It was a news alert that you really wouldn’t expect to get in the year 2024: “Dozens killed, hundreds hurt in pager explosions across Lebanon”. My immediate reaction was “Who still uses pagers, and why are they all exploding at the same time?” But as soon as I clicked through to the story–and saw that the victims of the blasts were mainly members of Hezbollah–it made immediate sense.
For those not familiar, Hezbollah is a terrorist group that has effectively taken control of southern Lebanon and use the country as a launch pad for constant rocket attacks into Israel. They were formed in the early 1980’s, trained by Iranian military officials, and continue to receive financial support and weaponry from Iran. While this may sound quite a bit like Hamas–which is also backed by Iran, and uses Gaza as a launch pad for constant rocket attacks (and the October 7th, 2023 ground assault) on Israel–Hezbollah is not a Palestinian group. Instead, they are a conglomeration of Shia Lebanese Muslims and bad actors from throughout the region committed to the elimination of the Israeli state (which it put into writing in 1985 as its main objective). In the days after October 7th, the group increased the frequency of rocket launches into northern Israel.
Hezbollah’s use of pagers as a main form of communication may lead you to believe that they are some backward culture. But a bit of history will explain the low-tech approach. Until this summer, Hezbollah used cellphones to pass along information and orders between its commanders and foot soldiers. That’s when they came to realize that Israeli intelligence (Mossad) was using the GPS coordinate information provided by the use of the phones to track Hezbollah commanders’ movements and successfully target them for attack. After enough of those guys were killed or seriously injured, the command went out among the organization to stop using cellphones–and to instead get pagers.
But where do you find a couple thousand pagers in this day and age? Hezbollah would have to hit the open market and buy in bulk.
(Time for a bit of side bar. When I read about Hezbollah going out to buy thousands of pagers, my local reporter brain immediately went to the process–wondering if they put out a Request For Proposals (RFPs), opened bids on a specific date, took the lowest-qualified bid to the Hezbollah Finance Committee for a vote, and then approved the invoice by a majority vote–just like the city councils and county boards I cover every day.)
In what would be an amazing act of cunning and daring-do, Israeli intelligence is believed to have set up a fake company that offered to sell Hezbollah the pagers they wanted–implanted with explosives that could be detonated remotely at any time. (Israel has not confirmed this is what happened–but multiple outlets have cited sources inside the government that confirmed that was the plan.) The pagers bore the brand name of a Taiwanese company–but they claim a Hungarian company paid them to use the brand on pagers they would make in that country. Efforts by journalists to track down that firm have met with dead ends, leading some to speculate that is where Israel got into the supply chain. Wednesday was apparently the day that Israel decided to send the magic command to the pagers.
And this apparently is not the only electronic sabotage that Israel has undertaken. Yesterday, thousands of walkie-talkies detonated inside Lebanon, killing dozens more Hezbollah members and injuring scores of others. That means that Israel likely formed a fake walkie-talkie company to double-up on the number of devices getting into the hands of Hezbollah members. The terrorists have to wonder if anything–electronic or not–is safe to be around or carry. The command structure of the group is likely in complete disarray, as communications could literally be a matter of life and death. And in the past few hours, Israeli airstrikes have hit some of those senior leaders who are trying to shelter in place–unable to coordinated transportation between safe houses mixed in with the civilian population.
Not surprisingly, not everyone is posting the Robert Redford/Jeremiah Johnson slow head nod GIF under on-line stories of Israel’s shocking success. The usual suspects are accusing the country of “targeting civilians” with these attacks. They apparently missed the part in all of the stories where Hezbollah purchased the pagers for its members/terrorists. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was first to social media to spew that nonsense and demand an “investigation into what support the US provided to Israel” to pull that off. That now puts her firmly on the side of both Hamas and Hezbollah in the past year. If this war drags on much longer, she’s going to have to defend the actions of the mullahs running Iran and whatever is left of Al Qaida.
The United Nation Secretary General also decried the operation as a “violation of international law”–equating the death of terrorist militants with the “innocent civilians” Hezbollah killed in a rocket attack that struck a soccer field where kids were playing in the Golan Heights area a couple of weeks ago. To be fair, a couple of kids were killed in the pager detonations, as they picked up the units to hand to their Hezbollah-member fathers.
But should the non-Hezbollah residents of Lebanon really be “living in fear”? The pagers and walkie-talkies were not being sold in Lebanese stores for teenagers and old men to buy. There were specifically ordered by Hezbollah and delivered to the group to be used by its members for commission of terrorist acts against Israel. So unless you are in Hezbollah, you probably have little to worry about–except standing next to a member of Hezbollah. And to me, that sounds like a problem that can be solved by no longer having Hezbollah in your country–not by wiping Israel off the map.
