On Tuesday and Wednesday, pagers and walkie-talkies apparently belonging to Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon and Syria exploded in an attack the group laid blame for on Israel. The explosions killed 37 people and wounded 3,000. Hassan Nasrallah, the group’s leader, said in a speech on Thursday that the attacks had crossed a red line.
The scenes in the videos were surreal. In one, a man in what appeared to be a grocery store was stuffing fruits in a plastic bag when an explosion suddenly erupted out of his jeans pocket, and he lay down in pain as panicked shoppers wandered around in shock.
When I was based in Beirut during a spate of suicide bombings in 2013 that were ostensibly a retaliation against Hezbollah’s involvement in neighboring Syria, I was often struck by the penchant amid the chaos of ordinary civilians to try to achieve a sense of normalcy. I once visited a neighborhood the evening after a double suicide bombing I was covering, only to be invited for a cup of coffee on the balcony of a home facing the street that had been partly blown off in the attack. Meanwhile I had endured a mini-panic attack on the way there because I was worried a car would explode in the traffic jam I was stuck in.
The exploding pagers and walkie-talkies, which appear to have been sneaked into Hezbollah’s supply chain in a coup for Israel’s intelligence services, have triggered great horror and suffering — to the Hezbollah cadres who were its primary victims and lost lives, appendages and eyes; the civilians who were wounded in the immediate vicinity; and the citizenry at large, among whom rumors run amok of exploding iPhones triggered by Bluetooth signals in this novel form of warfare.
But there is much to analyze in this mass maiming event: a new Orwellian form of warfare and violence too terrifying to contemplate but that has redefined the meaning of a precision strike; a sense of mass distress and fear, coupled with memes oozing schadenfreude by those whom Hezbollah has cowed and bullied for decades as well as those who question its raison d’etre with growing urgency; a resurgence of the mystical aura in the Arab world surrounding Israel’s Mossad agency and its capabilities after the intelligence services crumbled like a house of cards in the face of Hamas’ Oct. 7 assault; the collapse of Hezbollah’s facade of invincibility; and the question of what constitutes terrorism.
In the hours after the attacks, memes proliferated. Among them was a soldier sporting a balaclava and military fatigues cradling half a dozen messenger pigeons. Another featured two plastic cups connected with a wire with the caption: “If anyone wants to call me, this is my new number.” There were jokes about exploding toilets, as well as a photoshopped photo of Nasrallah, face blackened from an explosion, stating, “There is no need to be scared,” reminiscent of the famous meme of a comic dog drinking coffee at a table as the house burns around him, declaring that “this is fine.”
These were just a handful of the memes circulating on Lebanese (and Syrian) social media, alongside videos and stills of ambulances rushing the wounded to hospitals, sirens echoing in the background, accented by the panicked pronouncements of passersby. It is tempting to chalk this up to the unique resilience of the Lebanese, who have endured economic collapse, rule by the power of Hezbollah’s guns and the lack of the basic functionality of a modern nation-state.
Yet this kind of analysis is shallow because it is only partly correct. It is true that humor is often a refuge to deal with things we cannot hope to comprehend, such as every electronic device in the vicinity potentially housing an explosive device. But the schadenfreude also reflects a deeper rot that has taken hold of a party and paramilitary organization that has dragged the Lebanese into constant conflict to justify its existence, inflicting violence and other criminality upon the downtrodden at home and abroad.
Ridiculing Hezbollah has of course always been a favored pastime of its Lebanese opponents, lacking as they do the guns that can stand up to its coercion. Hezbollah began launching rockets into northern Israel in solidarity with Gaza as Israel began its campaign of dreadful violence on the enclave and its civilians shortly after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks. But for much of the past decade, the party had apparently given up on its imminent plans to liberate Jerusalem in favor of helping Syrian President Bashar al-Assad crush the uprising against him, famously leading the charge in besieging and starving out the civilians of the town of Madaya near the Lebanese border, in addition to a host of other crimes against the Syrian populace.
Hezbollah has also involved itself in Iraq on the side of Shiite militias there and as far afield as Yemen in support of the Houthis. All the while it has maintained an aura of almost smug superiority, because of in part its own rhetoric but also a halo of awe accorded to it by Western journalists and analysts every time they speak to a self-professed Hezbollah field commander. Before the attacks of Oct. 7 last year, the party exuded an air of quiet competence and a results-oriented approach with its enormous rocket stockpile that made Hamas look like amateurs.
These capabilities have not been tested since Hezbollah rebuilt its organization and weaponry after the stalemate as a result of the 2006 war, a catastrophe for ordinary Lebanese. This watchful detente with Israel had generally meant that before Oct. 7, Hezbollah’s arms were largely used to quell the Lebanese, Syrians and other Arabs whose interests were unfortunate enough to contradict those of Tehran. This has led to the deterioration of Hezbollah’s image among the region’s population and the cementing of its role as an Iranian proxy, a fall from grace that contrasts with its heroic perception for standing up to Israel in 2000 and 2006 (which may yet be revived in the event of a full-scale war with Israel).
In parallel, Israel has recovered some of the mysterious aura of its own intelligence services, which had been damaged by the enormous failure to anticipate and thwart the Oct. 7 attack, even though Hamas was training for it in plain sight and the Egyptians had warned Tel Aviv. The pager bombings have undoubtedly dealt a major blow to Hezbollah, irrespective of whether the operation had a specific aim as a deterrence signal, is the opening salvo of a war or amounts to no change in strategy at all. The reality is that Israel infiltrated the party’s supply networks, blew up thousands of its operatives and damaged its ability to communicate internally. The incidents will likely spur a hunt for agents and collaborators within the organization. It is unclear how deeply Israel’s infiltration goes, but its ability to target so many operatives simultaneously without the need to track them using sophisticated digital technology is both unsettling to and embarrassing for Hezbollah.
But what of the rest of the population, and indeed the world at large reeling from the possibility that such unsophisticated technology can be harnessed to conduct low-cost warfare? What of the potential for more sophisticated devices that are truly everywhere, rather than pagers that haven’t been in wide circulation since the 1990s?
Edward Snowden, the American whistleblower who exposed National Security Agency abuses in 2014 and fled to Russia, was quick to sound the alarm as news of the booby-trapped pagers began to spread.
“If it were iPhones that were leaving the factory with explosives inside, the media would be a hell of a lot faster to cotton on to what a horrific precedent has been set today,” he tweeted. “Nothing can justify this. It’s a crime. A crime. And everyone in the world is less safe for it.”
It isn’t difficult to imagine worst-case scenarios for the popularization of such technology, whether among ordinary tech-savvy individuals or rogue states, because we have already seen some of the worst-case scenarios. A child picks up her father’s beeping pager just before it blows up, as was the case with Fatima Abdullah, a 9-year-old girl who was killed — her face mangled — or the thousands of people who were injured for merely being, unbeknownst to them, in the vicinity of a Hezbollah operative on the street. There are already countless anecdotes of Lebanese citizens disconnecting appliances and electronic devices for fear that they could be turned into weapons. Yes, explosives were almost certainly planted inside the pagers. But tech journalists have reported that even normal mobile phones could technically have their batteries triggered to overheat remotely. Now imagine that writ large, incorporating electronic devices on planes and public transport, schools, hospitals, cinemas — everything, everywhere, all at once.
This potential is why the attacks have opened a Pandora’s shipping container of precedent and misuse, even if one were to make the short-sighted argument that such an operation that was purely aimed at members of a designated terrorist militia is a best-case scenario for a precision bombing campaign, one that is preferable to, say, bombing the home of a commander in the middle of a crowded neighborhood from the air. Because the result, ultimately, is terror.
Terrorism has always been a loaded word. International legal scholars have debated how to define it for decades. I was in high school when the 9/11 attacks happened and in college when George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq as well as when a series of car bomb assassinations decimated Lebanon, starting with the killing of Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri on Valentine’s Day 2005.
These formative experiences created the impression in my mind of terrorism being the province of non-state actors. The indelible image in my mind was of the wanton destruction wrought upon civilians by truck bombs exploding in crowded markets or religious shrines. It applied to the actions of groups like al Qaeda or the Islamic State group. A popular convenient shorthand was that terrorism was the wanton killing of civilians with the aim of enacting a political objective.
But what of states of terror cultivated by the military forces of nations that presumably are bound by international law? Was the firebombing of Tokyo a form of terrorism? What of chemical weapons? Or barrel bombs? Do they count?
Conveniently, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, a hybrid international court set up to investigate the Hariri assassination, came up with a more comprehensive legal definition for a crime of terrorism: an act carried out with the intent of causing a state of terror. It has three pillars. The first is the perpetration of a criminal act, such as killing, kidnapping or causing mass destruction that endangers human lives. The second has to do with the intent — spreading fear or coercing a population and thus influencing policy. The third is the use of means that are liable to create public danger, such as explosive materials or other destructive devices.
Customary international law already prohibits the use of booby traps — rigging objects that civilians might conceivably reach for because they are for everyday use. But the scale of Israel’s operation will raise questions about whether it constitutes a form of terrorism. It created widespread destruction that endangered human lives. Its aim was to spread fear: One could argue that it was meant primarily to scare Hezbollah members, but the persistent sonic booms of Israeli warplanes flying over the skies of Beirut and the ensuing panic among the Lebanese population suggests that the target audience extends beyond gun-toting commandos. And the means that were used were certainly liable to create public danger, as evidenced by the overcrowded hospitals.
It is generally impossible to predict how an individual, let alone a society at large, will react to events that trigger a sense of mass terror, a feeling that danger lurks around the corner or, as with Lebanon in the recent spate of exploding Hezbollah pagers, in the pocket of the man standing just ahead of you at the grocery store checkout counter.
Where to go from here? We are only just beginning to grapple with the implications of such a novel and unprecedented act of war. Was it just the opening shot of all-out war? Or will it spur a retreat and regrouping? How long before the first attack by a non-state actor using these methods?
A layered analysis will never get to the bottom of all these questions. But perhaps the most human thing to do is to observe the horror and panic of the people caught up in it and decide not to let it happen again.
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