From Stuxnet to Gospel to pager bombs, Israel is leading the weaponisation of the digital world

Thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies exploded across Lebanon this week as part of a suspected attack by Israel. AP

A series of pager explosions across Lebanon, and secondary attacks on walkie-talkies the following day, have killed and maimed a number of Hezbollah operatives, as well as many civilians, including children. The attacks have also injured thousands, including Iran’s ambassador to Beirut.

Israel normally does not claim responsibility for attacks on foreign soil – and it did not do so in this case either – but Defence Minister Yoav Gallant gave strong indications in a speech on Wednesday of Mossad’s role in the sabotage.

Mr Gallant also said that Israel, which has been battling Hamas in Gaza for almost a year, was opening a new phase in the war. “The centre of gravity is shifting northward, meaning that we are increasingly diverting forces, resources and energy towards the north,” he added.

The Lebanon attacks demonstrate Israel’s ability to strike from a distance, establishing a form of deterrence, while claiming plausible deniability, and avoiding a US rebuke at a time when Washington is pressuring Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to strike Hezbollah. Nevertheless, the Lebanese group does have the ability to weaponise the digital, raising the possibility of violent non-state actors retaliating against their adversaries and taking digital warfare into the realm of AI across the Middle East.

Notwithstanding the vague allusions to the attacks over the past couple of days, historical precedent does demonstrate that weaponising communications is a modus operandi of the Israeli state.

In 1972, in retaliation for the killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, Mossad operatives detonated an explosive in the phone of the Palestinian official Mahmoud Hamshari in his Paris apartment. While that telephone was an analogue device, the digital revolution made long-distance assassinations easier for Israel. Another telephone was weaponised in 1996, when Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, targeted the Hamas bombmaker Yahya Ayyash’s Motorola Alpha mobile phone. Working with a Palestinian collaborator, Shin Bet placed 50 grams of explosives in the device, enough to kill him when he held the phone to his ear.

The recent deaths in Lebanon are the epitome of the postmodern, a product of the digital culture of the easy-edit, a time when science and technology allow us to change and manipulate information easily through code, making distances relatively obsolete.

The book Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital Weaponrefers to Israel’s ability to destroy parts of Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility in 2010 with a malicious digital code known as Stuxnet. This code, sneaked into a USB drive, caused nuclear centrifuges to accelerate to the point that they destroyed themselves.

In 1981, by contrast, Israeli F-15 and F-16 aircraft had to fly long distances, refuel in mid-air and drop bombs on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear facility to destroy it, with some even missing their target. Israeli pilots risked being shot down or even crashing, which almost happened when the planes narrowly missed telephone wires on the way to their target outside Baghdad.

Stuxnet did not put any Israeli operatives at risk when they sought to target Iran’s nuclear facility. The code, unlike a conventional bomb, could be easily edited, put onto a USB drive, travel a far distance, achieve its objective, and give Israeli deniability.

Notwithstanding the technological sophistication and difficulty to tamper with thousands of communications devices, Israel over the past two days was able to strike targets all over Lebanon, even in neighbouring Syria, with relative ease, in that none of its operatives had to be present to target individuals. It was assassination by remote control.

Establishing deterrence is based on signalling and demonstrating the ability to inflict hurt on an adversary. While the death toll is relatively low, Israel has been able to warn Hezbollah that its members are not safe anywhere in their country, without having to violate the sovereignty of Lebanon.

Tragically, it has also had another effect, in that it has disrupted the civilians’ ontological security, meaning the mental state derived from a sense of order and continuity, even banality of everyday life. Even medical workers in the country use pagers due to electrical outages, and every citizen is bound to be left wondering if their mobile phone has been weaponised.

Deterrence cannot be measured, however, and instead of Israel having deterred Hezbollah, the group will be under pressure to save face by striking back. Israel should have learnt a lesson from when it introduced drone technology to the region in the 1970s, which only led to its proliferation among its adversaries, including the Houthis, who struck Israel directly with a long-distance drone in July.

Israel was the first to use drones in the Middle East in 1973 and had a monopoly on them in the region. But as Rami Khouri, the American University of Beirut professor, once told Peter W Singer, the world’s foremost expert on drones: “The response to drones is to get your own drones. They are just tools of war. Every tool generates a counterreaction.” Indeed, by 2024, Hezbollah released videos of its drones having violated Israel’s sovereignty, having reached the city of Haifa.

While it is uncertain if AI-enabled drones have ever been used, Israel did use an AI programme named Gospel to generate targets for its military campaign in Gaza.

With the digital domain having been weaponised, Hezbollah will feel the need to retaliate. The retaliation, however, is unlikely to be a brute rocket or missile strike that Israel can intercept. The group might play the long game of scoring its own digital victory, perhaps pursuing its own weaponisation of AI to achieve this goal.