BEEP! with Nadav Eyal
To help us better understand events in Lebanon over the past 24 hours, Nadav Eyal joined us for an emergency episode of the podcast.
NADAV EYAL is a columnist for Yediiot. He is one of Israel’s leading journalists. Eyal has been covering Middle-Eastern and international politics for the last two decades for Israeli radio, print and television news.
Full Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
NE: So this is probably one of the most impressive operations that Israel has had since the foundation of the state in 1948, and definitely the most impressive operation that we have seen since the beginning of the war. And if we talk about Israel restoring deterrence in the region, there is no doubt of these videos of Hezbollah operatives being hit simultaneously everywhere in Lebanon and in Syria, and emergency rooms in Lebanon overflowing with young men who are Hezbollah operatives who have just been hit by Israel. This is how you start to restore deterrence.
DS: It's 8:27 pm on Tuesday, September 17th here in New York City. It is 3:27 am on Wednesday, September 18th in Israel as Israelis transition to a new day. We have been in the midst of our special series on Call Me Back as we approach the one year, the grim one year anniversary of October 7th, in which we're having a series of conversations with various thought leaders reflecting on the past year and the year ahead. We started with Douglas Murray, the episode we just dropped yesterday was with Sam Harris. I highly encourage those who have not yet listened to the Sam Harris conversation to listen to it. And we will be dropping those kinds of conversations every week, as I said, leading up to October 7th. We did not plan to interrupt the series with news and analysis about breaking news developments, but no one warned us that 3000 members of Hezbollah today would have telecom IT problems, which interrupted their day and therefore is interrupting our day. And to help us understand this interruption, we are joined by our long time friend and regular on this podcast, Nadav Eyal from Yediot Aharonot. Nadav, thanks for being here.
NE: Thanks for having me, Dan. And it was a fantastic episode with Sam Harris, and I really recommend people listen to it. And they can actually watch it too.
DS: That's right. They'll be able to watch this too, because this is on video too. Okay. Nadav, I want to provide a brief, but detailed understanding for our listeners of what happened today.So walk us through what happened today in Lebanon.
NE: So, at about 3:30 p.m. local time, Lebanon, about 3,000 pagers basically blew up. It happened in Beirut, it happened at the Baka area, the valley of Lebanon, it happened in southern Lebanon, but it also happened in Damascus.
DS: Just geographically, just help us understand. So this is all over southern and central Lebanon.
NE: And Syria.
DS: And Syria, right. But in other words, it's not concentrated in one specific area. This was pretty widely distributed.
NE: Absolutely. Now, these pagers were used by Hezbollah as a recruitment system to their operatives. So I don't know how many of our listeners even remember the term ‘pagers.’ I guess you and I are old enough to have used them. I have used them as a journalist for many years. But basically a pager is something that only receives, or originally only receives data. Then you get a message at the time on the screen. Sometimes it was at the beginning of the pager phase in history. It was only a phone number that used to call you. Then it began to be real messages that you would see on a very small digital screen. And these pagers were used by Hezbollah in order to basically recruit. So this is not a tactical radio intelligence system. This is telling their operatives, do this and that now, usually using coded language. So they would use codes to say to different operatives, you need to, for instance, assign yourself into a specific location. This is not, I repeat, this is not the inner intelligence and communication of Hezbollah between its leaders. These operatives can be senior, they can be medium level, and they can be regular foot soldiers of Hezbollah and we should also underline that Hezbollah is not only a military organization, it's also a party in Lebanon. These pagers were handed over to military or combat operatives of Hezbollah and they blew up almost at once in Lebanon and from Lebanon to Syria as a result of a message that they received. That message pretended to be a message from the leadership of Hezbollah. We don't know yet what was exactly written. They were programmed to beep or to vibe and beep for a few seconds. So people pick them up or took them out of their pockets or from their bags. They looked at these pagers and then these pagers blew up.
DS: And blew up meaning, blew up in their faces, blew up in their hands, wherever. I mean, so they caused serious bodily damage.
NE: Yeah, we're talking right now, Hezbollah is trying to conceal the number of casualties. But according to former Lebanese sources, at least 11 people died during this attack and much more than a thousand were hurt. Hundreds were severely wounded in this attack. People lost limbs, people lost eyes. This was a serious attack and the thing about this attack is that it was widespread within the operational wing of the military of Hezbollah and that's the meaningful thing here and it was done through their own communication device, in this case, a pager. Okay, so now we go into the operation itself, and I should say that I am talking here under restrictions of Israeli, restrictive guidelines during wartime and in general, and not everything can be said. DS: For our listeners, because we've never really explained this, and we have you and others like Ronen Bergman and other Israeli journalists on a lot. If you work for an Israeli publication, you cannot report everything you learn during wartime. There are certain very sensitive topics that the IDF, they call them censors, but the IDF censors ask you to withhold for purposes of operational security of whatever may be going on.
NE: So basically what we, we can say is that there is here, you can definitely speculate about that, that there is here both a software component, but also a hardware component. Now here's the hardware component. I've heard speculation all through the day that somehow the batteries were made to heat up and then blow up somehow. So let's take this off the table. In order to have these kinds of detonations that we saw in Lebanon today, and maybe some of our listeners saw the detonations, you know, a person standing in a supermarket and suddenly something blows up or another person stands and buys vegetables. All men, by the way, all Hezbollah operatives. For this to happen, you need to put in place actual detonation material inside these pagers. So you need explosives. And it's not about the battery heating up. First of all, all the people that do have pagers, that are listening to us, nothing can make your pager explode this way and cause you serious harm. There is no cyber attack that can cause that if you don't have the hardware. And the hardware is putting explosives in. Now there are basically two types of explosives that you can put in when you want to wire a pager or a mobile phone or anything else. One of them is what people sometimes phrase as plastic, explosive that needs a detonator of sorts. Or you can use something that is more nitroglycerin, less stable in nature that you can put in. Judging from the size of the pagers and talking with people who are experts on these issues, you can see that there are a lot of things that you can do with nitroglycerin. Their assessment is that the type of explosives used by the people who operated this attack is more likely to be closer to the family of nitroglycerin than the family of plastic material because they don't think it was physically possible to put detonators inside those pagers without the other side, Hezbollah, knowing about this because of various specific reasons. So you need, first of all, to put the explosive inside the pagers. Now the second thing you need to do is you need to destabilize those explosives to the extent that they will detonate, and you need to do this in a synchronized manner. And for that, you would need a software change to the pager that will lead for either the battery warming up or some electrical circuit being in operation, electronically there, that will lead to the actual explosion. So there are two elements here that the intelligence service responsible for this, according to, you know, the entire world, and Israel has not claimed a responsibility, has not said nothing - it's the Israeli Mossad. You need to do these two things. Now we already know that these pagers were ordered from a Taiwanese company. The name of the company is known, the models of these pages are known, and Hezbollah received some of these pagers in the last year or so. And there's a possibility that some of them were even ordered even before then. And now I should give some background about the reasons for Hezbollah using pagers and mobile phones. Because in essence, if you think about your mobile phone, it can do, Dan, everything that the pager can do, right? A person can just shoot you a message. You can use WhatsApp, which is relatively safe, in terms of cyber security, relatively safe. You can use Signal, which is another app, relatively safe and secure, and could be secret to an extent. So why would they use pagers? And this ironically goes to a campaign led by Hassan Nasrallah in recent years against using mobile phones.
DS: Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah.
NE: Yes, and Nasrallah has taken issue with mobile phones because mobile phones, as you know, Dan, have a mic in them. And they also connect to the internet. And you can trace people with mobile phones and you can record people if you hack on their phones. And because of this reason, Nasrallah has kept warning Hezbollah operatives against using mobile phones, taking mobile phones into secure installations of Hezbollah in bases. And he had this not so crazy campaign saying basically your mobile phone can be used by the Israelis in any given time. So one of the reasons that Hezbollah opted to get those pagers was because they thought these pagers are much safer. First of all, a pager doesn't have a mic in it, right? Secondly, a pager in essence is not supposed to signal out anything. Right? It's just a receiver, like a radio. But even radios can be wiretapped in order to send signals out, and with pagers, it's supposed to be more difficult. At any rate, if indeed the Mossad is responsible, the Mossad understood that this can be a weakness to be used against Hezbollah, and then they initiated this incredibly sophisticated operation. This would go down in history as one of the most daring, sophisticated, and imaginative operations made by the Israeli Defense Apparatus in general and specifically by the Mossad. There is simply no other example for anything like this happening before. Israel, you might remember, at the time managed to booby trap the mobile phone used by Yahya Ayyash, nicknamed the Engineer, responsible for the deaths of dozens or hundreds of Israelis killed in suicide bombings. This was back in the 1990s when Shimon Peres was prime minister. He gave that order to detonate the mobile phone given to Yehya Ayyash and Yehya Ayyash died. This led to a series of suicide bombings in Israel by Hamas as a revenge. Israel did things like that. In another occasion, Israel managed to get, according to foreign sources, some sort of a virus or a software that led to the centrifuges used by Iran in its nuclear installations. To start rotating in a much higher speed than they could physically maintain, thus blowing up. That's another example. But doing this to actually an entire army, or to every operative having this kind of pager, this is scaling this up in ways that we have never seen before. And also, it's a rather targeted event, right? So you could see in that supermarket and in other places, the Lebanese are saying that innocent people have been hurt during this attack, but generally this is a very targeted attack against Hezbollah operatives. And what the Mossad did here is incredibly sophisticated and complex because they needed, first of all, to make sure that Hezbollah orders these pagers from a certain supplier, or at least know about this supplier, then in the route between the factory making the pagers, and until these pagers are with Hezbollah central command, you need somehow to implant the explosives and change the software. Where do you do that? Do you do that, Dan, at the factory itself or along the way? And I spoke with several people today. Some of them said you need to do this before the shipping goes out of the factory. So someone needed to go inside the factory and replace thousands of pagers at once. Or they needed to replace this when it was on the route to Hezbollah. So somewhere maybe on that ship or on that airplane. And to give the impression that this is exactly the same pagers, like the ones made by a Taiwanese factory. And for the Hezbollah Central Command, which are very suspicious, to make sure that they're not suspicious of these pagers. And if they, for instance, get support back from the Taiwanese company that was producing them, that was paid for these pagers, that they won't see that it's not exactly the same pagers. And we don't have exact answers to that, but I'm giving you an idea of what the Mossad, if it is indeed the Mossad, had to do in order to make sure that the pagers actually detonate in a synchronized way when they are giving the right signal or the right message by the Israeli handlers back in Tel Aviv. So this is, you know, we will have the documentaries and the movies about this operation. So this is probably one of the most impressive operations that Israel had since the foundation of the state in 1948, and definitely the most impressive operation that we have seen since the beginning of the war. And if we talk about Israel restoring deterrence in the region, there is no doubt of these videos of Hezbollah operatives being hit. Simultaneously everywhere in Lebanon and in Syria, and ambulances and emergency rooms in Lebanon overflowing with young men who are Hezbollah operatives who have just been hit by Israel. And the fact that this was flying through social networks. This is how you start to restore deterrence. So for Israel, a highly successful tactical operation here that can actually maintain or be extremely helpful if it wants to restore its deterrence across the region. And I should say that its deterrence is not, you know, as the war has shown us, both on October 7 when Hamas attacked, on October 8 when Hezbollah attacked, then the Houthis attacked, then the Iranians attacked - the Israeli deterrence in the region is not at its climax in recent months, right? And these kinds of operations, which we are seeing increasingly successful during the war, it's not the first and the second, you know, we almost forgot about Ismail Haniyeh, right? In Tehran.
DS: Which is also extraordinarily impressive, right? Israel got, assuming it was Israel, which Israel hasn't claimed credit for it. Israel has not taken responsibility, but it, our understanding is it was Israel and Israel got into the equivalent of Blair House. Like in Washington, D. C., but in Tehran, which is housing for, elite VIP housing for visiting dignitaries right in the power sanctuary, if you will, of, in Tehran, of the government.
NE: And of course, the killing of the chief of staff of Hezbollah, which happened in the same month.
DS: Right.
NE: And the killing of Mohammed Deif. The chief of staff, the actual chief of staff of Hamas and the military commander of Hamas for many years. So this, one could argue, is how you restore deterrence. It's not only about targeted assassinations. In this case, it brings to the table a major question today asked across the region from the Mediterranean to Tehran. What else has Israel in store for us? What else can blow up? And I promise you Dan, that right now, as we speak in Tehran, they are re evaluating everything. Because if Israel can do this to 3,000 pagers, can't it do it to many, many other things? Now, Israel has used these techniques specifically, and this is the reason I'm talking about Tehran, with the Iranian nuclear military program. So, things used to mysteriously, naturally self detonate in the recent 25 years. Sometimes it was a specific load coming down from a ship. Sometimes it was in an army base. And you, you didn't know exactly how this happened. But doing this, with scaling this to thousands of Hezbollah operatives, including, by the way, the Iranian ambassador that was hit in his face.
DS: Right. The Iranian ambassador to Lebanon was hit with this. So he had, the Iranian ambassador has the Hezbollah pager.
NE: Either he has a Hezbollah pager or he has a bodyguard.
DS: Right.
NE: Or a Hezbollah military attache next to him so close. That he would get hit as a result of that.
DS: I understand why you say this is impressive, but I would also argue this is one of the most humane military operations one could imagine. I mean, you described that video, which I saw, I was on Telegram, of a Hezbollah operative in a supermarket, and he's standing there around a few other people. I mean, one image I saw was he was standing next to like a fruit stand, and then there's a different one where there's a different guy at the cash register, and these pagers blow up and it takes out these individuals who have the pagers, but no one around them. Everyone around them is just standing there. In fact, the guy at the cash register, the woman behind the cash register just gets up and runs off like she's fine. And so it is, the precision is extraordinary. David French, who's a columnist for the New York times and he hosts a podcast called Advisory Opinions at the dispatch media, which I highly recommend, but he writes a lot about the law of war and how, and he's written a lot about how Israel has conducted itself according to the laws of war. He wrote here on X, which I'm quoting, ‘Israel's pager bombs represent one of the most precisely targeted strikes in the history of warfare. I can't think,’ David French writes, ‘I can't think of a single widespread strike on an armed force that's embedded in a civilian population that's been more precise. It's remarkable.’
NE: And one of the things that people should remember about Hezbollah is that Hezbollah does operate from its headquarters in the center of Beirut, it's a designated terror organization according to the United States, according to the E.U. It constantly uses people who seem to be civilians, but aren't. And this is one of the most difficult problems that Israel has when dealing with Hezbollah, when dealing with Hamas. And this was to an extent bypassed, brilliantly, by this ploy and by these pagers blowing up. And also blowing up at once, which is also an issue technically that you need to make sure happens properly. So you know, all in all, when you look at this, Israel had a tremendously eventful and successful day in the Middle East.
DS: Do you think the operation was planned before October 7th and they just activated it and utilized it now for reasons, whatever, whatever reason, which I assume you want to get into the timing of this. But do you think the planning was all done prior to October 7th?
NE: I think that the planning as of itself has been there before October 7th. The planning to have this kind of trick, as you might want to call it, or this kind of deceit, this was there before October 7th. The agenda of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, against mobile phones is before October 7th. And Israel wanting to use this en masse is before October 7th. But there's no doubt that with October 7th, Israel expedited a lot of process. And there's something I want to say that I used to say on your show again and again and again, and I think now maybe people understand what I meant. Israel prepared for a war in the north. It prepared itself to a war with Hezbollah. It was not prepared, unfortunately, tragically, to a Hamas invasion and an attempted ethnic cleansing on our southern border. And that's a tragedy. But what Israel did do after the second Lebanon war, in 2006, is prepare, prepare, and prepare again, to the possibility of a full scale war with Hezbollah, the Israeli defense apparatus - and these are words that I said on your show several times, Israeli defense apparatus came out of that war, the second Lebanon war, frustrated.
DS: 2006.
NE: They felt that they could have done much better. And Israel has and still has a lot of surprises in store for Hezbollah. And this is something that Hezbollah started to learn during this war, and now they just got another surprise. But if you get these kind of abilities to infiltrate your enemy, it doesn't end with pagers necessarily, right? So this is the kind of thinking that you have in Hezbollah today. They are shocked. We know that they are shocked. They have no idea what else is happening. Just imagine, Dan, are they now using their tactical radios? Aren't they fearful that their tactical radios are booby trapped? Other things are booby trapped? This is the kind of panic behavior that you would want to see with your enemies after this kind of an attack. Now, some people lost their lives. A couple of fingers, some people lost an eye. Others are seriously, seriously wounded. But you also took out, at least for the next couple of days, you took out more than a thousand people out of any sort of operation or play.
DS: So that then therefore begs the timing, why now?
NE: So that is an excellent question and one of the remarks that I've seen by people across the board is. We can understand if this is the first strike in a wider war launched by Israel against Hezbollah, but we don't understand why it's happening now and there are no airplanes in the air or tanks roaming into Lebanon. If you have thousands of pagers with some kind of explosive in them, with thousands of operatives, it's a time sensitive operation, which means that this could be exposed, A, and technically, it can become not operative at a certain point. So both things can happen. First of all, you can have some sort of leak, some genius engineer in Hezbollah that opens up its pager and understands what's happening. Secondly, there could be mistakes. There could be a fire, and then the pager blows up in a funny way, and then people start investigating. And secondly, there's also the technical possibility. that there's some sort of limit to your ability to detonate. So I'm not going to tell you Dan, what's the exact reason for this timing. I am going to tell you that sometimes these kinds of operations are time sensitive, and sometimes you need to make a decision. And it is my understanding that this issue was time sensitive and the Israeli political and security leadership had to make a decision and let me speculate now. The decision was either we do nothing and it becomes inoperative and we lose thousands of Hezbollah operatives getting injured or killed in the process. This is the first decision that they could make. Right now, I'm assuming, I'm speculating, whatever you want to call it Dan. The second decision is you use this and then you launch a full frontal attack against Hezbollah in Lebanon and you use that shock. But then again, you have serious problems because you have the U.S., the Biden administration saying, absolutely not. You need to have some sort of an international understanding to that. And I would point people to the statements made by both the defense minister and the prime minister in the last 48 hours, 48 hours. Look what happened down. We had a cabinet meeting in Israel saying that returning the Israeli displaced persons are refugees from the north back to their homes is now formally a goal of this war, something we didn't have from the beginning of the war, was demanded by the Israeli opposition. Netanyahu refused. Last 48 hours, he convened the cabinet and he made it a cabinet decision. Secondly, Netanyahu is saying in a public statement, we will get our civilians back to their homes and we will do anything in our power to do so. Amos Hochstein, The White House delegate to the region, meets Yoav Gallant, Gallant is saying, the window for diplomatic solution is closing. All of this happens in the last 48 hours. And then we basically wake up in the morning and we find out that in the afternoon, pagers are blowing up in Lebanon. So the second option was to use this to launch a full fledged war against Hezbollah, and if the Israelis considered that, they decided against it, because of political reasons, because of other reasons. The third option is the minimal one in which you actually use the pagers. You blow up the pagers. You do not assume responsibility. You do not say it's Israel that has done this. So you leave Hezbollah the ability to save face and move on to an extent. But you also confuse them, Dan. Let's say Israel does want to launch a full frontal, full fledged war against Hezbollah. Why should they let Hezbollah know immediately to that? Hezbollah doesn't know right now what, what are the intentions of Israel. And by the way, I don't know what are the decisions by the Israeli military leadership myself. So, what we're seeing here is that the Israelis decided, most probably, I'm assuming, on this third option. Let's blow up the pagers. And then, what will Hezbollah do right now? These pagers are a targeted attack. Let's say that they're attacking Tel Aviv. This is, for Israel, a reason, a casus belli, for a full fledged war. Israel's attack wasn't against the civilian population in Lebanon, right, as you mentioned before. It wasn't against resources like electricity and other resources also used by Hezbollah. Legitimate military aims if you're in a full fledged war and Hezbollah is using these installations. Israel made a targeted intelligence attack and never assumed responsibility for that. And that allows Hezbollah to move on. Now, I'm still not sure myself, what are the Israeli plans, but I wouldn't rule out that Israel assumed that if it's going to go for the minimal pagers blowing up everywhere without us assuming responsibility, you know, if an Israeli decision maker will take, make that decision, he will probably know that this could lead to to a war and to Hezbollah shooting at Tel Aviv and he made that decision anyway.
DS: Could they have made the decision because they were anticipating some operation from Hezbollah that they wanted to upend?
NE: Not that I know of. I think that generally speaking, this is something that sometimes doesn't transpire on the international media. Israel is the side that is really making the big decisions in the war in the north. It's Israel that is constantly escalating with Hezbollah, hitting Hezbollah harder and harder all the time. Because Hezbollah won't stop shooting. Look, basically, Israeli aim vis a vis Hezbollah is very simple. If Hezbollah was to just stop shooting their rockets, their missiles, their unmanned drones, to Israel tomorrow morning, I don't think that the Israelis would have continued on shooting at Hezbollah. Although this doesn't satisfy the Israeli defense apparatus, Israel would have counted that as a defeat of Hezbollah. Hezbollah joined this fight on October 8th in solidarity with Hamas. They had no reason to do that. There is no occupied Lebanese land there in Gaza. There is no excuse for them joining in with Israel. It's not even about the Palestinian casualties from the Israeli response, right? Because they joined at the morning of October 8th. This was before you had Palestinian casualties. You had the misery in Gaza. The entire set of misery was only with the Israelis murdered, taken from their homes, right? Massacred in the kibbutzim. So Hezbollah decided to join and basically said, We're going to be part of this fight, until you, Israel, stop your war in Gaza and withdraw to the border and allow Sinwar to win. To that, Israel said, absolutely not. And I have to tell you, in Israel, there are sometimes disagreements as to the war, as to the hostage deal. You've spoken about this many times. But I don't see any disagreement in Israel as to the north. Because in the case of the north, everybody understands that Hezbollah is just devoted to the idea of destroying Israel. They have joined forces with Hamas’s stated goal also of annihilating Israel. There's absolutely no reason for this war to begin with. Not that there is a good reason for the war in the South, right? But it's not their war to begin with. And the reason they're doing this as part of the Iranian led axis in the region, right? So for them to stop the war is incredibly simple. They don't need to leave Gaza like Yahya Sinwar needs to do. They don't need to release hostages because they don't have hostages. All they need to do is to stop shooting tomorrow morning. And Israel has been trying to persuade them by using force or diplomacy with Amos Hochstein, to just stop shooting and they won't. And this pager attack is just another page, as far as the Israelis are concerned, a glorious page in their attempt to convince Nasrallah that it isn't worth it, and now Nasrallah needs to make a decision, and let's say he says it is worth it, and I'm going to launch these missiles against Tel Aviv. He should think to himself, what does Israel have? What's Israel's next surprise? If they can booby trap 3,000 pagers used by my operatives to the extent of the Iranian ambassadors in Beirut, what else did they booby trap? Will everything work? That's big decisions to be made by the leadership of Hezbollah. And it's Nasrallah who's going to make this call together with, of course, the Mullahs in Tehran.
DS: Nadav, we will leave it there. Thank you for this very late night intervention of a different type, intervention on the Call Me Back podcast. As always, you help explain fast moving operational developments. So we appreciate it. And we will be checking in with you soon.
NE: Thanks, Dan.