Lessons from Israel’s pager attack

Israel’s latest successful attack may well be the final prelude to a wider full-scale Middle East war.

By detonating thousands of Hezbollah pagers in both Lebanon and Syria on Tuesday, and thousands of walkie-talkies in Lebanon on Wednesday — and on each day doing so almost simultaneously — it shattered Hezbollah’s command and control system, at least for the time being.

Having concluded that its cellphones were vulnerable to Israeli hacking, Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader and Iran’s important regional ally, ordered his minions to switch to pagers. Accordingly, his forces acquired the newest versions on the market. Although displaying a Taiwanese label, the pagers actually were made under license in Budapest, Hungary, reportedly by an Israeli front company. The Israelis were able to inject small amounts of explosives into the pocket-sized pagers. They appear to have used the same methods for infecting the walkie-talkies.

The result was the death on Tuesday of 14 Hezbollah fighters and officials, and nearly 3,000 injuries, many, but not all, to Hezbollah fighters. Another 14 deaths were recorded the following day. With pagers now appearing to be as vulnerable to Israeli malware as cellphones, Nasrallah must come up with a new method of transmitting orders to his forces, which will take some time.

White House advisor Amos Hochstein, who successfully negotiated a deal between Israel and Lebanon in 2022 to resolve their rival claims over a gas field in the Eastern Mediterranean, has returned to the region, frantically seeking to avoid the escalation of hostilities between the terrorist group and Israel. Jerusalem appears to be signaling that its operation may be its final pre-war warning that Nasrallah would do well to accede to Hochstein’s efforts to obtain a cease-fire.

On the other hand, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told Hochstein on the day before the detonations took place that his government had now assigned priority to returning the more than 70,000 Israelis displaced from their homes in northern Israel, and that Jerusalem was prepared to go to war to achieve that objective. Moreover, Gallant told Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin hours before the explosions that Israel was about to conduct an operation in Lebanon (although he did not specify the nature of the operation).

Yet even as the Lebanese-Israeli crisis intensifies, there appears to be no end to the political machinations in Jerusalem. Rumors abound that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will fire Gallant — for a second time — and replace him with Gidon Sa’ar, leader of the rival New Hope party. Sa’ar, a former member of Netanyahu’s government who quit because Netanyahu would not include him in the war cabinet, had opposed him in the 2019 Likud primaries.

Netanyahu has numerous reasons to ditch Gallant (again). The defense minister, who briefly lost his job the first time because he opposed Netanyahu’s proposals to weaken Israel’s Supreme Court, has clashed with the prime minister over the country’s Gaza strategy. While Netanyahu continues to prioritize the complete elimination of Hamas, Gallant doubts its feasibility and instead advocates for a deal that would result in the release of many, if not most, of the remaining hostages, be they alive or dead.

Netanyahu’s far-right allies, as well as his ultra-Orthodox coalition partners, also want Gallant out of the way. Ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir not only support Netanyahu’s priorities, but would intensify the Gaza operation, even to the point of expelling all the Palestinians that live there.

As for the ultra-Orthodox, their primary objective is to ensure the military service exemption of their yeshiva students, which the Israeli Supreme Court has ruled against. In order to circumvent the court’s ruling, the ultra-Orthodox support a new draft law, which Gallant strongly opposes as a distraction in the middle of Israel’s ongoing war.

If all that were not enough political mayhem, it has been reported that, despite pressure from his government partners, Netanyahu has delayed appointing Sa’ar to the defense post. This is reportedly because the prime minister’s wife, Sara, does not want Sa’ar to re-enter the government, since she views his previous political challenge to her husband as a betrayal. It was briefly reported that she had changed her mind and agreed that Sa’ar could rejoin the government, but a later report indicated that she had changed her mind again.

That such shenanigans could be taking place in the middle of one war, and with the prospect of another about to begin, is nothing less than mindboggling.

Washington remains committed to defending Israel against an all-out Hezbollah rocket and missile attack. But American influence in Jerusalem is quite limited. American officials have indicated that the U.S. would rather not see Gallant dismissed, but it is Sara Netanyahu who appears to have the final word.

There is one lesson American defense planners can already take away from the explosions in Lebanon and Syria: Supply chains, whether for computer-driven systems or for anything American forces rely on (such as medicine and food), are vulnerable to external malfeasance. President Biden has issued several executive orders in this regard, focusing, for example, on computer chips. Congress, in addition to passing the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, has a number of bills before it to further protect against foreign interference.

More needs to be done, however. With the stunningly rapid development of artificial intelligence, and the prospective emergence of all forms of biotechnology breakthroughs — as has already been documented by the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology’s interim report (full disclosure: I am a commissioner) — even more steps must be taken to ensure that America, working with its close allies, prevents China, Russia or any other state from inserting malware into supply chains critical to our national security.

Dov S. Zakheim is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and vice chairman of the board for the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He was undersecretary of Defense (comptroller) and chief financial officer for the Department of Defense from 2001 to 2004 and a deputy undersecretary of Defense from 1985 to 1987.