Israel’s blow to Hezbollah: how many birds did it kill with one stone?

In a single move, Israel turned Hezbollah’s inter-organizational communication pagers into bombs that exploded at the same time, disabling at least 3,000 Hezbollah cadres, and killing at least nine people. It didn’t even need to know the names of the Hezbollah-affiliated people to be eliminated; now it knows all of them: It is enough for Mossad to look at the records of who was hospitalized as of 15:30 on September 17.

The method of assassination through portable phones is not new.

First “mass assassination”

It is known that Chechen rebel commander Dzokhar Dudayev was killed by a Russian missile in 1996 locked on his satellite phone. In the same year, Israel killed Hamas bomber Yahya Ayyash via the cell phone he used; the examples can be multiplied.

Assassination has always been used synonymously with the concept of killing a specific person. Perhaps for the first time in history, we are facing an act of “mass assassination” in which a large number of people in different locations are targeted at the same time.

Perhaps for the first time in history, we witnessed the concept of mass assassination when portable communication devices were turned into bombs synchronously.

Al-Qaeda opened a new page in the history of terrorism by using civilian passenger planes as weapons in the September 11, 2001 attacks. Today, we are searched down to our underwear at airports.

The Israeli secret services opened a similar chapter by turning mass communication devices into weapons of mass assassination. We started to look at our cell phones as possible weapons.

Even the statement of Abdülkadir Uraloğlu, Turkish Minister of Infrastructure, when he said “There is no risk in Turkey” is remarkable enough: “It is almost not used.” (Mostly medical doctors, surgeons use them-MY)

A hard blow to Hezbollah

On February 17th of this year, Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah – possibly with Iranian intelligence support – said that Israel had completely infiltrated Lebanon’s telephone and internet network and that Israel could carry out assassinations through cell phones, and asked cadres not to use cell phones for intra-organizational communication.

After that, Hezbollah ordered 5,000 pagers from Taiwan’s Gold Apollo company – which is in full cooperation with the United States for fear of China. Gold Apollo’s owner Hsu Ching-kuang says the order was redirected to BAC, a contract manufacturing company in Hungary. According to the Reuters news agency, the Mossad traced the 5,000 pagers ordered by Hezbollah and planted explosives and an electronic circuit before delivery.

All that was left to do was wait for Hezbollah to deliver the devices to the people it cared about, start using them, and press the button.

Al Jazeera correspondent Zeina Khodr, reporting from Beirut immediately after the attack, described the scene as something out of a dystopian movie: “Suddenly there were explosions in the street, some people collapsed in a pool of blood.”

Hezbollah admits that this is the biggest security breach in their war with Israel so far.

How many birds with one stone?

Israel killed at least four birds with one stone with the Hezbollah coup.

1- Hezbollah shot and “neutralized” 3,000 people at the same time, from the front commander to a Beirut investor, at a level that the administration deemed worthy of a special pager.

2- The presence of the Iranian ambassador to Beirut, Mujtaba Amani among those injured by pager explosions, is yet another proof of an organic relationship between Hezbollah and Iran. Likewise, there are reports of exploding pagers in Syria.

3- The possibility of Israel knowing all active Hezbollah members was very slim. Now they have all the information they need to diagram the organization through hospital records.

4- Politically, the Binyamin Netanyahu government in Israel has not only intensified its challenge to Iran and Hezbollah with this attack. Barely forty days have passed since Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran and Hezbollah military chief Fuad Shoukour was assassinated in Beirut. With this action, Israel has shown that it will not hesitate to turn the Gaza crisis into a regional war.

Even though the US says it has nothing to do with this “mass assassination”, it will continue its full support to Israel in all respects, especially before the November 5 elections.