The deadly impact of the devices was not limited to persons carrying them, who were presumably Hizbullah members. The lethal charge was so powerful that each explosion affected its entire vicinity, whether family members, neighbours or random passersby. The persons carrying the pagers could have been in their homes, on the street or among worshippers in a mosque. To describe that operation as a surgical strike, as some pro-Israel mainstream media have done, is pure deception.

Some pro-Israeli pundits have seized on Israel’s caginess about acknowledging responsibility for this indiscriminate attack to gush about the Israeli army’s purported “humaneness”. Look at how it targets only terrorists and avoids harming civilians, they say disingenuously. This myth has already been exposed in Gaza where Israel tried to convince everyone that it was fighting Hamas and not deliberately targeting civilians. The lie collapsed the moment Israel began to bomb schools, hospitals, mosques, churches and residential blocks.     

The same applied to the pager attack in Lebanon, which struck dozens of innocent people unrelated to Hizbullah. The viciousness of that attack is nothing new for Israel. In fact, it did something more barbaric in Gaza than booby-trapping communication devices. In Gaza, Israel sank to booby-trapping Palestinian corpses. A recent video has been circulating online showing a horrifying explosion during a funeral procession in Gaza. It revealed that “the most humane army in the world” had planted an explosive device in the body of a dead Palestinian before handing it over to his family. It then detonated the body during the funeral, injuring dozens of mourners. It was just one more indiscriminate act like the pager bombs in Lebanon.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 3 October, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly