Targeted or not?
This morning’s news about Israel’s pager attack against Hezbollah in Lebanon is at once fascinating and appalling. Let’s get the basic outlines out of the way (CNN):
Hezbollah has vowed to respond to an Israeli attack that killed multiple people and injured thousands across Lebanon on Tuesday when pagers belonging to members of the Iran-backed militant group exploded almost simultaneously, exposing a massive security breach and demonstrating the scale of Israeli intelligence.
A child was among at least nine killed in the blasts, which wounded about 2,800 people, Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad said. At least 170 people are in a critical condition, he said, though the nature of the other injuries is unclear.
Two children died, say updated reports: an 8-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy. The death toll is now reported at 12, with several wounded in Syria and over 200 listed in critical condition, per Al Jazeera.
On the technical side, it is a coup for Israeli intelligence. Somehow, the service uncovered news that Hezbollah meant to purchase, thousands of pagers for its members. Israel secretly intercepted the devices at some point in the manufacturing process, slipped small amounts of powerful explosive charges into the devices, and remote-triggered them about 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, producing the chaos and injury mentioned above. The sophistication of the attack is mind-boggling.
“Tuesday was like something out of a bizarre James Bond movie,” writes The Washington Post’s David Ignatius. At once ingenious and diabolical.
How is this not terrorism?
The point of the attack itself is elusive (The New York Times):
“This is an amazing tactical event,” said Miri Eisin, a fellow at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism, an Israel-based research organization.
“But not a single Hezbollah fighter is going to move because of this,” said Ms. Eisin, a former senior intelligence officer. “Having amazing capabilities does not make a strategy.”
Israelis are divided about whether the attack was born from short-term opportunism or long-term forethought. Some believe that Israeli commanders feared that their Hezbollah counterparts had recently discovered Israel’s ability to sabotage the pagers, prompting Israeli commanders to immediately blow them up or risk losing the capability forever.
Others say that Israel had a specific strategic intent. Israel may have hoped that the attack’s brazenness and sophistication would ultimately make Hezbollah more amenable to a cease-fire in the coming weeks, if not immediately.
But that sounds like rank rationalization. The attack likely throws sand in the gears of any ceasefire efforts with Hamas in Gaza (already at an impasse) and the release of Israeli hostages. From embattled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s perspective, perhaps that is the point. Freeing the hostages frees Israelis to rid themselves of Netanyahu.
Except such an operation and its timing may have little connection to Netanyahu. In fact, one hand in may not know what the other is doing:
More generally, the attack also highlighted the dissonance between the discipline of Israel’s intelligence agencies, which have the ability to plan operations months or even years ahead, and the messy short-term thinking of Israel’s political leadership.
The attack followed days of reports in the Israeli press about an intention by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to fire his defense minister, even as [defense minister Yoav ] Gallant was overseeing the planned operation in Lebanon.
Hezbollah will surely retaliate, but must wonder what else Israel has up its sleeve.
European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell (via Al Jazeera):
“Even if the attacks seem to have been targeted, they had heavy, indiscriminate collateral damages among civilians, including children among the victims,” Josep Borrell said.
“I consider this situation extremely worrying. I can only condemn these attacks that endanger the security and stability of Lebanon, and increase the risk of escalation in the region,” he added.
He said that the European Union wants to avert an all-out war because it would have “heavy consequences for the entire region and beyond”.
I’m left shaking my head. How is this not terrorism from one of the United States’ strongest allies?
Update: If a violent Islamist faction did this, there would be no question what we’d call it.