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Israeli leaders have threatened to replicate the ‘Gaza model’ in south Lebanon. But Hezbollah may prove to be an even more challenging foe than Hamas.
On the afternoon of Sept. 17, my phone buzzed with dozens of messages from friends in Beirut, who described the surreal scenes they had just witnessed. One friend saw a man’s face blow up while he was on a motorbike. Another said his sister was with her 2-year-old when she heard a loud bang, followed by a rush of people running toward them in terror. A third sent a clip of security camera footage from a grocery store, where a man reaches to grab his beeping pager before it explodes in his hand.
Although no one has officially claimed responsibility for the attack, everyone understood very well what had happened: Israel found a way to detonate simultaneously thousands of pagers used by Hezbollah members. In our text exchanges, my friends and I began to wonder how the Israelis pulled this off — and if this meant that all electronic devices in Lebanon were now at risk.
A similar attack occurred the following day, this time targeting Hezbollah’s walkie-talkies. In one highly publicized incident, an explosion at a funeral for Hezbollah members killed in the first attack sent mourners scrambling in fear. Across the two days, around 3,500 people were reported injured, many still in serious condition, and at least 42 people killed, including two children.
We later learned that the Hungarian company from which Hezbollah had acquired its communication devices was, in fact, an Israeli front. The devices were not intercepted and then bugged, but manufactured by Israel from the start — a “modern day Trojan horse,” as the New York Times called it. This was a sizable security breach for Hezbollah, which even the group’s secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, somberly acknowledged in a speech two days later.
But it now seems that the attacks of last week were the prelude for a more traditional — and more deadly — open phase of war. At the time of writing, Israel has launched multiple airstrikes throughout south Lebanon and the Bekaa valley, and countless Lebanese civilians are currently fleeing the area following “immediate” evacuation orders from the Israeli army.
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So far, at least 492 people have been reported killed, including 35 children, and 1,645 wounded, and casualties are expected to rise. This makes Sept. 23, to quote Lebanese journalist Timour Azhari, the “deadliest day in memory in [the] Lebanon-Israel conflict,” and with Hezbollah launching rockets deeper into Israel, de-escalation is increasingly out of reach.
‘This cannot be the new normal’
For Justin Salhani, a journalist based in Beirut, the psychological impact of the pager attacks on Lebanon’s civilian population cannot be underestimated. People are “already fearful,” Salhani told +972, noting how many Lebanese have remained deeply traumatized since the devastating Beirut port explosion on Aug. 4, 2020.
Four years later, the harrowing scenes in Lebanese hospitals were repeating themselves. At the American University of Beirut’s medical center, one of the country’s largest and most prestigious facilities, it took two days for doctors and nurses to attend to the thousands of injuries from the first pager attack, according to a communications staffer at the hospital who spoke with Salhani. This was before the second wave of injuries from the walkie-talkie attacks.
Salhani and I were talking shortly before the Sept. 20 Israeli airstrike on the Dahiya neighborhood in southern Beirut, the third one this year, which killed Hezbollah’s operations commander Ibrahim Aqil, other senior members of the elite Radwan unit, and several civilians, including three children. Yet the device explosions stand out for their wide-ranging consequences — “not just for Hezbollah,” Salhani noted, but the future of warfare.
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In the words of Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the pager attacks “represent a new development in warfare where communication tools become weapons.” He condemned the tactic as a violation of international law and a possible war crime, affirming that “this cannot be the new normal.”
But given Israel’s history of using warfare to test new military technology and strategy, there is no indication that Türk’s warning will have any impact — and the pager attacks may, like other lethal Israeli innovations, become quickly normalized.
Gaza has long been Israel’s preferred military laboratory, and Israeli start-ups that market “battle-tested” weapons have reaped the benefits. This has turned Gaza into a place where the most morbid world records have been broken — home, for example, to the highest percentage of child amputees, with around 10 children per day losing one or both of their legs to Israeli bombs, according to the UN.
But Lebanon, too, has been a key battleground for Israel to develop its military stratagem. First outlined by IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot during the 2006 war, the infamous Dahiya doctrine endorses “disproportionate” force to “the enemy’s actions and the threat it poses,” and includes specifically targeting civilian infrastructure “to an extent that will demand long and expensive reconstruction processes,” according to a 2009 report by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel.
Anyone affected by Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon instinctively understands the Dahiya doctrine. And after the nearly year-long genocide in Gaza, which has seen the relentless destruction of entire cities, and recent statements from Israeli leaders, Lebanese citizens are firm in conviction that the Israeli military will not hesitate to inflict massive civilian casualties. Last November, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared that “what we can do in Gaza, we can do in Beirut,” while last week, IDF Major General Ori Gordin proposed re-occupying south Lebanon to create a “buffer zone” with Israel.
Add to this the explicitly genocidal rhetoric emanating from Israeli society against the Palestinian people in Gaza, with both traditional and social media consumed by open calls for genocide, as well as by Israelis soldiers themselves in Gaza. To anyone who has experienced Israeli occupation and bombardment in Lebanon, the reports, images, and videos coming out of Gaza feel eerily familiar — and now they fear they will witness the same in their own country.
Hezbollah’s difficult calculus
At the beginning of 2022, I argued in +972 that “Hezbollah couldn’t ask for a better enemy than Israel,” given how Israeli escalatory rhetoric and actions have helped Hezbollah justify the maintenance of its military hegemony in Lebanon. This is only more true today: pointing to Israel’s actions in Gaza, and now increasingly in Lebanon, Hezbollah can tell its supporters that no compromise with the Israeli state is possible, and that without armed resistance, Lebanese civilians will suffer the crimes that begin the moment Israeli troops enter any Arab territory.
As some analysts have pointed out, the Israeli attacks are likely to drive Hezbollah further underground — for some members, quite literally. In August, Hezbollah released a Hebrew-subtitled video, reposted by Israel’s own Foreign Affairs Ministry on YouTube, showing a hidden tunnel in Lebanon wide enough to fit large missile launchers and a convoy of trucks. It is not known how many similar tunnels exist.
Keeping the extent of this underground network a secret is naturally part of Hezbollah’s psychological warfare against Israel. It is a way of reminding the latter that — unlike Hamas and the densely populated Gaza Strip — Hezbollah operates in a much larger territory with no such restrictions, with much greater physical access to its allies in Iran and Syria than Hamas under Israel’s blockade.
Meanwhile, threats by Israeli leaders to apply its “Gaza model” to Lebanon risks pushing some Hezbollah members to employ more irregular warfare tactics, which the Israeli army has historically had difficulty confronting, such as ambushes, hit-and-run attacks, and other cross-border incursions.
This is especially true if Israel attempts another ground invasion of south Lebanon — a territory that Hezbollah has operated from as a guerrilla group since the 1980s, with increasingly sophisticated weapons after each round of fighting, and a more battle-hardened force since their interventions in Syria.
In other ways, however, Hezbollah is in a precarious domestic position. There is no sizable appetite for a war with Israel in a country that is still feeling the effects of one of the world’s worst economic crises, especially since the Beirut port explosion. The group’s decision to support Hamas after October 7 has, for these same reasons, also been highly controversial. It is, as of now, also unclear to what extent Hezbollah can rely on Iran’s direct support if that would bring an all-out war to Tehran’s own doorstep.
But without international pressure to stop the openly exterminationist policies of the Netanyahu government, Hezbollah may be pushed to a point of no return — with unimaginable consequences for the region.
Source: https://www.972mag.com/lebanon-hezbollah-pagers-israel-gaza/
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