 "Why pager explosions in Lebanon have dealt a big blow to Hezbollah")
Hezbollah has been left shocked and embarrassed.
Hundreds of pagers used by its members exploded in Syria and Lebanon – leaving nine people dead and thousands injured.
The governments of Syria and Lebanon have pointed the finger at Israel for the attack.
Hezbollah, which is based in Lebanon, is an ally of Iran.
Israel and Hezbollah have frequently exchanged fire across the Lebanon border since the October 7 attack by Hamas that sparked the war in Gaza.
But what happened? And how is the attack a huge blow to Hezbollah?
Let’s take a closer look:
What happened?
Around 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.
Taiwanese company Gold Apollo said Wednesday that it authorised 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.
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 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.
Abiad told the BBC most injuries “appear to be to the face and especially to the eyes, and also the hand with some amputations, whether it’s in the hands or the fingers.”
Abiad added that since the “vast majority” were wearing civilian clothes, Abiad told the broadcaster, this makes it “very difficult to discern whether they belong to a certain entity like Hezbollah or others”.
“But we are seeing among them people who are old or people who are very young, like the child who unfortunately died, and there are some of them who are health care workers,” Abiad said.
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 authorised to talk to the press.
The explosions came hours after Israel’s internal security agency said it had foiled an attempt by Hezbollah to kill a former senior Israeli security official using a planted explosive device that could be remotely detonated.
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 authorised to discuss the information publicly.
The United States “was not aware of this incident in advance” and was not involved, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said. “At this point, we’re gathering information.”
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.
The Israeli military declined to comment.
Among those wounded was Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon.
Elijah J Magnier, a Brussels-based senior political risk analyst, said he spoke with Hezbollah members who had examined pagers that failed to explode.
What triggered the blasts, he said, appeared to be an error message sent to all the devices that caused them to vibrate, forcing the user to click on the buttons to stop the vibration.
The combination detonated a small amount of explosives hidden inside and ensured that the user was present when the blast went off, he said.
“We hold the Israeli enemy fully responsible for this criminal aggression that also targeted civilians,” Hezbollah said, adding that Israel will “for sure get its just punishment.”
Iranian state-run IRNA news agency said that the country’s ambassador, Mojtaba Amani, was superficially wounded by an exploding pager and was being treated at a hospital.
Sean Moorhouse, a former British Army officer and explosive ordnance disposal expert, said videos of the blasts suggested a small explosive charge — as small as a pencil eraser — had been placed into the devices. They would have had to have been rigged prior to delivery, very likely by Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, he said.
How is this a huge blow to Hezbollah?
First, Hezbollah actually lost some of its members in the operation.
At least eight Hezbollah members were killed including the son of a Member of Parliament.
This is also a blow to their strategy.
According to CNN, Hezbollah has stayed away from hi-tech devices.
This, out of fears that the technology would be vulnerable to spyware from Israel and the United States.
Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah earlier this warned his followers to get rid of their cellphones.
“Shut it off, bury it, put it in an iron chest and lock it up,” CNN quoted him as saying. “The collaborator (with the Israelis) is the cell phone in your hands, and those of your wife and your children. This cell phone is the collaborator and the killer.”
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 said pagers were a new brand, but declined to say how long they had been in use.
A piece in Al Jazeera noted that Hezbollah would have thought pagers were a low-tech substitute for cellphones – thus making it much harder to hack.
Ex-Israeli official Avi Melamed told CNN, “Hezbollah regressed back to these devices thinking [they] would be safer for its combatants to use instead of phones which could be GPS targeted.”
“These very low-tech devices were used against them and very possibly deepening the stress and embarrassment on its leaders.”
Elijah Magnier, an independent military and political analyst, told Al Jazeera, “This is not a new system. It has been used in the past … so in this case, there has been involvement of a third party … to allow access …to remotely activate the explosions.”
Perhaps, as importantly, this is a blow to Hezbollah’s psyche and its the ground operational capabilities.
“These explosions … are powerful enough to [severely] hit the psychology of Hezbollah,” Magnier said.
Anadolu Agency quoted a former Israeli military commander as saying the terror group’s operational capabilities have been severely degraded.
“This is an opportunity to alter the current dynamics of the conflict with Hezbollah,” Yiftah Ron-Tal, a Major-General reserve in the Israeli army, said.
David Des Roches, a professor with the National Defense University, told Al Jazeera the operation was “a significant coup.”
“What it shows is that Hezbollah is thoroughly riddled with Israeli sources. The main thing here is [that] individual Hezbollah fighters will no longer trust Hezbollah equipment, so what you’ve got is a step back in communications. Hezbollah fights as a networked organisation and that requires pretty good real-time communications. They’re not going to have that any more,” Des Roches told Al Jazeera.
The attack also sends a message to Nasrallah.
“Repeatedly Israeli intelligence has shown its reach into Hezbollah, most notably the assassination of the senior commander Fuad Shukr in late July. This latest attack will cause deep internal concern within Hezbollah, possibly even some chaos among its ranks, their safety now compromised in such a dramatic way,” the Al Jazeera piece noted.
“We can reach you anywhere, anytime, at the day and moment of our choosing and we can do it at the press of a button,” CNN’s Chief Law Enforcement and Intelligence Analyst, John Miller said.
Ex-Israeli military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin agreed.
“It seems the goal was to pass a message that sharpens the dilemma of Nasrallah: how much is he willing to pay for continuing to attack Israel and backing [Hamas leader Yahya] Sinwar?” Yadlin wrote on X. “The organisation, which prides itself on secrecy and a high level of security, found itself penetrated and exposed.”
Israel has a long history of carrying out deadly operations well beyond its borders. This year, separate Israeli airstrikes in Beirut killed senior Hamas official Saleh Arouri and a top Hezbollah commander. A mysterious explosion in Iran, also blamed on Israel, killed Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ supreme leader.
Israel has killed Hamas militants in the past with booby-trapped cellphones and it’s widely believed to have been behind the Stuxnet computer virus attack on Iran’s nuclear program in 2010.
The pager bombings are likely to stoke Hezbollah’s worries about vulnerabilities in security and communications as Israeli officials are threaten to escalate their monthslong conflict. The near-daily exchanges of fire between Israel and Hezbollah have killed hundreds in Lebanon and several dozen in Israel, and have displaced tens of thousands on both sides of the border.
Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, the UN special coordinator for Lebanon, deplored the attack and warned that it marks “an extremely concerning escalation in what is an already unacceptably volatile context.”
On Tuesday, Israel said that halting Hezbollah’s attacks in the north to allow residents to return to their homes is now an official war goal. Israeli Defense Minister Gallant said the focus of the conflict is shifting from Gaza to Israel’s north and that time is running out for a diplomatic solution with Hezbollah.
With inputs from agencies
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