The case of the exploding pagers in Lebanon has been seen by some as bizarre, by others as sort of genius, and by some as outrageous.
On September 17th, some three thousand pager devices being used primarily by Hezbollah members started exploding in locations in Lebanon, and even in Syria.
Four thousand people have reportedly been injured in this coordinated act of sabotage, and at least eleven people died, including a 10 year-old girl.
Hezbollah immediately blamed Israel. Israel has declined to comment on the matter or claim responsibility.
But, as others have recognised, Israeli intelligence services have a track record of this kind of operation: both of planting explosives in general and of sabotaging electronics specifically.
Yes, there’s something admittedly very clever about this type of operation: both as a technical feat and as a demoralisation/humiliation strategy.
But it immediately raises two questions.
First, why didn’t Israel – with its history of inventive assassination techniques and sophisticated espionage operations – employ these sorts of tactics to target Hamas fighters and leaders after the October 7th inside-job? Not turning pagers into bombs specifically, but just general Mossad style high tech assassinations?
You know, instead of bombing Gaza to rubble and ashes and killing over 40,000 people?
And secondly, why is this not being labelled as a terrorist attack when it clearly fits all the criteria?
As for the first question, the answer is obvious: there was a preexisting agenda – one that wasn’t served by targeted operations or precise counter-terrorist type activity.
That’s why they’re apparently inventive enough to sabotage pagers being delivered to Hezbollah to cause mass casualties, but not clever enough to anticipate a Hamas attack on their own highly secured border or to prevent hundreds of their citizens being taken hostage.
As for the second question, it’s obvious that if Hamas, Hezbollah or some comparable group had executed an operation like the mass pager explosions, it would be automatically labelled as terrorism.
Why not Israel too, if the criteria fits?
After all, it reportedly isn’t just Hezbollah members that were caught by these exploding devices, but civilians too, including a 10 year-old girl.
And some of these devices went off in public places. This video on the BBC for example shows a pager exploding in a marketplace.
Edward Snowden, in series of tweets, touches on this too: saying that Israel has essentially conducted terrorism. ‘What Israel has just done is, via *any* method, reckless,’ he said. ‘They blew up countless numbers of people who were driving (meaning cars out of control), shopping (your children are in the stroller standing behind him in the checkout line), et cetera. Indistinguishable from terrorism.’
Even if it’s highly unlikely to be referred to as such.
What’s fascinating is to try to understand how this was done.
Israeli saboteurs had to have either had access to all these devices at the point of manufacture or at least the point of shipping origin (in this case, Taiwan reportedly), or at the point of delivery: which, according to some reports, was in Iran.
And apparently, Hezbollah – which reportedly switched to the 90s style pagers earlier this year because Israeli intelligence had compromised their mobile phone communications – had no inkling that anything was amiss.
It’s genuinely impressive, sure. But how they can then, with a straight face, tell their own people they were ‘caught off-guard’ by a ramshackle attack on October 7th is pretty farcical.
According to an ‘anonymous’ security expert speaking to Sky News, explosives could’ve been hidden inside the devices and activated when a certain signal was sent to them.
A bomb disposal expert and former British army officer is also quoted by Sky, saying the blasts are ‘consistent with 1 to 2 ounces of high explosive. And you could certainly get that amount in a pager’.
This being in contrast to the initial suggestions of a cyber attack or hack.
A Wired article quotes a former US National Security figure, who suggests, ‘Those explosions aren’t just batteries… These pagers were likely interdicted by Israeli authorities and modified with explosives.’
We could reasonably assume this was a Mossad operation. But it will probably continue being referred to generously as an act of sabotage, rather than as a terrorist attack.
Which is very questionable.
