The pager attack and its potential consequences

Israel has added a new type of weapon used in modern warfare by blowing up Hezbollah’s field communications devices. The horrific scenes circulating on the Internet are enough in themselves to shock anyone who sees them, including Hezbollah, which is the target of this attack. However, for Hezbollah, the matter does not end at the shock at the victims of the attack in various parts of Lebanon and Syria, whose number has exceeded 3,000 wounded, including 12 dead, not to mention those who have suffered serious injuries that may lead to death in some cases, especially given the many injuries to the face and head.

Perhaps the ultimate shock for Hezbollah – as well as its Iranian backer of course – is the loss of its field communications network, even if temporarily, before securing a safe alternative. The party’s purpose for using pagers was originally to stay away from the cellular network that is easily hacked by Israel or Hezbollah’s other enemies. In the coming days or weeks, the party may be forced to rely on a network of war correspondents to convey instructions between the central command and the groups spread across large areas of Lebanon and Syria. This method lacks the required speed for the current situation, in addition to the ease of targeting the correspondents’ vehicles. Hezbollah has been in a declared state of war with Israel for nearly a year, albeit in what is known as a “low-intensity” war in military terminology. This conflict is likely to turn into a large-scale war, which the Iranian axis is trying to avoid given its high price.

An effective communications network is crucial for waging any war, ever since wars came into existence, not only in modern wars. It is more like the nervous system of an organism, and its destruction leads to the complete paralysis of the targeted force, rendering it unable to continue the war, neither offensively nor in defending itself, regardless of the strength and number of its fighters or the level of its armament.

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One of the proposed explanations of the motives behind the Israeli attack is that it may be the first step ahead of launching a large-scale war on the northern front aimed at destroying as much of Hezbollah’s military capabilities as possible and terrorising its social environment that has been severely damaged since the beginning of the exhaustive war, with tens of thousands of civilians displaced from the south and other areas where the party is deployed. In this hypothetical case, the party is likely to be dealt a major blow, even if it intensifies its missile and drone attacks on northern Israel. It has become known that the extremist Israeli leadership is seeking to involve Iran and Hezbollah in a large-scale war by any means, despite the attempts by the US administration to rein it in.

The pager operation thus achieved many goals for Israel, both offensive and defensive, and is in itself a bitter defeat for Hezbollah and the Iranian axis. This is added to the other qualitative operations such as the assassination of the party’s senior military commander, Fuad Shukr, the assassination of Palestinian political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, the attack on an Iranian site in Syria in the Masyaf area, and the attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus last April, which also killed a number of leaders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

The fragility of the Iranian axis has reached the level that the daily threats issued by Iranian officials to respond to the assassination of Haniyeh in Tehran have not yet turned into a real response, more than a month and a half after the assassination. Meanwhile Hezbollah’s responses have generally not gone beyond the “rules of engagement” that Israel constantly violates, relying on Washington’s constant support.

In light of the repercussions of the pager operation, Hezbollah’s war machine will lose the ability to respond effectively to Israel even within the established limits, which will have significant moral repercussions that will greatly weaken the party politically.

In addition, the operation revealed the locations where Hezbollah fighters are deployed both in Syria and Lebanon, which forms a comprehensive military map of new Israeli targets in both countries. Washington quickly denied any prior knowledge of Israel’s intentions to launch Tuesday’s attack, and it is likely honest in this denial, given the fact that it is directly harmed by Netanyahu’s attempts to expand the scope of the war and drag Iran into it. This is especially since the presidential elections are approaching, and the Biden administration cannot risk facing a large-scale regional war that would force it to get involved alongside Israel, thus directly harming Democratic candidate Kamala Harris’s campaign, but Washington has no objection to weakening Hezbollah’s military capabilities if the matter stops at the pager attack and does not lead to an expansion of the war, as weakening the party is a joint Israeli-American goal.

It is likely, then, that under these conditions, Hezbollah will not be able to carry out a qualitative response equivalent to the pager operation, at least in the near future, and that Washington will continue to pressure Israel to stop its provocations of the Iranian axis.

This article first appeared in Arabic in Al-Quds Al-Arabi on 18 September 2024

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