“They don’t trust their smartphones, so they turn to these more archaic devices, which explode. What’s next?” Schneier says. “Everything becomes less efficient, because they can’t communicate well.”
Schneier describes the paranoid effect the operation has had as a kind of permanent “tax” on Hezbollah as an organization. “There are a lot of things you can’t do if you can’t rely on communications,” he says. Schneier compares the end result to the near-incommunicado state of a hunted figure like Osama bin Laden, who in his later years was forced to send messages only through human couriers who visited his secret compound in Pakistan.
Indeed, such paranoia has been sown among Lebanon’s population for years. The Israeli attacks with pagers and walkie-talkies followed repeated public warnings from Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah about the dangers of smartphone surveillance, given the Israeli intelligence services’ known hacking prowess. “Please break it, bury it, put it in a metal box,” Nasrallah said in one speech. In another, he appeared on Lebanese television next to an image of an iPhone surrounded by a red circle with a slash through it. “They are deadly spies,” he warned. Mobile phones were He is said to have been banned from attending Hezbollah meetings. In favor of pagers.
Now, the older alternative devices Hezbollah has turned to raise even more fears of injury or death. And that fear has come to encompass communications electronics more broadly: At Wednesday’s funeral for the victims of Tuesday’s attack, for example (an event that was itself the target of another attack), mourners were asked to remove the batteries from their phones.
Creating distrust in communication devices within Hezbollah can be very useful. Israel’s deliberate tactic to “prepare the battle space” in anticipation of impending Israeli military operations against Lebanon, says Thomas Rid, professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University and author of Active measureswhich specializes in disinformation and influence operations. He compares the operation to cyberattacks or physical attacks on “command and control” infrastructure at the start of a conflict, such as the U.S. efforts documented in former NSA chief Michael Hayden’s book Playing on the edgeto destroy the Iraqi army’s fiber-optic communications in 2003 in order to “drive” the enemy army toward more easily intercepted radio-based communications.
“This is taking attacks on command and control systems to a whole new level,” Rid says. “They sent the message: ‘No, we’re not just penetrating these devices and tapping them, we’re literally blowing them up, taking away any trust they might have had in their command and control system and also any future devices they might acquire.’”
For Israeli intelligence, Rid notes, the attack also represents a stunning reassertion of its power and public image following its disastrous failure to prevent the Hamas attacks on October 7. “This operation goes a long way to showing that they are perhaps the most creative and ruthless intelligence service on the planet right now,” he says.
But thanks to the collateral damage of the Israeli offensive, its effects, both physical and psychological, have by no means been limited to Hezbollah operatives. Franco-Lebanese security researcher Kobeissi, who now works as founder and CEO of the Paris-based technology company Symbolic Software, says he has already seen false rumors and misleading videos spread among the Lebanese, suggesting, for example, that iPhones are also exploding. “People are losing their minds, because it’s so scary, and that’s the point,” he says. “It’s impossible to think of this as limiting Hezbollah’s communications and capabilities without realizing that it’s also going to have a terrifying effect on the surrounding population.”
Kobeissi argues that the collateral damage of the attack will shape the way a generation of people think about Western technology in Lebanon and beyond. “The average Lebanese have no specific understanding of what it means to carry out a supply chain attack,” he says. “What they see is that a device made by an American ally, a device they depend on, can explode. And it is unfortunate that the Israeli intelligence community has not considered the repercussions this could have globally.”
Aside from that question of trust, Israel’s attack also represents an escalation, says Harvard’s Bruce Schneier: a new kind of attack that, now that it has been demonstrated, will surely be seen again in some form, perhaps even in an act of retaliation against Israel itself.
“It’s not just Hezbollah that should be worried. If I were Ukraine, I would be worried. If I were Russia, I would be worried. If I were Israel, I would be worried. This is not going in just one direction,” he says. “We all now live in a world of connected devices that can be weaponized in unexpected ways. What will that world look like?”
