“This is a cyberattack worthy of a spy movie,” notes The evening. This Tuesday, around 3:45 p.m., thousands of people, the majority of them members of Hezbollah, “were injured in simultaneous pager explosions across Lebanon and Syria”.
“In the southern suburbs of Beirut, in southern Lebanon and in the Bekaa, regions controlled by the Shiite party, at least 2,800 people were injured, 200 of whom are in critical condition,” and at least eleven were killed, the Belgian title specifies, citing the provisional report published by the Lebanese Ministry of Health.
“The explosions appear to be the latest salvo in a conflict between Israel and Hezbollah that escalated after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 and its ally Hezbollah began firing rockets into northern Israel in support.”observe The New York Times, emphasizing that “Both armed groups are supported by Iran”.
“Although Israeli officials have neither claimed nor denied responsibility for the explosions, Israel has a long history of sophisticated sabotage and assassination operations against its adversaries,” notes the American daily.
The Atlantic confirms that the Hebrew state “has been using digital technologies for months to target Hezbollah members”. But “Today’s attack is unlike anything that has ever happened before and appears to have struck a new kind of blow,” writes the magazine.
“It has maimed thousands of fighters and may have destroyed the group’s ability to respond if a wider conflict were to break out soon, continues the American title. It also revealed the identities of the victims, shattering Hezbollah’s painstaking efforts to preserve the anonymity of its members.”
“Risk of escalation of the border crisis”
The Israeli operation constitutes “one of the biggest security breaches of Hezbollah since its creation in the 1980s, precisely during the occupation of southern Lebanon, which Israel ended in 2000,” adds in echo The country.
It’s a “hard blow” for Hezbollah, also considers David Des Roches, professor at the National Defense University in Washington. “The main problem is that individual Hezbollah fighters will no longer trust the equipment” of the armed group, which functions as a “network organization”, he explains to Al-Jazeera.
“It requires very good real-time communications. They won’t have that anymore,” he told the Qatari channel.
Elijah J. Magnier, a military expert at the Institute of International Affairs (IAI), explained to Evening How Israel managed to trap Hezbollah’s pagers. “In recent months, the Lebanese movement has acquired new devices” And, “Since the pagers, manufactured in Taiwan, cannot be delivered directly to Lebanon, they were shipped via a third country,” specifies the researcher.
“It is in this third country that the Israeli intelligence services are said to have intervened to introduce explosives into the beepers such as RDX (cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine) or PETN (tetranitrate) of pentaerythritol)”he added. On Tuesday, the explosives were reportedly activated remotely “using drones or from the sea”.
In the columns of the Guardian, Yossi Melman, author of several books on Israeli intelligence, however, questions “the strategic wisdom of attack”Who “increases the risk of an escalation of the border crisis”.
The expert sees the Israeli operation as a “sign of panic”because although it demonstrates a “extraordinary ability to strike at the heart of Hezbollah,” she is not “not very targeted” And “will not change the broader strategic situation.”
Netanyahu “leads the dance”
“This attack comes in a context of extreme tensions,” adds The Time. “The exchange of fire, which has intensified over the past three weeks, has displaced approximately 200,000 people on both sides of the border since October 7, killing 600 people in Lebanon, including at least 137 civilians, and 48 people in Israel, including 13 Israeli civilians and 12 Druze children in the town of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights, which still claims a Syrian identity.”details the Swiss title.
Hezbollah claimed that Israel was “fully responsible” of these explosions and assured that he would “receive his just punishment”.
On Tuesday, the UN Special Coordinator for Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, deplored a “extremely worrying escalation in an already […] volatile”and urged “all parties concerned to refrain from any further action” likely to “trigger a wider conflagration”.
Ha’Aretz notes for his part that the operation “runs directly counter to the Biden administration’s intensive efforts to preserve diplomatic efforts in the face of military escalation,” noting that “Hours earlier, US envoy Amos Hochstein had urged senior Israeli officials not to escalate the conflict with Hezbollah, warning of potentially disastrous consequences.”.
But the Middle East Eye collected the testimonies of several experts who attribute responsibility for the latest developments to the United States, for having “so far refused to use their influence with Israel, their close ally, to end the war in Gaza, which has been going on for almost a year”.
One of them, Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC), believes that Tuesday’s operation is simply a reminder that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “leads the dance”, and who he and his government “are playing with Biden.”
“The US just sent an envoy to try to convince Israel not to start a war in Lebanon, and this is what they got in return. Netanyahu knows there will be no consequences,” he asserts.
