David Horovitz
Times of Israel, Sept. 19, 2024
“… even after Tuesday’s dramatic practical and psychological blow to Hezbollah, it remains conceivable that things could go either way.”
Tuesday’s detonation of thousands of Hezbollah pagers across Lebanon and into Syria was a spectacular feat of intel, technology and execution — the starkest of contrasts to the abject failures that enabled Hamas to carry out its October 7 invasion, mass murder, rapes, and abductions.
The exploding pagers operation — widely reported to have been carried out by Israel, though not acknowledged here as such — had apparently been devised to serve in the near future as an opening salvo in a major ground offensive to deplete and deter Hezbollah. This, in turn, would aim to create the conditions for a restoration of security in the north and the return of the tens of thousands of Israelis who have been forced from their homes for almost a year.
In such a scenario, the impact of the vast, coordinated wave of explosions could have been extraordinarily significant — not only in directly putting a proportion of Hezbollah terrorists out of action, but also broadly complicating communications and logistics within the world’s largest and most potent terrorist army at the moment of truth.
Amid a reported “use it or lose it” dilemma, with some in Hezbollah having become suspicious that their new pagers were Trojan horses, the decision was made to detonate the devices — but not, evidently, as the first act of a full-on war. … [To read the full article, click here]
