Hezbollah pager explosions, if caused by the Mossad, would be a big escalation

It may not have been acknowledged by Israel but the extraordinary, coordinated attack on Hezbollah, blowing up thousands of pagers used by members of the Lebanese group, is almost certainly a Mossad operation. The Israeli intelligence service has been engaged in the assassinations of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders for decades but, if its involvement is confirmed, this represents a significant escalation.

Reports continue to come in but, with at least nine dead and about 3,000 wounded in dozens, if not hundreds, of coordinated explosions, the episode demonstrates a ruthless and indiscriminate desire to target Hezbollah. The group had been using pagers as an alternative to mobile phones, which can be tracked and used to pinpoint deadly missile strikes on its commanders.

It is unclear how the explosions were caused and, although there is inevitable speculation about hacking, it is most likely they were the result of sabotaged devices. Initial reports said the pagers that exploded were a new model manufactured by a company whose supply chain may have been compromised by the perpetrators of the attack.

Yossi Melman, a co-author of Spies Against Armageddon and other books on Israeli intelligence, emphasised that it appeared the exploding pagers had been “recently supplied”, and added: “We know that Mossad is able to penetrate and infiltrate Hezbollah time and time again,” he added. But he questioned the strategic wisdom of the attack, in which a 10-year-old girl died.

“It enhances the chance of an escalation of the border crisis into a war,” Melman warned, and argued it was “more of a sign of panic” because, while he said it showed an extraordinary ability to strike at the heart of Hezbollah, it was neither very targeted, nor would it would change the wider strategic picture. “I don’t see any advance in it,” he concluded.

At the very least, Melman argued, some sort of response from Hezbollah was likely. Earlier on Tuesday it had emerged that the Iran-aligned Lebanese group, who have been engaged in a violent tit-for-tat with Israel for months, had, according to Israel’s Shin Bet domestic security service, planned to kill a former Israeli security official by remotely detonating an explosive device from Lebanon.

That could suggest the pager attack was a grim warning of the “anything you can do, we can do better” variety. But it would also be far from the first time Israel has engaged in an assassination or other spectacular attack and the results have backfired – or the situation not developed as intended.

A sabotaged mobile phone was used as long ago as January 1996 to blow up Yahya Ayyash, then Hamas’s chief bomb maker, in Gaza City. Ayyash, known as “The Engineer”, was considered responsible for introducing the strategy of carrying out suicide attacks on Israeli passenger buses – but his killing prompted a fresh wave of bus bombings and did little to calm the crisis at the time.

Khaled Meshal, another Hamas leader, survived an assassination attempt in 1997. Meshal, then Hamas’s political leader, had poison injected in his ear in an operation authorised by Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, while in Jordan. Meshal survived, and some of the Israeli agents responsible were arrested – prompting Jordan’s King Hussein to break off a peace accord and threaten to hang the plotters unless an antidote was supplied. An embarrassed Israel was forced to do so.

Five hours after arriving in Dubai in February 2010, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a Hamas leader responsible for weapons procurement, was killed in his hotel room by a team of 11 assassins who used fake European passports to conceal their identities. Hamas accused Israel of being behind the plot, some aspects of which could be seen in CCTV footage released by the Dubai authorities. Some of the agents changed their disguises in a deadly operation that, for all its elaborateness, was detected.

Since the start of Israel’s latest war with Hamas, there have been many more attempts to take out leaders of the Palestinian militant group. Ismail Haniyeh, then the group’s political leader, was killed by a “short range projectile” in Tehran in August – prompting warnings from Iran it would respond with direct military action against Israel.

Though Iran has refrained from an attack, the war between Israel and Hamas is close to entering its second year, and tensions with Hezbollah in the north have arguably never been higher.