Israel has struck a shattering blow against Hezbollah by killing several of its officers and officials and injuring no less than 2,800 more by turning their pagers into miniature explosive devices. The attack also deprives the Lebanese guerrilla movement of its main means of communication between its commanders and local leaders. On Wednesday, a further nine people, at least, were reportedly killed in Lebanon’s Bekaa region in the east of the country in another round of device detonations, this time targeting walkie-talkies.
The successful Israeli operation tips the military balance between Israel and Hezbollah further towards Israel and makes it more likely that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will escalate the conflict in northern Israel and southern Lebanon towards a full-scale war. On Monday, the Israeli security cabinet made the return of 60,000 Israelis evacuated from their homes in the north of the country over the past year an official war aim.
The devastating effect of Israel intelligence reportedly succeeding in introducing a small quantity of explosives into a batch of 3,000 pagers purchased by Hezbollah from a company in Taiwan is only the latest in a series of attacks Israel has made against Hezbollah and Iranian commanders together with the assassination of the political head of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran on 31 July. Hours earlier in July, Fuad Shukr, a veteran Hezbollah commander, was killed by an Israeli air strike in south Beirut.
In all the killings, Israeli ingenuity and technical skill have been aided by surprising Hezbollah and Iranian security lapses. Earlier in the year, three Iranian generals were killed in the Iranian consulate in Damascus by an airstrike, having presumably imagined that they would be safe on Iranian diplomatic territory.
One reason for their poor sense of security may be that Iran’s “axis of resistance”, of which Hezbollah is an important component, did not do much to resist Israel between the war in Lebanon in 2006, when Israeli forces suffered heavy losses and failed to achieve their objectives, and the opening of the conflict in Gaza on 7 October, 2023.
Hezbollah was involved in fighting for the government of President Bashar al-Assad against Syrian rebels. Its slack security measures, culminating in the colossal blunder of distributing the lethal pagers to its officers, may have stemmed from the long period during which its conflict with Israel was mostly rhetorical.
The heavy casualties among the Hezbollah leadership at a central and local level is bound to degrade its military capacity. But the impact of the loss of veteran fighters may well be short term since Hezbollah has in the past been able to absorb heavy losses.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, the US army found that campaigns to detain or kill insurgent leaders might look impressive, but those successfully targeted were usually replaced within 24 hours and often by younger, more aggressive and effective commanders. The elimination, permanent or temporary, of almost 3,000 Hezbollah officers and officials is a bigger blow, but one that the movement can survive.