Does targeting Hezbollah’s communications network pave the way for a wider war against it? | Politics

Hezbollah suffered the biggest security breach in its history on Tuesday, when pager communication devices widely used by its members in various Lebanese regions exploded simultaneously, resulting in a large number of deaths and injuries. The party was quick to accuse Israel of involvement in the attack and vowed to respond.

Tel Aviv’s avoidance – until the moment of writing – of acknowledging or denying its responsibility for the incident reinforces the belief that it was involved in it, because the latter usually resorts to remaining silent in major attacks of this type against Hezbollah and Iran, especially after the October 7 war, either to protect its intelligence tools, or to keep itself in the shadows to avoid granting legitimacy to a strong reaction from Tehran and its regional allies, and to hide its game aimed at spreading war in the Middle East more widely, or both.

It is not possible to immediately draw a clear conclusion about the nature of Tuesday’s attack. However, some realistic scenarios fall into two hypotheses. The first is what a Lebanese security source revealed to Al Jazeera, that the communication devices were rigged with explosives before the party imported them five months ago, which opens the door to another question related to how the devices were rigged from the source.

This hypothesis is similar to the assassination of Yahya Ayyash, a leader in the Qassam Brigades, in 1996. The second hypothesis is that malware caused the batteries of the pagers to overheat and explode. Whether the incident was the result of booby-trapping the devices or malware, the operation would require extensive intelligence work to target the right devices. This would include mapping the users of the party’s communications network, identifying vulnerabilities, and designing the attack accordingly.

What is certain in both hypotheses is that the scope of Hezbollah’s intelligence breach has reached unprecedented levels, especially since it is not the first of its kind. It is widely believed that Israel’s interception of a phone call by senior Hezbollah commander Fouad Shukr at the end of July contributed to his assassination. The breach of the party’s communications network also likely played a major role in Israel’s discovery in advance of the timing of the party’s military response to Shukr’s assassination last August, and its launching of a preemptive attack against him.

However, the intelligence breach, while important, is not the only reason for Israel’s high-risk attacks on Hezbollah and elsewhere. After the outbreak of the October 7 war, Israel carried out major assassinations in Lebanon, such as the assassination of Saleh al-Arouri, deputy head of the Hamas political bureau in the southern suburbs of Beirut on January 2, and the assassination of Fuad Shukr after that.

Al-Arouri’s assassination was part of Israel’s stated strategy of targeting Hamas leaders abroad, while Shukr’s assassination was designed to respond to a rocket attack on the town of Majdal Shams in the occupied Syrian Golan on July 27.

But targeting Hezbollah’s communications network is considered the biggest new escalation in the regional context of the war since the attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus last April, the assassination of Hamas political bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on July 31, and the attack that targeted sites around the Syrian city of Masyaf this month.

Two common links emerge between the k-connector attack and the other major attacks mentioned:

First, they are all similar in that they are designed to raise the costs of Hezbollah’s involvement in the war, and of Iran’s involvement by proxy in it. They are also designed by Israel to directly implicate Iran in the war, and to deepen Hezbollah’s involvement in the conflict.

The second is that Israel has avoided claiming or denying responsibility for the above-mentioned reasons. However, this tactic, which Israel is pursuing, does not hide the fact that it has become more daring than ever in escalating its conflict with Hezbollah and Iran, because it increasingly feels that the costs of its outbursts are limited.

For example, Israel would not have had the audacity to assassinate Haniyeh (it was designed to provoke a strong Iranian response) had Tehran not shown that its main priority after the attack on its consulate in Damascus was not to get directly involved in the war.

In the case of Hezbollah, its eagerness to close the circle of retaliation with Israel after Shukr’s assassination in order to avoid a further escalation of the conflict actually served as an additional powerful incentive for Israel to escalate its attacks on it since that period.

Israel has plenty of reasons to escalate its confrontation with Hezbollah. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans to fire Defense Minister Yoav Galant, who opposes a major offensive against the group, suggest Netanyahu intends to expand the scope and objectives of the war on the northern front. The targeting of the group’s communications network may be designed to undermine its ability to securely manage communications among its senior commanders, in preparation for a potential broad Israeli offensive against it.

The signals of weakness sent by Hezbollah, Iran’s concern about direct involvement in the war, and the current US administration’s preoccupation with the upcoming presidential elections provide the conditions required for Israel to go far in its strategy of military pressure on the party to remove the threat it poses to Israel in the north.

Before the party discovers the reasons for the major intelligence breach it suffered and plans for retaliation, it will have to prepare to deal with the more costly scenarios, which it has sought to avoid since the beginning of its involvement in the war.