Of all the mysteries surrounding a sophisticated and surprising attack against an avowed adversary of Israel, one question stands out: Why?
After hundreds of portable pagers were used by the Lebanese militia Hezbollah It exploded almost simultaneously On Tuesday, at least 12 people, including a child, were wounded and several thousand more were injured. Analysts wondered what benefit Israel had gained if it had indeed carried out the mass detonations, as widely presumed.
Those questions became more acute Wednesday when the attack escalated with a new round of deadly explosions of portable radios and other electronic devices. Lebanon's Health Ministry reported at least 14 dead and hundreds wounded, and the new blasts drew condemnation from around the world.
The Israeli government has refrained from making any public comment, but U.S. officials, while denying having detailed advance knowledge of the wave of explosions, told media outlets that Israeli intelligence clandestinely placed explosives in the pagers before they were sent to Lebanon.
American officials, eager to distance themselves from the attack, also issued warnings to Israel and, through its proxies, to Hezbollah and Iran to refrain from escalating military operations in retaliation. Both Israel and Hezbollah have long threatened a wider war along the Israel-Lebanon border, where the two countries regularly exchange rocket fire. A wider war, however, would be radically different.
At first glance, the motivation for the electronic attacks seemed clear enough: Hezbollah and Israel are arch-enemies, antagonists in a latent war. border war which for months has run parallel to the much more destructive and deadly confrontation between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas in Gaza.
Hezbollah has said it is acting in solidarity with Hamas, which for months has been trying to drag its Iran-backed allies into a wider war with Israel.
According to Gaza health authorities, who make no distinction between civilians and combatants, the year-long war between Israel and Hamas has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians. It has reduced much of the coastal enclave to ruins and left Israel internationally isolated due to the immense suffering of Palestinian civilians.
Analysts said Tuesday's attack wreaked havoc on Hezbollah's internal communications capabilities. Ahead of Wednesday's new round of explosions, they added that the setback suffered by the militant group was likely limited in both scope and duration.
Lebanese soldiers gather outside a damaged mobile phone shop after a walkie-talkie is believed to have exploded in the southern Lebanese port city of Sidon on Wednesday.
(Mohammad Zaatari / Associated Press)
Tuesday’s attack “undermines Hezbollah’s operational ability to securely communicate with its personnel,” researchers Yaakov Lappin and Tal Beeri wrote on the website of Alma, an Israeli think tank specializing in the conflict on Israel’s northern border.
Still, they assessed that the group could in all likelihood still undertake “an extensive attack against Israel in the near term,” if it so desired.
As a display of sheer technological prowess, the beeper plot — a sophisticated operation that analysts say required months of planning — was seen by many Israelis as a much-needed facelift for the country's security establishment.
Hamas's surprise attack on southern Israel on October 7, which sparked the current war in Gaza, was described as a Massive intelligence failure by Israel, a fact for which several senior security chiefs, but notably not Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have accepted responsibility.
The Hamas-led attacks killed some 1,200 people inside Israel and another 250 were taken hostage and taken to Gaza.
As the first anniversary of the war approaches, the pager attack allowed Israeli security officials to send “a message: 'We made a mistake, but we are not dead,'” French defense and strategy consultant Pierre Servent told French news agency AFP.
Yet beyond any perception of boosting domestic morale in Israel, some observers wondered whether the pager explosions would ultimately backfire, generating even more international opprobrium and setting the stage for a retaliation by Hezbollah.
“This is not the kind of incident that ends quietly in the Middle East,” military analyst Amos Harel wrote in the daily Haaretz. Harel mentioned the highly personal and humiliating nature of the pager attacks, which flooded Lebanese hospitals with wounded people, many with torn fingers or eye injuries.
Some suggested the pager plot was intended as an explicit message to Hezbollah that Israel has undisclosed technological capabilities it can still use against the group, whose conventional military strength dwarfs that of Hamas.
Firefighters stand outside a mobile phone shop in Sidon after the explosion.
(Mohammad Zaatari / Associated Press)
The warning comes at a time when Hezbollah is also moving into uncharted territory when it comes to remote attacks.
The pager explosions came on the same day that Israel's Shin Bet intelligence service revealed a failed attempt by Hezbollah last year to assassinate a former senior Israeli official – identified in media reports as former defense minister and army chief of staff Moshe Yaalon – using a powerful explosive planted in a Tel Aviv park. Another planned attack with a similar profile was also foiled, the Shin Bet said.
But any idea that the pager explosions were a carefully calculated and precisely calibrated deterrent message was undermined by media reports on Wednesday that Israel made a hasty decision to carry out the explosions, believing the plot was in the early stages of being uncovered.
In a diplomatic context, the timing of the attack appeared to be another slap in the face by Netanyahu to Israel's closest ally, the United States.
The explosions occurred as Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken traveled to Cairo to try to push for Egyptian mediation for a ceasefire and hostage release agreement between Israel and Hamas.
U.S. officials say Israeli strikes in Lebanon or elsewhere weaken their position in trying to negotiate with Arab allies and, through them, Hamas. The U.S. says it warns all sides that they are playing with fire as they risk a broader escalation of the war, but it is difficult to predict any side's actions.
At a news conference, Blinken said the Biden administration was still gathering information about the episode.
On the eve of Tuesday’s attacks, the Israeli prime minister met with an envoy of President Biden, Amos Hochstein, who was seeking to prevent Israel from suffering a major escalation in Lebanon, something Israel had hinted at in recent days. At that meeting, Netanyahu gave no hint about the chaos that would unfold a few hours later, according to Israeli press reports.
Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson in Washington contributed to this report.
