It really is like something out of a Hollywood spy movie.

At the same time, Hezbollah officials’ pagers exploded in a southern Beirut suburb, causing hundreds of injuries and great embarrassment.

Israel has not claimed responsibility for the attack, but all fingers point to the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, which is notorious for its inventive and brazen attacks on its enemies.

How this was technically achieved we may never know, but it could have been done by sending signals to overload individual circuits, causing the batteries to overheat and essentially turn them into small hand grenades.

To do this, the attackers would have had to know at least the make and model of each pager; in order to coordinate the explosions on certain devices, they would probably also have known the serial numbers. All of this points to another serious security flaw at Hezbollah.

Alternatively, the pagers themselves, which apparently all belong to the same batch, could have been tampered with before delivery.

We can assume that the people carrying the pagers were fairly high-ranking people within the group. This assumption is supported by reports that the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon was also injured when his pager exploded.

Hezbollah is very cautious in its communications, aware that cellphone conversations can easily be hacked and tracked. Pagers would have been seen as an easy alternative and would have been harder to infiltrate.

Live updates: Eight killed in pager explosions, including Hezbollah fighters

Israeli intelligence has repeatedly demonstrated its influence on Hezbollah, notably with the assassination of senior commander Fuad Shukr in late July.

This latest attack will cause great concern within Hezbollah and may even unleash chaos within its own ranks, as its security is now so dramatically compromised.

The bigger war

A few things have happened in the last few days that I find noteworthy.

First, late last week, the Israeli military declared the defeat of Hamas’ Rafah Brigade in the southern Gaza Strip. This is seen as the last major military success of the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip and allows Israel to focus its efforts on Hezbollah and the conflict on the Israeli-Lebanese border if it so chooses.

Last night, the Israeli security cabinet officially declared the return of the evacuees from the north to be one of the war aims, along with the defeat of Hamas and the release of the hostages.

At the same time, rumors are circulating that Defense Minister Yoav Gallant could be fired by Benjamin Netanyahu and replaced by Gideon Sa’ar, a former ally of Netanyahu who has now become an enemy and is taking a more aggressive stance on the Hezbollah issue.

And earlier today, Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence agency announced that it had uncovered a Hezbollah plot to assassinate a former high-ranking Israeli military officer with a remote-controlled Claymore bomb.

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How closely all these events are connected remains to be seen, but I think there is some connection as Israel increasingly turns its attention to the war in the north.

After October 7, Hezbollah allied itself with Hamas and joined the war in Gaza, pledging to attack Israel in solidarity until a ceasefire was agreed. However, the ceasefire has not materialized and Hezbollah finds itself in an increasingly difficult and arguably hopeless situation.

Israel attacks Hezbollah targets and fighters deep in Lebanon.

The Lebanese people and, we are told, Hezbollah itself do not want a full-scale war with Israel. Yet the organization’s secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, has maneuvered himself into a dead end and has no clear exit strategy – unless he makes a humiliating backtrack.

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It will be interesting to see how Hezbollah responds to the pager attacks now.

If a conventional airstrike had injured more than a thousand Lebanese, the noise of impending war would be deafening. But this attack, even though it is large in terms of scale and damage, is below the threshold of a conventional conflict, and so the response is unclear.