How Israel blew up pagers and radios in Lebanon

Hey everybody. Peter Zion here coming to you from Colorado today. I’m recording this on the 18th yesterday, the 17th of September, we had several 1000 pagers explode in Lebanon, injuring at least 2800 killing at least 12. This was undoubtedly an Israeli operation. I mean, the Israelis aren’t saying anything about it, but no one else would, and no one else would, and no one else has a vested interest in doing this. The target was Hezbollah, which is a militant slash political organization in Lebanon that the Israelis have kind of been dicking around with over the last several months and vice versa. Okay, so what’s going on? Number one, Hezbollah is not new. It’s been around for decades. Israel’s not new. It’s been around for decades, and basically since Hezbollah’s formulation, 40, 5060, it’s been a while years ago. They have always been spatting. Things have evolved over the last 15 years in a more peaceful direction. The two haven’t come to direct blows since a brief air war in the oughts. And the reason is very simple. Hezbollah is not a normal terror organization. They also have a political wing that is part of the government and Lebanon. So there’s a whole class of people in Hezbollah who don’t see a vested interest in firing rockets into northern Israel, because they now are part of the power structures. And if you challenge Israel in a way that Israel feels that the tanks need to move, there’s nobody in the neighborhood who can stand up to them. So you get this kind of hybridized organization where there’s a militant wing and there’s a political wing. I’m not suggesting any of them are nice people, but not everybody wants to have a war. In fact, even on the militant side, in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks of last year, Hezbollah knows that they are very fortunate that Israel has its hands full with basically a suppression operation in Gaza. The danger, of course, here is that everybody in the Middle East always wants the goddamn last word, so both of them have been doing attacks on each other, the same with the Iranians in order to get the last word. But since no one will let anyone else have last word, we keep having these layered attacks that go up and then go down, go up and go down, go up and go down, I have no reason to believe that this is any different. I don’t think it’s going to lead to a general war, but Hezbollah will feel like it has to respond, and then Israel will feel like it has to respond, which will make Hezbollah feel like it has I mean, welcome to the Middle East. This is just what the place looks like on a good day. And this does not change my assessment that the Middle East is still the calmest part of the world, and has been for a little over two years now. Okay, put that aside. What about this attack? Specifically? Well, a few things. First of all, this is clearly against international law. Using a civilian network, the telephone network, to trigger civilian devices, pagers in civilian areas. Lebanon is clearly not legal, but because Hezbollah has that militant wing and they’ve been launching missiles and rockets into Israel, I really don’t see anyone who matters bringing a court case against the Israelis for this one. So that’s kind of like the minor side show issue far more important, this was a pretty sophisticated attack. I mean, the Israelis have had a lot of Intel failures over the last few years. They completely missed the Gaza operation. They’re botching their counter attacks into Gaza now. This should have been done months ago, and they’re making no appreciable progress. They’re having to go back over areas that they’ve cleared over and over and over again. And this has the makings of a quagmire operation for them. And so in order to do this sort of tech, let me kind of lay out what’s going on here. So these painters were manufactured in Taiwan. They were shipped to Hungary, where Hungarian company distribution system, and somewhere between Taiwan and Hungary and these things being delivered to Hezbollah, the Israelis got a hold of the shipments at some point in the supply chain. It implanted explosives in all of them. Probably what they did was swap out the batteries and replace them with a hyper battery explosive system. There’s no way you can basically remotely hack a pager and turn into a bomb. Sorry, no. I mean, most would get really hot then you set it down. So the sophistication to do that without anyone noticing. Getting into 1000s of people’s hands is kind of impressive. There’s also the operational aspect. The reason Hezbollah uses pagers because cell phones can be easily tracked if you know what to do. Pagers only send a signal when they’re on and you know, it’s just a much simpler technology, but makes it much safer if you’re going to do something that you think might invite the Israelis to drop a bomb on your head. Well, the Israelis have now hit a couple 1000 people who were part of the Hezbollah supply chain distribution system. I mean, it’s not like everyone who has a pager it Lebanon got hit, just the people who had gotten a pager from Hezbollah, the vast majority, if not all of them who were affiliated with the organization in an operative way. So the next step here is that the Israelis undoubtedly had observers in the hospitals across Lebanon, and now have either confirmed or identified hundreds, if not 1000s of. Of Hezbollah agents and operatives, and you want to talk about a rich Intel Trove. It doesn’t get much better than that, not to mention that a lot of these guys are gonna have holes in their thighs and are gonna be really easy to identify after they heal, because they’re gonna be limping for the rest of their life. So, you know, gotta give credit where it’s due. That was a brilliant operation. And then finally, it raises the question of, what else all the Israelis been up to? I mean, after those Intel failures, there was an open question as to whether or not Israel lost its mojo. Clearly, at least some people within their intelligence services have not. And if you can interrupt a supply chain that that’s that interesting for pagers, what else can you do? Because, you know, manufactured goods in Lebanon, they don’t make anything. Everything is important. So that’s an opportunity for the Israelis to reach out and tackle anything that Hezbollah might have. An independent supply system for today, on the 18th we found basically a second wave walkie talkies, something else that is hard to hack, that exploded, that probably injured another 300 people, and again, now you’ve got a bunch of Hezbollah folks walking around missing fingers. So the Israelis are not done here, and Hezbollah will react here, but we have seen a level of sophistication in Israel today and yesterday that we just haven’t seen in the last few years whether they’re doing this, because they have some broader plans. Who knows whether they’re doing this? Just simply because this is the most recent in the tit for tat. I don’t have an answer for you on that, but what I can tell you is, operationally, Hezbollah has now been marked, and a more traditional assassination campaign now would be so much easier than it was just three days ago