The more I think about it, the more audacious and astounding Israel’s recent attack on Hezbollah operatives seems. There’s little doubt this has been the largest and most precisely targeted attack on a terrorist group in history. Brilliantly planned and executed, the modus operandi ensures that there was very little collateral damage. It’s almost impossible to imagine a more targeted attack on terrorists.

And yet it’s drawing criticism from those who already hate Israel. Ironically, the same people who think Israel’s more conventional military efforts in Gaza have too high a ratio of citizens to terrorists also can’t stand this ratio which is extremely small. For example:

“This attack clearly and unequivocally violates international humanitarian law and undermines U.S. efforts to prevent a wider conflict,” Ocasio-Cortez stated. “Congress needs a full accounting of the attack, including an answer from the State Department as to whether any U.S. assistance went into the development or deployment of this technology.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, which was among the organizations that blamed Israel for being attacked on October 7, called for the Biden administration “to condemn the Israeli government for killing children and maiming numerous civilians in Lebanon by detonating bombs reportedly placed in pagers without any regard for innocent life.”

Hezbollah has been lobbing rockets into Israel for years and has stepped it up post-10/7 to the point where many thousands of Israelis have had to flee their homes in the north for nearly a year, with no end in sight. The attacks by Hezbollah are terrorism, and have no military targets. They recently killed 12 children on a soccer field.

From Israel’s defenders:

“If Israel was responsible, then on available information these seem to be incredibly precise. Rules on targeting are principally necessity, distinction and proportionality,” Natasha Hausdorff, a barrister in the United Kingdom and legal director of UK Lawyers for Israel, told JNS.

“It is hard to imagine a better means of targeting Hezbollah operatives, whoever is behind the exploding devices,” Hausdorff said. “I would ask these individuals which international law they claim was violated.”

There is no such claim that is valid, but that doesn’t matter to Israel-haters.

I have some theories, though, about why this particular attack makes a lot of people uneasy, even those who acknowledge that it isn’t a violation of the laws of war, and that Hezbollah operatives are terrorists. The first involves its newness; there is something frightening about an attack that seems like something out of a science fiction action film. The second involves the obviously grisly aspect of the maiming that is involved, in which terrorists lost hands, eyes, and genitalia. The third involves the mechanism of delivery: communication devices. We can identify, because even though most of us don’t have pagers or walkie-talkies, we have cellphones that we carry around on our persons, especially in pockets. There’s been a lot of speculation on whether this could be done by China with cellphones, for example. Lastly, there’s a way in which it feeds into classic anti-Semitic memes of Jews as being diabolically clever and capable of nefarious action at a distance.

Israel is condemned by many people no matter what it does, but it’s in a fight for its very survival and it will do what it needs to do.

Until now it’s been assumed that the pagers were ordered through a foreign company – variously reported as having been in Taiwan and/or Hungary – and shipments were somehow intercepted and the explosives were added. But a competing explanation is that Hezbollah actually got pagers that were manufactured by Israelis, who set up a shell company for that purpose quite some time ago. From a story in the NY Times:

Even before Mr. Nasrallah decided to expand pager usage, Israel had put into motion a plan to establish a shell company that would pose as an international pager producer.

By all appearances, B.A.C. Consulting was a Hungary-based company that was under contract to produce the devices on behalf of a Taiwanese company, Gold Apollo. In fact, it was part of an Israeli front, according to three intelligence officers briefed on the operation. They said at least two other shell companies were created as well to mask the real identities of the people creating the pagers: Israeli intelligence officers.

B.A.C. did take on ordinary clients, for which it produced a range of ordinary pagers. But the only client that really mattered was Hezbollah, and its pagers were far from ordinary. Produced separately, they contained batteries laced with the explosive PETN, according to the three intelligence officers.

The pagers began shipping to Lebanon in the summer of 2022 in small numbers, but production was quickly ramped up after Mr. Nasrallah denounced cellphones.

Astounding. Israel has also said it has other tricks up its sleeve:

“We still have many capabilities that we have not yet activated,” Lt. Gen. Halevi assured Wednesday.

I have to imagine that this possibility strikes fear into not just Hezbollah, but terrorists all over the Arab world. It doesn’t seem like empty bragging at this point, does it?