ANKARA (Reuters) – Turkey is reviewing its measures to secure the communication devices used by its armed forces after the deadly blasts in Lebanon, a Turkish defence ministry official said on Thursday.
Hand-held radios used by armed group Hezbollah detonated on Wednesday across Lebanon’s south in the country’s deadliest day since cross-border fighting erupted between the group and Israel nearly a year ago, stoking tensions after similar explosions of the militants’ pagers the day before.
The blasts appeared to throw Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful proxy in the Middle East, into disarray, and occurred alongside Israel’s 11-month-old war against Palestinian Hamas militants in Gaza and heightened fears of an escalation and regional war.
The Turkish official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Turkey’s military exclusively used domestically-produced equipment but Ankara had additional control mechanisms in place if a third party is involved in procurement or production of devices.
“Whether in the operations we carry out, the ongoing war in Ukraine, and as with the Lebanon example, measures are reviewed and new measures are being developed as part of the lessons learned following each development,” the official said.
“In the context of this incident, we as the Defence Ministry are carrying out the necessary examinations,” the person added, without providing further detail.
In Tuesday’s explosions, sources said Israeli spies remotely detonated explosives they planted in a Hezbollah order of 5,000 pagers before they entered the country.
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan told state-owned Anadolu news agency that establishing an independent agency for cyber-security specifically was on the government’s agenda, and that President Tayyip Erdogan saw this as a necessity.
(Reporting by Tuvan Gumrukcu; Editing by Daren Butler, William Maclean)
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