Israel’s Likely Pager Attack on Hezbollah Has Terrifying Implications for the Future
Photo by Scott Peterson/Getty Images
Details are still scant as to what specifically occurred, but graphic videos have surfaced of pagers blowing up in people’s pockets in supermarkets, as the Lebanese minister of health says eight people were killed and over 2,800 were wounded by explosions in Lebanon and Syria today. The Israeli Defense Forces are widely assumed to be behind the attack, although they have not commented on the record yet.
Video showing just how powerful the pager explosions were pic.twitter.com/N9L8Wjfr0V
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) September 17, 2024
Assuming this is Israel, and given their ongoing war with Hezbollah I don’t see any reason to think it is not, yet again they are demonstrating their callous disregard for civilian life when targeting enemy combatants. It’s not possible to set off this many explosions that are this large without harming innocent bystanders, and while there is no official word yet on how many non-Hezbollah combatants were hurt, the videos emerging from this attack make it clear that people standing near those with exploding pagers in their pockets were injured as well.
This attack introduces a new battlefield that is likely to become more crowded and targeted at non-combatants. If phones and other handheld communications devices are a new front in kinetic warfare, then each and every one of us is a potential target going forward.
We are all tethered to our phones and reliant on them for nearly all of our communication and intervening in that trusted system is a gold mine for intelligence agencies. We already know that in 2016 security contractors in the United States discovered preinstalled software on some Android phones that sends all text messages on it to China every 72 hours, and in 2020, Malwarebytes wrote that “United States government-funded phones come pre-installed with unremovable malware.” There is undoubtedly already a massive cyber war being fought around the ubiquity of smartphones and other handheld communication devices, but turning them into bombs is a dramatic escalation with terrifying implications for where this is headed.
It is easier said than done to intervene in a supply chain and plant explosives or malware or whatever caused these pagers to blow up, but governments around the world have proven they are capable of doing so. There is no doubt that many bad actors today are wondering how feasible this kind of attack may be for them to carry out.
I really worry about journalists and dissidents in countries that don’t have many press freedoms now. They are already heavily surveilled by the regimes they report on and fight back against, and now a model exists for authoritarian governments around the world to attack them remotely with plausible deniability. This widespread assault looks designed to be part spectacle, as Israel seems to want to show Hezbollah it can strike anywhere at any time, but this could easily be repurposed as a more subdued and clandestine operation where people are attacked by these exploding devices in their homes with no one around to witness what happened.
Israel itself is an autocratic state under Benjamin Netanyahu, and it has shifted the Overton Window with this attack for other authoritarian regimes like it. Predicting the future has proven to be a folly in 2024, but it’s clear as day how this kind of attack has the potential to be targeted at civilians and journalists. If phones do become a more common form of kinetic warfare, we can thank Israel for proving to everyone how possible it is to remotely launch a widespread attack like this.