Mossad's technical department let loose on Hezbollah

Two days of an extraordinary low-tech war between Mossad and Hezbollah have grabbed world headlines. To what end, we don't know yet. But Israel's secret intelligence service has a history of dastardly targeting of the Israeli nation's enemies, from booby-trapped public phone booths to remote-controlled machinegun devices to the mass insertion of malware codes to destroy Iran's uranium-enrichment gas centrigue systems. So the blowing up of thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies in Lebanon, held by Hezbollah operatives, is the latest version of a war that has been going on for years. It's not high-tech sci-fi stuff, unlike the Stuxnet virus that was fed into Iran's nuclear weapons development programme 14 years ago. This is pure espionage with a Mossad killer touch added. First came the intelligence that Hezbollah had ordered neary 3,000 pagers from a company linked to a firm in Taiwan, then came the interception of the shipment and the insertion of one or two ounces of explosives fixed to the battery and a triggering device, then finally, all wrapped back into place and sent on its way to the eagerly-awaiting Hezbollah organisation which duly sent them out to all members for what was hoped to be discreet, untappable communication between leaders and operatives. Mossad had laid thousands of mini Trojan Horses among the Hezbollah members to be detonated whenever the government of Benjamin Netanyahu judged to be the right moment. According to US officials, Netanyahu was forced to give the go ahead to detonate all the tiny bombs prematurely because intelligence revealed Hezbollah was beginning to have suspicions that Mossad had interfered with the pagers and walkie-talkies. "Use it or lose it," one official said. So the bombs were triggered. Another coup by Mossad but the deaths and injuries that followed will not have helped to bring the war in Gaza to an end. In fact, the reverse. So Israel's action, or alleged action, may have scared Hezbollah like hell but I doubt it was well received in Washington where Joe Biden in his last few months as president is desperate to get a ceasefire deal in Gaza and an end to constant rocket-firing between Hezbollah and Israel.