The Grim Beeper: Hezbollah’s Exploding Tech
How Mossad and the IDF managed to turn Hezbollah’s technology against them and what happens next in the ongoing conflict.
On 5 January 1996, the Israeli security service, the Shin Bet, assassinated Hamas’s chief bomb-maker: Yahya Ayyash, codenamed “the Engineer.” The 29-year-old electrical engineer is believed to have been responsible for constructing sophisticated bombs and recruiting the suicide bombers who had killed some 90 Jews in buses and squares around Israel over the previous months.
His assassination was a clever piece of tradecraft. The Shin Bet delivered a telephone, with a hidden 15g explosive and triggering mechanism, to a nephew of a friend of Ayyash’s, who was known to supply the “Engineer” with disposable mobile phones. The phone eventually reached Ayyash, and when Shin Bet called him, he responded, “Yes, this is Ayyash.” The appropriate signal was then sent, and the phone exploded, shattering Ayyash’s skull and brain. (An unintended political side-effect of the operation, incidentally, was Benjamin Netanyahu’s emergence as Israel’s most prominent politician. Following the assassination, after the required 40-day mourning period, Ayyash’s disciples dispatched a series of suicide bombers into Israel, killing dozens in a wave of terror that undermined acting Prime Minister Shimon Peres’s election campaign (“he can’t deliver on security,” critics claimed), and Netanyahu was elected Israel’s prime minister, by a slim margin, for his first term in office. But that is another story.)
Last week, on 17–18 September, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, Mossad, together with the IDF, managed to take a leaf out of Shin Bet’s book and mount a devastating, industrial-grade targeted assassination campaign against Hezbollah, Hamas’s Lebanese sister organization, which has been rocketing northern Israel’s border-hugging settlements and IDF installations since 8 October 2023, in support of Hamas, which has been battling the IDF in and around the Gaza Strip since its 7 October invasion of southern Israel.
Some months ago, Mossad and the IDF produced or tampered with thousands of pagers that Hezbollah had ordered from a Taiwanese company. The Israelis planted a sleeping miniature bomb and triggering mechanism inside each pager. Hezbollah had switched to pagers following a series of assassinations of individual Hezbollah commanders carried out by Israeli jets and drones in pinpoint strikes around southern Lebanon. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, blamed the fighters’ mobile phones. He ordered his men to stop using them, arguing that Israel was able to exploit the phones to identify, track, and kill his fighters. So Hezbollah switched to more primitive pagers and walkie-talkies since these could not be tracked or used to identify their users’ locations.
The 5,000 imported pagers (and hundreds of similarly “treated” walkie-talkies) reached Lebanon and were dispersed among Hezbollah commanders and fighters. On 17 September, Mossad signalled the pagers that a message from Hezbollah high command was about to be delivered. The operatives duly lifted their devices to look at the screens and a second signal detonated the explosives. A dozen or so fighters were killed outright and some 2,800 were injured, many of them severely. Hundreds of them lost eyes, hands, and fingers. Among the seriously injured was reportedly Iran’s ambassador in Lebanon, who lost an eye—providing further evidence of the close connection between Tehran and the Lebanese terrorist organisation. Given the size of the devices, there were almost no collateral casualties—though the Western press chose to highlight the small handful of civilian casualties that did occur, rather than the thousands of terrorists killed and maimed. (Hezbollah has officially been designated a “terrorist organisation” by the US, the EU, the Arab League, and the Gulf Cooperation Council.)
It was a brilliant, targeted mass assassination: the Ayyash operation multiplied by three thousand. A few days later, Nasrallah admitted that Hezbollah had suffered the most devastating blow in its history. The following day, Israel triggered a similar second mass explosion, this time involving walkie-talkies, and some two dozen Hezbollah operatives were killed and hundreds wounded. As with the pagers, Israel had either manufactured the walkie-talkies or tampered with them while they were in transit to Lebanon.
But Hezbollah’s humiliation did not end there. Nasrallah apparently ordered an immediate counterstrike and told the organisation’s acting commander-in-chief, Ibrahim Aqil, who had replaced Fuad Shukr—assassinated in an Israeli air strike in Beirut in July—to get to it. Aqil summoned the commanders of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force for a meeting in a basement beneath a residential block of flats in Beirut’s Dahiya quarter, Hezbollah’s main stronghold. The Radwan Force had trained for years in the hope of mounting a cross-border invasion of the Galilee similar to the 7 October invasion of the Gaza Strip, which was carried out by Hamas’s elite Nuhba Force. But Israeli intelligence tracked Aqil, who had apparently been wounded in the pager attack and had just been released from hospital. On 20 September, F-15 fighter jets rocketed the building just after the meeting between Aqil and Radwan had got underway. Fifteen of Radwan’s senior officers died along with Aqil himself (as well as some 30 civilians).
Thus, Hezbollah’s nightmare week came to an end. Why the Israelis activated the pagers and walkie-talkies on 17–18 September is unclear. Most Israeli analysts believe that Israel had intended to unleash the operation at some future date as the first, disruptive step in a massive air and ground assault on Hezbollah. But the government ordered the plan to be activated prematurely after learning that Hezbollah officers had grown suspicious of their pagers (some pagers may even have been flown to Iran for inspection over the previous few days). So Israel acted quickly, before the operation could unravel.
Whatever the reasons for the timing, the operation was followed by a planned conventional air offensive by the IDF. Over the following days, the Israel Air Force (IAF) blanketed southern Lebanon with raids, hitting suspected Hezbollah concentrations, rocket launchers, and weapons storage facilities—many of them in civilian homes. On 21 September, Hezbollah responded by launching 150 rockets, drones, and missiles against targets in northern Israel, extending its reach well beyond the border area, as far south as the Sea of Galilee in the east and Haifa’s northern suburbs in the west. Israel closed all schools and forbade public assembly in the north. Over the preceding eleven months, Hezbollah had limited its strikes to targets adjoining the Lebanon border and to Israeli outposts in the northern Golan Heights. Now, although it acknowledged that it had widened its geographical target area, Hezbollah claimed that it aimed only at Israeli military and strategic installations, including the Ramat David IAF base in the Jezreel Valley and defence plants in the Zebulun Valley just north of Haifa.
Brian Stewart
But the Hezbollah strikes were ineffectual; no one was killed and only a handful of civilians and soldiers were injured. Most of Hezbollah’s missiles were downed by anti-rocket Iron Dome missiles or destroyed by the pre-emptive IAF strikes.
Nonetheless, the extension of the war deep into each side’s territory—with Israel striking at Hezbollah “generals” in the heart of Beirut and Hezbollah hitting targets 30–40 km south of the border—has pushed their mini-war of attrition to a new level, auguring an escalation to a full-scale, no-holds-barred conflict, in which Israel would probably flatten Dahiya (as it did in 2006), as well as destroying Beirut’s airport and harbour, and electricity and water plants (sending Lebanon “back to the Stone Age,” as one Israeli general once put it); while Hezbollah would rocket Haifa and its harbour, downtown Tel Aviv and its satellite cities, IAF bases, and Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport in Lydda.
Should such an all-out war break out, massive civilian casualties could be expected on both sides and how such a war would end is anybody’s guess. The war might include a massive ground invasion by IDF armoured columns and a protracted occupation of southern Lebanon. But the IDF general staff and Netanyahu seem to be holding back. They are understandably wary of a ground invasion, given Israel’s experience in 1982–2000, when they occupied much of southern Lebanon, when the IDF and Shin Bet proved unable to defeat the Hezbollah-led guerrillas; and given the embarrassing failure of Israel’s invasion of the area in 2006, when Hezbollah tank-hunters, wielding Russian-made Kornet anti-tank missiles, halted the Israeli columns in their tracks. Over the past two decades, Hezbollah has booby-trapped and mined southern Lebanon’s buildings and access roads and has riddled the area with tunnels—much as Hamas did in Gaza—rendering south Lebanon even less welcoming than it was in 2006.
The Israel–Hezbollah mini-war of 2006 was ended by UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which called on Hezbollah to disarm and withdraw its personnel from close to the Israeli border to north of the Litani River. Hezbollah abided by neither of these stipulations and Israel is worried that a similar internationally imposed resolution of the current conflict could end in a similarly ineffective agreement, leaving Hezbollah with its armaments once again poised along Lebanon’s border with Israel. In such an event, the 60,000 or so Israeli inhabitants of the border-hugging settlements would be unlikely to return to their homes, many of which have been devastated by Hezbollah rockets and anti-tank missiles over the past 11 months, while the settlers have been living with relatives or in hotels in central Israel, ever since they evacuated the area on government orders back in October 2023. Depopulation of the Israeli border zone has been Hezbollah’s main strategic achievement over the past eleven months of cross-border warfare—and the extension of Hezbollah’s rocketry further south over these past few days threatens to massively depopulate the rest of the Galilee, which is something that no Israeli government can countenance.
On Monday 16 September, the Israeli cabinet formally added the safe return home of these 60,000 people to its war aims—in addition to destroying Hamas and obtaining the release of the hostages taken by Hamas on 7 October—and published its decision. For months, these refugees, backed by the IDF General Staff, have been demanding that the IDF go on the offensive and push back Hezbollah to enable their return home. But the government countered that the IDF was incapable of mounting simultaneous offensives against Hamas in the south and Hezbollah in the north. So the IDF has spent the past months hunting Hamas amid the ruins of Gaza and in the organisation’s vast underground tunnel network.
But since the start of September, a crucial strategic change has been in the air. The IDF seems to be unable to make serious headway in rescuing the hostages in Gaza or in locating and killing Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in Gaza, and over the past weeks, the IDF has gradually shifted units—especially the crack 198th Division—from Gaza to the Lebanese border. (Meanwhile, it is rumoured that Hamas’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, may already be dead or severely injured; he has apparently been out of contact with Hamas’s political leaders in Qatar for weeks.)
It appears that on 16 September, alongside the publicised aim of “repatriating” the 60,000 refugees, and in the absence of decisive action in the south, the Israeli Cabinet secretly resolved to change the strategic situation in the north. That change began with the pager operation the following day. The ministers in effect decided to put an end to the low-level tit-for-tat holding pattern, a de facto open-ended war of attrition, that had characterised the fighting along the northern border, and to go on the offensive to break the deadlock. The government seems to have decided, at least for the moment, to gradually upgrade hostilities to a level just below all-out war and to play the denouement out by ear.
Israel’s leaders may have hoped that the massive Hezbollah casualties caused by the pager and walkie-talkie attacks would persuade Nasrallah to abandon his stated position that links the battle in the north with Israel’s war against Hamas. Nasrallah has repeatedly said that he will not cease rocketing Israel until Israel halts its offensive against Hamas and agrees to withdraw from the Gaza Strip. Israel has refused to do so, arguing that this would spell a Hamas victory and augur an eventual Hamas resurgence.
Benny Morris
Meanwhile, the IDF has followed up on last week’s operations with a massive air campaign against Hezbollah positions, weapons storage facilities, communications centres, and personnel in southern Lebanon and in the Beqaa Valley in eastern Lebanon, along the Syrian border. The immediate aim of the aerial onslaught, which involved more than 1,000 air strikes on 23 September and a similar number on 24 September, was to degrade Hezbollah’s ability to rocket Israel. Just before the air assault, Israel issued public warnings, including telephone and SMS messages telling Lebanese townspeople and villagers in both areas, which are largely Shi’ite-populated, to evacuate their homes. Massive convoys of Lebanese vehicles immediately clogged the roads heading north, especially the coastal highway, as people attempted to escape the ongoing and expected Israeli bombardments (and possible ground assault). In addition, the Lebanese government ordered the closure of all schools and universities, thus providing immediate shelter for the hundreds of thousands uprooted from the south and the Beqaa.
In southern Lebanon, Israel mainly targeted short-range rockets and rocket-launchers and their Hezbollah handlers; in the Beqaa, it was Hezbollah’s “strategic” medium- and long-range rockets, which both Hezbollah and its supplier, Iran, had intended for eventual use against IAF bases, Haifa, the Tel Aviv area, Beersheba, and Dimona.
Still, neither Israel nor Hezbollah appear to want an all-out war, and both have so far successfully avoided causing the other side large-scale civilian casualties (though the Lebanese authorities claim that by day’s end on 23 September, some 500 Lebanese had died and some 1500 been wounded, an unknown proportion of whom were civilians). Hezbollah is wary of all-out war for two reasons: Most of Lebanon’s Christians and non-Shi’ite Muslims are blaming—or are likely to eventually blame—Hezbollah for initiating the war against Israel and for doing so on behalf of the non-Lebanese and non-Shi’ite, i.e. Sunni Muslim, Hamas; and the Iranians, Hezbollah’s arms suppliers and financiers, are unwilling to be sucked into the fray and don’t want to “waste” Hezbollah’s 150,000 rockets and 50–100,000 fighters on a sideshow linked to Gaza when their primary intention for the organisation is that it should deter an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear weapons installations. No Hezbollah, no deterrence. But on 25 September, two hours ago as I write, Hezbollah launched a single, large, long-range rocket at Tel Aviv, which Hezbollah announced was directed at Mossad’s headquarters on the northern edge of the city, and which was intercepted by an Israeli “David’s sling” anti-rocket missile. This represents a small expansion of the war’s geographical parameters by Hezbollah, and is likely to push Israel to respond, probably much more forcefully, in Beirut’s Dahiya. We shall see.
If Israel continues to maul Hezbollah, the organisation may feel compelled to rocket Israel’s population centres, unleashing a massive Israeli counter-offensive against Beirut and other Shi’ite population centres. To date, both Israel and Hezbollah have desisted from more than symbolically hitting the other’s population centres—each perhaps hoping that the other will do so first, thus legitimising its own expansion of the conflict into all-out war.
Washington is pressuring Israel not to expand the war and to desist from a ground invasion of southern Lebanon and to desist from hitting Lebanon’s infrastructure and major utilities. President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris are worried that such an expansion, which would likely involve large-scale Arab civilian casualties caused by US-supplied bombs and missiles and might involve a direct confrontation between Israel and Iran, might hurt Harris’s chances of beating Donald Trump in November’s presidential election—especially given the large Muslim population in some crucial swing states, such as Michigan. Washington fears that a direct Iranian–Israeli clash could suck America itself into the war—and since the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, engaging in another war in the Middle East is a no-no for most Americans. That’s how one loses elections.
Israel, virtually isolated on the world stage and with Britain already declaring an arms embargo, needs to take American sensibilities into very serious consideration. There are already strong voices in the Democratic Party calling for an American arms embargo on Israel.
Over the past months, Israel has expended large amounts of ammunition—especially 155 mm artillery rounds, bombs, and Iron Dome Tamir missiles—in the battle with Hamas (and to a lesser extent, against Hezbollah), and must look to its ammunition stocks before contemplating any future operation in Lebanon. So far, the Biden Administration has supplied most of Israel’s military needs, though one large shipment of one-tonne and quarter-tonne bombs is still “suspended” on the grounds that their use in Gaza might result in the death of “innocent” Palestinians. So Israel must tread very carefully vis-à-vis Hezbollah in the coming weeks and not appear to be deliberately provoking a war with Iran.
But here Israeli and American interests collide. Given that Iran has done all it can to orchestrate a long, debilitating, multi-front war against Israel, and given that Israel currently has a marked superiority over Iran in attack aircraft and anti-aircraft and anti-missile defences, while Iran is still a year or two behind Israel in nuclear prowess, this is the moment to assail Iran’s nuclear installations and economic infrastructure (oil fields, refineries, power plants)—and if America is sucked in, so much the better. Now is the time to destroy the ayatollahs’ fanatical regime and subvert its anti-Western, anti-Zionist ambitions.
But before Israel can attack Iran, there is the problem of Hezbollah. At the moment, it appears that there will be no avoiding an all-out war against Hezbollah, although Israel will probably be reluctant to include a ground invasion in that scenario. And if there is an action involving ground forces, it is unlikely to resemble the 1982 IDF invasion, which reached as far as West Beirut—and ended in an unpopular over-extension and an embarrassing and tragic massacre in the city’s Palestinian refugee camps carried out by Christian militias allied with Israel.
With thanks to Twitter user Mike Linley for the title suggestion.
