Yesterday afternoon, over 3,000 Hezbollah operatives were hospitalized and eight were killed when their secure, military pagers all simultaneously exploded. But why? This appears to be what military experts call a “shaping operation” which means there’s more here than meets the eye, and this informs what will be happening in the coming days.  Here’s a review of what we’ve been able to understand so far, from a variety of public and non-public sources.

Before I continue – you may have noticed that we are in the midst of our Rosh HaShana fundraiser.  You can check our fundraiser emails for details on all we’ve done over the past year (it’s a LOT!) but for now I’ll just say: thank you so much for helping us help Israel! (Click HERE or on the button below to donate.) Now, back to the analysis…

*Photo: AI image for illustrative purposes only.

This particular shipment of pagers was delivered to Hezbollah last Spring from a manufacturer in Taiwan, although some of the manufacture may have been out-contracted to a factory in Hungary. According to other reports, each pager was loaded with up to 3 grams of explosive material and an electronic detonation system that can be activated through the pager network.

The “modifications” to the pagers were apparently installed at the factory level.  The system was, therefore, implemented long after October 7, but then remained dormant for months: until yesterday.

What happened yesterday?

Yesterday, Israel’s Security Cabinet adopted a new war goal of safely returning Israel’s displaced residents to their homes in the north: an entire region rendered uninhabitable by almost a year of near constant, devastating Hezbollah bombardment. The pagers exploded mere hours later. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied responsibility, though from all indications it seems likely that this was an Israeli operation.

According to some reports, a message was sent to the pagers shortly before the explosion, causing many of the Hezbollah operatives to be holding and looking at their pagers when they  exploded.  Some pagers exploded in pockets, apparently causing more “intimate” injuries. Hezbollah claims at least one child was killed,” and Iran has, bizarrely, labeled the event an act of “genocide.”  The original shipment from Taiwan included 4,000 of the sabotaged pagers and latest reports indicate over 3,000 Hezbollah operatives have been hospitalized.

Though a stunning feat of spycraft, and certainly humiliating to Hezbollah, the exploding pagers will not win a war nor bring Israel’s northern residents safely home.  That’s why we conclude this is a shaping operation. A “shaping operation” is an activity that “shapes” the battlefield for further attack. For example, destroying radar dishes, knocking out electrical grids, or disrupting communications networks, are all types of shaping operations that help disrupt enemy defenses and clear the way for a larger invasion.

In this case, Israel’s greatest concern is Hezbollah’s immense arsenal of rockets and missiles: large enough to overwhelm the Iron Dome missile defense system and to visit significant destruction on the Israeli civilian population.  In fact, this missile threat has been the main deterrent protecting Hezbollah from any major Israeli attack so far, and it even has the additional impact of protecting Iran’s growing nuclear program from Israel – Hezbollah’s retaliation would simply be too destructive.

Yet a massive missile barrage requires massive coordination. Due to Israel’s significant prowess at intercepting and disrupting hi-tech systems, Hezbollah has long elected to go “low tech,” hence the pagers: which operate via encoded messages on Hezbollah’s own private, military network. Thousands of Hezbollah operatives, who are responsible for coordinating attacks on Israel, are therefore trained to send and receive instructions by pager, before activating the relevant launches.

Yesterday’s attack on the pagers took out not only Hezbollah’s low-tech communications system, but also the people who operate it.  Thousands of Hezbollah operatives who had been specifically trained in launching coordinated missile attacks, are now all, simultaneously, in the hospital.  In the course of mere minutes, Hezbollah’s capacity to retaliate against Israeli civilians has been significantly degraded.

What happens next?

We should expect a variety of other shaping operations, some of which may become publicly known and some not, leading up to a large-scale Israeli military operation in Lebanon.  Israel will not want to allow time for Hezbollah’s highly trained operatives to be released from the hospital nor for the terror organization to reconstitute its missile coordination system, so we should expect to see the Israeli operation in the very near term.  That is, unless the United States steps in to save the Hezbollah terror organization.

United States Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Presidential advisor Amos Hochstein warned Israel against “starting” a war in Lebanon – as if Hezbollah’s continuing bombardment of northern Israel did not constitute a war that had already started long ago. The question now is whether Israel will, at long last, finish it.

Please keep us in your thoughts and prayers – even with all of Israel’s creative and astonishing defenses, we will still be in the line of fire, as Hezbollah fights in the only way it truly understands: by targeting Israeli civilians.