REPORT: Mossad Intercepted Hezbollah Pager Shipment, Loaded Them With Explosives.
The Israeli spy agency Mossad allegedly intercepted Hezbollah’s shipment of new pagers months ago and rigged them with high explosives — resulting in the stunning attack on the Lebanese terror group Tuesday, according to a new report.
Mossad agents reportedly placed Pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN), a highly explosive material, inside the batteries of the pagers, sources told Sky News Arabia, according to a translation from the Times of Israel.
The devices were then detonated by an external signal that caused the batteries inside to overheat, the sources added.
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Imagine the long-term implications of this. Hezbollah nutcases will never again feel comfortable carrying a pager or cellular phone. At a minimum, the terror group will have to change its buying practices; it appears since Mossad was able to intercept one shipment and load the devices with PETN, they were placing mass orders from a single source. Smart money says that if they keep using pagers, they won’t do that anymore.
There’s always a way around things like this, but now Israel has Hezbollah reacting to them rather than the other way around, which is never a bad situation to be in.
Ace of Spades adds: Hundreds of Hezballah Terrorists Hurt By Online Hate Speech and Israel Remotely Detonating Their Pagers But Mostly by Israel Remotely Detonating Their Pagers.
My only reservation is that any brilliant cover operation can usually only be executed once. You rely on the target not even knowing that your exploit is even a possibility. Once you execute the exploit, your ignorance-based advantage is gone. Hezballah and all other terrorists now know to check their electronic devices regularly.
As with killing the Hamas leader in Iran with a bomb slipped under his bed, Israel is burning through a lot of the covert op tricks it’s been slipping up its sleeve for decades, and these tricks will be unavailable (or at least, less reliable) in the future.
Still, this is a pretty existential fight and I guess Israel doesn’t want to go down holding any of its arrows in its quivers, unused.
This Saturday’s Power Line Week in Pictures will no doubt contain many images assembled from today’s endless amount of social media memes inspired by the exploding pagers.
This exchange should come with its own rim shot sound effect:
UPDATE: Israel “just created an incredibly dense and *up-to-date* social graph of an entire terrorist network, across Lebanon as well as neighboring countries. It is incredible what they just did:”
