Israel’s suspected mobile device offensive pushes region closer to chaos

At 3:30 pm on Tuesday, hundreds of pagers across Lebanon began beeping. A few seconds later, the devices — all believed to belong to members of the Lebanese Shiite Muslim political party Hezbollah — exploded. At least nine people were killed and thousands more wounded by the powerful blasts which ripped through homes and public spaces alike, said Lebanese officials. One day later, during a public funeral for some of those killed, a second wave of remote detonations rocked the already anxious nation, as walkie-talkies and other portable electronic devices exploded in unison. At least 14 people were killed and hundreds more hurt following Wednesday’s detonations, said the Lebanese Health Ministry.

While not officially confirmed as such, the pager bombs are widely understood to be the result of an intricate Israeli intelligence operation involving intercepted devices implanted with explosives before being dispersed to Hezbollah personnel. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not address the operation directly in a brief statement posted on X, and instead reiterated his promise to bring home the approximately 60,000 Israeli residents who were evacuated from the country’s north as a result of continual Hezbollah rocket fire.

Netanyahu’s promise notwithstanding, where can Israel, Lebanon, and the wider region go from here? After nearly a year of war on its southwestern border, is Israel in the early stages of opening another front to its north?

A ‘tactical success’ with ‘no clear strategic effect’

The suspected pager sabotage “could have been a brilliant and innovative operation” showcasing that for Israel’s “imaginative spy craft planners the sky is really the limit,” Yossi Melman said at Haaretz. Instead, the “implementation was wrong, and the whole project is unlikely to live up to its planners’ expectations as a strategic game-changer.”

The fundamental question “hovering” over the operation, said The Washington Post, is “why now?” With Israeli domestic politics at a boiling point, and international efforts to contain the ongoing violence already engulfing Gaza, observers have been left questioning the “timing of the attack and what it signaled about Israel’s intentions in Lebanon.” The lack of a wide-scale military follow-up suggests that the “timing wasn’t the optimal one,” former senior Mossad operative Oded Eilam said to the Post.

The one-two punch of explosive mobile devices was a “tactical success that had no clear strategic effect,” The New York Times said. While the operation “impressed many Israelis” in terms of sheer complexity and operational scope, “their core frustration remained: Hezbollah is still entrenched on Israel’s northern border, preventing tens of thousands of residents of northern Israel from returning home.” To that end, with Netanyahu, it is “hard to tell how much of this whispered campaign is really about military intentions” compared to “domestic politics and the prime minister’s constant need to tend to his coalition to keep him in power,” The Guardian said.

‘Limits, rules, and red lines’

Although longstanding low-grade fighting between Israeli forces and Hezbollah has intensified in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza, the mobile device attacks “eclipse previous provocations and, cutting as it does to the heart of Hezbollah, may force the retaliation that both its leadership and its allies seem to prefer avoiding,” Al Jazeera said.

In his first public response to the bombings, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah accused Israel of crossing all “limits, rules, and red lines,” calling the attack a “declaration of war.” But Nasrallah’s tone “indicated that the group will measure its reaction” so as not to “spark a major war with Israel,” said the BBC. The attacks may create a “snowballing effect of pressure” for the group, The Jerusalem Post said, however, “Hezbollah is in a position where it will want to weigh its options with Iran and other Iranian-backed proxies, such as the Houthis and militias in Iraq, as to its next steps.”

While U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has called on “all parties to maintain restraint and avoid escalation on the border between Israel and Lebanon,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has postponed his planned visit to Israel this coming weekend, just days after telling Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant that “priority should be given to reaching a deal to release the hostages held by Hamas and establish a ceasefire in Gaza, and to reach a diplomatic solution on the border with Lebanon that would allow civilians to return to their homes,” Axios said.