Paging Hezbollah – Includes Alastair Crooke and Col Jacques Baud interviews ( Judging Freedom and Dialogue Works)
Wed 8:20 am +01:00, 18 Sep 2024 Published: 2024-09-18 At 15:30 local time in Lebanon in Tuesday 2024-09-17 Mossad’s operations wing exploded thousands of pagers which had recently been acquired by Hezbollah. Injuries amounted to over three thousand, more then 200 serious, with at least eleven deaths. The explosive attack was not simultaneous, but in waves. One victim of the terrorist attack was a son of Lebanese member of Parliament, Ali Ammar. His response to his family’s tragedy was indicative of Lebanese attitudes to the genocidal Zionists: “We will deal with the enemy in the language it understands”. On the same day, Israel added to its formal war goals the return of citizens to their former homes near the border with Lebanon on land stolen from Syria in the 1967 “6 Day War”. This shift in explicit aims for their current war against the occupied Palestinaians occurred as Netanyahu attempted to replace Israel’s civilian military leader Gallant who has, like US military leadership, warned against the folly of invading southern Lebanon. Israel has neither claimed responsibility nor denied its running of the terrorist attack on Hezbollah and Lebanese civilians, as is standard for covert operations. The settler colonial, genocidal, Zionist state has a history of using communications devices for attacks dating back to 1996. An Israel official of Netanyahu’s regime issued a tweet implying responsibility for the attack, which has since been deleted. This article assumes that Israel’s external military intelligence and operations group was responsible for the attack on Hezbollah and civilians who happened to be near them when Mossad exploded the pagers. Pagers The operation looks like a supply-side attack based on a recent Hezbollah decision to issue pagers to some of its members. The design of the old pager communication system provides some security properties which mobile phones lack; their location cannot be triangulated by cellphone towers. The protocol and hardware implementation uses the radio and TV type broadcast model, which is to say that a pager communicates with one broadcast station at once, preventing triangulation. One can merely know that the receiving device is in range of the broadcast point rather than the far more precise location which can be obtained by triangulating the multiple cell tower connections which mobile phones maintain when possible. The new pagers used two AAA batteries or a lithium ion battery, depending on the model. The explosions captured on video and documented by the injuries received indicate that explosives were inserted into the new pagers. This opinion is supported by Lukasz Olejnik, an independent consultant and visiting senior research fellow at King’s College London’s Department of War Studies. Pagers are a major communications technology, often used in hospitals, a perfect location for them. In the case of a hospital running a pager service, the broadcast mechanism in the hospital allows the short message service to operate there and to not intrude on medical staff when away from the hospital. The physical separation of communications services, by pager or mobile phone, allows the health professionals to instantly know the origin of a message and thus to allocate increased attention to the pager messages. Mossad needed to install the explosives on pagers which were to be given to Hezbollah members and not the general public which would likely have included medical staff. This partially limited the deaths and injuries caused by of the explosions to Hezbollah and those nearby. By executing it, Mossad have declared to Hezbollah the level of penetration they have into the personnel of the military wing of Hezbollah because of the selection component of the interdiction component of the operation. The attack occurred while Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, awaiting ICC (International Criminal Court) charges on war crimes and leading the state being prosecuted at the ICJ (UN International Court of Justice) for genocide, is replacing his Defence Minister Gallant. One of the reasons for Gallant’s hesitation is that US military leadership have warned him that they agree that escalating of the conflict with Lebanon into a full ground war is highly dangerous. As with the idiotic Ukrainian invasion of Russia, the obvious question is: And then what? CENTCOM commander Kurilla has visited Tel Aviv repeatedly in the last fortnight likely informing Israel of the US military’s reluctance to be involved in a ground war with Hezbollah in Lebanon. The recent hypersonic missile attack close to Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv by Yemen’s Ansar Allah will have further raised the concerns of all professional military leaders in both Tel Aviv and Washington. US ships, including aircraft carriers, are sitting ducks vulnerable to attack by hypersonic missiles. Israel’s denial of the hypersonic nature of the projectile relies on people not being able to divide numbers:
Ansar Allah’s demonstrated possession of hypersonic missiles is a proliferation of the technology beyond Russia, Iran and China (and not the West). Each has its own political agenda and cultural background which influence its decisions. This complicates political and military action to avoid an escalation ramp which leads to US humiliation and a potential end of the Zionist, Jewish-apartheid state. The pager attack on Hezbollah can be partially viewed as a retribution for the hypersonic missile attack. This seems insufficient to explain it. Cost-Benefit Analysis The benefits to Mossad’s leadership, theoretically the Israeli regime, from exploding its Hezbollah interdicted pagers are very limited in casualties. It has further terrorized the Lebanese population, if that is even possible, especially in southern Lebanon, where they live under the buzz of drones and explosions of incoming missile and drone attack daily. The core benefit is a temporary period of but significant damage to Hezbollah’s communications capabilities. Hezbollah will run an internal security assessment. That will generate suspicions and cause internal distrust until the exact nature of the operation is understood by them. They will almost certainly add computer electronics experts to their ranks if they don’t have them, and insure that future supplies are audited for booby traps. Whoever was responsible for this, if there was such a role, is very likely to be the main target of their internal investigation to enumerate his or her network and identify Mossad connections. That the attack was possible reveals a serious failure of Hezbollah’s internal security service. The cost to Mossad is that the operation cannot be repeated. The opportunity is lost now and most likely into the future too. It is also likely to lose assets within Hezbollah. From the above, the most significant benefit for the cost is the temporary degradation of Hezbollah’s internal messaging. This would hint that the proposed dangerous attack on Hezbollah by Israel’s military is likely to happen very soon. There is an additional “window of opportunity” problem for the Zionists. They need air cover for their proposed war in Lebanon and the seasons are changing. Alastair Crooke noted that their airforce are unlikely to wish to fly a fortnight hence. Adding to their conundrum, apart from the recent Ansar Allah launched hypersonic missile attack, is that the US carrier Theodore Roosevelt left a few days ago for the South China Sea or other areas in the Pacific taking its fleet with it. This leaves one US carrier group in the area.
or support this work via Buy Me A Coffee or Patreon. Sources More sources will be added as further details and ramifications appear Lebanon: Nine Killed, 2,800 Wounded By Israeli Sabotage Attack That Exploded Hezbollah Pagers, Dave DeCamp, Antiwar, 2024-09-17 The Mystery of Hezbollah’s Deadly Exploding Pagers, Lily Hay Newman & Matt Burgess, Wired, 2024-09-17 [https://www.wired.com/story/pager-explosion-hezbollah/] Pagers, Chris Woodford, Explain That Stuff, 2022-10-04 Phones as weapons Slaying Blended Technology and Guile, Joel Greenberg, New York Times, 1996-01-10 How the phone bomb was set up, Patrick Cockburn, The Independent, 1996-01-09 MSM reports 11 people killed, thousands injured in Hezbollah pager explosions, Barak Ravid, Axios, 2024-09-17 [https://www.axios. com/2024/09/17/hezbollah-pager-explosions-israel-tensions] Hezbollah hit by a wave of exploding pagers in Lebanon and Syria. At least 9 dead, hundreds injured, Bassem Mroue, AP News, 2024-09-17 [https://apnews.com/article/lebanon-hezbollah-israel-exploding-pagers-8893a09816410959b6fe94aec124461b] What we know about the Hezbollah pagers attack, Gerrit De Vynck, The Washington Post, 2024-09-17 [https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/17/hezbollah-pagers-batteries-explosion-israel-lebanon/] Hezbollah vows to punish Israel after pager explosions across Lebanon, Laila Bassam, Reuters, 2024-09-17 Videos Col. Jacques Baud: Yemen STRIKES Tel Aviv: Israe”s Unexpected Downfall? – Ukraine Has Lost! [A7GJZIwADSY] Alastair Crooke : Israel and Ukraine Soon to Explode? [GtvmSBjfz-I], Napolitano interviews Crooke, Judging Freedom, 2024-09-17 Copyleft: CC0 |