The Daily - The Day Thousands of Pagers Exploded in Lebanon

Episode Date: September 19, 2024

Hundreds of electronic devices carried by Hezbollah members exploded simultaneously across Lebanon on Tuesday and Wednesday in an audacious plot by Israel.Patrick Kingsley, the Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times, discusses what the attack accomplished, and what it cost.Guest: Patrick Kingsley, the Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times.Background reading: What we know about the deadly wireless-device explosions in Lebanon.Israel’s pager attack was a tactical success without a strategic goal, analysts say.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From the New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernusi, and this is The Daily. Today, inside Israel's audacious and deadly plot to blow up thousands of electronic devices across Lebanon. My colleague Patrick Kingsley on what it accomplished and at what cost. It's Thursday, September 19th. So Patrick, you've been reporting on these remarkable series of attacks across Lebanon over the past two days. Tell me what happened. Well, at around 3.30 p.m. local time on Tuesday afternoon, suddenly there were hundreds, if

not thousands of explosions across the country of Lebanon. There was a man who seemed to blow up next to a fruit stall in a market. There was someone else who seemed to blow up in smoke at the checkout counter at a supermarket. And there was a man who was hit while he was on a motorcycle in heavy traffic. And basically what had happened was that the pages of hundreds, if not thousands, of operatives from the Lebanese militia Hezbollah exploded, almost all at once.

It set off chaos across Lebanon, in the capital Beirut, in eastern Lebanon, in southern Lebanon. Hundreds of ambulances were called into action, ferrying people suddenly to hospitals. The hospitals themselves were pandemonium. There were people coming in blinded, there were people coming in with maimed torsos, maimed groin areas, wherever they had been holding their pages on their bodies. There was a general sense of terror and fear spreading across Lebanese society as they realized that an everyday item such as a pager was able to explode in public spaces like shops, markets, and even traffic jams.

Okay, so there was pandemonium throughout Lebanese society. What do we know about who was behind the attack? We know from our teams reporting that the attack was mounted by some part of the Israeli military. Israel is locked in a years-long conflict with Hezbollah that escalated after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th. At that point, Hezbollah started firing on Israel in solidarity with Hamas. And since then, Israel and Hezbollah have been exchanging missile and rocket fire all along the Israel-Lebanon border. Hezbollah is not a state actor, it's a militia, but it is the most powerful armed group in Lebanon and probably the most powerful non-state actor

across the Middle East. And it has what amounts to a standing army. That army has been exchanging fire with the Israeli military for nearly a year now. And this appeared to be the latest salvo in that conflict. Right. Very important border there to the North and one that you and I, Patrick, have done a number of episodes questioning whether the conflict there that is of

course, kind of in some ways secondary to the conflict in Gaza might spill over into something bigger, so an area that has seen increasing conflict. Why pagers though? Why are Hezbollah guys walking around with pagers? You would think that they would use cell phones like everyone else in 2024. But Hezbollah has realized that Israel is able to hack cell phones, intercept Israel is able to hack cell phones, intercept cell phone messages, and derive a huge amount of information about Hezbollah from those intercepts. And to try and blunt that Israeli intelligence threat, they seem to have switched to pages,

this very lo-fi, old technology, basic technology, to prevent Israel from hacking their communications and their devices. Instead, the opposite happened. Israel still managed to hack the pages, not only to intercept messages, but to turn those pages into explosive devices. How did they manage to pull it off? What did they actually do? We understand from the reporting of our colleagues Ronen Bergman and Shira Frenkel that at some point in the creation or transportation of these pages to Lebanon, Israeli operatives placed within those pages several grams of explosives and a mechanism that would allow the explosives to be activated on the receipt

of a particular message. And what seems to have happened at 3.30 on Tuesday afternoon is that a message was sent to hundreds, if not thousands of these pages. The pages beeped for several seconds, attracting the attention of their owners, who in some cases seem to have taken them out to look at the pages to see what message was coming in. And at that point, the pages exploded, killing some people, maiming thousands of others. And how did Israel actually get to the pagers themselves?

We don't have the full picture here. What we do know is that the pages were made in the name of a Taiwanese company. That Taiwanese company has said it was not actually involved in the making of these particular pages. And in fact, it was subcontracted to a company based in Hungary the Hungarian government has said the pages were not made within Hungary itself and so there's a lot of uncertainty about Who exactly made these pages and at what point they might have been intercepted during their manufacture

or during the supply chain process. And as those questions were starting to be asked and in some cases answered, the story got even more complicated. A second set of explosions hit across Lebanon on Wednesday. The crowds had just gathered for the funeral and we heard a loud boom. And these were not exploding pages, but other kinds of communication devices, including two-way radios. And these explosions of the walkie-talkies seem to have been bigger explosions with perhaps more explosives hidden within the devices.

And those, again, sent a wave of horror and terror across Lebanon, raising fears that any device might now be a target and making people wary of even their telephones and their personal computers. And Patrick, between these two attacks, what was the total death toll? At least 12 people were killed in the Pager attacks on Tuesday, and as of very early Thursday, at least 20 people were killed in the second round of explosions on Wednesday, and more than 3,000 people were injured across both days. Hezbollah had not yet announced whether any of the people killed in the second round were its own members, but on Tuesday they said that eight of the 12 killed were from its

own ranks. And we know from the Lebanese authorities that two of those 12 were children. And also the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon appears to have been seriously injured in one of the attacks, Iran being Hezbollah's biggest benefactor. So even the Iranian ambassador had a Hezbollah pager. I don't think we quite know whether he had the pager or maybe he was with someone who had one, but certainly he was in proximity of one of these pages. Patrick, with that in mind, I'm wondering how we should think about this attack.

Because on the one hand, it was very precise, really aimed directly at these Hezbollah operatives. But on the other hand, it feels like it really stepped over the line into daily life in Lebanon. These children, a medic, just the fact that these explosions were going off in such public places. What are people saying about this attack? You've summarized the debate about this attack perfectly. On the one hand, you have Israelis and their supporters hailing what they see as a remarkably precise and ingenious and sophisticated attack that has pinpointed the whereabouts of specific militants from Hezbollah and managed to take

them out in hundreds of locations across Lebanon, yes, in public places, but with small enough explosives that the people that were mainly harmed by these attacks were the Hezbollah militants themselves. And even though these attacks caused so much fear and spilled so much blood in Lebanon. To Israelis, this was a much more discriminant attack than the kind of rocket fire that has been sent by Hezbollah into Israeli territory nearly every day for the past 11 or 12 months, even killing a group of school children as they played football in a town one weekend in the Golan Heights.

On the other hand, critics are saying that this was in fact not a very precise and well-weighted attack but almost an indiscriminate assault on thousands of places across civilian life throughout Lebanon. These may have been Hezbollah operatives, but they were not conducting military activity at the time in which they were hit. Some of them were in shops, some of them were in markets, some of them were in the street. And by targeting these people in such public places, Israel, according to these critics at least, was enacting some kind of state-sponsored terrorism that has sent fears throughout Lebanese society and prompted Lebanese citizens to wonder whether their device, their phone, their computer could be the next thing to be struck. Okay, so a range of views.

But whatever you think of this attack, it is clear that it's a major escalation and a real ratcheting up of the conflict on this very important border between Lebanon and Israel, which makes me wonder what Israel was trying to achieve here. Well, in the short term, it's quite clear what they were up to. They are trying to project strength. They're trying to deter an enemy that has been firing missiles into Israeli communities since October.

But in the long term, it's a bit of a mystery. And both Israeli officials and Israeli analysts I've been speaking to in the last 24 hours don't really understand what the strategic goal is right now. They understand what the short-term benefits are, but what comes next, what Israel wants to happen next, is unclear. We'll be right back. So Patrick, you said in the short term, it's clear what Israel's up to here, but in the long term, it's really a mystery. Let's take this just a bit at a time.

So walk me through the short term goal for Israel. Well, in the short term, it clearly deals a blow to one of its biggest enemies, an enemy that it's been fighting for nearly a year now. It incapacitates thousands of Hezbollah operatives. It sends a message of strength that instills fear and conceivably it makes people wary about using any kind of electronics if this is what Israel has the capacity to do to something as obscure as the pager. It also, to some extent, restores the prestige of Israel's fabled intelligence agencies that have long been revered and feared for their clandestine operations, but which really

took a blow to their reputations after the October 7th attack on Israel that Israel's intelligence agencies, its spies, its military failed to either predict in full or to prepare properly for. So an attack that is as intricate as blowing up hundreds if not thousands of pages simultaneously in a foreign country goes some way to restoring their aura in the eyes of both friends and foes. Okay, but what about the longer term though? We know that Hezbollah has said that it will keep fighting Israel until there's a ceasefire in Gaza, which of course at this point seems to be a very long way off.

So from Israel's perspective, how does this attack factor into its strategy to get Hezbollah to stop? Well, for months, the hope was that the fighting along the Israel-Lebanon border would end if the fighting in Gaza also ended. And that creates a bigger problem day by day for Israel because the war in Gaza shows no sign of ending. The negotiations for a truce in Gaza have reached a deadlock. It doesn't seem like we are going to see a ceasefire there between Hamas and Israel for weeks, if not months. And as a result, then the war between Hezbollah and Israel is also likely to continue for

weeks, if not months. So to try and shift the needle and to disconnect Hezbollah's fight from Hamas and to disconnect the fate of Lebanon from that of Gaza, Israel appears to have mounted these explosions of pages and other communications devices on Tuesday and Wednesday. The hope is that all of that will cow Hezbollah enough that they will stand down, that they will stop linking their fight to Hamas's fight and agree to some kind of ceasefire, even as the war in Gaza continues. And Patrick, is that realistic?

Like is that going to work? That's the big question. Israel has tried all sorts of small escalations in recent months. It even assassinated the top military figure within Hezbollah, Fuad Shukr, earlier on this year. That did not deter Hezbollah. So what experts are saying is that Hezbollah is unlikely to be deterred by this latest attack also. And in fact, there's a risk that it may be even more energized and even more motivated to maintain its battle with Israel, precisely because Israel's infiltration of its communications networks was so brazen and so embarrassing

to Hezbollah. This was a humiliation, the idea that so many devices were intercepted and hacked and poisoned as it were by explosives was a catastrophe for Hezbollah's own sense of strength and its own aura. And people that follow the group say that it's unlikely that they will be able to capitulate in the aftermath of something like that and that their only option is to continue fighting this low intensity border wall or even to escalate and that in turn will prompt Israel to hit back harder and then we will have the all out war between

Hezbollah and Israel that people have been fearing for months or all the way back to October. Right. Hezbollah has many, many thousands of fighters. So though more than 3000 may have been maimed, there are many, many more. And Hezbollah is probably very angry right now. As you're saying, it was a humiliation. And I guess my question, Patrick, is, you know, surely Israel knows that.

So I wonder whether there's any world in which this was kind of an intentional act by Israel to try to draw Hezbollah into a wider war. That's certainly one assessment that's been made by some people who follow this conflict closely, that this was a provocation designed to get Hezbollah to react strongly and then give Israel a pretext to react even stronger still or even to invade southern Lebanon. The problem with that argument is if that genuinely is Israel's strategic intention, why did the Israeli military not immediately follow its explosions on Tuesday and Wednesday with an invasion.

That would have been the perfect time to invade when Hezbollah was in shock. It was in disarray. Many of its fighters were in hospital. Others were trying to figure out what was going on. That would have been the moment to escalate to all-out war. That said, there has been a rise in rhetoric from Israeli leaders in recent days. The Defense Minister, Yav Galant, has talked about a military solution being perhaps the only solution to the conflict.

He also said the war is entering a new phase. The trouble for people like me and others that have to analyze these kind of statements is that it's clear nevertheless that these Israeli leaders are still keeping themselves one or two steps away from saying without equivocation that they are going to enter into some kind of all out war or even invade Lebanon. And it still feels like Israel is leaving the door open to some kind of mediation, some kind of diplomatic negotiation. I guess, Patrick, these two days and the attacks of these two days really do feel like they

pitch us into a new, more dangerous place. I wonder what you are going to be looking for in the days and weeks ahead to help answer some of these questions. Well, in the immediate sense, we're looking at Israeli troop movements. Will they send more troops to the north? We're looking at Israeli rhetoric. We're also looking at a speech that is set to take place at five o'clock local time on Thursday afternoon from the head of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah. And we'll be keeping a close eye to see whether he himself announces an escalation to see

whether he takes a more conciliatory or ambiguous stance. We'll also be monitoring all the shuttle diplomacy that's set to take place between Israel and Lebanon in the coming days. And we will also be keeping an eye out for yet more surprises. Yeah, because who would have ever thought that something like this would happen? No one outside of Israeli intelligence circles could have predicted that yesterday thousands

of pages would explode suddenly in the middle of the Lebanese day. Patrick, it is now 1230 a.m. for you, and I really appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you, Sabrina. Good night. Good night. On Wednesday night, The Times reported that the Hungarian company subcontracted to make the pagers was in fact a series of Israeli shell companies, and that the pagers had been made by Israeli

intelligence officers. The first batch of booby-trapped pagers shipped to Lebanon in 2022, and production ramped up when Hezbollah leadership told operatives to forgo their phones. In Israel, intelligence officers referred to the pagers as, quote, buttons that could be pushed when the time seemed ripe. We'll be right back. Here's what else you should know today. On Wednesday... Our patient approach over the past year has paid dividends. Inflation is now much closer to our objective, and we have gained greater confidence that

inflation is moving sustainably toward 2%. The Federal Reserve cut interest rates by half a percentage point, an unusually large move and a clear signal that central bankers think they are winning their war against inflation. The Fed's decision lowers rates to about 4.9 percent, down from a more than two decade high. The cut is meant to prevent the economy from slowing so much that the job market begins to weaken significantly. So far, Fed officials have managed to slow inflation without causing major economic problems.

For the White House, the Fed's announcement was encouraging and signaled that, after years of rapid price increases, a return to normal inflation was in sight. But Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump accused the Fed of playing politics by cutting interest rates, which ultimately helps consumers, so close to the election. Today's episode was produced by Will Reid, Jessica Chung, and Michelle Bonja. It was edited by Devon Taylor, contains original music by Pat McCusker, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. Special thanks to Shira Frankel.

That's it for the Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you tomorrow.