Restoring Lost Deterrence: Pager Explosions in Lebanon

In a well-coordinated assault targeting Lebanon’s southern suburbs—an area known for being a Hezbollah stronghold—and specific regions in Syria, hundreds of pager devices used by Lebanese Hezbollah members were detonated simultaneously. Early reports, at the time of writing, suggest the attack claimed the lives of over a dozen individuals and left thousands more injured.   Israel has a long-established record of carrying out extrajudicial operations, ranging from targeted assassinations to sophisticated cyber-attacks aimed at its adversaries. A hallmark of its tactics includes booby-trapping communications devices, as seen in the 1996 assassination of Yahya Ayyash, a prominent Hamas bomb maker, who was killed using a bomb concealed within his mobile phone. Given this precedent, it is plausible that Israeli intelligence, specifically the Mossad, orchestrated the recent operation by infiltrating the manufacturing process of these pager devices, possibly embedding lithium-ion batteries rigged with meticulously calibrated explosives.   The operation raises many questions about the strength of the security of Hezbollah’s communications infrastructure, which calls for looking at the incident from a deeper perspective to decipher its meanings and implications from the perspective of the communications security used by Hezbollah or other resistance groups in the region or even regular armies in the Middle East.