Hussein Ibish
At about 3:30 on a seemingly normal, relatively calm Tuesday afternoon, all hell suddenly broke loose across Lebanon. Pagers belonging to fighters, operatives, allies, and associates of the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia suddenly exploded, injuring at least 2,750 people, including civilians, and killing 12, including two children. The details of the operation are still unfolding, but Israel is almost certainly behind the detonations, making them one of the most audacious acts of sabotage ever conducted.
The attack demonstrated, not for the first time, the extraordinary degree of Israel’s penetration into Iran and its Arab allies. Just since January, Israel has assassinated the Hamas operative Saleh al-Arouri in Beirut, the Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh at a guesthouse in Tehran, and the Hezbollah military leader Fuad Shukr, again in Beirut. But the pager explosions mark an escalation, specifically, of the conflict that has been building between Israel and Hezbollah since October 8.
That day, following Hamas’s attack on Israel, Hezbollah fired rockets across the Lebanon-Israel border in a rather pro forma show of solidarity with the Palestinian extremists. But to Hamas’s disappointment, Hezbollah did not immediately ramp up its attacks beyond what had become routine across that border for more than two decades. In fact, Israel has been largely responsible for the escalation of conflict near the border over the months that followed, for reasons that are not impossible to discern. Hezbollah’s interests, however, are a bit more opaque, and have set the group against both a wider war and the terms of a negotiated peace.
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