At 2:36 am on Tuesday, the Prime Minister’s Office sent out a statement saying that the security cabinet 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, hundreds of wireless pagers exploded across Lebanon and even in Damascus in the pockets and bags carried by members of Hezbollah, wounding more than 2,800 and delivering a substantial physical and morale blow to the terrorist organization.
Coincidence? Probably not.
As of Tuesday evening, 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 Israel.
If indeed Israel was behind the innovative attack, and even before it becomes clear whether this is a prelude to a much bigger Israeli military action – this sowed chaos inside Hezbollah, neutralized hundreds of their fighters for at least several days if not longer, and created disarray regarding the organization’s ability to communicate – it does demonstrate 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 men 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 their strategic and military sites than they 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 – and this action, so soon after the war aims were updated, sends a message to Hezbollah that the government is serious about 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 hundreds 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, they have little idea of what form it will take.
An early warning?
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said months ago that Israel has new capabilities that will surprise Hezbollah and Israel’s 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 October 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 IAF were to strike Beirut tomorrow or tanks rolled into southern Lebanon, it would neither be surprising nor preemptive. The enemy is expecting something.
Tuesday’s pager explosions, however, show that there are other, non-conventional ways to surprise the enemy and gain a tactical advantage. And this leads to a third lesson: the next war is never fought like the previous one.
Following the security cabinet’s declaration Tuesday night, 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 materialize if a full-blown Third Lebanon War now erupts. But those are both elements of yesterday’s war.
Monday’s action 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.
