‘A sign of panic’
Operation lacks strategic value other than triggering escalation
It may not have been acknowledged by Israel, but the extraordinary, coordinated attack on Hezbollah, blowing up thousands of pagers used by members of the Lebanese group, is almost certainly a Mossad operation. The Israeli intelligence service has been engaged in the assassinations of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders for decades, but if its involvement is confirmed, this represents a significant escalation.
Reports continue to come in, but with at least nine dead and about 3,000 wounded in the co-ordinated explosions, the episode demonstrates a ruthless – if indiscriminate – desire to target Hezbollah. Ironically, pagers were being used as an alternative to mobile phones, which can be tracked and used to pinpoint missile strikes on its commanders.
It is unclear how the explosions were caused, and although there is speculation about hacking, it is most likely they came from sabotaged devices. Initial reports said the pagers that exploded were a new model manufactured by a company whose supply chain may have been compromised.
Yossi Melman, a co-author of Spies Against Armageddon and other books on Israeli intelligence, emphasised that it appeared the exploding pagers had been “recently supplied”, and added: “We know that Mossad is able to penetrate and infiltrate Hezbollah.” But he questioned the strategic wisdom of the attack, which left a 10-year-old girl as among the dead.
“It enhances the chance of an escalation of the border crisis into a war,” Melman warned, and argued it was “more of a sign of panic” because while he said it showed an extraordinary ability to strike at the heart of Hezbollah it was neither very targeted nor would it would change the wider strategic picture on the ground. “I don’t see any advance in it,” he concluded.
At the very least, Melman argued, some sort of response from Hezbollah was likely. Earlier yesterday it had emerged that the Iran-aligned Lebanese group, engaged in a violent tit-for-tat with Israel for months, had, according to Israel’s Shin Bet domestic security service, planned to kill a former Israeli security official by detonating a remotely activated explosive device from Lebanon.
That could suggest the mass exploding pager attack was a response, a grim warning of the “anything you can do, we can do better” variety. But it also wouldn’t be the first time Israel has engaged in an assassination or other spectacular attack that has not developed as intended.
A sabotaged mobile phone was used as long ago as 1996 to blow up Yahya Ayyash, then Hamas’ chief bomb maker, in Gaza City. Ayyash, known as “the engineer”, was also considered responsible for introducing the strategy of suicide attacks on Israeli passenger buses. His killing prompted a fresh wave of bus bombings and did little to calm the crisis at the time.
Khaled Meshal, another Hamas leader, survived an assassination attempt in 1997. Meshal, then Hamas’s political leader was injected with poison in his ear in an operation authorised by the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, while in Jordan. Meshal survived, and some of the Israeli agents responsible were arrested – prompting Jordan’s King Hussein to break off a peace accord and threaten to hang the plotters unless an antidote was supplied. An embarrassed Israel did so.
Five hours after arriving in Dubai in February 2010, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a Hamas leader, responsible for weapons procurement, was killed in his hotel room by a team of 11 assassins who used fake European passports to conceal their identities. Hamas accused Israel of being behind the plot, some aspects of which could be seen in CCTV footage released by the Dubai authorities. Some of the agents changed their disguises in a deadly operation that, for all its elaboration, was detected.
Since the start of Israel’s war with Hamas, there have been many more attempts to take out leaders of the Palestinian militant group. Ismail Haniyeh, then the group’s political leader, was killed by a “short range projectile” in Tehran in August – prompting warnings from Iran it would respond with direct military action against Israel. Though Iran has refrained from an attack, the war between Israel and Hamas is heading towards its second year, while tensions with Hezbollah in the north have arguably never been higher.