Despite much saber-rattling, Iran has not yet retaliated (as it has promised) for the breathtaking operation that neutralized Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh with a bomb planted in a diplomatic safe house in Tehran. Iran’s reluctance may be at least partly inspired by the regime’s well-founded belief that acting in haste might lead to an explosive device going off uncomfortably close to one’s nether regions.
That is what happened this morning to over 1,000 Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon and Syria. “Pagers carried by hundreds of Hezbollah operatives unexpectedly exploded at about the same time Tuesday afternoon,” the Wall Street Journal reported. “The affected pagers were from a new shipment that the group received in recent days,” the dispatch continued. “A Hezbollah official said hundreds of fighters had such devices, speculating that malware may have caused the devices to explode.”
Ironically enough, Hezbollah reportedly came to rely on pagers rather than more modern communications technologies because they were thought to be safe from “Israel’s electronic eavesdropping,” which is “regarded as among the world’s most sophisticated.” Hezbollah adapted, but so, too, did the Israelis.
There is, as yet, zero confirmation of Israeli involvement in what one Hezbollah official deemed the “biggest security breach” the terror group has experienced since the October 7 massacre. But there have been a lot of security breaches of late.
In July, Israel claimed credit for the successful targeting of one top Hezbollah operative, Fuad Shukr, in a Beirut suburb. Deemed the “right-hand man” to the terror group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, Shukr was also one of the primary perpetrators of the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in which 241 U.S. service personnel were killed. According to the Journal’s reporting, Shukr received a phone call, likely from a figure in Hezbollah’s orbit turned by Israeli intelligence or directly tied to Israeli security services, instructing him to head to the seventh floor of the building he occupied, where he was taken out in a pinprick strike.
Shukr and Haniyeh are hardly the only Iran-backed operatives who find themselves in Israel’s crosshairs. In 2020, Iran’s most prominent nuclear scientist and a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was killed by an “artificial intelligence-assisted remote control machine gun.” As the BBC noted, “Carrying out an assassination in such a surgical fashion against a moving target without any civilian casualties requires real-time intelligence on the ground.” Fakhrizadeh was one of five Iranian nuclear researchers who were killed in the last decade in sophisticated covert operations with links to “foreign actors.”
When Israel isn’t degrading Iran’s nuclear capabilities by taking out its personnel, it’s humiliating the Islamic Republic by executing daring raids inside Iran. The 2018 operation in which Israeli agents descended on a nondescript warehouse in Tehran, disabled the alarms, broke down doors, cut through safes, procured 1,000 pounds’ worth of Iranian nuclear documents, and exfiltrated those secret materials out of the country is just one of those spectacular feats.
The pager-bombing campaign may be another. But while the disabling of an untold number of Hezbollah operatives is remarkable, it’s also ominous. This week, Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant told reporters that the hour is nearing when Israeli forces will have to confront Iran’s cat’s-paw in southern Lebanon directly, in order to return the tens of thousands of Israelis who fled their homes along Lebanon’s border under fire and have not yet been able to return. Today’s operation may be a prelude to the next phase of Israel’s defensive war, a dangerous one in which the IDF will face off against an enemy with tens of thousands of fighters and over 150,000 rockets and missiles trained on Israeli cities.
No doubt, the simultaneous, coordinated detonation of the unsuspecting bombs in Hezbollah fighters’ pockets is a coup. The degree to which Israeli intelligence has penetrated Iran’s security services and those of its terrorist proxies is astounding, and it may have a deterrent effect on the Iranian regime. But Hezbollah will not be deterred into voluntary submission. The pager strikes are only the opening salvos of a more dangerous conflict, which now seems all but inevitable.
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