AP (“Hezbollah is hit by a wave of exploding pagers that killed at least 9 people and injured thousands“):
Pagers used by hundreds of members of the militant group Hezbollah exploded near-simultaneously Tuesday in Lebanon and Syria, killing at least nine people, including an 8-year-old girl, and wounding several thousand, officials said. Hezbollah and the Lebanese government blamed Israel for what appeared to be a sophisticated remote attack.
An American official said Israel briefed the United States on Tuesday after the conclusion of the operation, in which small amounts of explosive secreted in the pagers were detonated. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the information publicly.
The Israeli military declined to comment.
Among those wounded was Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon. The mysterious explosions came amid rising tensions between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah, which have exchanged fire across the Israel-Lebanon border since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas that sparked the war in Gaza.
The pagers that blew up were apparently acquired by Hezbollah after the group’s leader ordered members in February to stop using cellphones, warning they could be tracked by Israeli intelligence. A Hezbollah official told The Associated Press the pagers were a new brand, but declined to say how long they had been in use.
Taiwanese company Gold Apollo said Wednesday that it authorized its brand on the AR-924 pagers used by the Hezbollah militant group, but the devices were produced and sold by a company called BAC.
At about 3:30 p.m. local time on Tuesday, as people shopped for groceries, sat in cafes or drove cars and motorcycles in the afternoon traffic, the pagers in their hands or pockets started heating up and then exploding — leaving blood-splattered scenes and panicking bystanders.
It appeared that many of those hit were members of Hezbollah, but it was not immediately clear if non-Hezbollah members also carried any of the exploding pagers.
The blasts were mainly in areas where the group has a strong presence, particularly a southern Beirut suburb and in the Beqaa region of eastern Lebanon, as well as in Damascus, according to Lebanese security officials and a Hezbollah official. The Hezbollah official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press.
[…]
Experts said the pager explosions pointed to a long-planned operation, possibly carried out by infiltrating the supply chain and rigging the devices with explosives before they were delivered to Lebanon.
Whatever the means, it targeted an extraordinary breadth of people with hundreds of small explosions — wherever the pager carrier happened to be — that left some maimed.
One online video showed a man picking through produce at a grocery store when the bag he was carrying at his hip explodes, sending him sprawling to the ground and bystanders running.
At overwhelmed hospitals, wounded were rushed in on stretchers, some with missing hands, faces partly blown away or gaping holes at their hips and legs, according to AP photographers. On a main road in central Beirut, a car door was splattered with blood and the windshield cracked.
Lebanon Health Minister Firas Abiad told Qatar’s Al Jazeera network at least nine people were killed, including an 8-year-old girl, and some 2,750 were wounded — 200 of them critically — by the explosions. Most had injuries in the face, hand, or around the abdomen.
It appeared eight of the dead belonged to Hezbollah. The group issued a statement confirming at least two members were killed in the pager bombings. One of them was the son of a Hezbollah member in Parliament, according to the Hezbollah official who spoke anonymously. The group later issued announcements that six other members were killed Tuesday, though it did not specify how.
WSJ (“Hezbollah Pagers Explode in Apparent Attack Across Lebanon“):
Pagers carried by thousands of Hezbollah operatives exploded at about the same time Tuesday afternoon in what appeared to be an unprecedented attack that authorities said injured almost 2,800 and killed nine across Lebanon.
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Iranian state television said the country’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, was injured by his pager but was conscious and not in danger. Iran is the main supporter of Hezbollah, a U.S.-designated terrorist group that has grown into one of the world’s best-armed nonstate militias.
The apparent attack comes amid growing concerns that tensions along the Lebanese border are in danger of escalating, as the daily exchange of cross-border fire grows in intensity and efforts to strike a deal to pause the fighting in Gaza fail to bear fruit.
Israel’s government is under increasing pressure to return tens of thousands of evacuees to their homes in the north by silencing Hezbollah’s rockets and drones. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Monday that dimming prospects for diplomacy were leaving military action as the only alternative.
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Bassem Badran, who went to college in Illinois and now works in education in Beirut, waited outside the American University Hospital emergency room, where one of his friends was in critical condition and two others were being treated for lesser wounds. The friend with the worst injuries had been shopping in a supermarket when his pager exploded, blowing off his hand.
Badran said many of those who carry pagers aren’t militants in the traditional sense but rather working professionals who you may not even know are Hezbollah members. “But when there is a situation they believe in defending their village and their country,” he said.
Randa Slim, director of the Conflict Resolution and Track II Dialogues Program at the Middle East Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C., said the attack against Hezbollah operatives is historic in its scope and manner, one that took significant planning and preparation.
“It sends a significant message to Hezbollah leadership that, ‘We can get you anywhere,’” said Slim. “And it very much affects morale.”
“The war on the border is no longer on the border—with this attack it has expanded into their homes and shopping places around Lebanon,” Slim said.
NYT (“Israel’s Pager Attack Has No Clear Strategic Goal, Analysts Say“):
Israel’s attack on pagers belonging to Hezbollah on Tuesday was a tactical success that had no clear strategic impact, analysts say.
While it embarrassed Hezbollah and appeared to incapacitate many of its members, the attack has not so far altered the military balance along the Israel-Lebanon border, where more than 100,000 civilians on either side have been displaced by a low-intensity battle. Hezbollah and the Israeli military remained locked in the same pattern, exchanging missiles and artillery fire on Wednesday at a tempo in keeping with the daily skirmishes fought between the sides since October.
Although Tuesday’s attack was an eye-catching demonstration of Israel’s technological prowess, Israel has not initially sought to capitalize on the confusion it sowed by initiating a decisive blow against Hezbollah and invading Lebanon.
And if the attack impressed many Israelis, some of whom had criticized their government for failing to stop Hezbollah’s strikes, their core frustration remains: Hezbollah is still entrenched on Israel’s northern border, preventing tens of thousands of residents of northern Israel from returning home.
“This is an amazing tactical event,” said Miri Eisin, a fellow at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism, an Israel-based research organization.
“But not a single Hezbollah fighter is going to move because of this,” said Ms. Eisin, a former senior intelligence officer. “Having amazing capabilities does not make a strategy.”
Israelis are divided about whether the attack was born from short-term opportunism or long-term forethought. Some believe that Israeli commanders feared that their Hezbollah counterparts had recently discovered Israel’s ability to sabotage the pagers, prompting Israeli commanders to immediately blow them up or risk losing the capability forever.
Others say that Israel had a specific strategic intent. Israel may have hoped that the attack’s brazenness and sophistication would ultimately make Hezbollah more amenable to a cease-fire in the coming weeks, if not immediately.
“The goal of the operation, if Israel was behind it as Hezbollah claims, may have been to show Hezbollah that it will pay a very high price if it continues its attacks on Israel instead of reaching an agreement,” said Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, a former head of Israel’s military intelligence directorate.
Time will tell whether this was mostly psychological warfare or had a larger strategic purpose. Tactically, the operation was indeed brilliant. I gather that Israeli intelligence convinced Hezbollah that their cell phones were compromised, prompting them to switch to pagers, and then managed to sabotage the pagers. It certainly highlights the difference in operational sophistication.
Once again, though, it appears that minimizing collateral damage was not a high priority. Why set these off in the middle of the afternoon, when the militants would have been most likely have been out and about? The ratio of nine Hezbollah dead to 2750 unspecified folks injured, if accurate, is problematic—especially since there does not appear to have been a high-value target.
UPDATE: Eliot Cohen weighs in, calling the attack “Israel’s Strategic Win.” After a long build-up, he argues:
Set aside the thousands of Hezbollah operatives disabled or killed by these explosions and consider the psychological effect. Hezbollah members will now be unlikely to trust any form of electronics: car keys, cellphones, computers, television sets. Myth and legend, no doubt reinforced by an information-warfare campaign, will magnify Israel’s success in getting inside black boxes no matter how big or how small. An army skittish about any kind of electronics is one that is paralyzed—an individual leader, like Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar, can communicate without a phone, but an entire organization cannot.
The Iranians, already reeling from the assassination of the political head of Hamas in a Revolutionary Guard Corps guesthouse on the day of the inauguration of the new president, now have much to wonder about as well. How, they must ask themselves, did the Israelis penetrate the supply chain? How did they get access to the pagers? How did they know that this batch was going to Hezbollah? How did they manage to foil whatever security precautions had been taken?
From a failure so large, witch hunts will follow—no doubt fed, again, by a solid information-warfare campaign. Organizations looking for spies and saboteurs, particularly after such a disaster, are unlikely to be forgiving or measured, and so a spiral of accusations, torture, and executions will likely ensue. War is an affair of the mind as much as anything else. By showing its extraordinary reach, Israel will breed internal fear and suspicion that can be more paralyzing than fear of an enemy.
Viewed as a psychological operation rather than a kinetic strike, it makes more strategic sense. Especially if, as Cohen believes, the Israeli leadership and people see a full-on war with Hezbollah in the short term as not only inevitable but necessary.
