Lebanon pager explosions show Hezbollah is leaking like a sieve

Israel’s apparent ability to booby-trap the pagers of thousands of Hezbollah militants will have greatly increased the anxiety levels in the group’s ranks.

For months, the Israelis have engaged in targeted assassinations against Hezbollah members, suggesting they have penetrated the group. This led Hezbollah’s secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, to ask members to avoid using cell phones, which Israel monitored. The use of pagers was seen as a way around this vulnerability. After the operation on Tuesday, however, Hezbollah can have little faith in its communications network.

To understand what the network means to Hezbollah, we need to go back to May 2008. At the time, Lebanon was divided between the March 14 coalition of parties and the Hezbollah-led March 8 coalition. The government, headed by Fouad Siniora, had made the decision to investigate Hezbollah’s independent communications network, which the group saw as essential for the security of its communications, but which the March 14 groups viewed as an instrument to target them, away from the prying eyes of the state.

Within days, Hezbollah had mounted a military takeover of western Beirut, and tried to move on the mountain retreat of the Druze leader Walid Joumblatt, who had pushed for the government decision. This mini conflict was the closest thing Lebanon had come to reviving the civil war of 1975-1990. Hezbollah’s willingness to resort to such violence to protect its network only shows the impact of Israel’s ability to interrupt that network today.

In the fighting between Hezbollah and Israel since the October 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas, it has been a key principle of Hezbollah that it maintain a parity in deterrence with the Israelis. Yet this has become steadily more difficult to achieve, as the Israelis time and again have transgressed the previous rules of engagement between the two sides.

The Israelis realise Hezbollah is fighting with one hand behind its back. The group does not want to provoke an all-out war with Israel that devastates Lebanon and produces an angry backlash from the country’s other sectarian communities, and even from the Shiite population.

In light of this, the Israelis have had the latitude to expand their strikes against Hezbollah members, including senior military officials in the group, notably killing the military commander Fouad Shukr in July. In the deterrence game, Hezbollah is being outpaced, which leads to two questions for the immediate future.

The first, and most immediate question, is how Hezbollah will retaliate against the attacks of Tuesday. It will not be enough to fire rockets or launch drones at Israeli targets. On the contrary, the technical sophistication of Israel’s operation has to be met with a response of the same calibre, while anything less will only highlight the disparity between the sides. That is why Hezbollah is more likely to take its time, absorb the blow, discover how Israel penetrated its supply network for pagers, and carefully prepare a devastating punishment.

There may also be a second concern in the party. Iran and Hezbollah certainly have long suspected that Israel’s provocative attacks against them were designed to elicit a potent counterreaction on their part, which would compel the US to intervene on Israel’s behalf. Drawing the US into a war with Iran has long been an aim of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Therefore, both Iran and Hezbollah have taken this into consideration when planning their retaliation against Israel.

The second, and broader, question is what does the Israeli operation tell us about the “unity of the arenas” strategy that Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and their allies formulated last year? The strategy sought to create co-ordination between the parties of the so-called Axis of Resistance led by Iran, so that if Israel attacked one of them, the others would enter the fray against Israel on behalf of their partners.

The limitations of the strategy have been shown through Hezbollah’s assiduous avoidance of a major escalation in Lebanon. But the Israelis have taken this a step further through their operation this week, showing that they have a panoply of potential actions that leaves the Axis of Resistance groups at a significant disadvantage.

However, Israeli technical superiority, even if it is obvious, does not mean the Israelis would welcome an all-out war with Hezbollah. If their forces were to enter Lebanon, this would play to Hezbollah’s advantages, while the group could adapt its communications channels to ensure greater secrecy.

Which poses the question of why the Israelis revealed their advantage this week by detonating the pagers. If they were able to infiltrate Hezbollah so deeply, why give this away by provoking explosions that would have been much more effective had they been carried out in the midst of a battle with Israel? Some reports have suggested that Hezbollah had suspicions about the pagers, forcing the Israelis to act quickly.

Perhaps. However, the reality is that Hezbollah appears to be leaking like a sieve, and unless it can discover who is passing on its vital information to the Israelis, we will see more damaging blows like the ones this week.

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