They probably thought the world would applaud. The Israeli planners behind one of the most spectacular intelligence actions in the country’s history – targeting thousands of Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon and beyond by exploding the pagers in their pockets – would certainly have expected an ovation for the sheer audaciousness of it.

A plan years in the making, seemingly involving a fake manufacturing company that secured the contract to supply communication devices to Hezbollah before discreetly modifying them into remote-controlled grenades – it’s the stuff of Hollywood. But I suspect the Mossad wanted to be praised for more than its ingenuity and technical prowess.

First, the target was not a Palestinian group but Hezbollah, a proxy of the Iranian theocracy. It does not sit in territory occupied by Israel, but rather in Lebanon, where it exerts serious power. What’s more, Hezbollah has hardly been minding its own business this last year. Since 7 October, it has been bombarding northern Israel, raining daily fire on the communities across the border, turning them into ghost towns and forcing more than 60,000 Israelis from their homes.

Above all, it would have expected plaudits for what one British intelligence expert described to me as an “amazingly precise” strike, “in the sense that the only people carrying those pagers are going to be Hezbollah members and operatives.” (The fact that the Iranian ambassador to Beirut had one of the devices only confirms how closely Tehran and Hezbollah are militarily entwined.) In this view, and even allowing for several civilian casualties, what happened on Wednesday was “about as discriminate as you can get given the scale of the operation”.

But if the Mossad and its political masters thought that position would be universal, they will have been disappointed. Instead,........

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