The Real Goal of Israel’s Exploding-Pager Attack on Hezbollah

This article originally ran in New York magazine on September 18, 2024

The wave of exploding pagers that injured nearly 3,000 and killed at least nine, including a 9-year-old girl, in Lebanon and Syria on Tuesday was a stunning and unexpected blow against Israel’s longtime foe, Hezbollah. While the sheer number of casualties will put a damper on the terrorist group’s ability to wage offensive action, physical incapacitation of enemy fighters likely wasn’t Israel’s primary goal. Rather, the move was likely aimed at creating fear and internal suspicion that would more significantly undermine the group’s ability to fight.

“It promulgates fear,” says Dr. Patrick Sullivan, director of the Modern War Institute at West Point. “It demonstrates to their enemy, ‘Hey, we can reach out and touch you anywhere, anytime.’ I would imagine that Hezbollah is significantly questioning who is in their ranks, who are their suppliers, and what vulnerabilities they have.”

In military science terms, the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah is described as asymmetric. Israel is a nation with a standing army and all the resources of a modern economy. Hezbollah is a paramilitary organization whose members are dispersed among the population of Lebanon. While they have fewer men and weapons than Israel, they can attack by surprise then melt away. (Hezbollah has used these sorts of hit-and-run tactics most recently in its ongoing shelling of Israel’s north.) You can’t destroy a guerrilla organization through the kind of direct, tank-on-tank attritional slugfest that Russia and Ukraine are currently waging. Instead, the core struggle is waged in the informational domain and the strategic objective is to degrade the psychological state of the enemy, according to Sullivan.

“It’s a way to target internal unity of purpose within an organization,” he explains. “Not everyone is as committed as the leaders are. You have a rank and file who can potentially leave the organization if they assess that their personal risk is too high. You have financiers who might reconsider how they’re supporting the organization if they’re creating too much exposure for themselves.”

A wavering of commitment is apt to be intensified by uncertainty about an adversary’s capabilities. The sudden, simultaneous explosion of thousands of electronic devices is something that has never occurred before and could never be expected; it implies that Israel can strike in ways that are impossible to anticipate, let alone prevent. That may be extremely demoralizing for those on the receiving end of it.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, as surveillance videos showing sudden explosions and victims laid out on the ground circulated across social media, it wasn’t entirely clear how the attack had been carried out. But within hours, Reuters was reporting that up to three grams of explosive material were hidden inside devices that looked like AP924 pagers sold under the name of Taiwanese firm Gold Apollo and manufactured under license by a Hungarian company. The devices were apparently designed to be triggered by an incoming message.

Somehow, Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, managed to infiltrate the supply chain and booby-trap the pagers that Hezbollah purchased as an alternative to cell phones, an undertaking that must have required not just imagination and skill but also patience. “Israel is demonstrating that it can identify and target members of Hezbollah regardless of their location or position in the organization. This is indicative (again) of a sophisticated Israeli intelligence apparatus, which despite its failures leading up to the October 7 Hamas massacres can execute complex and audacious attacks,” writes retired Australian Army general Mick Ryan in The Interpreter.

Barely 24 hours after the pagers exploded, a second wave of attacks hit Hezbollah, this time with exploding hand-held radios, according to Reuters. The AP reports “multiple explosions went off Wednesday at the site of a funeral for three Hezbollah members and a child killed by exploding pagers the day before.” Christiaan Triebert of the New York Times visual investigation unit posted images on Twitter of fragments of an ICOM IC-V82 model radio handset marked “Made in Japan.” Reuters reports that the radios had been bought by Hezbollah around the same time as the pagers, five months ago. (The death toll in the attacks is at least 12, according to Lebanese authorities.)

The difficulty of the achievement itself can have a profound psychological impact. In asymmetric guerrilla warfare, ultimate success lies not in destroying the enemy’s physical war-making capacity but in shaping the political environment. “The goal is to achieve a decisive effect in the information domain so you can create the perception that you’re winning or that you have the initiative, then try to cohere a political effect off of that,” Sullivan says. “It’s a direct assault on the enemy’s will and morale, trying to make the other side give up just because they’re worn out. They don’t see an end game, so abandoning the fight to lick their wounds to survive another day seems to be the better outcome.”

Seen through the lens of political struggle, a side that is deeply committed has an advantage because the prospect of defeating it will seem discouragingly unrealistic to its adversary. This has always been a strength of groups including Hezbollah whose core purpose is to fight for existential stakes, such as destroying Israel. An operation like Mossad’s pager attack is extra effective because it demonstrates that Israel, too, is bringing a similar level of patience and persistence to the fight. “When the Israelis do stuff like this, they signal that they’re matching that level of commitment,” Sullivan says, “and so there’s real informational power in what Israel has done, and that might affect the strategic thinking of not just the terrorist groups but also their supporters in Iran and some of the other Gulf states.”

Israel made a similar demonstration earlier this year with its assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, whom it blew up using a remote-control bomb it had planted months before inside a heavily guarded guesthouse in Tehran.

The audience for this kind of sophisticated surprise attack isn’t just external enemies but also the Israeli public, which was demoralized by the catastrophic failure of its military and intelligence services in the run-up to the October 7 attack. These operations demonstrate that Israeli leadership is not, after all, entirely feckless. But, as with much else in the ongoing struggle between Israel and its adversaries, the ultimate impact is not clear now and may never be. “Having amazing capabilities does not make a strategy,” former Israeli intelligence officer Miri Eisin told The New York Times.

The perennial conundrum of guerrilla warfare is the possibility that instead of sapping the enemy’s resolve an attack can steel it. However badly Israel may have degraded Hezbollah as a fighting force by putting thousands of its members in the hospital, it certainly increased pressure on the group to respond with an attack of its own, as it has already vowed to do.

Then there’s the issue that Israel has shot its wad. Having invested the resources to put thousands of devices into the hands of an unwitting enemy, Israel acquired for itself a devastating secret capability, but it was a onetime deal. Once it used it, it no longer possessed it, nor could it ever again achieve that particular kind of surprise.

The onus was on Israel, then, to time the deployment for maximum strategic effect. The extent to which it managed to do that is unclear; Axios is reporting that Israel decided to trigger the attack because it feared that its plans had been exposed, leaving it in a “use it or lose it” position.

In the days and weeks to come, Israeli intelligence will be carefully monitoring the response among Hezbollah and its allies, anticipating a response, and planning its own subsequent countermoves. “Maybe those aftereffects are ready to go,” Sullivan says, “but we’re not going to know until we see them deployed.”