A broader Israel-Lebanon war now seems inevitable
On Wednesday, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said the war against Hezbollah had entered a “new phase” and that Israel would be concentrating more of its efforts against the group. “The center of gravity is moving north. We are diverting forces, resources, and energy toward the north,” Gallant told Israeli Air Force personnel at an air base.
By the next day, dozens of Israeli airstrikes hit alleged Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon. Meanwhile, the group’s leader Hasan Nasrallah delivered an address describing the clandestine explosive attacks as an “act of war” by Israel and “a major assault on Lebanon, its security and sovereignty, a war crime.”
Diplomats looked on in dismay. “This act of grave escalation will lead the region to what we have been warning against, which is an all-out war which will turn the region into scorched earth,” Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty said in Cairo on Wednesday, speaking alongside U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
Though the pager attacks represent a dramatic tactical victory for Israeli’s security establishment, it’s not clear what strategic goals it achieves. Hezbollah is reeling and in disarray, but it may be that Israel carried out the attack because the Lebanese group was about to discover that its technology had been compromised.
“The timing does not reflect a strategic move by Israel,” a senior former Israeli official with knowledge of the operation told my colleagues. “The timing was coincidental because of things that may have happened on the ground that would have allowed the exposure of this capability.”
Also, it arguably locks the region into an inevitable escalatory chain. “Even if they were trying to send a message, why now?” a Middle East-based security official told my colleagues, also speaking on the condition of anonymity. “There will be a reaction from Hezbollah. Why do this if you are truly interested in preventing a wider war?”
Some Israeli and Western policymakers have hoped to delink the conflict with Hamas from tensions with Hezbollah. But the current course of events makes that harder. “Israel is poised to visit greater violence on Hezbollah in the hope of forcing it into ceasing cross border fire,” Firas Maksad, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, told me. “However, Hezbollah cannot yield without undermining the much vaunted ‘unity of fronts’ it and Iran proclaimed after October 7. The broadening of the war has, therefore, become inevitable.” [Continue reading…]
The pagers and radios were reportedly distributed mainly among people allegedly associated with the Hezbollah movement, which includes civilian and military personnel and is involved in an armed conflict with Israel along the border.
“To the extent that international humanitarian law applies, at the time of the attacks there was no way of knowing who possessed each device and who was nearby,” the experts said. “Simultaneous attacks by thousands of devices would inevitably violate humanitarian law, by failing to verify each target, and distinguish between protected civilians and those who could potentially be attacked for taking a direct part in hostilities.
“Such attacks could constitute war crimes of murder, attacking civilians, and launching indiscriminate attacks, in addition to violating the right to life,” the experts said.
Humanitarian law additionally prohibits the use of booby-traps disguised as apparently harmless portable objects where specifically designed and constructed with explosives – and this could include a modified civilian pager, the experts said. A booby-trap is a device designed to kill or injure, that functions unexpectedly when a person performs an apparently safe act, such as answering a pager.
“It is also a war crime to commit violence intended to spread terror among civilians, including to intimidate or deter them from supporting an adversary,” the experts warned. “A climate of fear now pervades everyday life in Lebanon,” they said. [Continue reading…]
In Lebanon, as Israel picked off senior Hezbollah commandos with targeted assassinations, their leader came to a conclusion: If Israel was going high-tech, Hezbollah would go low. It was clear, a distressed Hezbollah chief, Hassan Nasrallah, said, that Israel was using cellphone networks to pinpoint the locations of his operatives.
“You ask me where is the agent,” Mr. Nasrallah told his followers in a publicly televised address in February. “I tell you that the phone in your hands, in your wife’s hands, and in your children’s hands is the agent.”
Then he issued a plea.
“Bury it,” Mr. Nasrallah said. “Put it in an iron box and lock it.”
He had been pushing for years for Hezbollah to invest instead in pagers, which for all their limited capabilities could receive data without giving away a user’s location or other compromising information, according to American intelligence assessments.
Israeli intelligence officials saw an opportunity.
Even before Mr. Nasrallah decided to expand pager usage, Israel had put into motion a plan to establish a shell company that would pose as an international pager producer.
By all appearances, B.A.C. Consulting was a Hungary-based company that was under contract to produce the devices on behalf of a Taiwanese company, Gold Apollo. In fact, it was part of an Israeli front, according to three intelligence officers briefed on the operation. They said at least two other shell companies were created as well to mask the real identities of the people creating the pagers: Israeli intelligence officers.
B.A.C. did take on ordinary clients, for which it produced a range of ordinary pagers. But the only client that really mattered was Hezbollah, and its pagers were far from ordinary. Produced separately, they contained batteries laced with the explosive PETN, according to the three intelligence officers. [Continue reading…]