Thousands of radios and pagers were turned into bombs. What does that mean for the future of war?
Over the past two days, the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah has been targeted with an attack as sophisticated and audacious as it is brutal, with the devices in their own pockets turned into deadly weapons.
On Tuesday, hundreds of pagers distributed by Hezbollah to its members and associates in Lebanon and Syria exploded, killing at least 12 people, including two children, and injuring nearly 3,000. Then, in a follow-up attack on Wednesday, thousands of two-way radios used by the group exploded, killing nine people and wounding some 300, some of whom had been attending the funerals of those killed in the earlier attack. There have also been reports of solar energy systems exploding in several areas of Lebanon, but few details have been reported about these incidents.
Hezbollah quickly blamed Israel for the attack. While the Israeli government has not yet commented — it rarely comments on covert actions abroad — experts and media reports are generally assuming it was responsible. It’s hard to think of another regional actor with the ability and motivation to carry out such an unprecedented operation.
The attack has stunned former intelligence operatives with both its scale and sophistication. “This is a hell of an opp,” Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA counterterrorism specialist now with the Atlantic Council, told Vox. “It’s probably the most impressive kinetic intelligence operation I’ve ever seen.”
Beyond demonstrating the prowess of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, what’s less clear is what this tells us about Israel’s overall strategic goals, not to mention how Hezbollah will respond or how this will impact the outcome of this conflict or conflicts in the future. Here are a few of the biggest outstanding questions and what we know about the answers.How did they do it?
The emerging consensus from experts and media reports is that small amounts of explosive material were placed inside the pagers. Some reports have suggested the explosive was detonated by malware that raised the temperature of the batteries in the pagers, but US officials told the New York Times that the devices were also implanted with switches that detonated the explosive remotely. According to the Times, the pagers received simultaneous messages on Tuesday that appeared to be from Hezbollah’s senior leadership, but instead caused the devices to beep for several seconds and then explode.
The pagers were from a shipment of 3,000 that Hezbollah says they ordered from Gold Apollo, a Taiwanese company. But Gold Apollo says they were actually made by BAC Consulting, a company based in Hungary, and that the Taiwanese firm merely licensed its design and trademark. Reporters have so far been unable to contact BAC, and former intelligence officials who spoke with Vox said it’s questionable whether the company even makes pagers.
Hezbollah had reportedly switched from using cellphones to old-fashioned pagers several months ago to avoid Israeli surveillance. Communications are generally a point of vulnerability for militant groups. Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Hamas’s top leader, Yahya Sinwar, has abandoned electronics entirely and now relies on a system of human couriers and coded handwritten messages for communication.
The attack comes several weeks after the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, reportedly by a bomb that had been planted by Israeli agents in a guesthouse in the Iranian capital months earlier. It also comes several days after a rare raid by Israeli ground forces in Syria that destroyed an alleged underground Iranian missile factory.
