Jason Burke
The Guardian / September 19, 2024
Hassan Nasrallah due to give televised speech, as US warns all sides in Middle East against escalation ‘of any kind’.
Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, will seek to rally his followers and inspire new defiance of Israel in a much-anticipated televised speech on Thursday afternoon, after the Lebanon-based militant Islamist organisation was thrown into disarray by successive waves of unprecedented attacks that have been blamed on Israel.
On Tuesday, thousands of pagers used by Hezbollah exploded simultaneously, killing 12 people, including two children, and wounding up to 2,800 others across Lebanon. A day later, 25 people were killed and more than 450 wounded when walkie-talkies exploded in supermarkets, on streets and at funerals, stoking fears that a full-blown war between Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, and Israel could be imminent.
There was no comment from Israel, which hours before Tuesday’s explosions had announced it was broadening the aims of its war in Gaza to include the return of northern residents who had been evacuated from their homes due to attacks by Hezbollah.
Israel said on Thursday it had bombed six Hezbollah “infrastructure sites” and a weapons storage facility in the south of the country, a stronghold of the organisation.
Eight people were reported to have been injured by antitank missiles fired by Hezbollah into northern Israel, and two were hurt in a drone attack.
With tensions in the Middle East spiralling, senior diplomats from the United States, Britain, Germany, France and Italy will meet on Thursday in Paris before a UN security council meeting planned for Friday. Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, will join his counterparts in the French capital after discussing the possibility of a Gaza truce in Cairo.
The White House warned all sides against “an escalation of any kind”. John Kirby, the US national security council spokesperson, said: “We don’t believe that the way to solve where we’re at in this crisis is by additional military operations at all.”
The Lebanese foreign minister, Abdallah Bou Habib, warned that the “blatant assault on Lebanon’s sovereignty and security” was a dangerous development that could “signal a wider war”.
Turkey on Thursday accused Israel of seeking to expand the war in Gaza to Lebanon. “The escalation in the region is alarming,” the foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, said on state-run TRT television. “We see Israel mounting its attacks towards Lebanon step by step.”
Nasrallah’s speech on Thursday will be keenly watched. The attacks dealt a heavy blow to Hezbollah, which already had concerns about the security of its communications after losing several commanders to targeted strikes in recent months.
The Hezbollah leader will need to reassure followers after the attacks, which amounted to the biggest security breach for the organisation since its foundation more than 40 years ago.
Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert at the Swedish Defence University and pioneer of western studies of Hezbollah, said: “This is a huge humiliation for an organisation that prides itself on its security. They were lured into a trap … There were some civilian casualties, but most were Hezbollah people who will now be out of action for some time.”
Nasrallah will have to show defiance of Israel but without committing to further escalation, which could lead to a war that Hezbollah’s sponsors in Tehran have so far sought to avoid.
Iran’s envoy to the UN said the country “reserves the right to take retaliatory measures”, after its ambassador in Beirut was wounded.
Hezbollah is a keystone member of Iran’s “axis of resistance”, which includes Hamas, the Houthis and other militant groups across the Middle East.
In Israel, a man whom Israeli security forces said they arrested for plotting assassinations against senior political figures has been named as 73-year-old Moti Maman. Maman, from Ashkelon, was arrested last month and indicted on Thursday. The Shin Bet and Israeli police have claimed that Iran was backing the plot to kill senior defence officials and possibly the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Analysts said Israeli operatives probably planted explosives on the pagers before they were delivered to Hezbollah. “A small plastic explosive was almost certainly concealed alongside the battery, for remote detonation via a call or page,” said Charles Lister, of the Middle East Institute.
The preliminary findings of a Lebanese investigation into the blasts were that the pagers had been booby-trapped, a security official said. “Data indicates the devices were pre-programmed to detonate and contained explosive materials planted next to the battery,” the official said, requesting anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
A source close to Hezbollah, asking not to be identified, said the pagers were “recently imported” and appeared to have been “sabotaged at source”.
After reports that the pagers had been ordered from a Taiwanese manufacturer, Gold Apollo, the company said they had been produced by its Hungarian partner BAC Consulting KFT, which has a licence to use its brand. A government spokesperson in Budapest said the company was “a trading intermediary, with no manufacturing or operational site in Hungary”.
Icom, the Japanese communications equipment maker whose walkie-talkies are thought to have been detonated on Wednesday, said the devices may have been a discontinued model containing modified batteries.
“We can’t rule out the possibility that they are fakes, but there is also a chance the products are our IC-V82 model,” said Icom’s director, Yoshiki Enomoto, according to the Kyodo news agency. The firm sold about 160,000 units of the model in Japan and overseas before ending production and sales in 2014 and it said it was not clear how the devices had ended up in the Middle East.
Hezbollah has traded near-daily cross-border fire with Israel since Hamas’s 7 October attacks sparked the war in Gaza.
Since October, more than 500 people have been killed in Lebanon by Israeli strikes, most of them fighters with Hezbollah and other armed groups but also more than 100 civilians. In northern Israel, at least 23 soldiers and 26 civilians have been killed by strikes from Lebanon.
About 60,000 Israelis were evacuated from their homes along the contested border with Lebanon and have been unable to return for fear of being targeted by Hezbollah.
On Wednesday, the Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, described “the start of a new phase in the war” triggered by the Hamas attacks into Israel last October.
The retired Brig Gen Amir Avivi, who leads the Israel Defense and Security Forum, a group of hawkish former military commanders, said: “There’s a lot of pressure from the society to go to war and win. Unless Hezbollah tomorrow morning says ‘OK, we got the message, we’re pulling out of south Lebanon’, war is imminent.”
The United Nations human rights chief, Volker Türk, said Tuesday’s attack had come at an “extremely volatile time”, calling the blasts “shocking” and their impact on civilians “unacceptable”. The UN secretary general, António Guterres, urged governments “not to weaponize civilian objects”.
Jason Burke is the International security correspondent of The Guardian
