Hezbollah has long touted secrecy as a cornerstone of its military strategy, forgoing high-tech devices to avoid infiltration from Israeli and US spyware.
In a televised address over six months ago, Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah called on Hezbollah members and their families in southern Lebanon, where fighting with Israeli forces across the border has raged for nearly a year, to forgo their cell phones.
“Shut it off, bury it, put it in an iron chest and lock it up,” he said in a speech in February. “Do it for the sake of security and to protect the blood and dignity of people.
“The collaborator (with the Israelis) is the cell phone in your hands, and those of your wife and your children. This cell phone is the collaborator and the killer,” he said in his fiery speech.
Unlike other non-state actors in the Middle East, Hezbollah units are believed to communicate through an internal communications network.
This is considered one of the key building blocks of the powerful group that has long been accused of operating as a state-within-a-state.
The pagers – for decades obsolete to most people in Lebanon – would have served to prompt Hezbollah members to contact one another through those phone lines.
In addition to causing a mass-casualty event across several parts of Lebanon, the apparent infiltration of those pagers, one step removed from their actual networks, will have rattled the Iran-backed group.
In its bid to escape Israel’s radar, its back-to-basics approach appears to have literally backfired in a way that they would have least expected.
