Israel’s Pager Attack Was a Tactical Success Without a Strategic Goal, Analysts Say

by · NY Times

News Analysis

Israel’s Pager Attack Was a Tactical Success Without a Strategic Goal, Analysts Say

By targeting so many pagers at the same time, Israel demonstrated technical prowess and partly restored the aura of its intelligence agencies. But its long-term intent is unclear.

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Inspecting a car in which a pager exploded in Beirut on Tuesday.
Credit...Hussein Malla/Associated Press

By Patrick Kingsley

Reporting from Jerusalem

Israel’s attack on pagers and other wireless devices belonging to Hezbollah was a tactical success that had no clear strategic effect, analysts say.

While it embarrassed Hezbollah and appeared to incapacitate many of its members, the attack has so far not altered the military balance along the Israeli-Lebanese border, where more than 100,000 civilians on either side have been displaced by a low-intensity battle. Hezbollah and the Israeli military remained locked in the same pattern, exchanging missiles and artillery fire on Wednesday at a tempo in keeping with the daily skirmishes fought between the sides since October.

Although the attack on Tuesday was an eye-catching demonstration of Israel’s technological prowess, Israel has not so far sought to capitalize on the confusion it sowed by initiating a decisive blow against Hezbollah and invading Lebanon. A second wave of blasts was heard across Lebanon on Wednesday, reportedly caused by exploding walkie-talkies and other devices, but the Israeli military did not appear to be preparing for an imminent ground invasion.

And if the pager attack impressed many Israelis, some of whom had criticized their government for failing to stop Hezbollah’s strikes, their core frustration remained: Hezbollah is still entrenched on Israel’s northern border, preventing tens of thousands of residents of northern Israel from returning home.

“This is an amazing tactical event,” said Miri Eisin, a fellow at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism, an Israel-based research organization.

“But not a single Hezbollah fighter is going to move because of this,” said Ms. Eisin, a former senior intelligence officer. “Having amazing capabilities does not make a strategy.”

The intricacy of the attack has restored some of the prestige and aura that Israel’s intelligence agencies lost on Oct. 7, when Hamas led a surprise attack on Israel that the Israeli military failed to predict or prepare for. Among Israelis, the devastation caused by Hamas’s attack dented their trust in the military leadership, and it has since prompted the resignation of the military intelligence chief, as well as the head of its main signal intelligence agency.

Still, Israelis are divided over whether the attack was born of short-term opportunism or long-term forethought. Some believe that Israeli commanders feared that their Hezbollah counterparts had recently discovered Israel’s ability to sabotage the pagers, prompting Israeli commanders to immediately blow them up or risk losing the capability forever.

Others say that Israel had a specific strategic intent. It may have hoped that the attack’s brazenness and sophistication would ultimately make Hezbollah more amenable to a cease-fire in the coming weeks, if not immediately.

“The goal of the operation, if Israel was behind it, as Hezbollah claims, may have been to show Hezbollah that it will pay a very high price if it continues its attacks on Israel instead of reaching an agreement,” said Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, a former head of Israel’s military intelligence directorate.

Hezbollah began firing on Israel in early October in solidarity with Hamas, after its Palestinian ally raided southern Israel, prompting a large-scale Israeli counterattack on Gaza. Since then, Hezbollah has tied its fate to that of Hamas, vowing that it will not stop fighting until Israel withdraws from Gaza.

Given the connection, officials on either side of the border have hoped for months that a truce in Gaza would lead to a parallel agreement in Lebanon. American and French mediators, led by Amos Hochstein, a U.S. envoy, have shuttled between Beirut and Jerusalem, preparing the ground for a truce between Israel and Hezbollah in the event of a deal in Gaza.

The expectation was that the Hezbollah war would end without the need for a bigger Israeli attack on Lebanon, as long as a solution could be found in Gaza.

With negotiations over Gaza now at an impasse, the Israeli leadership faces rising domestic pressure to find another way of coercing Hezbollah to stand down.

As a result, the Israeli leadership has recently intensified its public focus on Hezbollah, with the country’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, warning this week that “military action” was “the only way” to end the conflict.

The pager attack appeared to make good on that warning. Analysts said it had been an attempt to persuade Hezbollah to disentangle its fate from that of Hamas and, in doing so, end the northern war without waiting for a resolution in the south.

“The point is to disconnect the war Hezbollah declared on Israel from the war with Hamas,” General Yadlin said.

The operation gives Mr. Hochstein “another tool to use when speaking with Hezbollah: ‘You better reach an agreement, or you’ll face more substantial and surprising attacks,’” General Yadlin added.

Some are more skeptical, arguing that Hezbollah is unlikely to change course, even if it has been degraded and disoriented by the attack.

Avi Issacharoff, an Israeli columnist, wrote in a commentary on Wednesday that the assault “will not prompt Hezbollah to stop its attacks on Israel’s northern civilian communities, but to escalate them.” Mr. Issacharoff added, “We appear to be in for days and possibly even weeks of escalating hostilities that might ultimately force the army to launch a ground operation, even as the army is still operating on the ground in Gaza and is still taking losses.”

Hezbollah views itself as the most influential Iranian ally in the Middle East and would try to avoid creating the perception that it had abandoned Hamas, according to Sima Shine, a former senior officer in the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency.

“I don’t see it happening,” said Ms. Shine, an analyst at the Institute for National Security Studies, an Israeli research organization. “It is very important for them to be the head of all the proxies in the region, the one who gives direction to others, the one who trains others from time to time.”

More generally, the attack also highlighted the dissonance between the discipline of Israel’s intelligence agencies, which have the ability to plan operations months or even years ahead, and the messy short-term thinking of Israel’s political leadership.

The attack followed days of reports in the Israeli news media about an intention by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to fire his defense minister, even as Mr. Gallant was overseeing the planned operation in Lebanon.

“This is a very strange situation,” Ms. Shine said. It shows “such a gap between the politicians and the security establishment.”

Gabby Sobelman and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.

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