An inventive Israeli operation to trigger a sophisticated mass attack remotely boggles the imagination. In what must have been a long-planned manoeuvre executed with precision to make thousands of pagers explode simultaneously, the assumed architect of this strike on Hezbollah in Lebanon may invite the imagining of scenarios in which humans could be speeding towards Armageddon if modern society’s ubiquitous wireless communication devices can be used to stage such attacks.
The worst visualisations of Hollywood script writers dreaming up dystopian scenarios could get validated by such acts. The death toll of 11 and the count of around 3,000 wounded may pale when compared to the toll that missiles and bombs launched at Ukraine, the Gaza Strip and many other countries of the war-struck regions of Europe and West Asia. But the possibilities exploding beepers may engender are too forbidding because human destructiveness is the real propellant here.
On the available evidence gathered so far on the Lebanon hits, the operation may have got at a particular batch of pagers, which are essentially low-tech communication devices still in use in certain professions and by some people in remote locations, the Hezbollah had ordered because its leader believed cellphones were vulnerable since they are too easily monitored or hacked.
If undetectable explosives had been planted in pagers in Hungary, or wherever they were produced, and were made to explode by an electronic signal, it might appear to be complex ops cleverly run. But they could only be of limited value in creating the mayhem of warfare that certain sections of the world believe in and are able to command greater destruction with the help of the military-industrial complex that produces powerful armaments and ammunition.
Israel is thought to be the obvious progenitor of such ideas of targeted killing through explosive devices, covert assassinations and sabotage, the justification invariably being its everyday sense of an existential threat in a life among myriad enemies in a region more prone to violence than many others. Its intelligence wings are masters at surveillance and counterintelligence ops and preemptive strikes like the synchronised explosion of pagers in Lebanon.
The point is that the minute they accept a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip instead of waging a war against Hamas as well as Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies, Israel can look forward to living in peace since revenge may already have been wreaked for the barbarous October 7 incursion that the Hamas staged in Israel.
How the Palestinians would view peace after decades of oppression in Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem is a different matter altogether. But to give peace a chance instead of eternally protecting his position as the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu would have to call off the offensive and sit down to negotiate a future in which the Palestinians will have full self-rule and an opportunity to build a better and more peaceful future for all in the region.
Meanwhile, peace loving people of the world will be left wondering what could happen if cellphones, nowadays capable of being used to trigger destructive activities through IEDs and such, can be converted into weapons that explode on demand. They should, in fact, be petrified of a future for mankind steeped in the power of demolition and annihilation of what man, as a sentient being, has developed in about 6,000 years of civilised living.
