Israel’s latest successful attack may well be the final prelude to a wider full-scale Middle East war.
By detonating thousands of Hezbollah pagers in both Lebanon and Syria on Tuesday, and thousands of walkie-talkies in Lebanon on Wednesday — and on each day doing so almost simultaneously — it shattered Hezbollah’s command and control system, at least for the time being.
Having concluded that its cellphones were vulnerable to Israeli hacking, Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader and Iran’s important regional ally, ordered his minions to switch to pagers. Accordingly, his forces acquired the newest versions on the market. Although displaying a Taiwanese label, the pagers actually were made under license in Budapest, Hungary, reportedly by an Israeli front company. The Israelis were able to inject small amounts of explosives into the pocket-sized pagers. They appear to have used the same methods for infecting the walkie-talkies.
The result was the death on Tuesday of 14 Hezbollah fighters and officials, and nearly 3,000 injuries, many, but not all, to Hezbollah fighters. Another 14 deaths were recorded the following day. With pagers now appearing to be as vulnerable to Israeli malware as cellphones, Nasrallah must come up with a new method of transmitting orders to his forces, which will take some time.
White House advisor Amos Hochstein, who successfully negotiated a deal between Israel and Lebanon in 2022 to resolve their rival claims over a gas field in the Eastern Mediterranean, has returned to the region, frantically seeking to avoid the escalation of........