Yesterday's terrorist attack by Israel against Hizbullah in Lebanon was quite sophisticated.
Back in February Hizbullah had urged its affiliates to avoid smart-phones, which can be controlled by foreign intelligence services, and to instead use pagers to receive text messages and alarms when necessary.
Israel must have recognized that suggestion as a chance to infiltrate the supply chain for these communication tools.
It somehow managed to manipulate pager shipments to Lebanon some of which would be acquired by Hizbullah and its affiliates. Yesterday specific encoded messages were sent to the manipulated pagers. Some moments later they started to blow up. Eleven people were killed and some 4,000 were wounded.
Not all people killed or wounded were members of Hizbullah. Pagers are also used by emergency and volunteer services. Western media avoid to call this attack a terrorist operation. But just ask yourself how they would describe the attack if this had happened to the other side of the conflict.
Pagers are not an exclusive means of Hizbullah. The attack was indiscriminate. The explosions happened in many situations of daily life – during visits in shops (vid), in driving cars in the middle of traffic, near to bystanders including children.
The pagers were sold under the brand name of Gold Apollo, a Taiwanese company specialized in such devices. But, according to the company, the devices sold in Lebanon were manufactured under license by the Hungarian company BAC Consulting KFT.
Lowkey writes:
The CEO and founder of BAC is Cristiana Arcidiacono-Barsony, who describes herself as a strategic adviser in internal affairs with international experience in the Middle East.
According to her academic profile she studied at SOAS and LSE universities in London.
The above points to an MI-6 involvement in the affair.
Elijah Magnier reports (vid) that the delivery of the pagers had been held up for several months by customs in a Middle Eastern country. The time was allegedly used by Israeli services to dismantle the devices and to replace their original Lithium-Ion batteries with ones which included explosives and birdshot to create a maximum of damage. The electronics of the devices were manipulated to trigger delayed explosions after the pager received a certain coded message.
This very sophisticated operations must have cost millions and must have involved a quite large number of specialists.
It would have been ideal for Israel to trigger such a mayhem as part of a general attack on Hizbullah. It would have increased Hizbullah's time to implement its defense plans.
To trigger the attack outside of a large scale war context is a rather limp maneuver. Most of the wounded will soon recuperate and return to their duties.
Israeli officials claim that they triggered the operation because some Hizbullah members had found out about the explosives and would soon alarm their leadership. It was thus a 'use it or lose it' situation.
That though does not sound plausible to me. How would Israel know that Hizbullah members found out about it? If they had so why would they not immediately inform their command of the imminent danger?
It is more plausible that the Netanyahoo government used the attack as a means to silence it critics which demand an all out attack on Hizbullah. The Israeli military and Netanyahoo know that a war with Hizbullah would be theirs to lose.
Now they can say: "See, we are already doing something very very serious …"
But that wad has been blown for little effect. It was a one time shot. They chances to repeat such an operation are close to nil.
Tomorrow Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah will publicly offer more information about the incident and its possible consequences.