Analysis
Israel’s stunning intelligence successes in Lebanon highlight its grave failures in Gaza
Jerusalem has knocked Hezbollah back on its heels with strikes against senior leaders and, ostensibly, the attacks on communications devices. So why did it get October 7 so wrong?
By Lazar Berman
Today
Members of Hezbollah carry the coffins of comrades who were killed in an Israeli strike a day earlier, during their funeral procession in the southern suburbs of Beirut on September 21, 2024.
Israel’s string of recent successes against Hezbollah — alongside operations widely attributed to the Jewish state — are the products of precise intelligence on the inner workings of the Lebanese terror group.
The IDF and Mossad, along with other agencies, have shown that they are consistently able to locate senior Hezbollah leaders and identify where they store key weapons stockpiles and when attacks are being planned.
If Israel was indeed behind last week’s two days of exploding pagers and walkie-talkies, then it has also infiltrated Hezbollah’s supply chains and knows what kind of security checks are performed on new equipment.
As for attacks Israel has taken responsibility for, it’s not only the recent strikes against commanders of the elite Radwan Force, loaded rocket launchers, and other top Hezbollah leaders that show the quality of Israeli intelligence vis-a-vis the Shi’ite terror group. Since Hezbollah started firing across the border on October 8, Israel has been picking off Hezbollah fighters and commanders. It has also killed top Hamas and Iranian officials in Lebanon.
These are the results Israelis — and the world — have come to expect from their vaunted intelligence services.
But such successes also make the intelligence failure leading up to Hamas’s October 7 attacks even more galling.
Sparks fly at the site of an Israeli airstrike on the outskirts of the southern Lebanese village of Zawtar on September 21, 2024. (AFP)
It wasn’t only the catastrophic failure to adequately pick up on, and take seriously, the terror group’s far-from-hidden plans to invade Israel. Lackluster Israeli intelligence on Gaza has been evident in a range of other aspects, too, including in the months since the Hamas invasion and massacres.
Israel took the better part of a year to find and eliminate most of Hamas’s senior leadership, and has yet to kill its chief Yahya Sinwar. Though Israel was aware of Hamas’s vast underground tunnel network, it still was caught by surprise at the tunnel’s scope as troops slowly uncovered the array of shafts during the war. And Israel still struggles to locate the remaining hostages held in Gaza, and has managed to rescue only eight of them alive.
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Protesters in Tel Aviv call for a hostage-ceasefire deal with the Hamas terror group to secure the release of Israelis held captive in the Gaza Strip, September 21, 2024. (Paulina Patimer/Pro-Democracy Protest Movement)
The source of the disparity is straightforward: Israeli policy-makers, both in government and the military, heavily prioritized the Hezbollah threat in the years leading up to the war. And not for nothing. Their assessment that the Lebanese terror group represented a far greater danger than Hamas in Gaza was principally correct.
But Israel went too far with that idea. Since Hamas was the weaker enemy, and Israel had no desire to reassert control over 2 million Gazans, it shifted nearly all its focus to the threats it thought its forces would actually have to contend with.
Israel believed that Hamas had already revealed most of its own potential threats, and that these were largely under control. After it was surprised by Hamas’s offensive tunnels in 2014, Israel located and destroyed those that led into its territory, and built a massive underground barrier to prevent further subterranean incursions. It kept a close eye on Hamas rockets — which the terror group had been firing since 2001 — and destroyed stockpiles of them during flare-ups.
IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari holds a Koran in a video taken on September 6, 2024, from a Hamas tunnel in southern Gaza’s Rafah where six Israeli hostages were murdered. The video was made public on September 10, 2024. (Israel Defense Forces)
But the sort of intelligence that would be needed to defeat Hamas on the ground in Gaza was nonexistent: Israeli leaders simply didn’t imagine the need to prepare for such a scenario.
The IDF hadn’t had an approved operational plan to conquer Gaza since 2015, which had clear implications for intelligence priorities. After all, a tunnel leading from one part of Khan Younis to another had little relevance for Israel if its troops weren’t expected to ever operate there.
Now, over the course of 11 months of war, Israel’s intelligence on Gaza has improved markedly. As troops capture documents and hard drives, and Shin Bet agents interrogate terrorists, a clearer picture has emerged.
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The improved intel has had a noticeable effect on IDF operations. While the massive operation in Gaza City at the start of the war involved three divisions operating very aggressively, the subsequent conquests of Khan Younis and Rafah were far more targeted, demanded fewer troops, and were consequently less destructive.
A man walks past a billboard displaying portraits of Hamas terror group leader Ismail Haniyeh (left) and its Gaza military chief Muhammad Deif, with the word “Assassinated”in Hebrew, in Tel Aviv, on August 2, 2024. (Oren Ziv / AFP)
With time, Israel was able to locate and eliminate many of Hamas’s commanders, including Marwan Issa and the elusive Muhammad Deif. It was also able to save some living hostages, and locate bodies of those who were killed.
These achievements are all certainly important, but the damage already done cannot be overstated. Hundreds of civilians and soldiers have been lost, and dozens of hostages remain in Hamas tunnels.
Without a way to end the war in Gaza, Israel might be on the brink of an even more destructive war against Hezbollah. Tens of thousands of Israelis are out of their homes, the economy has stagnated, and Israel’s standing in the world has taken a serious hit.
The horrors of October 7, and the difficult aftermath, could have been prevented had Israel’s intelligence been more imaginative and less firmly wed to the ostensibly reasonable notion that Hezbollah represented a greater threat. It was emphatically less reasonable not to ensure there were measures in place in case that assessment was wrong.
For now, Israel seems to have learned its lesson, but there is no guarantee that will stick. After all, only the day before Hamas flooded over the border to carry out its heinous plans, Israel marked 50 years since its previous most significant intelligence failure — that of the Egyptian-Syrian invasion that marked the beginning of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
With a military built to defeat its enemies and an aggressive doctrine that aimed to do so quickly, Israel was able all those decades ago to bounce back quickly from the debacle and defeat multiple Arab armies on the battlefield in less than 3 weeks. The victory led to peace with its main enemy, Egypt, and to the effective end of the existential threat Arab states posed to Israel.
The intelligence failure 50 years later has resulted in a far, far longer conflict that doesn’t seem to be headed toward resolution anytime soon. Quite the opposite — it could well expand into a more difficult war with Hezbollah and perhaps other regional forces that Israel doesn’t want.
That is because excellent intelligence work and stunning tactical successes do not by themselves add up to victories. In the hands of level-headed leadership focused on winning the war above all else, they represent key components of that victory.
Almost a year into the war, it remains to be seen whether Israel has such leaders.
Failed Machismo: Israel’s Pager Killings
With each ludicrously diabolical move, Israel’s security and military services are proving that they will broaden the conflict ignited when Hamas breached the country’s vaunted security defences on October 7. Notions such as ceasefire and peace are terms of nonsense and babble before the next grand push towards apocalyptic recognition.
The pager killings in Lebanon and parts of Syria on September 17 that left almost 3000 people injured and 12 dead were just another facet of this move. On September 18, a number of walkie-talkies used by members of Hezbollah were also detonated, killing 14. (The combined death toll continues to rise.)
In keeping with the small script that always accompanies such operations, the coordinated measure to detonate thousands of deadly pagers had Mossad’s fingerprints over it, though never officially accepted as such. It featured the use of the Apollo AR924 pager, adopted by Hezbollah as a substitute for smartphone technology long compromised by Israeli surveillance.
The group had ordered 5,000 beepers made by the Taiwanese Gold Apollo manufacturer in the early spring, most likely via BAC Consulting, a Hungarian-based company licensed to use the trademark. According to a Reuters report, citing a “senior Lebanese source”, these had been modified “at the production level.” Mossad had “injected a board inside the device that has explosive material that receives a code. It’s very hard to detect it through any means. Even with a device or scanner.”
The manner of its execution stirred sighs of admiration. Here was Israel’s intelligence apparatus, caught napping on October 7, reputationally restored. French defence expert Pierre Servent suggested that, “The series of operations conducted over the last few months marks their big comeback, with a desire for deterrence and a message: ‘we messed up but are not dead.’” A salivating Mike Dimino, former CIA analyst and plying his trade at Defense Priorities, a US-based think tank, admired the operation as one of “classic sabotage” that would have taken “months if not years” to put into play and proved to be “[i]ntelligence work at its finest.”
While admired by the security types as bloody, bold machismo, this venture remains politically stunted. However stunning a statement of power, it only promises temporary paralysis. It’s true that Hezbollah is in disarray regarding its communications, the extent of the compromise, and pondering the nightmarish logistics of it all. Its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has every reason to feel rattled. But the pretext for an escalation, the temptation to reassert virility and strength, has been set, thereby creating the broader justification for a move into Lebanon.
The broader war, the death, and the calamity, beckons, and an excited DiMino proposes that, “If you were planning a ground incursion into Lebanon to push Hezbollah N[orth] of the Litani, this is exactly the sort of chaos you’d sow in advance.” An unnamed former Israeli official, speaking to Axios, confirmed that the modified pagers had been originally intended as a swift, opening attack “in an all-out war to try to cripple Hezbollah.” Their use on September 17 was only prompted by Israeli concerns that their operation might have been compromised.
Nasrallah, in his September 19 speech, complemented the dark mood. “Israel’s foolish Northern Command leader talks about a security zone inside Lebanese territory – we are waiting for you to enter Lebanese territory.” He also promised that the only way 120,000 Israelis evacuated from the North could return safely “is to stop the aggression on the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.”
Every resort to force, every attempt to avoid the diplomatic table, is another deadly deviation, distraction and denial. It is also an admission that Israel remains incapable of reaching an accord with the Palestinians and those who either defend or exploit their dispossession and grief.
On a granular level, the wide flung nature of the operation, while audacious in its execution, also suggests an absence of focus. The target range, in this case, was violently expansive: not merely leaders but low-level operatives and those in proximity to them. The result was to be expected: death, including two children, and broadly inflicted mutilations. In humanitarian terms, it was disastrous, demonstrating, yet again, the callousness that such a conflict entails. Bystanders at marketplaces were maimed. Doctors and other medical workers were injured. Lebanon’s hospital system was overwhelmed.
Human Rights Watch notes that international humanitarian law prohibits the use of booby-traps precisely because such devices could place civilians in harm’s way. “The use of an explosive device whose exact location could not be reliably known,” opined Lama Fakih, Middle East and North Africa Director at HRW, “would be unlawfully indiscriminate, using a means of attack that could not be directed at a specific military target and as a result would strike military targets and civilians without distinction.”
Amended Protocol II of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, to which both Lebanon and Israel are parties, offers the following definition of a booby-trap: “any device or material which is designed, constructed or adapted to kill or injure, and which functions unexpectedly when a person disturbs or approaches an apparently harmless object or performs an apparently safe act.”
Quibbling over matters of international humanitarian law is never far away. Over the dead and injured in rarified air, disputatious legal eagles often appear. While the use of such devices “in the form of harmless portable objects which are specifically designed and constructed to contain explosive material” is prohibited by Article 7(2) of Amended Protocol II, the legal pedants will ask what constitutes specific design and construction. Ditto such issues as proportionality and legitimate targeting.
Jessica Peake of the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, is mercifully free of quibbles in offering her assessment: “detonating pagers in people’s pockets without any knowledge of where those are, in that moment, is a pretty evident indiscriminate attack” and also a violation of the rule of proportionality.
The calculus of such killings and targeting enriches rather than drains the pool of blood and massacre. Its logic is not one of cessation but replication. No longer can Israel’s military prowess alone be seen as a reassurance against any retaliation and whatever form it takes. October 7 continues to cast its dispelling shadow. Deterrence through sheer technological power, far from being asserted, has been further weakened.
Taiwan and Bulgaria Friday both denied making the deadly pagers that exploded in Lebanon this week. as the Taiwanese company Gold Apollo said his company licensed its trademark to a Hungarian-based company called BAC Consulting, which Hungary said was solely and intermediary and did not have manufacturing production facilities in Hungary. Photo by Ritchie B. Tongo/EPA-EFE
Sept. 20 (UPI) -- Taiwan's government and Bulgarian authorities Friday both denied making the exploding pagers used by Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Taiwan economy minister Kuo Jyh-huei told reporters Friday they weren't made in his country.
"The components for Hezbollah's pagers were not produced by us," he said.
Taiwan foreign minister Lin-Chia-lung said he wanted to "unearth the truth, because Taiwan has never exported this particular pager model."
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Bulgaria's National Security State Agency said in a statement that investigations by multiple government agencies determined the devices that exploded in Lebanon and Syria were not "imported, exported or manufactured in Bulgaria."
The statement added that a company known as "Nortal Global" also did not carry out transactions under Bulgarian jurisdiction with respect to the devices.
Gold Apollo CEO Hsu Ching-Kuang said his company licensed its trademark to a Hungarian-based company called BAC Consulting to sell pagers in some regions, although Hungarian authorities said BAC Consulting was solely an intermediary and did not have manufacturing production facilities in Hungary.
Israel is widely believed to be behind the attacks, with Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant declaring Wednesday the blasts signaled Israel was at "the start of a new phase in the war" but Israel has not directly claimed responsibility for the attack.
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The New York Times reported, citing three unnamed intelligence officers briefed on the situation, that BAC Consulting and two other shell companies were created to hide that Israeli intelligence officers were making the pagers.
On Thursday Japan's Icom, inc. also said it had not made the IC-V82 model walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah that also exploded in Lebanon Wednesday.
"It was discontinued about 10 years ago, and since then, it has not been shipped from our company," Icom said.
