The Lebanese militia Hezbollah, Iran’s main tentacle in the Middle East, has blamed Israel for the thousands of simultaneous explosions of pagers – a common means of communication among its members – recorded in Lebanon and Syria, and the impulse for revenge has led them to promise that they will retaliate against their alleged perpetrators: “They will receive their just punishment.”
What is certain about the operation is, at present, its result: at least nine dead, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health, and nearly 3,000 wounded with injuries of all kinds – amputations, burns, punctures. Two hundred of them remain in critical condition. Hezbollah rushed to deny that the leader of the militia, Hassan Nasrallahwas on the list. However, the one that appears in the register is Mojtaba Amani. That is, the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon.
What is not known about the operation is its author. All roads lead to Tel Aviv, but Israel remains silent, as it did after the assassination of the Hamas political leader, Ismail Haniyahin a residence provided by the ayatollahs’ regime in Tehran. Discretion is a well-known attribute of the Israelis. But, here again, the most educated recognize traces of the Mossad in the explosive detectors: they recall, they say, the telephone traps of the 1990s.
The chain of explosions began yesterday afternoon. Beirut hospitals are experiencing a strain forgotten since the 2020 pandemic. As night fell, explains his colleague Miguel Flores, ambulances continued to enter and leave the hospitals. The method used to cause such particular and massive damage was apparently the manipulation of these small devices in such a way that, if they overheated remotely, they would explode in the pocket, hands or ears of their owners.
Some media outlets, such as Sky News Arabia, go further: they speculate that only an injection of pentaerythritol tetranitrate into their lithium batteries explains such destructive detonations.
The most pressing question for the Iranians and their Lebanese allies is, in reality, how this was possible: how the Israeli enemy, if it was the Israeli enemy, gained access to the devices that support their communications – presumably classified – to manipulate them at any time. will do so before reaching its thousands of final recipients. Hezbollah’s deadly security failure coincides, to the dismay of the Iranians, with other compromising episodes, such as the aforementioned death of Haniyah, the suspicious fatal accident of the president Ebrahim Raisi or the entry of Israeli drones into the kitchen of the Isfahan nuclear power plant.
A new goal
This fatal failure coincides, in turn, with a reality allied to the most widespread theory: according to which it was the Israelis who conceived and executed the operation.
“7-O started in Beirut, so the operation in Gaza will end in Beirut,” he warns. Alberto PriegoDoctor of International Relations from Comillas University, to this newspaper. The professor talks about the meetings organized in the capital of Lebanon by the Iranians with their powers of attorney — Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis — to attack Israel. The result was the October 7 terrorist attack, which left more than 1,200 dead, 255 kidnapped, some injured and hundreds raped. The response ordered by Benjamin Netanyahu It was fierce, with thousands of Palestinians dead in Gaza, with hunger, with polio, with more than a million displaced.
In recent weeks, the Israeli press has reported a change in the prime minister’s war priorities.
Yesterday, before the chain of explosions, the prime minister announced that his new “goal” was for the 600,000 Israelis displaced from the north of the country, far from Hezbollah’s fire from southern Lebanon, to return home. Many analysts understood the message: the security of the residents of this region is guaranteed only if the enemy disappears from the neighborhood. And this condition, Netanyahu believes, is possible only if the Israelis succeed in an incursion into their territory.
American diplomacy has been dissuading its Israeli allies from this idea for months. The envoy Amos HochsteinWithout going any further, he told the Israeli minister last Monday: Yoav GallantDefense chief, that all-out war with Hezbollah would not bring the 600,000 compatriots home. On the contrary, he believes, it would make things more difficult for them. The newspaper Haaretz He maintains that Gallant is of the same opinion, he prefers to avoid crossing that border, so Netanyahu has already accepted his replacement: Gideon Sa’arleader of the opposition party Nueva Esperanza, with whose support he would also strengthen his parliamentary weight.
