Israeli intelligence has suffered a blow after having failed to warn of Hamas’s October 7 attack, but with this week’s deadly pager blasts in Lebanon the fearsome Mossad agency appears to have hit back.
Israel has not commented on the unusual attack that turned communication devices used by Hezbollah members into explosives, killing 12 people including two children and wounding up to 2,800 others across Lebanon.
The Iran-backed Hezbollah movement, whose militants have traded cross-border fire with Israeli forces throughout the Gaza war in support of Palestinian ally Hamas, has pinned the blame on Israel.
Experts and some Israeli media outlets said the pager operation bears the telltale signs of a job by Mossad, the spy agency famous for exploits like the early 1970s revenge killings of those behind the deaths of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.
The simultaneous blasts Tuesday of hundreds of paging devices in Lebanon “was another stunning display of Israeli intelligence prowess”, said John Hannah of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America.
The operation likely required intervention in the devices themselves as well as access to Hezbollah’s communications, experts said.
Hannah, a former national security adviser to US vice president Dick Cheney, said Mossad has demonstrated “a repeated ability not only to deeply penetrate its worst adversaries’ most sensitive networks, but then execute operations of exquisite precision and lethality whenever it chooses to do so”.
Less than two months ago, an Israeli air strike killed senior Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut, an operation that had required precise and timely information about his whereabouts.
The following day Iran announced the death of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, reportedly by an explosive device planted weeks prior. Israel has not commented on that attack.
As the Gaza war triggered by Hamas’s October 7 attack drags on, the killings highlight how Israel has leaned on Mossad to accomplish high-profile feats.
And while other Israeli intelligence agencies have more direct responsibility for the Palestinian territories, “it’s pretty clear that Mossad was as surprised as everyone else” by the unprecedented Hamas attack, Hannah said.
Black September and blunders
Mossad was formed in 1949, but it was the deadly attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics that gave birth to the modus operandi now most associated with the spy agency: deploying operatives abroad to assassinate enemies.
Late one night during the second week of the Games, Palestinian gunmen from the Black September militant group broke into the Olympic village and stormed the quarters of the Israeli delegation. After a violent hostage drama, 11 Israelis were dead.
A clandestine revenge operation, codenamed “Wrath of God”, saw the heads of Black September and their allies from the Palestine Liberation Organisation die in mysterious circumstances in Italy, France and Cyprus.
Mossad’s name has since been tied to numerous daring operations and in recent years the targeted killings of Iranian nuclear scientists and officials, but the agency’s record has not been flawless.
In 1973, Israeli-dispatched assassins killed Moroccan waiter Ahmed Bouchikhi, mistaking him for Black September’s head of operations.
And in 1997, an unsuccessful poisoning attempt against former Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal in Amman soured ties between Israel and Jordan, just a few years after they had made peace.
‘Strategic goal’
The pager blasts represented a significant innovation in Israel’s rich history of shadow warfare, said Barak Gonen, senior lecturer at the Jerusalem College of Technology and a former cybersecurity official in the Israeli military.
The basic idea is similar to a Chinese scheme last decade that targeted US companies “by planting a new device the size of a rice grain into the motherboards of the PCs that they were using”, he said.
But with “this operation… the payload wasn’t just command and control, but also included a detonator”.
Assuming Israel was the perpetrator, “it is a very significant boost to Israeli deterrence,” said Kobi Michael, senior researcher at the Misgav Institute think tank and the Israeli Institute for Security Studies.
Israel’s enemies will now “check or re-check 10 times before putting their hands on any sort of electronic means or platform”, he said.
Just hours before the pagers exploded Israel had broadened the aims of the Gaza war to include its fight against Hezbollah, but multiple analysts said the timing of the blasts may have instead reflected fears the Lebanese group would discover and foil the operation.
Hezbollah officials have insisted they were not looking for war, but vowed revenge for the attack, again raising fears of an all-out war.
Eyal Pinko of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies said the operation was a warning for Hezbollah “not to go any further”.
Yossi Melman, intelligence commentator for the left-leaning Israeli daily Haaretz, said “there was no strategic goal” to the operation.
The pager blasts “would have been complemented by massive air strikes and even a land invasion” in the case of a “full-scale” war, but “I don’t think that it has a strategic goal”, he said.
