At 3:30 p.m. on September 17, 2024, pagers began to beep and buzz in Beirut and all over Lebanon, alerting Hezbollah operatives to a message from their commanders. But the message was not from Hassan Nasrallah or anyone else in the terrorist organization. Within less than ten seconds, the pagers would explode, sending Hezbollah, Lebanon, Iran, and even the White House into a panic.
Before anyone knew what was happening, the blasts had Hezbollah terrorists flying off their motorcycles or collapsing onto the floors of supermarkets, writhing in pain as a bizarre smoke belched upward from their pockets, belts, or fingers. From the sounds of the blasts and the fright that followed, it became clear that a massive sabotage operation was under way.
The beeper bombing killed or wounded some three thousand five hundred Hezbollah operatives. Between two and four children were killed, and there were some other civilians hurt, but what stood out to most observers was the attack’s accuracy.
“This was the most impressive supply-chain operation in modern intelligence history, and maybe forever,” General David Petraeus, a former CIA director, told us. For an operation of its size, harming so many Hezbollah operatives and so few others, the targeting was unprecedented. “Usually,” Prime Minister Netanyahu noted to us, “the guys who get beepers were important—command-and-control positions. That’s why they need the beepers.”
As Hezbollah tried to find its bearings and switch its method of communication the next day, a similar wave of exploding walkie-talkies, cell phones, and other devices wounded another five hundred or so terrorist operatives. What was going on? This was an astonishing reversal for Hezbollah, which only a day before had viewed itself as enjoying a substantial measure of impunity by virtue of the size of its rocket arsenal. It thought it had deterred Israel.
Back at Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv, ten minutes before the pagers were due to go off, everyone was on edge. In the spy agency’s state-of-the-art situation room, plasma screens waited for satellite video feeds to stream real-time updates from on the ground. If the pager operation failed, it could cause a collapse in confidence in the Mossad. So much money, so many years, and such great expectations had been poured into the project. If something went wrong, would Israel’s vaunted intelligence service plunge the country into its most costly war since the fight for independence?
Even a few minutes after the beepers started to explode, the Mossad didn’t yet know how successful the operation was going to be. There was no remote-tracking method to follow what was happening. Mossad Director David Barnea, a famously cool operator, was feeling the heat.
It was only as media reports started to arrive of beeper attacks not only in Beirut, but deep into Lebanon, in the Hezbollah stronghold of the Bekaa Valley, that the Mossad operatives allowed themselves to exhale. The project seemed to be succeeding; Hezbollah had been dealt a thunderous blow. “We had a surprise prepared,” Netanyahu told us with a grin. “They didn’t know what hit them.”
Israel informed White House of the operation, but barely
The Biden administration was about as shocked as Hezbollah. “It was morning in Washington, and we received a request for an urgent phone call” on September 17, recalled Dan Shapiro, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, and a former US ambassador to Israel under President Obama. “Minister Gallant informed Secretary Austin that Israel had a ‘special capability,’ which he was about to exercise in Lebanon. He was vague about what it did or how it would work, but he wanted Austin to have advance knowledge,” Shapiro said.
As a senior Israeli official close to Netanyahu told us on September 17, the day of the beeper bombing, “The US objective from the start was to de-escalate. Our objective is to win the war.” Even up until the last minute, Shapiro added, Gallant felt compelled to withhold all the details.
“When the call concluded, we were still pretty confused about what he was describing,” Shapiro told us. “But within less than thirty minutes, we started to see reports on CNN and other television networks about explosions happening in Lebanon,” Shapiro explained. They would learn what Israel’s “special capability” was, like everyone else, by watching the news.
“It was unusual. And in some ways, you could say it was impressive,” Shapiro reflected. The Biden team had reacted with genuine alarm at the escalatory potential of Israel’s action, but it was colored by admiration. “They were impressed by the creativity, the ingenuity, the secrecy, and the careful targeting of Hezbollah members, ensuring that civilians weren’t affected,” Shapiro said. How could you not be?
It was on August 25, 2024, three weeks before the pager operations, that Hezbollah escalated the fight and changed the way Netanyahu viewed the northern front. Hezbollah had planned to launch several hundred, and maybe up to one thousand, rockets that day, including on Israeli intelligence headquarters north of Tel Aviv. Yet the IDF did not only stymie Hezbollah; it cleaned house. With clear intelligence dominance, it blew up the vast majority of the rockets and drones Hezbollah intended to use as well as others—thousands of them—before they could even be launched.
Suddenly, Netanyahu was euphoric and ready to press Israel’s advantage. The prime minister asked: What if instead of losing five thousand to ten thousand Israelis from tens of thousands of rockets over several weeks in an all-out war, he could pre-emptively destroy enough Hezbollah rockets and launchers to shrink Israel’s casualties by orders of magnitude? What if he could ensure that the terrorists would not be able to mount an effective strike in retaliation? This was the thought that changed the northern front.
The real story of the beepers and walkie-talkies began almost two decades earlier. The earliest foundations were laid by Yossi Cohen for then–Mossad chief Meir Dagan from 2002 to 2006. Dagan led the Mossad for an unusually long nine years from 2002 to 2011. Already a legend in Israel, he would receive credit for a years-long campaign of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, Israel’s 2007 attack on Syria’s nuclear reactor, and the 2009–2010 STUXNET cyberattack on Iran’s nuclear program, among other exploits. Cohen himself would go on to lead the Mossad from 2016 to 2021.
By 2014, the Mossad and IDF intelligence wanted to expand into new areas of surveillance and sabotage, targeting Hezbollah’s walkie-talkies. Tamir Pardo was the Mossad chief at the time, and Herzi Halevi was head of IDF intelligence. They worked on a plan that would allow Israeli intelligence to use the walkie-talkies as a surveillance tool as well as a “judgment day” weapon to be pulled out if the sides ever fell into a general war.
“The walkie-talkie was a weapon, just like a bullet or a missile or a mortar,” Michael, a fictitious name for a former Mossad agent, said in an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes. Inside the walkie-talkie was a battery, made in Israel at a Mossad facility, which included an explosive device, he revealed. These walkie-talkies were designed to be placed in the chest pocket of a Hezbollah fighter’s tactical vest. We were told that Hezbollah bought more than fifteen thousand of them. “They got a good price,” Michael said, with no small dose of irony. But, he added, the price could not be too low because that could cause Hezbollah to get suspicious.
One limitation of the walkie-talkies, which Israel would detonate the day after the pagers, was that Hezbollah fighters were expected to carry them only during war or military exercises. This meant that on most days, they were sitting idle in military barracks. For the Mossad, this was not good enough. It wanted to plant devices on Hezbollah operatives that they would have in their possession at all times.
Cell phones? No. Nasrallah had been telling his operatives that Israel was using cell phone networks to track them, and that they needed to go low-tech to avoid detection. “You ask me where the agent is,” Nasrallah told the Hezbollah faithful. “I tell you that the phone in your hands is the agent,” he said. “Bury it. Put it in an iron box and lock it.”
Nasrallah preferred pagers because they could receive messages without giving away a user’s location. They were safe, Nasrallah thought. This created just the lethal opening the Mossad had been looking for.
IN THE WAR ROOM: THE INSIDE STORY OF ISRAEL’S FIGHT AGAINST HAMAS AND THE IRANIAN AXIS
By Yonah Jeremy Bob and Elliot Kaufman
A Wicked Son Book/
Post Hill Press
352 pages; $32.50
Mr. Bob is a senior military analyst for The Jerusalem Post. Mr. Kaufman is a member of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board. This article is adapted from their book, “In the War Room: The Inside Story of Israel’s Fight Against Hamas and the Iranian Axis,” forthcoming Sept. 8.
