What the terror of pager bombs foretells

Two dimensions of a future scenario emerge after Israel orchestrated the detonation of thousands of pagers and walkie-talkie sets in its ongoing war against Hezbollah. One is whether it violates international law; the other is a cold analysis of whether Israel’s predatory mass explosion of pagers has established a new and dangerous template other countries could potentially deploy.

The attack wiped out the Hezbollah infrastructure to prevent detection of their internal communications by Israeli agencies. At the time of going to press, the casualties of the 17–18 September ‘pager blasts’ in Lebanon and Syria were 37 civilians, including children, and thousands reported injured.

That Israel’s strategy of planting undetectable explosives in pagers and walkie-talkie sets could be copied to blow up aircraft and vehicles is a fear being expressed even by the country’s American supporters. Immediately after the blasts, one conservative US think tank wondered whether this action could be replicated on cell phones or other electronic equipment in common use.

Although Israel has not officially claimed responsibility, defence minister Yoav Gallant publicly revealed that Israel was “entering a new phase of war”. Israeli army chief Herzi Halevi also warned that they were capable of many more surprises as “we are already two stages ahead... We will make it so that terrorists will be afraid of going to the toilet and even eating food”.

American National Public Radio (NPR) disclosed on 20 September that an official (who was not authorised to speak publicly) informed them that Israel had notified Washington after the explosions claiming responsibility “for Tuesday’s attacks”. Quoting legal experts, NPR added that Israel was responsible for violating international protocols and treaties to which it is a signatory.

This is because in 1996, the UN added Article 7(2) to the Amended UN Protocol II of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, which banned ‘booby traps’ hidden in devices. Lama Fakih, Human Rights Watch director (Middle East and North Africa), defined these as “objects civilians are likely to be attracted to or are associated with normal civilian daily use” and which strike “military targets and civilians without distinction”.

Experience indicates that Israel will not be swayed by allegations of human rights violations by UN bodies or US Congressmen. It was only on 17 September that the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly adopted a non-binding resolution drafted by Palestine demanding that Israel end ‘its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory’ within 12 months.

Israel also ignored the July 2024 order of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) asking it to stop settlement activity in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem and end its illegal occupation of those areas and the Gaza Strip as soon as possible. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had then said the court had made a “decision of lies”.

In the wake of the mass explosions, Hezbollah’s rocket barrage was met with retaliatory bombing by Israel. On 20 September, Hezbollah operations commander Ibrahim Aqil was reported killed in an air strike in suburban Beirut during a meeting of the elite Radwan unit.

Also known as Tahsin and Abdelqader, Aquil was prime accused in the Beirut truck bombings at the US embassy in April 1983, which killed 63 people, and at the US Marines barracks in October 1983, which claimed 241 lives. Three-and-a-half months later, Ronald Reagan had ordered the withdrawal of all US troops from Lebanon.

The Israeli action of triggering pager and walkie-talkie explosions might be the first predatory step by any State comparable to the action/ overreaction sequence witnessed in, say, the US invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11.

Starting with the first suicide bombing in history in 1881, the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in St. Petersburg by members of Narodnaya Volya, through the assassinations of Lord Cavendish (British chief secretary in Ireland) in 1882, the French president Carnot in 1894, the Spanish prime minister Antonio Canovas in 1897 and King Umberto of Italy in 1900, right down to the modern day, no State has triggered such an attack, with such serious ramifications.

Could America have pre-empted 9/11 if their agencies had taken Ramzi Yousef’s warning seriously?

Yousef masterminded the detonation of a 680-kg bomb placed in a rented van in the basement of New York’s World Trade Center on 26 February 1993. The explosion killed six and maimed thousands. Yousef was arrested from Pakistan in 1995 and airlifted to New York to be tried for the WTC bombing and the ‘Bojinka’ plot to plant bombs on 11 American planes in the Far East.

A New York Times report from 1997 reveals how ‘Yousef gave a detailed account of his role in the bomb plot, even bragging about it, while being flown back to the United States’. US secret service agent Brian Parr told the jury that “Mr. Yousef said he had hoped the explosion would topple one tower onto the other, killing tens of thousands of people, to let Americans know they were ‘at war’”.

Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. With more and more personal devices linked to the internet, such copycat attacks could become the frightening fallback option for States engaged in overt or covert warfare, with civilians in the first line of assault.

The writer is a former special secretary, cabinet secretariat. Courtesy: The Billion Press