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The Israelis somehow managed to hack into Hezbollah’s communication system, and turned every one of its new pagers into an explosive, blowing up in the hands, or the pockets, of those possessing them. So far, the Lebanese Minister of Health, Firass Abiad, has said that around 4,000 have been wounded and 200 people have been critically wounded; a dozen have already died.

There is chaos all over Lebanon, as Hezbollah tries to come up with an alternative method of communication. It had been employing pagers because it believed they were safer than cell phones, which the group assumed were more easily hacked than pagers. They see that they were wrong. This massive hack has no doubt filled Hezbollah’s bezonians with extreme alarm. If the Israelis can pull off this spectacular attack, what other hacks will Hezbollah suffer in the future? Our preliminary Jihad Watch report is here, and more on this extraordinary development can be found here: “Pager detonations wound thousands, majority Hezbollah members, in suspected cyberattack, Jerusalem Post, September 17, 2024:

Hundreds of members of the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah were seriously wounded on Tuesday in Lebanon’s south and the southern suburbs of Beirut when the pagers they use to communicate exploded, security sources told Reuters.

And the total number of wounded has now risen to 4,000.

A Reuters journalist saw 10 Hezbollah members bleeding from wounds in the southern suburb of Beirut known as Dahiyeh

A senior Lebanese security source told Al-Hadath that Israel infiltrated the communication system of individual devices and detonated them.

Iranian ambassador Mojtaba Amani was reportedly injured in a Hezbollah explosion, according to state-owned Mehr News.

A Hezbollah official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the detonation of the pagers was the “biggest security breach” the group had been subjected to in nearly a year of war with Israel.

According to reports, the phones were called before the explosion for some period of seconds to increase the chance that whoever received the call would pick it up and be maximally wounded.

The pagers detonated were the latest model brought in by Hezbollah in recent months, three security sources told Reuters….

If the Mossad was able to cause the explosions of more than 4,000 pagers all over Beirut, the Beqaa, and southern Lebanon — with some even exploding in Syria and Iraq — taking care to phone their owners first so that the phones would be picked up, and held close to their owners’ bodies when they exploded, what other instruments may the IDF be able to hack into to create the next mass casualty event for Hezbollah operatives? And how will Hezbollah members now communicate among themselves? Do they now dare go back to using their cell phones, which they had stopped using because pagers were believed to be more secure against potential hackers? What about the computers belonging to Hezbollah members? Could Mossad hack into those too, so that they explode when a certain email address is either sent to, or received from, someone posing as a Hezbollah member? What a fiendishly clever enemy, that is showing yet again it can run rings around its enemies. Hasan Nasrallah must surely remember Stuxnet and the malware introduced into Iranian computers, so that those computers then made Iran’s centrifuges at Natanz whirl so fast that they destroyed themselves. Hezbollah, and the Syrians, and the Iranians, are all still smarting from the recent attack on, and destruction of, the underground factory for precision missiles that Israeli air force commandos of the elite Shaldag unit managed to blow up at Masyaf, in Syria.

The IDF is no longer in any mood to wait for an attack by Hezbollah, and only then to respond, to retaliate. It will from now on be striking first. In the north, the IDF has ordered more troops to arrive every day from Gaza to prepare, should the order be given, for a ground offensive against Hezbollah. The aim is clear: Hezbollah needs to be pushed back north of the Litani River, and must be sufficiently mauled by the IDF so that it agrees to stop lobbing rockets and drones into northern Israel, to ensure that 60,000 Israelis can return safely to their homes.