On Monday, Israeli officials announced they had uncovered a Hezbollah plot to assassinate a former security official with a remotely operated bomb. 

On Tuesday, hundreds of Hezbollah operatives were maimed and injured as their pagers simultaneously exploded.

The exact details of what happened in Beirut and its surrounds will be pored over for years to come but – innovation aside – it is really just another chapter in the oldest book. 

It is power politics through terror; communication through slaughter; a modern and grossly lopsided version of the Biblical idiom “an eye for an eye”.

If you are in the neighbourhood and let on that you are repulsed by it, you’ll be told to toughen up. 

Or, as it was put to me recently: “You white boys don’t get it. Strength is the language of the Middle East. The only language they understand.” I’ve heard near identical versions of the same message from both sides.

Some think Tuesday’s pager attack is a prelude to all-out war in the north – yes, another one.

Israel and Hezbollah have been trading blows for nearly a year across the Israel-Lebanon border and there is no doubt things have been gradually hotting up, with strikes on both sides increasing in intensity and reaching ever deeper into each other’s territory.

Losses are also mounting. Hezbollah has lost some 600 fighters while casualties on the Israeli side are much lower at 46, but the country has lost a large chunk of land. 

Since the start of the war on Oct 7, it has had to evacuate over 60,000 people from an area of around 650 square kilometres along the Lebanon border because of Hezbollah’s rockets.

Within Israel, this is causing Benjamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu’s government extreme discomfort. How could a leader who promised “absolute victory” in the wake of Oct 7 preside over the loss of around three per cent of the country’s most productive land?

In recent days, it has been reported that Netanyahu was plotting the sacking of Yoav Gallant, his defence minister, in order to launch a land invasion of southern Lebanon. 

Gallant, it was said by the prime minister’s people, had long opposed such an action, while Bibi was all for it.

It is unclear how much, if any of this is true. It was previously thought that Gallant was the hawk when it came to Lebanon and Bibi the dove. 

Indeed, Gallant is said to have argued for war to be declared on Hezbollah in the immediate aftermath of the Oct 7 attack.

Bibi, on the other hand, is regarded by the Israeli defence establishment as an “operations guy” – someone who prefers a quick “mowing of the lawn” to all-out war which comes with much greater military and geo-political risks, as he has found in Gaza.

In this context, the pager strike seems more likely to have been ordered by Netanyahu, not as a prelude or provocation for a war in the north, but as an alternative to it; an operation that satisfies both the perceived military need to respond to Hezbollah’s own assassination plot and his own need to please his increasingly warlike core.

The first major survey of Israeli and Palestinian attitudes post-Oct 7 published last week found that 45 per cent of Israeli Jews would prefer entering a full-scale regional war, including Iran, than agree to a peace deal that includes an independent Palestinian state.

The pager attack, which if Lebanese health ministry data is to be believed killed at least nine people and injured around 3,000, will certainly go some way to satiating that desire for robust action – for the time being at least.