If we thought yesterday was astonishing enough, that astonishment has deepened further today.
Yesterday, an audacious and unprecedented attack on Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon and Syria somehow caused thousands of electronic pagers to blow up simultaneously, killing at least 12 Hezbollah men and wounding at least 3000 others with many suffering serious and permanent injuries to their eyes, hands or groin. Israel reportedly thinks the Hezbollah death toll is much higher.
This was an utterly brilliant move in terms of intelligence gathering, technological wizardry and psychological warfare. We don’t know all the details, but it seems the Israelis intercepted a consignment of replacement pagers and inserted into all of them a small amount of explosive which was detonated when a message was sent to them. Since the only people to have these pagers were Hezbollah operatives, the Israelis managed at a stroke to disable hundreds if not thousands of the most senior people involved in waging permanent war against Israel civilians, and caused panic, demoralisation and chaos in their ranks.
Even worse was their humiliation as the Arab world, no less than Israel’s supporters, erupted on social media in a blizzard of hilarious memes. Israel has made Hezbollah into an international laughing stock. In the Arab world, that’s deadly.
The further brilliance of the operation was to target the enemy with absolutely minimal civilian casualties — because the explosives were confined to the Hezbollah operatives themselves and with an explosive charge that was very small.
This didn’t stop the enemies of Israel in the west instantly leaping to complain about the “irresponsibility’” of causing pagers to explode and thus imperil everyone around them — the precise opposite of what happened.
I was presented with this argument on Times Radio this morning; you can listen to the clip by clicking here.
Yesterday’s pager coup has been hailed by military types as having changed the face of modern warfare. That was even before what happened today.
Walkie-talkies — to which Hezbollah operatives presumably were forced to resort having had to dump their pagers yesterday — and other types of electronic devices they owned started to blow up around Lebanon and the region.
According to Lebanese sources, one of the radios exploded today in the office of Muhammad Kanzo, Chief of Staff for the Lebanese member of parliament Hani Kabisi. Kabisi is Chief of Staff for Nabih Berri, Speaker of the Lebanese Parliament and Chairman of the Shia Amal Movement.
The exploding devices are telling the world the identity of Hezbollah operatives who have been passing themselves off as regular guys.
If the impact of the pager attack was devastating enough for Hezbollah, today’s events make it far worse. It’s not just the additional number of combatants who will have been killed or maimed. Hezbollah will now be terrified to use any piece of electronic equipment at all. Their means of communication, absolutely essential to direct their operatives to wage war, have been rendered all but useless.
The tactic of disabling the enemy in order to strike it most effectively is a military classic. Yesterday, the immediate assumption that the pager attack was a pre-emptive strike auguring an immediate all-out IDF assault on Hezbollah gave way to perplexity when no such assault occurred.
It may be that Israel hopes these electronic attacks will persuade Hezbollah to abandon its war against Israel and retreat behind the Litani river. This would be an error.
From the experience of the past several decades, including the previously negotiated supposed withdrawal under a UN resolution and policed by UN forces — which stood by for years while Hezbollah sited its vast rocket and missile arsenal right under their noses among Lebanese civilians — any such retreat, even if it were to take place, would be tactical and temporary. With that menacing arsenal and Hezbollah’s tunnel infrastructure of strategised mass murder still in place, Israeli civilians would still be unable to return to their homes in the north of the country from where they have been displaced for the past 11 months.
Today’s developments suggest, however, that Israel hadn’t yet finished its task of disabling the enemy before any such all-out attack. There may therefore be more such disabling attacks to come as a precursor to the long-promised war to finish the job.
And then, of course, there’s Iran. The regime in Tehran must now be in a state of panic. Not only is Hezbollah, the proxy army whose missile batteries form the principal threat to Israel from the Iranian regime, now on its knees for the moment as the result of Israeli out-of-the-box thinking. The Iranian regime will be wondering that, if Israel can pull off this kind of tactic against Hezbollah, what might it be about to do to themselves and their spear-carriers in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps?
Of course, we don’t yet know what Israel’s strategy actually is. We know that the Biden administration is putting Israel under enormous pressure not to wage all-out war on Hezbollah. Maybe Israel is buckling to that pressure. There have also been reports that the pager attack was indeed intended as a pre-emptive strike for an all-out assault on Hezbollah, but Israel was forced to make it a stand-alone event because it had become compromised by some Hezbollah operatives becoming suspicious of their pagers.
Despite all that, maybe we’ll see that all-out attack very soon. Israel has long feared such a war, though, because of the certainty of thousands of Israeli victims from enormous barrages of Hezbollah rockets and other weaponry that might overwhelm Israel’s defences. We don’t know whether the events of the past 36 hours have reduced that threat. But there may be no better opportunity than this to take that gamble.
What has long been crystal clear, however, is that Hezbollah has to be defeated once and for all. And so does Iran. The October 7 pogrom put steel into the Israeli public’s backbone. Never again must Israel face the threat of another October 7 or worse. The endless war of attrition by Hezbollah must be stopped. And the head of the snake in Tehran must itself be lopped off. The Israeli public will stand for nothing less.
What has also been clear is that the Biden administration has been doing everything it can to stop Israel from defeating its mortal enemies.
Israel has long observed that — contrary to the west’s moral cretins who so falsely claim that Israel’s responses to Hamas are themselves war crimes — it has used only a fraction of its firepower against Hamas and Hezbollah and that it has far more up its sleeve than anyone can imagine. In the past 36 hours, we’ve seen some evidence of the dramatic surprises that Israel can indeed spring.
But this has also shown us that, given what it does indeed have up its sleeve, Israel could have finished off Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran too long ago if it hadn’t been prevented from doing so by America — which has been intent instead on appeasing and empowering Iran, creating a state of Palestine in Gaza which would become yet another Iranian terror proxy, and cynically weaponising the grievous plight of the hostages to force upon Israel a ceasefire which would led to the survival of Hamas.
At least America, though, did stand against today’s move by the UN General Assembly which voted 124-14 to ethnically cleanse Jews from the “West Bank”, Gaza and eastern Jerusalem. The Jerusalem Post reports:
The text of the resolution was based on the advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice in July that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory was illegal. Prior to the vote, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he supported the ICJ opinion and would abide by the vote, which calls on the IDF to withdraw to the 1948 ceasefire lines within 12 months.
While the US voted against this disgusting resolution, Britain abstained. This was as unsurprising as it was shameful. The British government has long misrepresented international law by falsely declaring Israel to be in “illegal occupation” of the “Palestinian territories” — which have never existed in law or history.
The new Labour government under Sir Keir Starmer has ramped up hostility towards Israel by repeating the falsehoods and blood libels being promoted by the international “humanitarian” establishment led by the Hamas-supporting UN; endorsed the request by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for warrants to arrest Israel’s prime minister and defence minister, despite the fact that the prosecutor’s arguments rested entirely on malicious falsehoods and had zero connection with law; restored funding to UNRWA despite overwhelming evidence that it is an adjunct of Hamas; and introduced a partial arms embargo against Israel when it is fighting for its life against an eight-front war of extermination led by Iran.
So the fact that Britain didn’t oppose the shocking UN resolution is hardly surprising. What’s notable —and par for the miserable course — is that it didn’t even have the spine to vote in favour of it, and thus openly reveal itself to be the despicable country it has become.
As I have said before, this is a battle between civilisation and barbarism, truth and lies, good and evil. All who support Israel in this seismic battle will be rejoicing at the blow that it struck yesterday and today against the forces of barbarism.
Those who stand against the Jewish state — the west’s legions of “Free Palestine” Hamas supporters, liberal proponents of the “two-state solution” which would actually be a Final Solution, Israel’s false friends in the US Biden administration and Britain’s Labour government, and the UN and “human rights” establishment that have weaponised international law in the cause of Israel’s destruction — are all running interference for the genocide of the Jews and the destruction of the west that the Islamists declare will follow. They are all (whether knowingly or unwittingly) bag-carriers for evil.
Yesterday, it was announced that four more young IDF soldiers have fallen in Gaza, including the first female soldier to have been killed in this war, after entering a booby-trapped building in Rafah. Since the launch of the ground war in Gaza, 348 Israeli soldiers have been killed. All this tragic loss of young lives — not to mention the thousands murdered on October 7 and in the countless terrorist attacks on Israel over the years, along with the young heroes killed while fighting for Israel’s life in war after war — because for decades America, Britain and the west have appeased, funded and incentivised the genocidists of Iran and the Palestinian Arabs, and refused to allow Israel to defeat the forces of darkness that threaten the entire free world.
Today, the head of the IDF, General Herzi Halevi, observed:
We have countless capabilities still lying in wait, untouched. The plans are already in motion.
Let’s hope they really are, and that Israel doesn’t turn the tactical genius of the past two days into strategic failure.