Gaza update: what the Lebanon pager attacks could mean for the Middle East conflict

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Israel tends not to rush to claim responsibility for assassinations and the like. But the reputation of its intelligence services goes before it. Most experts are saying that the fiendishly imaginative nature of the attacks in Lebanon this week, which involved thousands of exploding pagers and walkie talkies carried by members of Hezbollah, makes it odds-on that this was an Israeli operation.

Another thing many academic experts and commentators agree on is that this could be the trigger than sets what for the past year – since Hamas carried out its brutal October 7 attacks in Israel and Israel launched its devastating retaliation on Gaza – has been a fairly consistent set of low-level exchanges of rocket fire and bombardment between the Israel Defense Forces and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.

We spoke with Scott Lucas, who has been a regular contributor to our coverage of the conflict in Gaza and has offered valuable insights into its regional implications over the past year. Here he addresses four key questions which give context and significance to the attacks.

Given the widespread assumption that Israel was behind the attacks, he believes that the country’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is feeling the pressure from his failure to deliver a decisive victory against Hamas in Gaza or return more of the Israeli hostages to their families alive and well.

Hezbollah, meanwhile, is reeling from the damage the attacks have delivered to its command and control systems and the questoin is whether it is in any position to escalate, while its ally Iran is also not keen for an esclation into a regional conflict.

Meanwhile, Tarek Abou Jaoude, who lectures in comparative politics with a particular focus on Lebanese affairs at Queen’s University Belfast, believes that both sides appear to be talking themselves into a more intense confrontation, which could mean all-out war.

Recent polling suggests that after 11 months of witnessing the conflict of Gaza, the people of Lebanon – despite being generally hostile towards Hezbollah which has implanted itself in their country as both a political and military state within a state – are increasingly supportive of Hezbollah’s regional policies.

Many Israelis, meanwhile, are tired of constant bombardment from Hezbollah rockets, which has displaced 60,000 of their fellow citizens in the country’s north. It’s a dangerous moment, he cautions.

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Looks like a war crime

Anybody celebrating the ingenuity and audacity of the pager attacks is missing an important point. While these attacks may have been aimed at Hezbollah’s communications systems with the aim of neutralising its command and control systems, it involved what appears to have been a fairly indiscriminate attack on people carrying Hezbollah-issued pagers and walkie talkies. It’s important to remember that Hezbollah is not just a military organisation. It’s also a political party with 15 of the 218 seats in the Lebanese parliament.

So the attack didn’t just involve military targets. Among its victims were children and other civilians, including Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon. International humanitarian law, which will determine the legality of these attacks, expressly forbids the targeting of civilians in war, writes Giacomo Biggio, an expert in international law at the University of Bristol.

In planning such an attack, he explains, “military commanders are under an obligation to do everything feasible to verify that the target of an attack is not a civilian”. Not only that, but they much ensure that any collateral damage is “proportionate” – that is, that it should not be excessive to the “concreted and direct military advantage” anticipated from the attacks.

His own view is that these attacks were likely in breach of the laws which are designed to protect civilians in time of war, and therefore could well be war crimes.

Weaponisation of everything

The sight, on Tuesday afternoon, of people’s pagers suddenly exploding as they shopped for groceries in Beirut must have been the stuff of some people’s nightmares. A dystopian vision from the future of war, where a person’s personal technology can be weaponised and turned against them.

Mark Lacy, a senior lecturer in politics, philosophy and religion at Lancaster University, specialises in changing nature of warfare and traces the weaponisation of everyday technology from the pages sci-fi novels to the battlefield and beyond. It’s important to remember, he writes, that what only state military might be able to achieve today, will inevitably be within the reach of terrorist groups and criminals in the near future.

So, should we worry that our mobile phones might turn on us in the way people’s pagers and walkies talkies attacked them in Lebanon this week? Perhaps not yet, Lacy concludes. But as he puts it: “In times of dramatic and rapid change in AI, drones, robots and cyberattacks, the only certainty is uncertainty in this complex, and often terrifying, world we are living in.”

Gaza Update is available as a fortnightly email newsletter. Click here to get our updates directly in your inbox.