It is not just an atrocity; it is also the next form of deadly pursuit in warfare.
The escalating conflict between Israel and Hezbollah has witnessed a surge of attritional dimensions since October last year.
Yet, by any measure, a sophisticated Israeli attempt at mass murdering around 5,000 Lebanese citizens linked to Hezbollah – ranging from everyday health care workers to countrywide security officials – by way of wirelessly synchronised device explosions last week, transcended any notion that the hitherto level of warfare between the two protagonists would continue.
In what should aptly be termed ‘supply chain terror’, Israel remotely triggered the pagers, walkie-talkies, phones, intercoms, radios, solar panels, some of which were bought on the civilian market, in an audacious attempt at diminishing Hezbollah’s ability to continue its on-going battle with the Jewish state.
Many of the victims were tagged, wounded or lifeless, slumped in barber shop chairs, buying groceries, riding scooters, lounging on sofas, doing rotating shifts in hospitals and even driving with their toddlers in the baby seat.
According to Lebanese health sources, more than 40 people have been killed, so far, with hundreds of others injured, many with injuries so horrific they are rendered to being blind, charred, deaf, fingerless, limbless or bereft of vital organs such as kidneys as a direct consequence of the lithium batteries inside these civilian devices being laced with PETN explosives.
The targeting of its civilian communication infrastructure with such scale and precision undoubtedly constituted a temporary blow to Hezbollah, although the Islamic movement readily contained the damage, if we consider the depths of their resolve echoed in the almost immediate continuance of the cross-border military campaign.
However, in the broad spectrum of things, the means Israel employed to insert themselves into the Hezbollah acquisition network through a trail of shell companies, complex financial transactions and the elaborate manufacturing and shipping of the explosive-ridden goods to the end users as an opening shot of war, now sets a dangerous precedent for any future conflict the world over.
Sophisticated savagery par excellence?
The remote targeting of civilian infrastructure is obviously not a new tactic of warfare. Neither, for that matter, is using wireless electronic mechanisms to eliminate one’s enemies from afar.
Israeli intelligence could not have displayed this more vividly than in their 1996 targeting killing of senior Hamas military figure, Yahya Ayyash. He was decapitated within seconds of answering an analogue mobile phone call from his family whilst in hiding – oblivious to the phone’s battery being partially laced with explosives – and placed in his possession by a friend who fatally betrayed him in liaison with Israel.
But what Israel did in its most recent endeavour was to systematically target a segment of the civilian population, not merely to try and render their employers (Hezbollah) into a hopeless bout of demoralisation and fear, but to also render these civilian employees into an all-encompassing paranoia where the long arm of the Israeli state feels explosively omnipresent even in the structures of their basic electronic possessions.
Although one would be hard-pressed to find a member of Hezbollah’s cadres suddenly disowning the movement and then crumbling at what former CIA Director, Leon Panetta, described as Israel’s "a form of terrorism”, it remains beside the point.
Instead, what should immediately come to mind in a world full of conflict and proxy wars of which the two military superpowers – Russian and the USA – are heavily involved, is the blueprint even mildly sophisticated countries or their networks could adapt from Israel’s brazen attack and the endless potential that would inevitably be used to develop it even further.
Now, imagine the critical mass that China (the world’s largest manufacturer of civilian hardware) could employ for the same end, distributing civilian goods fitted with an explosive ruse to be activated as and when it feels the necessity to pre-empt its enemies in potential conflict.
Since the international economy is naturally dependent on international trade between states, designing electronic sabotage at scale to indiscriminately target civilians and military personnel alike, only requires the manufacturers of civilian goods to tamper with their products at the factory level for the end recipients and those around them to become unwitting victims.
On that premise, is it realistic that customs would make sweeping inspections of every single gadget, from every single box, in every single consignment of shipping containers, to qualify their gadgets explosive free before they enter the civilian market?
How about when the organised criminal fraternity and non-state actors also begin employing these crude tactics as a form of coercive behaviour within the existing second-hand market? When they interdict your postal courier services to target an item you bought online? When you innocently send a device for repair?
The answer is that it will have no bounds when nobody plays by any rules, the forces of war can no longer be controlled.
In foresight, we will then live in an era where those we oppose or conflict with as a nation can not only render us to feel they are potentially everywhere – but taking a leaf out of the Israeli notebook – that they can potentially explode everywhere.
They can explode whilst you watch TV with your family, in the pockets of the person sitting next to you on a plane, in your air pods as you jog away, on the smartphone your colleague is texting with, in your children’s devices, the laptop placed on your bedroom desk as you sleep and even in chips Elon Musk wants to implant in your brains – like time-bombs to be detonated at the whims of your enemy.
This also naturally extends to military equipment, and perhaps Arab states that have bought billions in military hardware from Israel under the illusion of one day having a qualitative military equivalence or parity with it, should resort to some extensive spot checks as a matter of expediency before the fallacy of trying to do so is reduced to burning ashes in a matter of seconds.
While Hezbollah and its battle-hardened constituent Shia Muslim community will endure and adapt to the repercussions of these attacks, can the same be expected from societies living in an otherwise bubble of peace, when the very fabric of everyday things they take for granted can be used to such consequential ends by adversaries who seek to gain concessions from the state?
Even shy of an actual attack, the collateral of its potential would be staggering: the instilling of fear and chaos in the civilian population, the breakdown of mental resilience, the distrust in each other and electronic devices, the conspiracy theories, the rumour mills and all of this in a world where miniature Faraday Cages would not be a practical solution.
In conclusion, it is imperative to confront the ethical implications of Israel’s actions, as the cost of inaction is too great when the consequences of this new form of warfare will reverberate far beyond the conventional battlefield, not just for the evolution in warfare it has created, but also the security of human life it will irrevocably alter.
Dr Mohammad I Aslam is a Fellow, Royal Asiatic Society (GB), and Associate Fellow at the Institute for Middle Eastern Studies, King’s College London.