By Ron Unz
September 24, 2024
For the last half-dozen years, Israeli-born Ronan Bergman has served as a reporter with the New York Times, and I've regularly heard him described as the best-connected American journalist in Israel, with especially close ties to that country's powerful security services such as the Mossad, Shin Bet, and Unit 8200.
Much of that reputation goes back to the 2018 publication of his book Rise and Kill First, a widely praised and highly authoritative history of the Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence service, as well as its sister agencies. As I wrote in early 2020:
The author devoted six years of research to the project, which was based upon a thousand personal interviews and access to an enormous number of official documents previously unavailable. As suggested by the title, his primary focus was Israel's long history of assassinations, and across his 750 pages and thousand-odd source references he recounts the details of an enormous number of such incidents.
That sort of topic is obviously fraught with controversy, but Bergman's volume carried glowing cover-blurbs from Pulitzer Prize-winning authors on espionage matters, and the official cooperation he received is indicated by similar endorsements from both a former Mossad chief and Ehud Barak, a past Prime Minister of Israel who himself had once led assassination squads. Over the last couple of decades, former CIA officer Robert Baer has become one of our most prominent authors in this same field, and he praised the book as "hands down" the best he had ever read on intelligence, Israel, or the Middle East. The reviews across our elite media were equally laudatory.
If Bergman ever considers bringing out an updated, revised edition of that volume, I think that this newer text might devote an entire chapter to the very serious blow that Mossad recently struck against Lebanon's Hezbollah organization though the use of booby-trapped exploding pagers, an operation at least as daring and successful as anything covered in his very thick 2018 volume.
Although the Israeli government has not officially claimed credit for the attacks, no one doubts that Mossad was responsible and a dozen of their current and former defense and intelligence officials provided all the details to the New York Times.
Over the last year or two, Hezbollah had become increasingly concerned that the cell phones used by its members were giving away their locations and allowing the Israelis to target them with airstrikes or missiles, so its leadership finally decided to shift most of its communications network to the use of old-fashioned pagers, which only receive signals rather than also emitting them.
However, according to news reports by Bergman and others, the Israelis had cleverly anticipated that possibility, and several years ago they had established a front-company based in Hungary that produced pagers and other electronic devices under license from a Taiwanese manufacturer. Its initial products were entirely legitimate but Mossad was prepared for any sabotage opportunities that might eventually come along. So when Hezbollah placed its order for some 5,000 such pagers, the company provided them, but each device also contained a deadly load of high explosives and ball-bearing shrapnel. Then, at 3:30pm on Tuesday, September 17th all the pagers beeped for an incoming message, prompting their owners to pick them up and exploding a few seconds later.
The result was thousands of such simultaneous pager explosions across Lebanon and elsewhere, with reports of some 2,700 casualties, hundreds of whom were maimed or severely injured, together with about a dozen deaths. The following day, walkie-talkies that had been similarly booby-trapped also detonated as did as some solar panels, and although those numbers were much lower, another couple of dozen deaths were reported, probably because those larger devices concealed heavier explosive charges. All of this produced widespread terror across Lebanon, with everyone suddenly fearful of electronic devices, including reports that terrified mothers were unplugging baby-monitors from their cribs.
Over the years, Hezbollah had become quite proud of its security, and the leadership freely admitted that this was the worst breach they had ever suffered, resulting in very serious losses. I haven't seen reports that any of the organization's senior leaders had been killed or wounded in the blasts, but given the huge number of casualties, I'm sure that at least some had been caught in the attack. Then, just a couple of days later, an Israeli airstrike destroyed a Beirut building, killing a high-ranking Hezbollah military leader and a number of his colleagues as they were meeting together, perhaps to plan a retaliatory strike against Israel. It's obvious that Hezbollah has suffered a very bloody nose, and a major setback in its ongoing military conflict against Israel.
Mossad certainly achieved a brilliant tactical victory, one that its members and pro-Israel partisans surely intend to boast about for years. But many aspects of the attack seemed very puzzling to me, and experienced military analysts wondered whether any long-term gains had been achieved.
After Israel invaded Gaza in retaliation for the Hamas raid last October, Hezbollah and its Israeli enemies soon began trading cross-border fire, bombarding each other with missiles, rockets, drones, and artillery shells, and those exchanges have now continued for nearly a year. As a result, some 160,000 civilians on both sides of the border have fled their homes, with perhaps 60,000 of these being Israelis.
With so many tens of thousands of Israelis having become internal refugees, displaced from their communities in the north of the country and spending the last year living in temporary accommodations, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been under enormous political pressure to attack and invade Lebanon in order to drive the Hezbollah forces away from the border, thereby allowing those Israelis to return home. In addition, the most extreme religious elements among his supporters regard portions of southern Lebanon as part of Israel's God-given lands and wish to see them conquered and annexed, with their local Lebanese residents expelled and replaced by Jewish settlers.
However, the last time the Israelis launched a ground invasion of Lebanon in 2006, their forces suffered a severe defeat at Hezbollah's hands, and during the last eighteen years that organization has become far more powerful, with many of its troops having gained a great deal of military experience during their successful intervention in the Syrian civil war. Meanwhile, a year of fighting against Hamas in Gaza has left the IDF exhausted, so despite Israel's command of the air, it's not at all clear how well such a ground assault would go. Moreover, Hezbollah has reportedly amassed an enormous arsenal of some 150,000 rockets and missiles, and these could be used to inflict devastating damage upon most of Israel's cities and towns if it chose to do so.
The combination of these two conflicting factors has led to repeated indecision on Israel's part. For months, media leaks have reported that Israel had made the decision to invade Lebanon and that the attack was imminent. But nothing has ever happened, presumably because the military risks of such an operation were considered too great.
Those booby-trapped pagers and other devices might have played an absolutely crucial role in an Israeli ground invasion. If they had all been detonated at the beginning of such an attack, Hezbollah's forces would have been left dazed and confused, with their entire communications network knocked out, thereby preventing them from mounting an effective defense or retaliatory measures. This would probably have allowed the IDF to win a major initial victory on the ground.
But instead those explosions occurred alone, with no invasion taking place. So Hezbollah has merely licked its wounds and is surely now putting in place a replacement communications network, presumably based upon a large shipment of carefully vetted pagers received from Iran or China or Russia. Israel thus lost the element of surprise, with little to show for it except wounding a large number of Hezbollah members. Thus, the exploding pagers merely produced a tactical victory instead of a potentially strategic one.
This raises the obvious question of why the Israelis chose to shoot their bolt when they did instead of waiting until the pagers could be detonated in conjunction with a major invasion.
According to media reports, the Israelis may have suspected that some Hezbollah members had discovered that the pagers contained explosives, and were thus faced with a use-it-or-lose-it dilemma, choosing to immediately detonate all the devices before they were discarded and the entire long Mossad effort was totally wasted. This is certainly possible, but given the extreme difficulty the Israelis had previously had in penetrating Hezbollah's organization, I really wonder how they could have learned that a couple of Hezbollah operatives had discovered the explosives during the short time interval before the latter notified their top commanders and a quick order came down to junk all the pagers.
My own guess is quite different. I think that the explosions indicate that despite media leaks to the contrary, the Netanyahu government had taken a firm decision to abandon plans for any ground invasion of Lebanon in the foreseeable future as just too risky. If any such invasion were now off the table, the pagers had lost their strategic value, so they were instead detonated for essentially political reasons. Netanyahu hoped that the serious damage and humiliation the attacks inflicted upon Hezbollah would provide his government with an immediate boost in popularity, helping to deflect the continuing anger over its lack of success in returning its displaced civilians to their homes in the north. Thus, under this interpretation, the pager explosions suggest that no ground invasion of Lebanon will take place.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah's military effectiveness hardly seems to have been crippled. Early Sunday morning, its forces fired off some 150 rockets, cruise missiles, and drones into Israel, bombarding areas far south of those they had previously targeted. The very tight Israeli censorship makes it difficult to estimate damage, but it sounds like Israel's Iron Dome defenses failed to stop many of the projectiles, which inflicted numerous injuries and started large fires, while Hezbollah could probably keep these attacks at this level every day for the next several years, completely saturating and overwhelming Israel's defenses. Thus, pager explosions or not, Hezbollah's huge arsenal could easily level most of Israel's cities while the Israelis still seem reluctant to tangle with its very formidable ground forces. So perhaps just as observers had suggested, the Mossad operation was merely a tactical Israeli victory with great propaganda value but little if any strategic significance.