Very few screenwriters could imagine something like what just happened in Lebanon (and Syria): attacks that injured thousands of fighters from the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah, in addition to a dozen others killed, following the explosions on Tuesday of the pagers they used to receive orders and instructions and walkie-talkies on Wednesday. This is not a movie, but a new demonstration of Israel’s impressive technological capacity to defeat its enemies wherever and whenever it wishes.
In this case, and while there are still many clues to unravel, everything seems to indicate that Tel Aviv was not only able to know about Hezbollah’s plans to acquire these devices, but also to physically manipulate them at some point in the supply chain, inserting an explosive inside, and detonating them simultaneously. All of this, seen from the perspective of the ranks commanded by Hasan Nasrallah, represents an extreme vulnerability that affects both their morale and their operational capacity. If the Lebanese militia resorted to less sophisticated pagers or its own telephone lines, it was precisely in an attempt to prevent Israel from being able to trace their conversations via cell phones. But, as has now become dramatically clear, this did not even manage to escape Israeli eyes and ears.
In the military field, this forces Hezbollah to rethink its action protocols and modify its internal networks and communication systems. A task that will not only generate considerable operational problems during the process, precisely in the midst of a violent confrontation against the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), but will also offer its enemy the opportunity to take further advantage of this moment of weakness to redouble its efforts. its attack.
In the context of a clash on both sides of the common border that already foreshadowed a real escalation, it is even possible to imagine that these attacks were anticipated from the initial plans, for fear that the manipulation would be discovered. In military terms, the coup would have had more significance as a complement to the launch of a ground invasion, seeking to neutralize thousands of fighters of the Party of God at the very moment when they should have been active in responding to said invasion.
In any case, what is most worrying is what might follow. On the Hezbollah side, it can be taken for granted that there will be a response. This has been confirmed with each new chapter of a confrontation that dates back to the summer of 2006, when the IDF failed to eliminate the militias despite its insistence on an all-out war. Since then, a new confrontation has been brewing that, like what has been happening in Gaza since last October, has increased tensions with a daily exchange of rocket and missile fire by the Lebanese militias – forcing some 80,000 Israelis to flee their homes in the area near the common border – and air and artillery attacks by the IDF that have caused the evacuation of some 110,000 Lebanese from the south of the country.
What has happened in recent months suggests very clearly that Hezbollah does not want a full-scale frontal confrontation, aware of its clear inferiority compared to an enemy that has guaranteed control of the airspace and that has a superiority of forces that is impossible to eliminate…with their limited means. On the one hand, and as one of the pawns that Iran uses in the region to defend its interests, it is involved in supporting the cause defended by Hamas; but, on the other hand, it is trying to calibrate its blows so as not to be drawn into a total confrontation that could result in an unbearable punishment.
On the contrary, the government led by Benjamin Netanyahu has for some time been promoting a dynamic of brute force that helps figures like Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich try to materialize their dream of a Jewish state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean; and Netanyahu himself as a strategy to stay in power and thus avoid prosecution in the three legal cases that could land him in prison.
Netanyahu, in his desire to prolong and widen the conflict with his neighbors, has just added to his war objectives the return to their homes of Israelis evacuated from the north of the country. An objective that implies “to clean up” southern Lebanon from the presence of Hezbollah fighters and sympathizers. A goal that cannot be achieved without a forceful entry into the country, using not only special operations units, but also armored and mechanized units in the line.
An objective, in short, which could well lead the region into an escalation from which, in the long term, no one will be able to emerge victorious.
