You likely remember that in mid-September 2024, Israel simultaneously exploded thousands of pagers used exclusively by Hezbollah members high enough in importance to warrant a need for immediate means of communication. These were not civilian pagers. The pagers, along with walkie-talkies, had become the favorite means of communication to get Hezbollah messages to its terrorist members because Hezbollah feared Israel was monitoring cell phones.
Video and other reports reflected the pagers going off in hands, and pockets, on hips, and in faces throughout Lebanon and even Syria.
The pagers reportedly carried a notification that there was an encrypted message requiring the recipient to push two buttons that could only be pressed using two hands, thereby maximizing damage. Because many Hezbollah members raised the pagers to their faces to read the supposed message, the pagers blew up in their faces blinding many of them. Iran’s Ambassador to Lebanon had parts of his hands blown off, raising the obvious question why the Iranian Ambassador carried a Hezbollah pager.
Lacking cell phones or pagers, Hezbollah members fell back on their trusted walkie-talkies. The next day, Israel blew those up too, causing almost as much damage as the pagers.
While there has been no definitive release of how many Hezbollah members died as a result of exploding pagers and walkie-talkies, it’s clear that many thousands were severely injured.
It was a turning point in the war launched by Hezbollah on October 8 in solidarity with Hamas after its October 7 attack on Israel. It stunned and embarrassed Hezbollah.
Lacking cell phones, pagers, or walkie-talkies to communicate, almost the entire chain of command of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan special forces gathered in person to meet to plan a counter-attack. Israel then bombed that meeting wiping out a large portion of Hezbollah’s most experienced commanders.
The rest, as they say, is history, leading to the killing of Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah, and the elimination of the entire Hezbollah command chain. While Hezbollah was not completely destroyed, it had to beg for a ceasefire. Hezbollah no longer was able to help defend the Assad regime in Syria, which it had propped up on behalf of Iran, and Assad ended up falling as well.
Those pagers set off a sequence of events that changed the region in ways we cannot yet fully understand.
But how did Israel do it? There have been many accounts involving Israel’s Mossad inserting itself into the supply chain, but none as detailed as the interview on 60 Minutes by Leslie Stahl of two supposed Mossad operatives. Of course, we have no way of knowing that they really are Mossad operatives, but they did seem legitimate.
The walkie-talkie operation was ten-years in the making. The pagers shorter but still over several years.
Here are some short clips followed by the full segment.
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