The United States-led Western power bloc’s latest geo-tactical success in West Asia was its protégé Israel’s two-stage shock attack last week against Lebanon with digitally triggered detonation of communications devices used by the Hezbollah militia. The two waves of detonations of telecommunications devices are believed to have killed at least 65, mainly Hezbollah officials but also civilian bystanders and injured nearly 1,200.
After the first strike through the triggering of telephonic pagers carried by Hezbollah officers last Tuesday, a second similar strike on Wednesday triggered explosions on hand-carried radio transceivers carried by cadres of the powerful Lebanese militia organisation. Since the Hezbollah is a large popular movement with strongholds in communities spread across Lebanon, the sudden waves of explosions have served to terrorise much of the Lebanese population in general.
Although Israel has not formally acknowledged its role in the two remotely controlled, digitised explosion, strikes, Government politicians in Occupied Jerusalem responded to the attacks by indirectly praising the prowess of its military. That political backing, thereby, implicitly laid claim to this latest aggression against neighbouring Lebanon.
Heighten tensions
While the Western powers largely silently looked on without comment at first, the mayhem caused by protégé Israel has only served to further heighten tensions and spark more cross-border artillery, rocket fire between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, along with aerial attacks on Beirut by the Israeli air force.
As other countries began accusing Occupied Jerusalem of carrying out the strikes, at least France, from among the Western powers, has expressed sympathy with Lebanon, its former colony. Washington has refused to “speculate” about the responsibility for the attacks, also, helping provide legitimacy for its protégé’s belligerence.
Given that the militarily lethal use of telecommunications equipment in civilian contexts is a violation of humanitarian law, the United Nations itself has sternly criticised the attacks and warned the un-named perpetrator against such criminal actions.
Israeli politicians have indirectly rejected such international legal criticism making the now familiar argument of “self-defence”, the very same logic used to justify the ongoing military offensives in Palestine that are now labelled as ‘genocidal’ by all world authorities.
On Thursday, the Israeli air force followed up with bombing raids on Beirut and suburbs with Hezbollah supporting communities, killing at least a dozen people, some of whom are believed to be militia cadres and officials. Hezbollah later confirmed the death of two of its ground level commanders in these air raids.
The Lebanese Government strongly protested these air raids. Lebanon’s Government has formally warned the world that these two digital device attacks and the air raids inside Lebanon threaten a full-fledged war between Israel and Lebanon. The Hezbollah leadership warns that Israel has “crossed the red line” by these actions.
The pager detonations injured the Iranian Ambassador to Beirut on Tuesday – presumably due to the detonations of pagers carried by Hezbollah officers who were meeting him at the time. Officials in Tehran also warned that by this action Israel had “crossed the red line” in relation to Iran.
On Friday, on the insistence of the Arab nations, the UN Security Council convened an emergency session on the attacks on Lebanon. At the time of this writing, the session had not concluded. However, most observers do not expect anything specific or positive to emerge from the UNSC at this point.
Current attacks
Israel insists that its current attacks on Lebanon are meant to suppress the current sporadic bombardment by small Hezbollah rocket fire on the northern Israeli border district adjoining its Arab neighbour state. More than 10,000 Israeli residents of this district have been displaced by the bombardment although the small and barely accurate Hezbollah rocketry usually caused minor building damage and light injury to the resident population.
Nevertheless, the displacement of ten thousand from a whole border district is a major setback for Israel given its small territory and small overall population. The Likud Government now says that it will focus its military operations in the North to ensure some safety for its northern district to enable the return of the displaced population.
It was significant that, at the Security Council meeting, it was Syria that made a statement on behalf of the Arab member states. After years of West-provoked civil war inside Syria, Damascus is now gradually winning back its international stature among the Arab nations as a neighbouring state that is standing up to Israel.
Meanwhile, the unceasing Israeli offensives in the Gaza and West Bank sectors of Israeli-Occupied Palestine are now in their 11th month with the official death toll in Gaza alone nearing 41,800, according to reports. There is no indication whatsoever that the world community will be able to stop the Israeli military operation from completing a whole year of massive destruction of habitat and massacre of an entire population.
Most analysts said that the lavish military and financial backing and the firm diplomatic backing of Israel by the Western powers was continuing in the face of world community criticism and, indeed, legal admonitions by world judiciary bodies. The naked colonial intent of the Western powers is there for all to see – and suffer. As the Security Council held a heated debate on Friday in New York, UN Spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric warned the region now stands “on the brink of a catastrophe.”
Meanwhile, there is a lot of soul-searching inside the Hezbollah organisation to account for the fiasco of the pager and transceiver detonation attacks.
World news agency reports indicated early speculation by experts that the pagers could have been subjected to a sophisticated online hack that caused them to explode. Subsequently, however, the consensus among analysts is that the Arab militia movement, long famous for its high level of organised militancy, had failed to be more strictly selective in its procurement of such equipment from foreign suppliers.
Trade dealings
Experts argue that, to cause damage on the scale that they did, the devices had to be rigged with explosives before they entered Hezbollah’s possession. As to who actually manufactured the devices and who subsequently accessed the consignment to pack in explosives prior to end-user delivery, remains a mystery lost in the maze of international trade dealings via layers of business intermediaries and proxies.
Reports indicate that a Taiwanese manufacturer may have been involved in the original production. However the several layers of buyers of this consignment seemed to include a Hungarian equipment supplier along with other little-known logistics intermediaries. Such layers are typical in the murky world of non-state armed militia supply lines.
The final outcome is that of a sensational – if murderous – success of Israeli counter-insurgency ingenuity.
But can ingenuity alone, however crafty, suffice to sustain geopolitical military adventurism and great power colonial genocide in this increasingly globally unified human civilisation? Can Western military dominance and its proxies continue to sustain such globally damaging and disruptive projects as that we see in West Asia?
