The News
Israel and Hezbollah traded new missile attacks on Thursday after a second day of exploding electronic devices in Lebanon that have killed at least 37 people and wounded 3500 more, raising fears of an all-out war.
Separately, Israel announced it arrested an Israeli businessman last month after he attended meetings in Iran and discussed assassinating Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Reuters reported.
Multiple sources say Israel’s spy agency Mossad is responsible for the thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies that have exploded across Lebanon this week, saying the agency is targeting members of the Iran-backed political party and militant group Hezbollah. Israel has not yet commented on the explosions.
SIGNALS
The pager operation could have devastating consequences
The pager operation was unparalleled in its “secrecy, lethality, ingenuity, audacity, and impact,” an expert in urban warfare at the Modern War Institute wrote on X. Yet the attack did nothing to make Israel safer or secure the return of hostages, a columnist argued in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, saying it could instead trigger a war in the north that will dwarf the devastation in Gaza. The pager explosions produced what lawyers call “excessive incidental civilian harm,” one of the criticisms leveled at Moscow regarding its alleged war crimes in Ukraine, in a way that risks normalizing violations of international law elsewhere in the region, The Guardian argued in an editorial.
Pager bombings amount to psychological warfare
The operation was “long in the making,” The New York Times reported: Small numbers of booby-trapped pagers began shipping to Lebanon in 2022, after a shell company was set up by Israeli intelligence officials. Israel was probably tempted to set off the explosives sooner, lest Hezbollah raised the alarm, but their psychological effect was all the more devastating because of how long they were in place: “It is unsettling enough to know that your enemy found his way into the front pocket of your skinny jeans. It is even worse to know that he has been there for five months,” The Atlantic wrote.