Closing the tabs, not answering the pager ...

“If you’re looking for an Israeli agent, look at the phone in your hand,” Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s chief, warned his men.

Instead, communications would be confined to more old-fashioned means: couriers delivering messages by word of mouth. Telecoms would be limited to 1980s-style pagers, with none of the vulnerabilities of smartphones, Hezbollah sources told Reuters in July. Thousands of the latest and most secure models were duly procured and distributed to top fighters, officials and allies.

On Tuesday afternoon, that was revealed as a terrible blunder.

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A side-level, strategic coup of the pager attack is that it instantly identified, in public, members of Hezbollah to anyone around them. On a macro level, it's bound to breed the level of suspicion in S Lebanon that the Haniyeh attack did in Tehran.

— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) September 17, 2024

Ed: That thought crossed my mind too, but I am not certain how much Hezbollah cares about being known.

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Videos posted of the attack on social media suggest that the “explosive devices were integrated into the pagers,” N.R. Jenzen-Jones, a weapons and ammunition expert and researcher at Nottingham Trent University, said in a post on X. “The scale suggests a complex supply-chain attack, rather than a scenario in which devices were intercepted and modified in transit.” ...

“This looks to be perhaps the most extensive physical supply chain attack in history,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator, a national security think tank.

Ed: Its audacity sends a message of its own. Israel will do the unexpected, will wait months to attack until the time is right, and will precisely target those who commit terror. That's a message of deterrence.

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Simultaneous Pager blast of 2500+ Hezbollah terrorists have put #Lebanon on Chaos. Have to say the Israel intelligence agency #Mossad is the most efficient intelligence agency in the world and nobody can match their intelligence. #Pager #pagers https://t.co/SqazBDfL2B pic.twitter.com/I1KNPEmXNM

— Ganesh (@me_ganesh14) September 17, 2024

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Hamas has issued a statement condemning Tuesday’s pager explosions.

“We appreciate the struggle and sacrifices of our brothers in Hezbollah, and their insistence on continuing to support and back our Palestinian people in Gaza, and we affirm our full solidarity with the Lebanese people and our brothers in Hezbollah,” a statement from Hamas said.

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Ed: Of course we weren't. The mission got completed successfully.

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The United States warned Iran not to increase risks for a regional war in the aftermath of an unusual attack in which hundreds of Hezbollah pagers exploded in Lebanon, killing at least eight and wounding over 2,700 people.

“We would urge Iran not to take advantage of any incident, any instability… to further increase tensions in the region,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters in Washington on Tuesday.

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Rashida Tlaib Uninjured After Her Pager Mysteriously Explodes https://t.co/8sgUgFsCmV pic.twitter.com/KfYRmKgT66

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) September 17, 2024

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Exactly! If it wasn’t some sort of miracle from above, Israel’s strategy of not saying if they did or did not do an action causes fear. Enemies begin to fear that Israel is everywhere, even if it isn’t, like the childhood fear that monsters are under the bed and in the closet.

Only one question remains. Does anyone know what kind of Shiva basket one is supposed to send to the family of a dead terrorist?

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Shalom! pic.twitter.com/hs9N81y6WR

— Marina Medvin 🇺🇸 (@MarinaMedvin) September 17, 2024

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The pager explosions have left Hezbollah with few good options in its conflict with Israel, says Maha Yahya, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. ...

“They’ve lost the deterrence – they haven’t lost it completely, but they’ve been hemorrhaging, if you like, a lot of their deterrence,” she added.