said Is­rael briefed the Unit­ed States on Tues­day af­ter the at­tack, in which small amounts of ex­plo­sive hid­den in the pagers were det­o­nat­ed. The per­son spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty be­cause they were not au­tho­rized to dis­cuss the in­for­ma­tion pub­licly.

The so­phis­ti­cat­ed ap­par­ent­ly re­mote at­tack re­newed fears that the Is­rael-Hamas war in Gaza could spill in­to a wider re­gion­al con­flict.

Hamas’ al­ly Hezbol­lah and Is­raeli forces have ex­changed fire near­ly dai­ly since Oct. 8, the day af­ter a dead­ly Hamas-led as­sault in south­ern Is­rael trig­gered the war. Since then, hun­dreds have been killed in the strikes in Lebanon and dozens in Is­rael, while tens of thou­sands on each side of the bor­der have been dis­placed.

De­spite pe­ri­od­ic cy­cles of es­ca­la­tion, Hezbol­lah and Is­rael have care­ful­ly avoid­ed an all-out war, but Is­raeli lead­ers have is­sued a se­ries of warn­ings in re­cent weeks that they might in­crease op­er­a­tions against Hezbol­lah in Lebanon.

Is­rael be­gan mov­ing more troops to its bor­der with Lebanon on Wednes­day as a pre­cau­tion­ary mea­sure, ac­cord­ing to an of­fi­cial with knowl­edge of the move­ments who spoke on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty be­cause he was not au­tho­rized to speak to the me­dia.

The AR-924 pagers used Tues­day’s at­tack were man­u­fac­tured by BAC Con­sult­ing KFT, based in the Hun­gar­i­an cap­i­tal of Bu­dapest, ac­cord­ing to a state­ment re­leased by Gold Apol­lo, a Tai­wanese firm that au­tho­rized the use of its brand on the pagers.

BAC ap­peared to be a shell com­pa­ny.

“Ac­cord­ing to the co­op­er­a­tion agree­ment, we au­tho­rize BAC to use our brand trade­mark for prod­uct sales in des­ig­nat­ed re­gions, but the de­sign and man­u­fac­tur­ing of the prod­ucts are sole­ly the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of BAC,” Gold Apol­lo said in a state­ment.

The com­pa­ny’s chair, Hsu Ching-kuang, told jour­nal­ists Wednes­day that the firm has had a li­cens­ing agree­ment with BAC for the past three years.

BAC Con­sult­ing Kft., a lim­it­ed li­a­bil­i­ty com­pa­ny, was reg­is­tered in May 2022, ac­cord­ing to com­pa­ny records. It has 7,840 eu­ros in stand­ing cap­i­tal, the records showed and had rev­enue of $725,768 in 2022 and $593,972 in 2023.

At the head­quar­ters in a build­ing in a res­i­den­tial neigh­bour­hood of Bu­dapest, As­so­ci­at­ed Press jour­nal­ists saw the names of mul­ti­ple com­pa­nies, in­clud­ing BAC Con­sult­ing, post­ed on pieces of pa­per on a win­dow.

A woman who emerged from the build­ing and de­clined to give her name said the site pro­vides head­quar­ter ad­dress­es to var­i­ous com­pa­nies.

BAC is reg­is­tered to Cris­tiana Rosaria Bár­sony-Ar­cidi­a­cono, whose de­scribes her­self on her LinkedIn page as a strate­gic ad­vi­sor and busi­ness de­vel­op­er. Among oth­er po­si­tions, Bár­sony-Ar­cidi­a­cono says on the page that she has served on the board of di­rec­tors of the Earth Child In­sti­tute, a sus­tain­abil­i­ty group. The group does not list Bár­sony-Ar­cidi­a­cono as among its board mem­bers on its web­site.

The AP has at­tempt­ed to reach Bár­sony-Ar­cidi­a­cono via the LinkedIn page and has been un­able to es­tab­lish a con­nec­tion be­tween her or BAC and the ex­plod­ing pagers.

The at­tack in Lebanon start­ed Tues­day af­ter­noon, when pagers in their own­ers’ hands or pock­ets start­ed heat­ing up and then ex­plod­ing — leav­ing blood-splat­tered scenes and pan­ick­ing by­standers.

It ap­peared that most of those hit were mem­bers or linked to mem­bers of Hezbol­lah — whether fight­ers or civil­ians — but it was not im­me­di­ate­ly clear if peo­ple with no ties to Hezbol­lah were al­so hit.

The Health Min­istry said health care work­ers and two chil­dren were among those killed. In the vil­lage of Na­di Sheet in the Bekaa Val­ley, dozens gath­ered to mourn the death of one of the chil­dren, 9-year-old Fa­ti­ma Ab­dul­lah. The Health Min­istry had pre­vi­ous­ly giv­en her age as 8.

Her moth­er, wear­ing black and don­ning a yel­low Hezbol­lah scarf, wept along­side oth­er women and chil­dren as they gath­ered around the lit­tle girl’s cof­fin be­fore her bur­ial.

Hezbol­lah said in a state­ment Wednes­day morn­ing that it would con­tin­ue its nor­mal strikes against Is­rael as part of what it de­scribes as a sup­port front for its al­ly, Hamas, and Pales­tini­ans in Gaza.

“This path is con­tin­u­ous and sep­a­rate from the dif­fi­cult reck­on­ing that the crim­i­nal en­e­my must await for its mas­sacre on Tues­day,” it said. “This is an­oth­er reck­on­ing that will come, God will­ing.”

At hos­pi­tals in Beirut on Wednes­day, the chaos of the night be­fore had large­ly sub­sided, but rel­a­tives of the wound­ed con­tin­ued to wait.

Lebanon Health Min­is­ter Fi­ras Abi­ad told jour­nal­ists dur­ing a tour on hos­pi­tals Wednes­day morn­ing that many of the wound­ed had se­vere in­juries to the eyes, and oth­ers had limbs am­pu­tat­ed. Jour­nal­ists were not al­lowed to en­ter hos­pi­tal rooms or film pa­tients.

Abi­ad said that the wound­ed had been sent to var­i­ous area hos­pi­tals to avoid any sin­gle fa­cil­i­ty be­ing over­loaded and added that Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syr­ia and Egypt of­fered to help treat the pa­tients.

Ear­li­er Wednes­day, an Iraqi mil­i­tary plane land­ed in Beirut car­ry­ing 15 tons of med­i­cine and med­ical equip­ment, he said.

Ex­perts be­lieve ex­plo­sive ma­te­r­i­al was put in­to the pagers pri­or to their de­liv­ery.

The AR-924 pager, ad­ver­tised as be­ing “rugged,” con­tains a recharge­able lithi­um bat­tery, ac­cord­ing to spec­i­fi­ca­tions ad­ver­tised on Gold Apol­lo’s web­site be­fore they were re­moved af­ter the at­tack.

It claimed to have up to 85 days of bat­tery life. That would be cru­cial in Lebanon, where elec­tric­i­ty out­ages have been com­mon af­ter years of eco­nom­ic col­lapse. Pagers al­so run on a dif­fer­ent wire­less net­work than mo­bile phones, mak­ing them more re­silient in emer­gen­cies — one of the rea­sons why many hos­pi­tals world­wide still re­ly on them.

For Hezbol­lah, the pagers al­so pro­vid­ed a means to side­step what’s be­lieved to be in­ten­sive Is­raeli elec­tron­ic sur­veil­lance on mo­bile phone net­works in Lebanon.

“The phone that we have in our hands — I do not have a phone in my hand — is a lis­ten­ing de­vice,” warned Hezbol­lah chief Has­san Nas­ral­lah in a Feb­ru­ary speech.

Tai­wan’s Min­istry of Eco­nom­ic Af­fairs said from the be­gin­ning of 2022 un­til Au­gust 2024, Gold Apol­lo has ex­port­ed 260,000 sets of pagers, in­clud­ing more than 40,000 sets be­tween Jan­u­ary and Au­gust of this year. The min­istry said that it had no records of di­rect ex­ports of Gold Apol­lo pagers to Lebanon. —TAIPEI, Tai­wan (AP)

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Sto­ry by JOHN­SON LAI, JUSTIN SPIKE and BASSEM MROUE | As­so­ci­at­ed Press.  Justin Spike re­port­ed from Bu­dapest and Bassem Mroue re­port­ed from Beirut. As­so­ci­at­ed Press jour­nal­ists Ab­by Sewell and Ka­reem Chehayeb in Beirut; Melanie Lid­man and Josef Fe­d­er­man in Jerusalem; Zeke Miller in Wash­ing­ton; and Jon Gam­brell in Dubai, Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates, con­tributed to this re­port.