towards an open war between Hezbollah and Israel?

It is 3:30 p.m. in the streets of Beirut, Lebanon. Sitting on a café terrace, browsing the stalls of a market, or driving their cars, thousands of Hezbollah members hear the ringing of their pagers – this rudimentary communication device, popular in the 1990s, allows short alert messages to be received – when suddenly: the device explodes. Simultaneously, all over the country, twelve people are killed and nearly 2,800 injured. The next day, it happens again: walkie-talkies explode in the hands of members of the Shiite militia, allied with Iran. The result: twenty dead and more than 450 injured. Two unprecedented attacks in the history of intelligence services, signed by the Mossad, the Israeli secret service. According to the first elements of the investigation, the devices were allegedly booby-trapped when they left the factory, with explosives, before being delivered to Hezbollah several months ago. Once again, the Mossad demonstrates that it can strike “anywhere and at any time”. But beyond its technical prowess, could this attack tip Hezbollah and Israel into open war in Lebanon?

“By triggering these explosions, the Israeli government knew that it would not neutralize the members of Hezbollah but that it would injure the vast majority of them,” says Guillaume Ancel, a former officer and war chronicler. “In the wake of the explosions, a ballet of ambulances began and the hospitals were quickly saturated: ears torn off, wounds to the hip (the pager is often worn on the belt), hands cut off, horror gripped the streets of Beirut.” According to the CIA (the American intelligence agency), the armed branch of Hezbollah is made up of 20,000 full-time men, so this attack would have injured 20% of them. An unprecedented affront to the Shiite militia allied with Iran. “Mutilating so many members of a political and paramilitary organization is quite a provocation and exposes one to large-scale reprisals. The question is what Benjamin Netanyahu wanted to do. By using this cartridge at this time, he is expressing his desire for regional escalation, because in this case, it is an attack, not a response,” continues Guillaume Ancel, author of the blog nepassubir.

An “extremely worrying” escalation according to the UN

Since 7 October, southern Lebanon has been one of the most active fronts in the conflict. In total, more than 150,000 people have reportedly been forced to move, including 60,000 on the Israeli side and 95,000 on the Lebanese side, to protect themselves from the exchange of artillery fire on the border. Those responsible for the beeper attack “will have to be held accountable”, declared Volker Türk, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, who denounced the modus operandi of this attack. “The simultaneous targeting of thousands of people, whether civilians or members of armed groups, without knowing who was in possession of the targeted devices, where they were and in what environment they were at the time of the attack, constitutes a violation of international human rights law and, to the extent that it is applicable, international humanitarian law”, he said indignantly on behalf of the United Nations.

The day after the explosions, Josep Borrell, the head of European diplomacy, condemned these “attacks” on pagers and deplored an “extremely worrying escalation”. As did Washington, which also warned against any “escalation”. In fact, in the context of a tense election campaign between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, this attack and its possible regional consequences are causing difficulties for its American ally. In particular, the Democratic administration, which for months has been calling on Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, for a de-escalation in the Middle East.

Infiltration of Hezbollah by Mossad

Israeli provocation is not the preferred path of Emmanuel Dupuy, the president of the Institute for Prospective and Security in Europe. According to him, the Mossad would have acted more out of pragmatism. He assures that “if the Israelis triggered the explosion of the pagers these last two days”, it is because “their hacking was about to be discovered by Hezbollah”. At the time of the explosions, the weakness of Hezbollah’s security services was obvious to the world and to its Iranian ally – the Iranian ambassador himself having been injured. This attack, like the one that killed Ismaël Haniyeh, the head of the Hamas political bureau, in Tehran, on July 31, instills the psychosis of a generalized infiltration of the Mossad into the security apparatus of Iran and the Lebanese militia. “Hezbollah is paralyzed, its leaders fear that its entire system, including its attack system, will be hacked,” underlines Emmanuel Dupuy. Whether immediate or delayed, a response seems inevitable in the powder keg that South Lebanon has become.