Eight people have died after hundreds of pagers exploded simultaneously across Lebanon and in parts of Syria on Tuesday, wounding members of the militant group Hezbollah, the Iranian ambassador and dozens of other people.
An ambulance arrives to American University of Beirut Medical Center as more than 1,000 people, including Hezbollah fighters and medics, were wounded when the pagers exploded. Pic: Reuters
It really is like something out of a Hollywood spy movie.
The pagers of Hezbollah officials simultaneously exploding in a southern Beirut suburb, causing hundreds of injuries and immense embarrassment.
Israel hasn’t claimed responsibility, but all fingers will point to the Mossad, Israel’s external intelligence agency famed for inventive and audacious attacks on its enemies.
Technically, we might never know how it was achieved but it could have been done by sending signals to overload the individual circuits which would overheat the batteries, effectively turning them into small hand grenades.
To do that, the attackers would have had to know at least the make and models of the individual pagers; to go further and co-ordinate the explosions on specific devices, it’s likely the serial numbers would also be known, all of which points to another major security breach for Hezbollah.
Alternatively the pagers themselves, all apparently part of the same batch, could have been tampered with before delivery.
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An ambulance arrives at the American University of Beirut Medical Center amid a large number of injured people after pagers began exploding. Pic: Reuters
We can reasonably assume that those carrying pagers would have been fairly senior within the group. That is supported by reports Iran’s Ambassador to Lebanon was also injured when his pager exploded.
Hezbollah has been very cautious with its communications, aware that mobile phone conversations can be easily hacked and traced – pagers would have been considered a lo-fi alternative and harder to infiltrate.
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Repeatedly Israeli intelligence has shown its reach into Hezbollah, most notably the assassination of the senior commander Fuad Shukr in late July.
This latest attack will cause deep internal concern within Hezbollah, possibly even some chaos among its ranks, their safety now compromised in such a dramatic way.
Police officers inspect a car where a pager exploded in Beirut, Lebanon. Pic: AP The wider war
A number of things have happened in recent days which, taken together, I think are also notable.
Firstly, late last week, the IDF declared defeat of Hamas’s Rafah brigade in southern Gaza. This is being seen as the final major military achievement for the IDF in Gaza and allows Israel to pivot its efforts at Hezbollah and the conflict on the Israeli-Lebanese border should it choose to.
Late last night, Israel’s security cabinet officially made the return of the northern evacuees one of the war aims, alongside defeating Hamas and returning the hostages.
At the same time, rumours are swirling that the defence minister Yoav Gallant could be sacked by Benjamin Netanyahu and replaced with Gideon Sa’ar, a Netanyahu ally-turned-foe who is more hawkish on the Hezbollah issue.
And earlier today, Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence agency revealed it had uncovered a Hezbollah plot to assassinate a former senior Israeli military officer using a remotely detonated claymore device.
To what extent these events are all linked, we shall have to see, but I think there is some connection as Israel increasingly focuses on the war in the north.
Hezbollah allied with Hamas after 7 October and tied itself to the war in Gaza by committing to attack Israel in solidarity until a ceasefire was agreed. The ceasefire hasn’t happened and Hezbollah has found itself in an increasingly difficult and arguably unwinnable situation.
Israel is hitting Hezbollah targets and fighters deep into Lebanon.
The Lebanese people, and we’re told Hezbollah themselves, don’t want an all-out war with Israel and yet the organisation’s secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah has boxed himself into a corner with no clear exit strategy short of a humiliating climbdown.
How Hezbollah now responds to the pager attacks will be interesting.
If more than a thousand Lebanese had been injured in a conventional airstrike then the noises of imminent war would be deafening. But this attack is below the threshold of conventional conflict, albeit it large in scale and damage, and so the response is unclear.
