The biggest unanswered questions about the Hezbollah pager attack

Over the past two days, the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah has been targeted with an attack as sophisticated and audacious as it is brutal, with the devices in their own pockets turned into deadly weapons. On Tuesday, hundreds of pagers distributed by Hezbollah to its members and associates in Lebanon and Syria exploded, killing at least 12 people, including two children, and injuring nearly 3,000. Then, in a follow-up attack on Wednesday, thousands of two-way radios used by the group exploded, killing nine people and wounding some 300, some of whom had been attending the funerals of those killed in the earlier attack. There have also been reports of solar energy systems exploding in several areas of Lebanon, but few details have been reported about these incidents. Hezbollah quickly blamed Israel for the attack. While the Israeli government has not yet commented — it rarely comments on covert actions abroad — experts and media reports are generally assuming it was responsible. It’s hard to think of another regional actor with the ability and motivation to carry out such an unprecedented operation. The attack has stunned former intelligence operatives with both its scale and sophistication. “This is a hell of an opp,” Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA counterterrorism specialist now with the Atlantic Council, told Vox. “It’s probably the most impressive kinetic intelligence operation I’ve ever seen.” Beyond demonstrating the prowess of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, what’s less clear is what this tells us about Israel’s overall strategic goals, not to mention how Hezbollah will respond or how this will impact the outcome of this conflict or conflicts in the future. Here are a few of the biggest outstanding questions and what we know about the answers. How did they do it? The emerging consensus from experts and media reports is that small amounts of explosive material were placed inside the pagers. Some reports have suggested the explosive was detonated by malware that raised the temperature of the batteries in the pagers, but US officials told the New York Times that the devices were also implanted with switches that detonated the explosive remotely. According to the Times, the pagers received simultaneous messages on Tuesday that appeared to be from Hezbollah’s senior leadership, but instead caused the devices to beep for several seconds and then explode. The pagers were from a shipment of 3,000 that Hezbollah says they ordered from Gold Apollo, a Taiwanese company. But Gold Apollo says they were actually made by BAC Consulting, a company based in Hungary, and that the Taiwanese firm merely licensed its design and trademark. Reporters have so far been unable to contact BAC, and former intelligence officials who spoke with Vox said it’s questionable whether the company even makes pagers. Hezbollah had reportedly switched from using cellphones to old-fashioned pagers several months ago to avoid Israeli surveillance. Communications are generally a point of vulnerability for militant groups. Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Hamas’s top leader, Yahya Sinwar, has abandoned electronics entirely and now relies on a system of human couriers and coded handwritten messages for communication. The attack comes several weeks after the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, reportedly by a bomb that had been planted by Israeli agents in a guesthouse in the Iranian capital months earlier. It also comes several days after a rare raid by Israeli ground forces in Syria that destroyed an alleged underground Iranian missile factory. “What we have seen over the past two months shows that Israel and its intelligence apparatus have completely infiltrated the most sensitive echelons of the entire Axis of Resistance,” said Charles Lister, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, referring to the informal name for Iran’s network of proxy militias throughout the Middle East. It was only a year ago when the reputation of Israel’s intelligence services took a major hit with the failure to anticipate the October 7 attacks, despite abundant signs that Hamas was preparing for a major operation. It’s worth noting that while the operations in Lebanon and Iran were likely carried out by the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, Israeli-occupied Gaza is the responsibility of the Shin Bet, the domestic security service. The Shin Bet official responsible for Southern Israel and Gaza resigned over that failure, as have two senior military intelligence officials. Polymeropoulos said that while October 7 damaged the reputation of Israel’s vaunted spy services, “they have now restored that notion of deterrence based on fear, this notion that Israel has eyes everywhere.” Why did they do it? Emily Harding, a former CIA analyst and director of the Intelligence, National Security, and Technology Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, noted that prior to October 7, Israel had shifted many of its intelligence resources away from Hamas toward Iran and regional proxy groups like Hezbollah. Over the past year, attention has obviously shifted to Gaza, she said, “but at the same time, they’ve clearly decided they’re not going to tolerate an imminent threat on their northern border” with Lebanon. Even as the war in Gaza has raged, Israel and Hezbollah have been exchanging fire over the Israel-Lebanon border, displacing tens of thousands of civilians on both sides. While Israel reportedly backed away from plans to launch a major preemptive strike against Hezbollah in the early days of the war, senior Israeli officials, most notably Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, have repeatedly said that a military assault will be needed to deal with the threat on Israel’s northern border. Earlier this week, Israel’s security cabinet added restoring security to the north as one of its primary war aims. Without referring specifically to the pager and walkie-talkie attacks, Gallant said on Wednesday that a “new phase” of the war with Hezbollah had begun. The question now is whether the attacks were launched as preparation for some major military action, or whether — contradictory as it may seem — this was conceived as a way to de-escalate tensions by putting Hezbollah on its heels, at least for a little while. For the moment, this second possibility looks more likely. Despite Gallant’s declaration, Israel doesn’t appear to be taking advantage of the chaos in Lebanon to launch a military invasion. It’s also possible that the timing of the attack wasn’t intentional at all. The Middle East-focused news site Al-Monitor reported on Tuesday that Israel had intended to wait longer to detonate the devices but was “forced” to move more quickly by reports that some Hezbollah members were starting to think there was something odd about their pagers. How will Hezbollah respond? Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate, saying Israel would receive its “fair punishment for the attacks.” The militia’s leader Hassan Nasrallah says he will give a speech on Thursday to address the “latest developments.” But Hezbollah’s ability to strike back may be limited by the state of chaos it currently finds itself in. “They almost certainly have little to no communication or the infrastructure to be able to coordinate not just an initial round of a retaliation, but whatever would come next,” said Lister. Harding predicted that Hezbollah’s next move is likely to be a “big internal mole hunt to try to figure out where their vulnerabilities are.” After the follow-up explosions on Thursday, “they can’t trust anything that they have right now.” Iran, whose ambassador to Lebanon was among those injured by the blasts — not a huge surprise given the close links between Iran and Hezbollah — has also claimed the right to respond. The question is whether this would go beyond the missile strike it launched in April in response to Israel’s bombing of the Iranian consulate, which killed two senior generals. Though that barrage was unprecedented in scale, most of the missiles were intercepted by Israel’s defenses, with the assistance of several other countries including the US, and the attack caused little damage. Iran President Masoud Pezeshkian also said the US shared responsibility for the attack, given its support for Israel, though Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the US had no advance knowledge of the operation. What does it mean for the future of conflict — and is my phone safe? The Washington Post’s David Ignatius wrote on Wednesday that the attacks mark the start of a “very dangerous era in cyberwarfare” in which “any device that is connected to the internet can potentially be transformed into a weapon.” But some perspective is needed. The devices themselves were not weapons. Hackers have warned in the past that it’s possible to use malware to remotely tamper with or even detonate a device’s battery, but to cause the kind of damage seen this week, you need old-fashioned explosives. As a matter of technology, this isn’t a huge advance over Israel’s killing of Hamas bomb maker Yahya Ayyash using an exploding cellphone in 1996. From a technical point of view, what was impressive was Israel’s apparent ability to “hack” the supply chain and insert explosives into so many devices. There probably aren’t that many situations other than this one where that’s possible. As Axios’s Colin Demarest writes, referring to worries that the US could be vulnerable to such an attack, “the Pentagon is unlikely to buy thousands of C-4-laden pagers for top brass.” Your iPhone is probably safe, too. But this week’s attacks represent something radically new in terms of tactics, if not technology. In international law, “booby traps” are prohibited under many circumstances, and given how many devices were detonated and the fact that civilians, including children, were injured and killed, there are questions about whether the attack met international legal standards. And then there’s the issue of whether other actors — either nation-states or militant groups — might now attempt something similar in the future. Colin Clarke, director of research at the Soufan Group, a think tank focused on counterterrorism, compared the attack to the early use of deadly drone strikes by the US. Once mainly the provenance of the US, killer drones have now spread widely to both state and non-state actors. Wars like the current conflict in the Middle East are “often laboratories of innovation for all sides,” Clarke said. “We’re going to see militant groups developing new tricks and trying to leverage emerging technologies in new ways.” Given the vast number of connected devices now in homes and businesses all over the world, there’s no lack of potential targets. Even if it would be difficult for anyone to pull off another similar attack of this scale, Clarke said it’s the sort of precedent-setting example that “could give bad people good ideas.” Few things spread faster than innovative ways to kill people in war.