Goodness Gracious, Great Balls Of Fire

Someone - and it doesn't take the brains of an archbishop to work out who - has just carried out a very clever and potentially devastating attack on Iran's most powerful terrorist proxy.

Remember pagers? Those annoying little things that clipped to your belt, vibrated when someone tried to call you, and communicated via a tiny LCD screen that displayed incomprehensible codes? They were rubbish, weren’t they? That’s why nobody uses them anymore.

Well, nobody except terrorists.

Terrorists - especially terrorists whose attacks are directed at a particular technologically-advanced country in the Middle East - like pagers. Despite their annoying design and limited functionality, pagers do have one great advantage over a modern smartphone: Security. They’re simple-minded little things, and all they can do is receive a message, beep, vibrate on your belt and display a short string of unintelligible nonsense on their blurry screen. Among the endless list of things they can’t do are a couple that are of great interest to intelligence organisations. For example they can’t be tricked into broadcasting a signal that can be used to guide a special forces snatch team - or, of course, a bomb.

Hezbollah, the Iranian proxy that occupies most of southern Lebanon and has been bombarding towns in northern Israel with rockets since Hamas launched its genocidal onslaught last October, is a huge fan of pagers. Since last year the group has been moving away from communicating by mobile phone and issuing its members with the less capable, but more secure, old-style devices instead. A few days ago it took delivery of a large batch of new pagers - it’s not clear now many, but at least a thousand and probably more than twice that - and seems to have quickly delivered them to its members.

At 3:30pm local time this afternoon, every one of those pagers simultaneously exploded.

Now, I know Chinese batteries don’t have the best reputation, but this number of simultaneous explosions in a single batch of pagers clearly isn’t a coincidence. It’s very obviously an extremely sophisticated attack against Hezbollah, and the list of entities with both the capability and motive to carry it out isn’t very long. In fact there’s only one likely candidate, and that’s Israel.

Israel Probably Did This

There are many reasons for assuming Israel - more specifically its intelligence and security agencies, Mossad and Shin Bet - was behind today’s attack. One is that, yesterday, the Israeli Defence Forces announced they’d foiled a Hezbollah plan to assassinate a senior military official. The second is that, earlier today, the Israeli cabinet added ending Hezbollah rocket attacks on the north of the country to its war goals. The third is that they’ve done things like this before.

On 5 January 1996 Yahya Ayyash, a notorious Hamas bomb maker known as “the Engineer”, answered a call on his mobile phone. The origin of the call is disputed. The “official” version is that it was a regular weekly call from his father, but there are persistent rumours that when he answered it a voice said, in Israeli-accented Arabic, “Hello, this is Shin Bet.” Either way, a moment after Ayyash put the phone to his ear fifteen grammes of RDX high explosive concealed behind its speaker detonated, killing him instantly. A similar amount of explosives could be concealed inside a pager, although obviously the results would be less lethal.

High explosives are powerful, but we’re talking about a very small charge here. The first explosion I ever set off was what’s called a “confidence charge” and, as the name implies, it’s just to get you used to handling the infernal stuff. It went off with a modest bang and excavated a crater about the size of a soup bowl - and that charge contained a third of a stick of PE4, an RDX-based plastic explosive. As a stick of PE4 weighed half a pound (227g) this was about five times as much as you could hide inside a pager. Ayyash died because he was a cooperative sort of chap who helpfully pressed the charge against his own ear. People don’t tend to hold pagers to their ears, though; generally they either clip them to their belt or stick them in a pocket, meaning an exploding one is much less likely to kill - although if it goes off in your trouser pocket, or on your belt forward of your hip, it probably will remove you from the gene pool in a slightly more testicular manner. Hence the title of this post. Sorry; I couldn’t resist.

So What Happened?

As ever where Israel is concerned, the internet is already filling up with obnoxious nonsense about the attack. Some people are denying it was an attack at all, claiming it’s simply the result of Hezbollah buying a bunch of dodgy Chinese pagers with faulty batteries. Well, it wasn’t. Others are panicking in case Israel has worked out how to remotely make the batteries in electronic devices explode, and starts vaporising people like David Lammy. It wasn’t that, either. Both of these “theories”, to dignify them with a name they don’t really deserve, are based on profound ignorance of battery technology.

I vape (and used to use a type of somewhat dangerous vaping device known as a “mech mod”), so I’m very familiar with the potential hazards of lithium ion batteries. They can certainly be dangerous, but they’re not explosive. What does occasionally happen is that they go into thermal runaway and heat up rapidly. Sometimes they burst into quite impressive flames. A runaway battery will also boil off its own electrolytes, releasing a large volume of gas. If that happens with a big enough battery inside a strong enough enclosure, like a sturdy battery casing (or a mech mod, which was basically just a metal tube with a heavy cap screwed to one end and a switch to the other) the released gas can build up enough pressure that the enclosure will burst violently - but this isn’t possible with a small battery inside a pager’s plastic case. No, Hezbollah’s pagers had actual explosives concealed inside, along with a mechanism to detonate those explosives when a specific signal came in, and that makes this a deliberate - and very sophisticated - attack.

There have also been a lot of complaints about Israel launching an “indiscriminate” attack. This is of course blatant nonsense. The pagers were ordered by, and delivered to, Hezbollah. Hezbollah then distributed them to its members, and I think we can safely assume it wasn’t handing them out to anyone who wasn’t a member. After all, it wouldn’t make much sense to order a large number of devices specifically to set up a secure communications network, then give them to people who had no need to be part of that network. Nobody who wasn’t a Hezbollah member had any reason to be carrying one of those pagers. I mean, seriously, it’s 2024; nobody who isn’t a terrorist or drug dealer has any reason to be carrying a pager anyway. This attack was not indiscriminate. Bluntly, it’s hard to think of a less indiscriminate way to attack Hezbollah than to let Hezbollah itself deliver the bombs to its own members. As for the “collateral damage” so many pro-terrorist “anti-zionist” commenters are whining about, remember - these charges were tiny. Here’s a video of one of them going off:

Notice how the two men standing right next to him are startled but completely unharmed? Notice how the grapes less than a foot from the seat of the explosion aren’t even blown off the table? The target goes down, clearly wounded - but the blast is so small that, while effective in direct contact, it doesn’t even splatter a bunch of grapes (not the most famously robust things) within arm’s reach of the bomb. I don’t think collateral damage is going to be much of a problem here.

Anyway, if anyone does feel inclined to whine about collateral damage, why aren’t they also whining about the thousands of rockets Hezbollah has fired at northern Israeli towns since last October? Around 60,000 Israeli civilians have had to be evacuated - and, until the endless barrages out of southern Lebanon end, they can’t return home. Hezbollah chose to involve themselves in this war by launching rocket attacks in support of Hamas after the 7 October massacre. Nobody made them do it; it was entirely their own decision. Now they’re learning that decisions have consequences.

Will Hezbollah See Sense?

Those consequences are likely to be severe. Lebanese sources say the attack killed eleven people and wounded around 4,000, with 400 of them in critical condition. Reports suggest that the targeted pagers rang for several seconds before exploding, giving the targets a chance to take them out and look at the screens to see who was calling. That means a large number of Hezbollah members are likely to have lost some fingers; many more, still fumbling to get the gadget out the pocket of their jeans, will have experienced that thing Jerry Lee Lewis sang about in 1957.

So someone - and we all know who, don’t we? - has just put a pretty significant dent in Hezbollah’s manpower. Perhaps more importantly, they’ve put an even bigger dent in Hezbollah’s confidence. After all, the terrorist group switched to pagers last year because they didn’t trust mobile phones anymore. After today, do you think they still trust pagers? Somehow I don’t think so. Their leaders - those who aren’t in hospital getting used to their new gender identity, anyway - will be scrambling around trying to work out a way to communicate that isn’t susceptible to some creative interference from Mossad. They’ll also be trying to work out exactly how the explosively enhanced pagers got into their hands, and who was responsible.

Meanwhile Hezbollah members will be wondering what else might suddenly explode. Is their phone safe? What about their laptop? Could Mossad pack enough RDX into a pair of AirPods to make their eardrums meet in the middle? Whatever communications gadget their leaders come up with to replace the pagers, you can bet the average Jihadi Joe isn’t going to feel terribly happy putting it in his trouser pocket.

On top of the casualties and shredded confidence, this episode is also a massive humiliation for Hezbollah. It’s clear Mossad have thoroughly penetrated their security, and then demonstrated that in the most spectacular way imaginable. It’s an embarrassment for Iran, too - they’re suddenly faced with the awkward prospect of explaining why their ambassador to Lebanon had a Hezbollah pager in his pocket (and now has a collection of painful blast injuries).

Israel wants to focus on winning the war on Gaza and bringing its remaining hostages home. The festering low-level conflict on its northern border initiated by Hezbollah last October is a distraction it would sooner do without, but the terrorists forced it on them. Today, Israel made ending that conflict one of its official war aims - and then hit Hezbollah, hard. There’s a clear message here: Back off and stop firing rockets, or it’s going to hurt. Are Hezbollah’s leaders smart (and rational) enough to get that message, or will they double down and expand their attacks? It’s hard to say. But, whatever they do next, they’ll be doing it with thousands of their members in hospital and the rest suffering from a debilitating blend of technophobia and rattled confidence.

Anyway, has anyone seen Jeremy Corbyn since 3:30pm? I’m a bit worried about him and he’s not responding to his pager . . .