The sophisticated attack on Hezbollah, and what it means for a fractious Middle East

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Assassinating targets with exploding pagers: as a plotline in a spy movie it would stretch credibility. Yet the authorities in Lebanon have been left counting the casualties of an extraordinary coordinated attack, that risks escalating the bitter conflict in the Middle East.

Twelve people died in the explosions on Tuesday, including two children, and thousands more were injured in the blasts. The onslaught was aimed at Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon, who had apparently turned to the devices to avoid being tracked via mobile phone.

No one has claimed responsibility, but Israel is widely assumed to have been behind it. On Wednesday, nine people were killed and hundreds more people reported injured after similar attacks began, this time targeting walkie-talkies. In today’s First Edition, we talk to the Guardian’s defence and security editor Dan Sabbagh, about how such attacks could have been carried out – and what might come next.

Five big stories

In depth: ‘Hezbollah will be under some pressure to respond’

Grim details of Tuesday’s attack continued to emerge throughout Wednesday, as funerals began to take place for the victims. The Lebanese health minister said almost 3,000 injured remained in hospital. Some witnesses said they had heard the two beeps that signalled a message arriving, shortly before the pagers blew up – with experts suggesting that may have been how the attack was remotely triggered.

Gruesome footage appeared to show a pager exploding in a man’s pocket in a grocery shop, in just one of scores of such incidents, which happened simultaneously on Tuesday afternoon. The backdrop to the blasts is the simmering cross-border conflict on Israel’s northern border, between Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah group, since the 7 October attacks last year.

“You’ve got this tit for tat that’s been ongoing – and deepening, if anything,” says Dan. He adds that 60,000 people have been displaced from the border region on the Israeli side, and about 75,000 within Lebanon, as rocket attacks have taken place in both directions.

Targeting Hezbollah directly is not new: Benjamin Netanyahu’s government claimed to have killed a Hezbollah leader in an airstrike on Beirut in July, for example. But the widespread and indiscriminate nature of Tuesday’s blasts represented a significant escalation. Lebanon’s information minister Ziad Makary called it “a blatant attack on Lebanese sovereignty, that targeted civilians, not only Hezbollah members.”

A state operation?

Israel’s much-feared intelligence agency, the Mossad, has a long history of meticulously planned assassinations. But as Dan points out, the sophistication required to plant explosives, physically, inside what appears to have been a job lot of deadly devices, is on a different level.

When Hezbollah opted to switch to the low-tech option of pagers, he says, it was “so well penetrated by Israeli intelligence,” that they knew the changeover was happening, and were able to “physically compromise the supply chain,” to put explosives inside the devices.

Add in the reports suggesting the US was tipped off that something was about to happen, says Dan, and “all in all, it looks like a state operation. It looks like Israel. It looks like Mossad”.

As far as the deadly pagers were concerned, attention initially switched on Tuesday to a Taiwanese firm, Gold Apollo, as the apparent manufacturer of the devices. But the firm’s chief executive Hsu Ching-kuang, doorstepped by journalists at its headquarters outside Taipei, said it had licensed the product to a European company.

That European company, Budapest-based BAC Consulting, issued its own denial on Wednesday. “I did not manufacture the pagers,” chief executive Cristiana Bársony-Arcidiacono told a Hungarian news website. “I am only a mediator. I believe you have misunderstood this”.

Even as questions continued to swirl about how the pagers could have been tampered with, there was a fresh string of explosions in Lebanon – this time emanating from walkie-talkies. At least 20 people were killed and more than 450 wounded in cities across the country.

‘Yet another act of hybrid warfare’

The attacks intensified international criticism of Israel, already under pressure over the months-long conflict in Gaza.

The UN high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, called for those responsible for the blasts to be held to account. “Simultaneous targeting of thousands of individuals, whether civilians or members of armed groups, without knowledge as to who was in possession of the targeted devices, their location and their surroundings at the time of the attack, violates international human rights law and, to the extent applicable, international humanitarian law,” Türk (pictured above) said.

World leaders, anxious about the risk of a conflagration in the region, called on both sides to show restraint. A spokesperson for the Russian foreign ministry called the attacks, “yet another act of hybrid warfare against Lebanon,” the purpose of which was, “to foment a large-scale armed confrontation in order to provoke a major war in the Middle East.”

What next?

In fact, Dan says, it is unclear what strategic aim Israel’s scattergun attacks achieved, unless they were simply intended as a provocation.

“Hezbollah will be under some pressure to respond: and it raises the question, does Israel want Hezbollah to respond? Does Israel want Hezbollah to make a move that will force Israel, in turn, into an even more aggressive move, and perhaps start a war?”

Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate, and if reports of a second round of explosions emerge, public pressure on the organisation’s leadership is likely to increase.

Even without the international calls for restraint, there are reasons for Hezbollah to respond with caution. “Nobody thinks Iran really wants a full on conflict with Israel that might drag in the US, and Iran does not want Hezbollah getting in one either, and nor, really, does Hezbollah,” says Dan.

“Because although the geography of southern Lebanon is different to Gaza, which is intensely built up, with civilians and fighters cheek by jowl, it’s still going to be a bloody and difficult conflict on both sides.”

On the Israeli side, opening up a fresh front while the Gaza conflict is ongoing, would risk overstretching the country’s military and alienating key backers including the US.

Yet the stakes are extremely high – and as Dan concludes, with details still emerging about the latest round of blasts, amid emotive images of the fallout from the pager attack, “conflict is inherently unpredictable”.

What else we’ve been reading

Few people are better placed than Faiza Shaheen to review Diane Abbott’s new book. “After enduring so much racism, and at a time of few political wins for the left, we have to ask: how did Abbott end up having the last laugh?”, she asks. Nimo

In case you missed it, I enjoyed this righteously furious piece from Marina Hyde, on the baseless (and misogynist) rumours being whispered about 29-year-old Tory peer Charlotte Owen, by “trouser rubbing ‘journalists’”. Heather

One of the most bizarre and unsettling moments of the US presidential debate was when Donald Trump peddled the lie that Haitian migrants were capturing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. Moira Donegan writes about the violence, bomb threats and xenophobia that has turned residents’ lives upside down since the conspiracy hit the internet. Nimo

Apparently “Britishcore” is a thing on social media. Check out Dylan B Jones’s tongue-in-cheek list of endearingly naff things about living on this soggy isle and see which resonate with you. (For me: “Hearing the Countdown music in your head every time there’s a time constraint on anything”). Heather

Brian Reed, the reporter behind S-Town and the Trojan Horse Affair, is back on our airwaves with a new podcast called Question Everything, in which he reevaluates all that he has ever learned about journalism. It’s an exercise in peeling back the layers of an industry that is dealing with record levels of mistrust. Nimo

Sport

Football | Inter Milan escaped Etihad Stadium with a surprise 0-0 draw against Manchester City in the Champions League, exacting a small measure of revenge for their narrow loss to Pep Guardiola’s side in the 2023 final. Meanwhile, Celtic started the new Champions League format with a 5-1 win over Slovan Bratislava which eclipsed their biggest victory in the group stage era.

Cricket | Essex have been fined £100,000, with half suspended, after admitting to a charge of racism at the county club which they failed to address between 2001 and 2010, the Cricket Regulator has announced.

Football | Rob Couhig’s prospective deal to buy Reading has collapsed, raising fears over the future of the troubled League One club. Couhig, the former Wycombe owner, satisfied the English Football League’s owners’ and directors’ test but Reading’s owner, Dai Yongge, failed to complete a deal to sell the club.

The front pages

The Guardian leads on “Fears of escalation as second wave of deadly explosions hits Lebanon”. The Mirror calls it a “Walkie-Talkie bomb blitz”, while the Times has “‘New phase’ in conflict as walkie-walkie blasts kill 20”. The Telegraph takes a similar line with “New phase of Mid-East war after walkie talkie blitz”. The Sun simply goes with “Death by walkie talkie”.

The Mail has “Labour has ‘undermined’ Israel, says Netanyahu”. The Financial Times looks to the US with the headline “Fed’s half-point cut to interest rates signals era of easing policy has begun”. The i reports “Rogue landlord MP founded nursery firm accused of child safety breaches”.

Today in Focus

Cartoon of the day | Nicola Jennings

The Upside

A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad

At one point in its history, Lake Uru Uru in the Bolivian highlands supported the local community and was a sanctuary for wildlife. Residents used the lake sustainably for fishing, farming and irrigation, but it has since been completely destroyed by urban waste and mining pollution. Fed up with the ever-increasing pollution, local indigenous women formed the Uru Uru Team in 2019 to reverse some of the damage. They used totora reeds, a bulrush that can grow to six metres and is known to be very effective at absorbing heavy metals and contaminants, to clean the water.

Slowly, wildlife – including flamingos and other bird species – have begun to return to the water. The team’s aim is to plant 4,000 totora a year and completely clean up the lake, to bring back the birds and allow the community to grow vegetables again. “We have to empower ourselves because nothing will happen if we are just passive and wait for a solution to come from elsewhere,” one of the team members, Tatiana Blanco, says.

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