Middle East crisis is a stark lesson to always expect the unexpected

While Israel has dubbed it a “new phase” of its nearly year-long war with Hezbollah, a senior UN official warned that the region is at risk of a conflict that could “dwarf” the devastation witnessed so far.

Even those normally disinterested in the seemingly endless spiral of violence in the Middle East couldn’t help but sit up and take notice last Tuesday of the thousands of reported explosions that took place in public places, as first pagers then walkie-talkie handsets belonging to Hezbollah militia members detonated in their hands.

Though Israel has yet to comment on claims that it was responsible, all signs point to it being a sophisticated and audacious operation carried out by the country’s secret intelligence service, Mossad.

This, however, was only the beginning. For by the week’s end not only had Hezbollah launched hundreds of rocket strikes against Israel, but it in turn responded with massive air strikes, one of which targeted a senior Hezbollah commander in the group’s stronghold in the Dahiya neighbourhood in southern Beirut.

The assassination of Hezbollah operations commander Ibrahim Aqil, who had a $7 million bounty on his head for two 1983 Beirut truck bombings that killed more than 300 people at the American Embassy and a US Marines barracks, is arguably the most damaging blow Israel has struck against the group since its formation in the early 1980s. Aqil, was the second member of Hezbollah’s top military body, the Jihad Council, to be killed in two months after an Israeli strike in the same area targeted Fuad Shukr in July.

“Ibrahim Aqil is a senior commander, the closest person to Nasrallah,” Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari said, referring to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Like most senior Hezbollah military officials, Aqil has been a shadowy figure, making no public appearances or statements.

Following the killing of Shukr, Aqil became head of the Radwan, Hezbollah’s formidable, elite offensive force, whose fighters are trained in cross-border infiltration and responsible for attacks on Israeli soil.

Hezbollah fighters carry the coffins of fallen four comrades who were killed Tuesday after their handheld pagers exploded, during their funeral procession in the southern suburb of Beirut, Lebanon

Significant blow

Aqil’s assassination represents a significant blow and another huge security failure for Hezbollah, already struggling to recover from a week that started with the covert attacks that caused electronic devices carried by thousands of the militant group’s members to explode virtually simultaneously.

It was 3.25pm last Tuesday when two members of Hezbollah were eating lunch at a shopping mall in Beirut when the pager that one of the men was carrying exploded, leaving him severely injured and bleeding from the arms and eyes.

Across the city a few minutes later, another blast tore through a Hezbollah office after a pager used for internal communications received a text message consisting of a series of numbers, then beeped for five seconds before detonating, throwing a man from his chair and destroying his desk, a witness told journalists. Similar scenes across Lebanon and in Syria splayed out.

In one instance, a man was standing at a shop cash register when the pager at his waist exploded, hurling him to the ground. Another man, shopping for green almonds in a market, collapsed when smoke burst from his midriff as shoppers stared in confusion or ran off in panic.

In a short space of time, perhaps an hour at most, thousands of pagers exploded killing 12 people including two children and four healthcare workers, and injuring more than 2,800.

The blasts plunged the Lebanese capital Beirut into a panic, sending hundreds of members of Hezbollah to overcrowded hospitals with mangled hands, facial injuries and worse.

Police asked citizens to stay off the roads so ambulances could bring the injured to hospitals, which put out desperate calls for blood donations.

Medics at the American University of Beirut’s hospital were told to dispose of their own pagers.

But things didn’t stop there. The following day a second wave of explosions saw walkie-talkie radio handsets and other electronic devices detonate.

By the end of the day, 20 more people were dead and 450 more injured. The attacks also exposed the identities of thousands of Hezbollah operatives, many of whom worked covertly, in itself a coup for Israeli intelligence.

But as is usual in operations carried out abroad, Israel has neither confirmed nor denied its alleged involvement in the attacks, leaving it for others to investigate the shadowy and labyrinthine trail of how the explosive rigged pagers ended up in Hezbollah’s hands.

To date, several media organisations have reported that Israel’s Mossad secret service infiltrated Hezbollah supply chains and planted explosives in the devices.

Images of the attack aftermath on Tuesday showed branding for Gold Apollo, a Taiwanese electronics manufacturer, on the exploded pagers.

A nondescript, 40-person business in a shabby Taipei suburb, Gold Apollo is one of tens of thousands of Taiwanese companies that manufacture the ubiquitous, cheap electronics of daily life, including the almost obsolete pager.

Among the company’s current bestsellers are restaurant pagers that coffee shops hand out to customers to signal that their drink is ready.

But just how exactly a batch of black AR924 pagers carrying the Gold Apollo branding on their backs ended up at the heart of this operation appeared to have confused even Hsu Ching-Kuang, the company’s founder and president, on whom journalists focused last Wednesday.

A police officer attempts to enter the office of Gold Apollo on September 18, 2024 in New Taipei City, Taiwan. Pager bombings across the Middle East have sparked new widespread worries about spiralling violence 

Sales to Lebanon

ACCORDING to the Financial Times, a sales manager first said that the company had been selling to Lebanon for years. The Taiwanese government released a statement saying the manufacturing and assembly of such pagers was done in the country. But then Gold Apollo pointed to Budapest, naming BAC Consulting as a company with whom it had a long-running licensing agreement. This allowed BAC to design, manufacture and sell the pagers in designated regions but under the Gold Apollo brand and trademark.

BAC Consulting, according to Hungarian company records, was set up in May 2022 by a woman called Cristiana Rosaria Barsony-Arcidiacono, now aged 49. She is apparently the sole director of a company that generated revenues of about $800,000 in 2023. But she did not reply to calls from the Financial Times or other media outlets until tracked down by NBC News to which she told the broadcaster: “I don’t make the pagers. I am just the intermediate. I think you got it wrong.”

But as the newspaper highlighted, on her LinkedIn profile Barsony-Arcidiacono lists a PhD from UCL in particle physics among her qualifications, as well as stints at other elite UK institutions such as The School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas) and the London School of Economics.

All of which raises the question, says the Financial Times, as to “how or why an academic with wide expertise in climate change, particle physics and the global economy would be selling Taiwanese pagers to Lebanese buyers”.

Other media outlets including The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), citing people who said they knew Barsony-Arcidiacono, described her as an elusive figure who would often appear for stretches of time and then leave.

Certainly, by midweek, BAC Consulting’s website had been taken offline, but not before Hungarian media outlet Telex.hu reported that pagers were sold to Hezbollah by a Bulgarian company known as Norta Global Ltd.

Company probe

Since then, Bulgarian authorities have opened a probe into the company, which was registered in the capital Sofia by a Norwegian citizen in April 2022, a month before BAC was registered in Hungary.

Meanwhile, The New York Times reported that BAC was, in fact, an Israeli front, according to three intelligence officers briefed on Israel’s operation.

The NYT sources, who spoke to the newspaper on condition of anonymity, said that at least two other shell companies were created to mask the actual identities of the pager manufacturers who were, in fact, Israeli intelligence officers.

The report stated that BAC produced a range of ordinary pagers for other clients, but separate pagers were produced to supply to Hezbollah, which contained batteries laced with the explosive PETN

The NYT reported that the pagers began shipping to Lebanon in the summer of 2022 in small numbers, but production was quickly ramped up after Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah earlier this year said that Israel was using mobile phone networks to pinpoint the locations of his operatives.

“You ask me where is the agent,” Nasrallah told his followers in a publicly televised address in February. “I tell you that the phone in your hands, in your wife’s hands, and in your children’s hands is the agent.”

Then he issued a plea.

“Bury it,” Nasrallah said. “Put it in an iron box and lock it.”

According to American intelligence assessments cited by NYT, Nasrallah has been advocating for the use of pagers for some time as a more “secure” option and “Israeli intelligence officials saw an opportunity”.

One possibility is that the pager bombs were the opening act for a bigger Israeli offensive in Lebanon. If some reports are to be believed then Israel’s decision to use them at this precise moment was taken on a “use it or lose it” basis, according to US and Israeli sources cited by the Reuters news agency.

In other words, Mossad originally wanted to detonate the pagers as an opening blow in an all-out war against Hezbollah but chose to act early when a Hezbollah member became suspicious of the devices and planned to alert his superiors.

Having learned of the suspicions, Israeli leaders reportedly considered launching an immediate full-scale war in order to retain the pager attack as an opening blow. They also considered leaving things as they were, even at the risk of the operation being compromised, according to the Al-Monitor Arab news website.

But go ahead Israel did, scuttling any notion of a dialling down of hostilities with Hezbollah and its Iranian backers, and precisely at the moment, too, when US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Egypt in the early hours of last Wednesday, in the latest push for a Gaza ceasefire.

Emergency workers use excavators to clear the rubble at the site of Friday's Israeli strike in Beirut's southern suburbs, Saturday, Sept. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein).

Severe wounding

WHATEVER the reasons behind the timing of the decision to detonate the pagers and other devices, the net effect has been the severe wounding of much of Hezbollah’s command structure and interrupting its communications.

“The security breach means that Hezbollah’s military arsenal is virtually paralysed,” was how Lina Khatib of Chatham House, a think tank summed it up, speaking to The Economist magazine.

The pager strike might yet still serve as an effective prelude to an invasion. However, so far there are no signs of an Israeli incursion and its generals and politicians appear split over whether this is the right moment for an all-out military operation in Lebanon.

To date, Hezbollah has also carefully calibrated any retaliation to the killing of its leaders such as its commander Faud Shukr a month or so ago. Whether that will change in light of the latest targeting of the Radwan operations commander Ibrahim Aqil remains to be seen, and Nasrallah in a televised address has stressed that the pager and handset attacks “crossed all red lines”, accusing Israel of what he said represented a “declaration of war”.

But Hezbollah may not be in a rush to rise to all-out war, with people close to the group describing it as being in a state of shock from the events of recent days. Clearly deeply penetrated by Israeli intelligence, it will take time to rebuild its command and control structure, security, and communications network.

Nasrallah himself has acknowledged that Hezbollah had suffered an “unprecedented blow” and while he has vowed to continue fighting and inflict a “just punishment” on Israel, that is easier said than done.

As for Israel, it still faces a strategic dilemma. In the wider context this stems from its failure to defeat Hamas after almost a year of operations in Gaza. Both the military and political costs of opening up a northern front in Lebanon against a Hezbollah that will not back down also pose enormous challenges.

Perhaps for this reason some analysts are convinced that Israel is – albeit for now – simply in the business of sending out deterrence messages. They point to the fact that whenever Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is under pressure to go to war with Hezbollah, he appears to opt for a similar operation to that of last week.

In terms of what happens now, the coming days will be more tense than ever. Seeing Hezbollah on the back foot and bloodied, Israel might press home the advantage. Hezbollah, on the other hand, must weigh up its own response and be quick about it to not appear weak.

The only certainty here is that there’s no chance of peace breaking out any time soon. And if last week’s events hold any lessons about the region, it’s always to expect the unexpected.