Somewhere between a factory in Hungary and Lebanon, persons unknown adapted 1,000 Taiwanese-licensed pager devices being supplied to Hezbollah by adding a small, high-explosive charge.
Hezbollah adopted them since they do not require a GPS signal and hence cannot be used to locate the users with a bomb or missile. But they do receive text messages, in this case from persons unknown who were able to infiltrate the signal network.
On Tuesday afternoon these devices simultaneously beeped – prompting users to take a closer look – before exploding, causing horrific injuries to hands, eyes and stomachs. Eleven people were killed, including an eight-year-old girl, while more than 4,000 sustained injuries. Fortunately, Lebanon’s health service is geared up for such disasters. Even so, the wounded required the services of a hundred hospitals which quickly reported shortages of blood plasma.
Israel’s Mossad intelligence service is a capable organisation which performs many tasks. Its diplomatic end does things like finding out the amount of money North Korea required to not arm Arab states with ballistic missiles (the opening ask was more than its total GDP but they settled for some millions). Or indeed agnostically liaising with US, UK, Russian or Saudi spooks about Islamist terrorists.
Mossad’s business
Its polyglot officers have also conducted daring penetration missions inside hostile regimes, including Nasser’s Egypt and Baathist Iraq, or used terrorist organisations – like the Islamo-Marxist sect Mujahedeen-e-Khalq – to murder scientists and officials in the case of Iran.
For murder is also Mossad’s business, however they dress it up as “mowing the grass” or “targeted killing”. Television and the movies have added a certain glamour to the proceedings. And the victims of these attacks often don’t warrant much sympathy.
They include the 1972 Munich Olympics attacks on an experienced Hamas bomb maker called “The Engineer”, who in 1996 was decapitated when an adapted mobile phone exploded in his hand. There have been dozens of similar assassinations, the aim being to degrade technical expertise or the leadership of militant groups.
But murdering Iranian engineers and scientists has not prevented Iran becoming a nuclear threshold state in the interim. Nor have targeted strikes this summer against Hezbollah commanders like Fuad Shukr or Hamas supremo Ismail Haniyeh in downtown Tehran.
Poison
Sometimes these operations go badly wrong or result in civilian casualties, as we saw in graphic detail yesterday, even if it has helped repair Mossad’s image after the intelligence failures on 7 October. An innocent Moroccan waiter was shot dead in Norway by Mossad killers, for example, after they misidentified him as a member of the militant, pro-Palestinian group Black September.
The team posing as Canadian tourists who in 1997 sprayed poison into the ear of Khaled Meshal, head of Hamas political activities, outside his home in Amman, was quickly rounded up by Jordanian security. The head of Mossad, Efraim Halevi, was forced to rush an antidote out to Jordan, since King Hussein was threatening to hang his agents. Meshal remains an influential Hamas leader today.
But these operations are passively tolerated by Western governments, including our own. Only when, in 2010, Mossad used cloned European passports to get a large team into Dubai to smother a Hamas arms procurement operative in his hotel room, did some of them give Israel a slap in the wrist.
Rather brazenly the “tennis players” who carried out this hit looked directly into CCTV cameras in the hotel corridors – except they were wearing prosthetic make-up and slipped out of the Emirates unimpeded. MI6 told them off for using a UK passport.
An act of state terrorism
What happened yesterday was not a “targeted” assassination since most of the Hezbollah fighters survived the attack, albeit injured, as well as the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon who was blinded in one eye. There were also further casualties in Syria and most likely Iran. No, the combination of death, injury and fear among civilian Lebanese makes this an act of state terrorism, since it can be safely assumed that Hezbollah does not rely on the services of eight-year-olds or elderly women buying vegetables in a market.
Israel’s admirers in the Western press will be celebrating this latest act of technologically sophisticated derring-do, even as more sober heads with actual responsibilities condemn an indiscriminate terror attack which is bound to elicit a response from within Iran’s carefully crafted Axis of Resistance.
We can safely assume that the US, UK and EU will be “closely monitoring” the situation, while pursuing increasingly pointless negotiations to bring about a ceasefire in Gaza. US President Joe Biden’s envoys, Antony Blinken and Amos Hochstein, pointlessly cruise the region despite the President’s strategy of hugging Israel close to restrain her having long been exposed as hopeless.
IDF ground incursion
But what were these attacks supposed to achieve in a strategic sense? Having turned Gaza into a ruined hellscape, Israel’s war aims have shifted from notionally freeing hostages from Hamas tunnels to returning 60,000 refugees to the north of Israel whence they fled from Hezbollah rocket attacks.
Israel’s crippled economy cannot afford to support these people indefinitely, any more than it can sustain the year’s long rotation of essential civilian workers into the reserve units fighting in Gaza or bright young people fleeing to Cyprus, Greece, Germany and the US.
Just under 100,000 Lebanese have fled deeper into Lebanon, too, in order to escape relentless Israeli artillery and air strikes. This all requires eliminating Hezbollah’s forces from just north of the border, where under UN Resolution 1701 they are not supposed to be.
It may be that Tuesday’s horrendous attacks had to be brought forward after Hezbollah became suspicious that its supply lines had been compromised. At least one Hezbollah operative was killed by Mossad to stop his suspicions becoming widespread. In that case this attack was designed to coincide with an IDF ground incursion by forces which have been built up for months.
But what then? The last time Israel invaded southern Lebanon, in 2006, it ended up in a score draw after 34 days of fighting with an enemy which was not so experienced or well-armed as it is today after constant combat on behalf of Assad’s Syria, with detours to Yemen to instruct the Houthi.
Oil-exporting arteries
Hezbollah is a formidable fighting force, and that will not have changed after yesterday’s dramatic stunt since it has anywhere between 50-100,000 fighters. Does anyone seriously believe that it could not rain rockets down on the returned inhabitants of northern Israel? Does the IDF then push on to Beirut, effectively collapsing what remains of Lebanese statehood? Does it go for broke with an air assault on Iran, a vast country with its foot on one of the world’s main oil-exporting arteries?
There is also the problem of America’s number one special client blithely turning a defensive war in Gaza into a regional one involving seven simultaneous fronts. After all, since 2010 or thereabouts, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has sought to drag the US into war with Iran, not least because Israel’s air force lacks refuelling tankers to conduct a sustained air assault on its regime.
Does Biden want a third world war to crown his presidency? Because Russia is not going to idly spectate as one of its main sources of support gets pummeled.
Israel, the victim of 7 October, has become an all-points war machine, acting within the window of opportunity provided by the paralysis of America’s presidential elections. For months – in fact until 20 January – the world will watch the lame duck incumbent fumble around, in anticipation of either the inexperienced Kamala Harris or, worse, a vengeful lunatic who combines certitude with the attention of a fruit fly, as John Bolton puts it.
A very long game
But the war machine is in danger of running amok under a cynical and messianic Israeli leader whose sole priority is his own political survival. The general atmosphere is shaped by genocidal messianic fanatics in the Israeli war cabinet in a rhetorical climate of great crudity of thought and feeling.
This latest attack in Lebanon comes amid reports that Netanyahu is trying, yet again, to sack his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, as well as the IDF’s top general, Herzi Halevi, who recognises the damage he is doing to Israel’s international standing (such as it is) with tactical gambits which have no long-term strategic significance against opponents who are expert in playing a very long game.
So the enormous death toll from Israel’s perpetual wars will pile up, and all for the sake of what amounts to the politics of the parish pump in a country otherwise given over to discussions of civil war or the prospect of extinction. Think about that when our economy is plunged into recession and the bombs really fly.
Michael Burleigh is Senior Fellow at LSE Ideas and author of Day of the Assassins: A History of Political Murder (Pan MacMillan)