As the dust settles from the mass pager and radio communication blasts that rocked Hezbollah in Lebanon on Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively, and caused thousands of injuries and dozens of deaths in the ranks of the Iran-backed terror army, observers have begun to assess the damage incurred by the Islamist group.
In a televised speech on Thursday, Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah acknowledged that his organization absorbed an unprecedented blow to its personnel and security, adding that there was no dispute that “the enemy has technological superiority.” Nasrallah and other Hezbollah leaders have vowed retaliation.
The historic attack has severely disrupted Hezbollah’s operational infrastructure by taking thousands of commanders off the battlefield due to injuries, hundreds of them severe, while eliminating much of its ability to communicate with field operatives, since pagers were meant to be a safer replacement for smart phones, which the group considers too vulnerable to espionage.
As such, the damage to Hezbollah’s command structure, communications infrastructure and morale is considered significant, damaging the organization’s ability to function confidently.
Hezbollah on its knees
According to Cmdr. (res.) Eyal Pinko, a researcher at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University and a former Israeli Navy officer, who also served in an intelligence organization, the attack struck up to 3,000 terror operatives in “less than a second.
“If you just look at the persons who were carrying those beepers, this is probably the senior commanders and above. So it’s from the battalion commanders and above. So probably what is happening now in Hezbollah is that all the commanding structure from, let’s say, the rank of lieutenant colonel in a regular military to the generals, the two or three generals, are totally injured or some of them are already died. So now to get even to the time to reset and to start to understand what is happening, it will take a few days.”
The surprise attack left Hezbollah on its knees, he added, though the organization’s opposition in Lebanon still does not stand a chance against the Islamist group’s armed operatives, estimated to number almost 100,000 (including reserve forces).
“You need to have a huge army in order to, to compete with them,” said Pinko. However, the 3,000 or so injured operatives mean that an enormously significant number of senior commanders are not functional—in all likelihood, “all [of the] senior commanding level were damaged,” he assessed.
Hezbollah operatives in Syria were also hurt in the pager blasts.
And on Sept. 9, international media reports said Israeli special forces and aircraft struck an IRGC missile site in Hama, western Syria, which was designed to produce accurate missiles for Hezbollah. That attack, said Pinko, harmed the group’s ability to get hold of “kits that make their bombs more accurate—the rocket accuracy program. So all these moves kind of look like softening up the target before actually striking,” he said.
On July 31, the Israeli Air Force killed Hezbollah’s second in command, Fuad Shukr, considered to be the organization’s “military” chief of staff, landing another blow.
Pinko said that strike and others like it showcased “very precise, very accurate, very good intelligence, amazing intelligence.”
Meanwhile, as international media reports focus on the pager attack, less attention has been given to how the explosive material in them was activated.
Malicious code
Barak Gonen, senior lecturer at the Jerusalem College of Technology and a former cybersecurity official in the Israel Defense Forces, told JNS that in theory, “Getting a remote device to run a malicious code requires uploading the code into the device before execution, which is an immense task if done remotely.”
He added, “I would assume that all modern intelligence agencies employ experts that master the skills of attacking remote devices. However, in this event, as the details unfold it becomes more apparent that the devices were ‘treated’ before handling them to Hezbollah. As an attacker, holding the device in your hand makes it far easier to attack, as you can alter the code that is running in the device. What the attacker would need to do is have an image of the new code, and then burn it into the device pretty much in the same manner that the factory, or cellphone technicians, do.”