Israel is right to turn the pager against Islamist terrorists

Remember how Israel got to this point: almost a year ago, on October 7 last year, Hamas terrorists crossed Israel’s southern border from Gaza and murdered approximately 1,200 innocent people in a hideous, unprovoked massacre. Hezbollah operates on Israel’s northern border, in Lebanon and Syria. Hamas and Hezbollah are sponsored by the same evil regime in Iran, but they are two separate organizations. Hezbollah is Shiite and Hamas is Sunni. Hamas claims, absurdly, that it represents the interests of a historically nebulous group called the Palestinians. Hezbollah has only a secondary or even tertiary interest in the “Palestinian cause”, and is instead a broader Islamist movement against the West.

The Gaza war is not a Hezbollah battle and Israel has done nothing to make it a Hezbollah fight. However, Hezbollah decided to enter the fight without any provocation or pretext of Israeli perfidy. Almost immediately after October 7 last year, Hezbollah began firing rockets from Lebanon towards Israel. In the 51 weeks since then, Hezbollah has carried out more than 8,000 missile and drone attacks, the most famous of which was the death of 12 Druze children, a branch of Shiite Islam who live as Israeli citizens and protected residents. As a precaution, more than 70,000 Israelis have been displaced from their homes in Hezbollah’s target zone.

This is the context of the now famous Israeli booby trap for Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies. The pagers were allegedly sold by an Indian-born agent through a Bulgarian or Hungarian shell company (reports vary) from a manufacturer in Taiwan, which, however, claims it did not actually build the devices. Whoever organized such a supply chain took the craft of intelligence to a brilliant level.

What was even more brilliant was how precisely targeted it was. For decades, every time Israel acted in self-defense, international critics accused the Jewish state of indiscriminate bombing of civilians, regardless of how carefully Israel acted to attack only identifiable military assets. This time it was known that these electronic devices were ordered by Hezbollah for Hezbollah. Unless you were part of a terrorist organization, you did not have any of these devices. While the explosion could also injure someone nearby, the ratio of terrorists to innocent victims of this attack certainly set a record for precision targeting and civilian safety. For minimizing collateral damage so effectively, Israel deserves admiration for its ethics and skill.

When Israel began this round of self-defense, it worked to make it really count. Instead of limiting itself to neutralizing thousands of rank-and-file Hezbollah members, it also struck at the heads of this murderous group and the places from which the rockets were fired. The September 24 raid killed Ibrahim Muhammad Qubaisi, head of the group’s missile division. The September 20 strike killed Ibrahim Aqil, a member of the Jihad Council whom the United States has blamed for four decades for orchestrating the truck bombing that killed 63 Americans outside the embassy in Beirut in 1983.

Earlier this summer, in response to other Hezbollah rockets fired at Israel, Israel eliminated Hezbollah leaders Taleb Abdallah, Mohammed Nasser and Fuad Shukr.

The usual suspects make all the anti-Semitic accusations that the Israeli attacks on these leaders and missile sites were the deliberate destruction of homes and civilians. This is tendentious nonsense. Israel has time and time again released videos showing secondary explosions at targeted sites, eruptions of the kind that can only come from weapons depots.

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For all this the world should be grateful to Israel. It is Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran, not Israel, that are destabilizing the Middle East. Israel is not the aggressor, but the wronged and the righteous defender of its nation and territory. In justified retaliation, Israel continues to improve its already admirable record of minimizing civilian harm while eliminating terrorists. He should continue his good work.

The way to achieve peace in the Middle East is for the rest of the world to put pressure on Islamists to leave Israel alone.