Exploding Pagers, Hezbollah, Rocket Fire, and Why No One Can Predict What Comes Next
The location of one of the impacts. Notice the skeletons of three cars. These are the two houses that went up in flames. The owner of the house on the right decided to sleep in his bomb shelter. That saved his life. Photo courtesy Ari Sacher.
by Ari Sacher
The brilliance of the Israel Defense Force was astonishing, but their strategy was unclear. Last week, the pagers of thousands of Hezbollah operatives suddenly began to explode – in their hands, in their pockets, and in their ears.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had for years enforced a ban on cellphones because he knew that they could serve as a portal for eavesdropping and for geolocation of the owner of the phone. Pager technology was the preferred form of communication. The technology was ancient, and pagers had been out of production for years. For this reason, the pager network was far less susceptible to hacking than the cellphone network. Nasrallah trusted them with his life. Big mistake.
Somebody had known about this network for quite some time and had successfully infiltrated the Hezbollah supply chain, outsourcing the production of pagers from a Taiwanese company called “Gold Apollo” to a company in Hungary called BAC. After the explosions, when reporters went to BAC offices to interview the CEO, they found an empty house with a mailbox. BAC was a straw company, and the pagers were being manufactured under license elsewhere. Whoever had manufactured the pagers had incorporated PETN, an explosive, in the battery. Last week, a signal was sent to all of the pagers indicating that a high-ranking Hezbollah official wanted to speak with them. When the call was answered, the pager exploded. This occurred nearly simultaneously all over Lebanon, injuring about 4,000 and killing more than 800, according to a Hezbollah message that was leaked to the internet. The operation was brilliant: Only Hezbollah operatives were targeted, meaning zero collateral damage. Note that the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon was also seriously injured, a clear indication of overt Iranian collusion with Hezbollah. All eyes turned to Israel, who neither confirmed nor denied the rumors.
After their pager network had been compromised, Hezbollah turned to an alternate form of communication – walkie-talkies. As the walkie-talkies operated on a point-to-point network, it made potential eavesdropping even more difficult than breaking into the pager network. The next day, walkie-talkies inexplicably began to explode all over Lebanon. This network had obviously been infiltrated as well. All eyes turned to Israel, who neither confirmed nor denied the rumors.
Hezbollah was in chaos. Communication was impossible. They could not coordinate an attack, and they could not prepare a defense. An IDF attack was a sure thing. Perhaps this was what the IDF had been waiting for all along, to attack and defeat Hezbollah when they were in complete and entire disarray. But when 24 hours went by without any significant IDF movement, Israelis quickly grew skeptical. The exploding phone trick was cutesy, but wasn’t that meant to be a leadup for something much bigger? Every newspaper and radio station asked the same question: What was the strategy?
On Sept. 20, this question received an answer. IDF fighter-bombers destroyed a building in the Dahia neighborhood in Beirut, a Hezbollah stronghold. The media initially reported that the target was Ibrahim Aqil, the Head of Operations in Hezbollah. Less than an hour later, the IDF admitted that Aqil, who was also the acting commander of the terror group’s elite “Radwan Force,” was the target.
Aqil was wanted not only by the Israelis. The U.S. accused him of a pivotal role in the Beirut truck bombings that struck the American embassy in April 1983, which killed 63 people, and a U.S. Marine barracks six months later that killed 241 people. The State Department had offered $7 million for information about his whereabouts. Interesting factoid: Aqil had been wounded in the pager explosions two days earlier and had just been released from the hospital. Nevertheless, the killing of Aqil, while an intelligence coup, was far less than what Israelis thought was coming. Yes, he was a high-ranking Hezbollah official, but in late July, Israel had assassinated Fuad Shukr, the Hezbollah head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and what had that accomplished? Been there, done that, and the Hezbollah continued to fire rockets at northern Israel.
As the weekend wore on, it became evident that Aqil was not the only person killed in the Dahia bombing. At least 20 high-ranking Hezbollah commanders were in the same room with him. After the dust had cleared, Israel had taken out 6 of the top 9 terrorists in Hezbollah. How does that happen? Did the IDF get lucky, finding so many wanted men together in one room? Likely not. When cellphones are forbidden and when pagers and walkie-talkies blow up in your face, the only way to hold an important meeting is face-to-face. That was the strategy: It had taken years of planning but in one fell swoop the IDF had decapitated Hezbollah leadership. What a coup de grace. What foresight. What planning. The operation went a long way in restoring at least some of the IDF intelligence deterrence that had been destroyed on October 7. The stage had now been set for a final assault on Hezbollah to push them north above the Litani River, where they would no longer threaten Israeli border towns, enabling nearly 100,000 citizens to return to the homes they had evacuated on October 8.
This is where this essay was meant to end, but Hezbollah were not ready to roll over and die, at least not yet. On Sept.21, Hezbollah announced that they were preparing to avenge the deaths of their commanders. At 8:30 p.m., Brigadier Danny Hagari, the IDF spokesman, briefed the nation. He told us that a strike by Hezbollah was imminent and that the IDF Home Front Command had updated its rules for citizens living north of Haifa, a population center of more than one million, located about 20 miles south of the Lebanese border. My town of Moreshet is about 10 miles to the east of Haifa, well and truly in the middle of the newly-defined danger zone. Schools were canceled, and no more than 100 people were permitted to congregate indoors. Outdoor events were limited to 10 people. And then we waited. All through the night, IDF fighter-bombers buzzed overhead, and we heard the distant thuds of their bombs falling in Lebanon, hopefully on fully-loaded missile launchers.
At about 1 a.m. we were roused from our sleep. We were not awoken by the sirens in our town, but, rather, by sounds of nearby interceptions. We went to our bomb-shelter all the same. Can’t be too safe. The target was the Ramat David Air Base about 10 miles south of us. Nothing was hit, other than a barn full of cows. So while people’s lives were spared, their livelihood was not. A little before 5 a.m. we were awakened again, this time by our town’s siren. Once again we quickly – but orderly – went down to the bomb shelter. This time the intercepts were much louder and much closer. The target was the RAFAEL Leshem facility, Israel’s most important factory for missile development and production, about two miles down the road. The missiles all missed their target, overshooting it by a few miles and flying over our heads.
I did not bother going back to bed. We had to start our day, as our daughter had to return to her army base in Tel Aviv on an early bus. I went to synagogue for morning prayers. At 6:24, another alarm sounded. This time there were two targets: the RAFAEL Leshem facility and the RAFAEL David Institute in Haifa bay. About 20 seconds later – far shorter than the 90 seconds we were promised – we began to hear intercepts right over our heads. Suddenly, I heard an explosion far louder than I had ever heard before – and I have been to more than a few missile flight tests in my life. It was clear that something had fallen nearby and exploded. We all exited the synagogue.
Only a few yards from my house, I could see fire and smoke. We ran down to the source of the fire. Two rockets had fallen, one about 50 yards down the street from my house and one on the street below. These were Fajr-5 rockets; each carrying a warhead weighing 400 pounds, of which about a third of the weight was high explosive and the rest consisted of shrapnel – ball bearings – to increase the killing power. Two houses were completely on fire. The flames were so high that I considered the odds of anyone coming out of them alive were nil. I ran back to my house, and my wife and youngest daughter were in the bomb shelter. We remained there for 10 minutes as per Home Front Command instructions, and then I left to see what I could do to help. By this time, the police and the fire brigade had arrived on the scene. An Israeli Arab police officer who was blocking the street told me that everyone had managed to escape their homes without injury. As I walked home, I saw some of the people, who lived on the parallel street whose homes had been hit, walking like zombies up the street toward a large clubhouse we had just built for the local youth. Here they will stay until they can find another arrangement. Here too, no injuries.
A few hours later, my wife and I took a walk around the block to assess the damage. The rocket that hit closest to us impacted a driveway and completely destroyed three cars. Two houses that were adjacent to the driveway sustained major external damage, but the internal damage was apparently less than could be expected. Across the street, the houses had their roofs blown off, windows smashed, and walls riddled with pockmarks from the shrapnel. On the street below, there was a cavernous crater in the ground where the rocket had impacted (No such crater was found on the street above, likely because a large tree over the impact point had triggered the warhead above ground). Cars had been strewn as if by a hurricane. One car had been blown completely over a fence and landed upside down in the front yard.
The speed in which the mess was cleaned up was striking. Explosive Ordnance Disposal EOD came and took away the rocket debris. The hole in the road was filled in, and the cars were towed. Now, the town youth are going door-to-door to clean up houses that suffered damage – broken glass, smoke damage and the like. Just another day at the office.
What is my takeaway? It is that in this war, no person has the vaguest idea what the future holds. Who would have thought that in only three days, Israel would turn Hezbollah into a shell of itself, convincingly turning the tide of a seemingly endless war of attrition? Who would have thought that Israel could surreptitiously plant explosives in pagers and walkie-talkies, turning them into ticking time bombs? Who would have thought that two rockets carrying a combined total of nearly a half a ton of explosives would impact a residential area and yet no-one would sustain even a scratch? And who would have thought that Iron Dome, with its nearly 95 percent success rate, would miss two rockets that would fall over the heads of many of the people who are responsible for its design and production? Nobody knew. Nobody could have known, and anyone who claims that he was unsurprised by the events of the last four days is a liar.
Oh, by the way, our house sustained only minor damage – a few pictures and a light fixture fell. It took about five minutes to clean up. Had the Hezbollah rocket launchers in Lebanon been elevated only a thousandth of a degree higher, we would be having a very different conversation. Do I believe in miracles? Do I ever.
Ari Sacher is chief systems engineer of Iron Dome, and a senior policy advisor to the U.S. Israel Education Association.
