Australia / Israel Review

At 2:36 am on September 17, the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office sent out a statement saying that the security cabinet had updated the objectives of the current war to include “returning the residents of the North securely to their homes.”

The brief statement concluded: “Israel will continue to act to implement this objective.”

Fourteen hours later, thousands of wireless pagers exploded across Lebanon and even in Damascus in the pockets and bags carried by members of Hezbollah, reportedly wounding nearly 3,000, killing at least 11, and delivering a substantial physical and morale blow to the terrorist organisation.

Coincidence? Probably not.

Israel has not taken responsibility for the attack, which is the stuff of which action movies are made, yet Lebanon, Hezbollah, and others are pointing their fingers squarely at the Jewish state. 

If indeed Israel was behind the innovative attack, and even before it becomes clear whether this is a prelude to a much wider Israeli military action, this sowed chaos inside Hezbollah, neutralised hundreds of its fighters for at least several days, if not longer, and created disarray regarding the organisation’s ability to communicate. It demonstrates several factors:

First, the security cabinet updating the war’s aims was not without significance.

Israel did not need to declare that returning the 60,000 displaced Israelis to their homes was a war aim to go after Hezbollah members carrying pagers via those pagers, but that declaration does put the attack into a certain context – what was for the last 11 months is not what will be.

After nearly a year of tit-for-tat exchanges with Hezbollah – during which Israel has had the upper hand, killing more Hezbollah fighters and inflicting far greater damage on its strategic and military sites than it did on Israel – this action signals that Israel is taking off the gloves and escalating to a new level of operation.

The public’s patience with the status quo in the north has run out, and the Government understands this – one of the reasons why it updated the aims of the war. This action, so soon after the war aims were updated, sends a message to Hezbollah that the Government is serious about taking more aggressive steps to return its citizens home.

That message is not only for Hezbollah but also for the international community, first and foremost to the US – get Hezbollah to stand down, meaning to move significantly north of the border with Israel and cease firing missiles and drones, or Israel will indeed take the steps it has been threatening to take for months.

Second, this action shows awesome, jaw-dropping capabilities that will be seen throughout the region.

Rigging pagers so that they explode in the hands of thousands of Hezbollah fighters and operatives simultaneously from Beirut to Damascus is obviously something not done overnight.

This shows that whoever was responsible for this had been planning it for a long time. The message in that is also clear: even though Hezbollah may be expecting an Israeli attack, it has little idea of what form it will take.

An early warning?

Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said months ago that Israel has new capabilities that will surprise Hezbollah and Israel’s other enemies. This comment was lost among endless other “we-will-send-Lebanon-back-to-the-stone-age” threats he has issued since Hezbollah began attacking Israel on Oct. 8.

Yet this attack, if carried out by Israel, shows that Gallant’s words about surprises were not empty.

The level of pre-planning involved is also significant. Given that this war of attrition has dragged on for months and the Government has now declared its readiness to go to war to change the situation in the north, Israel has lost the element of surprise in any conventional attack on Hezbollah.

In other words, if the Israeli Air Force were to strike Beirut tomorrow or tanks rolled into southern Lebanon, it would neither be surprising nor pre-emptive. The enemy is expecting something.

The pager explosions, however, show that there are other, non-conventional ways to surprise the enemy and gain a tactical advantage. And this leads to the third lesson: the next war is never fought like the previous one.

Following the security cabinet’s declaration, the mind immediately went to tanks moving into Lebanon like they did during the First Lebanon War in 1982, or planes bombing Hezbollah’s Dahiyeh stronghold in Beirut as they did in the Second Lebanon War in 2006. And all that still might materialise if a full-blown Third Lebanon War now erupts. But those are both elements of yesterday’s war.

The pager operation shows that the next war with Hezbollah will be fought differently and in an innovative and creative way: two traits with which Israel has been amply blessed.

Herb Keinon is a senior contributing editor and analyst for the Jerusalem Post, writing extensively on diplomacy, politics and Israeli society. © Jerusalem Post (jpost.com), reprinted by permission, all rights reserved.