“Israel has been trying to persuade them by using force, or diplomacy with Amos Hochstein, to just stop shooting and they won’t.
“This pager attack is just another page, as far as the Israelis are concerned, a glorious page, in their attempt to convince Nasrallah that it isn’t worth, and now Nasrallah needs to make a decision.”
A Lebanese army soldier uses razor wire to block an entrance of a Beirut southern suburb after explosions hit locations in hundreds of Hezbollah fighters were wounded paging devices exploded simultaneously across Lebanon (Photo by IBRAHIM AMRO/AFP via Getty Images)AFP via Getty Images
After the extraordinary tactical triumph of yesterday and today, it is likely that Hassan Nasrallah, General Secretary of Hezbollah, might think twice before escalating the conflict further.
“Let’s say he says it is worth it, and I’m going to launch these missiles against Tel Aviv. He should think to himself: ‘What’s Israel’s next surprise? If they can booby trap 3,000 pagers used by my operatives, to the extent of the Iranian ambassador in Beirut, what else did they booby trap?’”
Twelve people were killed and 3,000 others were wounded during yesterday's sophisticated remote attack, which involved the simultaneous detonation of thousands of handheld devices used by militants at around 15:30 local time.
Israel hasn’t claimed responsibility, but Lebanon has accused Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, of being behind the coordinated attack, which injured the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, causing him to lose an eye and incur serious damage to the other.
Hezbollah has vowed revenge but Jerusalem is yet to comment.
Israel took advantage of this decision with the latest remote attacks, thereby humiliating Hezbollah, according to retired British Army officer Colonel Richard Kemp.
“They have proven unable to have a sufficient security system to prevent this happening and that will be a humiliation for them,” he said.
Mourners at a Beirut funeral (Getty Images)AFP via Getty Images
“And not only that, but in using a system — pagers — that were designed to stop the Israelis from monitoring their communications, they’ve made themselves even more vulnerable to Israeli aggression or Israeli attack. That is grave humiliation for them.”
While early rumours speculated that a hack may have caused the pager batteries to overheat, causing their detonation, experts have claimed that this is unlikely.
“Let’s get this off the table,” said Eyal. “In order to have these kinds of detonations that we saw in Lebanon […] you need to put in place actual detonation material inside these pagers, so you need explosives.”
“It’s not about the battery heating up,” he said, explaining that this wouldn’t be powerful enough to cause the serious harm seen yesterday. “There is no cyber attack that can cause that if you don’t have the hardware, and the hardware is putting explosives in.”
As well as installing hardware in the pagers, the intelligence service responsible for the attack will have also triggered a software change in the devices to trigger the explosions remotely.
“You need first of all to put the explosives inside the pagers,” said Eyal, “And the second thing you need to do is destabilise those explosives to the extent that they will detonate, and you need to do this in a synchronised manner, and for that you would need a software change to the pager.”
Taiwanese firm Gold Apollo, who manufacturers the Rugged Pager AR-924 model which exploded, has denied any connection with producing the devices. The firm said the pagers were made by a Hungarian-based company — BAC — who had licensed Gold Apollo’s brand.
.jpg?w=400&q=0.3)
A woman carries a Hezbollah flag (Getty Images)AFP via Getty Images
“At some point along the supply chain, Israelis must have gotten a hold of them because they couldn’t have done it once they were distributed,” said Andrew Fox, a former British special forces officer and research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society.
“They've either manufactured a battery that will go bang, or they've injected something into the batteries that were in there. It’s impossible to say, but it'll be one of those two things.”
The coordinated attack represents a “remarkable” triumph for Israeli intelligence, according to Fox. “If you look at the intelligence infiltration of Hezbollah and Iran, it’s remarkable that they've found out where Hezbollah was sourcing their pages from, and then they've been able to infiltrate that supply chain to the extent where they can sabotage it.”
The feat reveals that Iran is heavily penetrated by Israel. “Now, we knew that from the Haniyeh bombing anyway, that had some insider involvement, I think the knock on effect of this is that it will create a huge amount of paranoia and worry amongst Hezbollah.”
He added: “That’s a huge blow to morale, that Israel can take out 3,000 of their operatives in one fell swoop by penetrating their network. That's what a terrorist organisation lives in fear of, having the network penetrated.
“It's what defeated the IRA in Northern Ireland. It's the gold standard of taking down a terror network — to penetrate it from the inside.”
Six months ago, Nasrallah made the decision to abandon the use of mobile phones among Hezbollah in favour of using pagers, which he assumed to be less vulnerable to Israeli hacks and more difficult to track.
An exploded phone in Lebanon (Getty Images)AFP via Getty Images
