Hezbollah’s Exploding Pagers

On Tuesday, hundreds of encrypted Hezbollah pagers in Lebanon and Syria began exploding at the same time. According to The New York Times, witnesses saw smoke coming out of the pockets of victims followed by a small explosion that sounded like fireworks or a gunshot. 

Lebanon’s health minister said Tuesday that at least eight people have been killed and 2,700 were injured. The tiny country’s hospitals were overwhelmed with patients suffering from burn wounds, blown-up hands, and groin injuries. 

While Israel has not taken responsibility, who else could it be? This kind of precise, imaginative sabotage has been a calling card of the Mossad for decades. Indeed, Hezbollah’s pagers exploded on the same day Israel’s domestic security organization, the Shin Bet, announced that it had foiled a Hezbollah plot to assassinate a former senior security official using a claymore mine that would have detonated by a cellular device in Lebanon. Talk about being hoisted on one’s petard. 

And yet for all of Israel’s tactical brilliance, its strategic position with regard to Hezbollah remains perilous. After October 7, when the Lebanese militia began firing barrages of rockets, missiles, and drones at northern Israel, some 100,000 Israelis had to flee their homes on Israel’s northern border. Nearly a year later, they still cannot return. 

This has been a pattern. 

Consider Israel’s mortal enemy, Iran. Over the last 15 years, the Mossad appears to have Iran’s regime wired for sound. In 2020, a truck fitted with a remote control machine gun shot down Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, while he was on his way to his vacation home on the Caspian Sea. The operation was straight out of the finale of Breaking Bad. 

Before the killing of Fakhrizadeh, Mossad operatives in 2018 broke into a warehouse full of secret plans and schematics that comprised the archives of Iran’s secret nuclear program. Israeli agents made off with the archive and then presented the material to the International Atomic Energy Agency and later, reporters from all over the world. It was an intelligence coup by any measure.  

Earlier, in 2009, Israeli and American intelligence agencies inserted a cyber worm known as Stuxnet into the software that controlled the speed that centrifuges spun to enrich uranium in Iran’s Natanz facility. The operation destroyed the machines, and for a few months Iran’s program was set back.

All of these operations demonstrated an operational cunning and competence that are the stuff of spy novels. And yet Iran today is closer than ever to obtaining a nuclear weapon, according to the U.S. government’s own recent estimates. 

“I think it’s fair to say the Israelis have tended to look at strategy as an accumulation of tactical victories,” Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA operations officer who is now a distinguished fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told The Free Press. “That obviously has been tested to the max with the Islamic Republic of Iran. I think the Israelis are aware it hasn’t worked.”

This failure of Israeli covert action to improve its strategic standing in the Middle East is perhaps best demonstrated by its recent killing of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh. At the end of July, Haniyeh lost his life in an explosion at the guest house where he was staying during the inauguration of Iran’s new president.

Not only did Israel’s agents reportedly manage to sneak a bomb inside a guest house in the capital city of their mortal enemy, but after Iran vowed revenge, to this day it has yet to follow through on its threat. That sounds like an unbelievable success. But there’s a catch. Because of Iran’s mere threat of retaliation, most commercial airlines have stopped their flights to Israel, further isolating a country maligned for fighting a war in Gaza started by Iran’s proxy, Hamas. Indeed, after the pager explosions, Air France and Lufthansa have canceled flights to Tel Aviv, fearing Hezbollah’s retaliation. 

In this respect, the real story is not that covert action for Israel is worthless. Gerecht stressed that the tactical success of these operations have value. The prospect of every encrypted Hezbollah pager exploding at the same time may be a psychological deterrent for the organization’s middle managers and others. 

But they will not deter Hezbollah from launching the missiles and rockets into Israel that make it impossible for 100,000 citizens to return home. As Gerecht said, “Israel’s tactical brilliance is no substitute for serious hard power and military interventions.”

Put another way, Israel cannot defeat its enemies by waging war only in the shadows. 

Eli Lake is a Free Press columnist. Follow him on Twitter at @EliLake and read his piece “Israel Is Not Equivalent to Hamas.”

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