Eight people have been killed and 2,800 others, including an undetermined number of Hezbollah members, have been injured when the pagers they used to communicate exploded simultaneously on Tuesday, in an apparently unprecedented operation by the Mossad, the famous Israeli secret services abroad. After an initial reaction without pointing the finger at Israel, the Hezbollah militia has ended up blaming it “fully” and has promised “just punishment in ways that it expects and does not expect.” The coordinated attack takes to an even more dangerous point the war of attrition that they have been waging for almost a year and that had already been intensifying in recent weeks. It is also one of the biggest security breaches of Hezbollah since its birth in the eighties, precisely during the occupation of southern Lebanon, which Israel ended in 2000.
Since early afternoon, social media and messaging groups have been filled with images of the explosion, or of people lying bloodied on the ground in different parts of Lebanon, including Hezbollah strongholds such as Dahiye, on the outskirts of Beirut, or in the south of the country. The explosions began around 4:00 p.m. local time (3:00 p.m. in mainland Spain) and lasted around an hour. It is not known how they occurred.
The country’s Ministry of Health has reported at least eight dead and 200 seriously injured. Two of the dead were members of Hezbollah and another, a 10-year-old girl, the militia said. Some hospitals have been overwhelmed by the transfer of so many wounded in such a short time. One of them, although slightly, is the Iranian ambassador to the country, Mojtaba Amani, according to the Mehr agency. There are also members of Hezbollah in Syria (14, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights). Its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has not been affected, according to the group.
The Shiite militia only accused Israel hours after the attack, after an “in-depth investigation, both on the security and technical level” by its “specialized services.” In the midst of the escalating conflict that continues to rise in temperature, everything points to an operation by the Mossad, which usually relies on actions — assassinations, kidnappings, sabotage, poisoning… — that are not only effective but also spectacular, whose objective is to cause damage, but also to demoralize, displaying the technical means and the ability to penetrate the enemy’s defenses and communications.
The almost simultaneous explosion of hundreds of devices has no known precedent and is, at the very least, the biggest security breach suffered by the group in the war of attrition it has been waging with Israel since October 8, 2023. It was a modern model of search engine acquired by Hezbollah in recent months, security sources have specified to the Reuters agency.
Lebanon’s foreign ministry has described the simultaneous explosions as a “dangerous and deliberate escalation by Israel,” just preceded by threats to “expand the war” in the country “on a large scale.” On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the inclusion of a fourth war objective – the “safe” return to their homes of tens of thousands of displaced people from the border with Lebanon – and said he would “continue to act to implement this objective.” This is in addition to the three statements made at the beginning of the war and limited to Gaza: “Destroy Hamas, bring back all our hostages, ensure that Gaza no longer represents a threat to Israel.”
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Prime Minister Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and other senior security officials have moved to Kiria, the army base in Tel Aviv where the most important decisions are made in times of war and are concentrated in anticipation of a risky situation, such as the promised response from Hezbollah. Hours before the explosions, authorities announced that they had thwarted an attempted attack by the group against an unspecified former senior security official.
According to the newspaper Israel Hayomthe head of the Israeli army’s Northern Command, Uri Gordin, said in a recent closed-door meeting that the army is going through a strategic moment that allows it to invade southern Lebanon to create a “security buffer zone” with a dual objective: to push Hezbollah’s elite forces away from the border so that the 60,000 Israelis evacuated from the north of the country can return to their homes and to negotiate a permanent agreement from a position of strength. Netanyahu also said on Thursday in an analysis of the intelligence information: “We are facing a wide-ranging war of one level of intensity or another.”
Topaz Luk, one of Netanyahu’s closest advisers, suggested the Mossad’s role in a tweet just before deleting it. It was a response to another post by a journalist from the daily HaaretzJaim Levinson, mocking that the Israeli prime minister would not make decisions on the conflict on the Israel-Lebanon border so as not to spoil a trip to New York with his wife, Sarah. “Well, that hasn’t aged very well,” Luk responded.
