Through the lens of a security camera, the world watches as a man in a baseball hat picks fruit out of a basket at a Beirut market. Suddenly, he collapses to the ground, clutching his chest as bystanders scramble for safety. This same scene played out thousands of times across Lebanon on September 17, as pagers owned by the political and military group Hezbollah exploded, causing roughly 12 deaths and over 3,000 injuries. The next day, walkie-talkies followed suit.
Although no group has claimed responsibility, there is little doubt that Israel, specifically its spy agency Mossad, is to blame for the attack. The leading theory is that Israel accessed pagers intended for use by Hezbollah and fitted them with C4 explosive to remotely detonate on command. The pagers used in the attack were manufactured by a small firm in Budapest, which was formed in 2022 and may be a shell company set up by Mossad, indicating that the operation has been in the works for 3 years and potentially even longer.
The explosions, which seemed to come out of nowhere, are a type of covert operation known as a “Hand of God” attack because they seem to strike down victims from the heavens. Here are five takeaways from the immediate aftermath of the attack.
1. Nowhere is Safe for Israel’s Enemies
This is not the first indication that Israel has wide-ranging capabilities to strike targets across the Middle East. This year, Israel has assassinated Hamas agent Saleh al-Arouri and Hezbollah general Faud Shukr in Beirut and, most significantly, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran. These assassinations have pushed Hezbollah leadership underground, where it once operated largely in the open.
The psychological effects of this attack are much more significant than even Israel’s ventures into enemy territory to assassinate key targets. Israel has democratized fear in Lebanon. As Graeme Wood pointed out in his article on the subject, Israel’s pager operation is reminiscent of an American operation during the Vietnam war codenamed “Eldest Son.” American soldiers infiltrated the Laotian border and planted exploding bullets inside magazines used by the Viet Cong. When a Viet Cong soldier tried to fire his weapon, one of the exploding bullets would detonate, killing the user. Since the Americans only planted one bullet at a time, no investigation could uncover the source of the explosion. As a result, the Viet Cong began to distrust the weapons given to them by China, just how a Hezbollah operative might think twice before carrying their car keys.
Although the physical impacts of the attack are significant, with over 3,000 injuries – many of which are to Hezbollah generals and fighters – the psychological and political impacts have an even greater reach. An army cannot operate if it can’t trust basic technology, and there will be internal inquiries into how Israel was able to penetrate so far into Hezbollah’s supply chain. Right now, nerves in Lebanon are higher than they have been in a long time.
2. Israel has solidified “Beg for Forgiveness” Policy
It appears that many of Israel’s most recent operations, from the assassinations in Iran and Lebanon to the pager and walkie-talkie sabotages today, have been as much of a surprise to Washington as they have to Tehran. It seems Israel has slowly learned that they can exercise greater autonomy from the White House, so long as they don’t push the envelope far enough to provoke a reprisal. Apparently, something changed in Israel’s calculus this week to the point that they thought an extensive attack on Hezbollah would be forgiven by Israel’s foreign partners.
Israel has a long history of preemptive strikes, such as the grounding of Egyptian fighter jets that many argue led to Israeli victory in the 1967 war. However, preemptive strikes are controversial within western military doctrines, so Israel grew more restrained as they pulled into the U.S. orbit. However following the assassination of Fuad Shakr in August, Israel launched preemptive rocket strikes into Lebanon, demonstrating that they felt free to pursue their own military agenda even before the October 7 attacks.
3. Israel Understands Hezbollah’s Constraints
Along with pushing the limits of their relations with Washington, Israel has also pressed Iran and Hezbollah to determine where their red lines are to prompt a wider war. In recent months, Israel has concluded that Iran wants to avoid an open conflict. For Iran, Hezbollah is a crucial deterrent against Israel and the United States. It is also much more important to Iran than Hamas, so it does not want to risk its most valuable asset in a war over Gaza. In fact, the Hamas-Iran partnership is not particularly strong, as Hamas is an insignificant, junior partner that has stepped out of line in the past. For example, Hamas and Iran sparred with each other during the Syrian civil war in 2012. Hezbollah and Iran are trying to avoid a war that could undo the political and military gains they have achieved over the past few years.
However, Hezbollah cannot retreat. A constant point of tension with Israel is Hezbollah’s positioning along the Israeli border. Out of solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, Hezbollah has been launching low level missile attacks into Israel, which have displaced 80,000 Israelis from border villages. Israel wants Hezbollah to back up from the border to allow Israelis to return to their homes and has much to offer in return.
However, Hezbollah cannot accept what would otherwise be a reasonable settlement to move troops away from the border and establish a UN or joint military buffer. Following the end of the Lebanese Civil War in the early 1990s, the new Lebanese government allowed Hezbollah to keep their weapons while other militias were forced to disarm. The reasoning at the time was that Hezbollah needed to maintain arms to protect the border and oust Israel from two small border villages it still controlled. If Hezbollah pulls back now, domestic actors within Lebanon, such as disarmed militias or political adversaries, will begin calling to nationalize Hezbollah’s forces or disarm it like the rest of the historical militias. To hold onto their military power – which doubles as political power given their unique warmaking capabilities on the southern border – Hezbollah needs to maintain the current levels of conflict. Knowing this, Israel feels free to take aggressive actions such as the September attacks without fear of retaliation.
4. The Rot Runs Deep in the Israeli Military Complex
In the past decade, there have been numerous examples of Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers firing upon civilians and using unnecessary force. The killing of a Turkish-American activist in the West Bank drew international condemnation earlier this year, but no prosecutions emerged from an internal investigation by Israeli authorities. Unfortunately, this pattern has become increasingly common as of late. Israeli soldiers are rarely punished for civilian deaths, and the culture within the IDF has become increasingly extreme since October 7. As soldiers face few repercussions for extrajudicial civilian casualties, they are more likely to repeat such attacks. The rot within the IDF runs beyond a few trigger-happy “bad eggs,” as claimed by Israeli leadership.
From the top down, the tolerance for civilian casualties in the IDF is conspicuously high. At some points during the war, the Israeli “non-combatant casualty cutoff value” (NCV), which determines the tolerance for civilian deaths for each combatant killed, was up to 100 for certain targets. By contrast, the United States’ NCV during the war in Afghanistan was around 1 to 2.
The Lebanon attack is just one more example in a long line of IDF overreaches. Not every pager or walkie-talkie targeted in the attack was in the hands of a Hezbollah fighter. Moreover, many civilians were caught in the blast radius, including a 9-year-old child that was killed in the attack. Targeted or not, 3,000 injuries is an abhorrent toll for an attack in a foreign country, exemplifying the belligerent culture that permeates all levels of the Israeli military complex.
5. The “Hand of God” was Inordinate but Successful
Although the pager bombings were an aggressive action that many would argue crosses moral bounds, they are consistent with Israeli policy in Gaza. Unlike Israel’s Gaza policy, however, the attacks were an overwhelming success. The most common injuries were to the hands and faces of victims, which will have an obvious impact on fighters’ ability to communicate and fire weapons.
Beyond this, the damage to the communication and command structure of Hezbollah is extensive. Unable to trust phones or pagers, Hezbollah needs to find a new way to talk to itself. Nonstate groups often insulate leaders from traditional communication (Bin Laden used couriers and avoided technology), but this is impossible on an organizational scale. Additionally, several Hezbollah generals and political leaders were killed in the attack, and the organization likely has a long way back to being fully functional.
All told, this is a dangerous development in the volatile conflict that has been simmering on the Israeli-Lebanon border for many years. We still may see the conflict open up in the weeks following the attack. Hezbollah is one of the most capable nonstate actors in the world, with more rockets than most countries, soldiers with combat experience in Syria and beyond, and advanced weapons provided by Iran. While Hezbollah leaders vowed revenge following the attack, Israel carried out an air raid and flyover of Beirut. These operations could be political posturing and intimidation tactics, or they could be the first steps in a major escalation that could embroil the Middle East for many years to come.
Toby Zimmerman ‘27 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at t.zimmerman@wustl.edu.