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Death toll in Lebanon walkie-talkie explosions rises to 20, with more than 450 injured
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
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It disrupts communications, but that's only an advantage if Israel immediately follows up with a full assault and there's nothing else Hezbollah could adopt. If Hezbollah goes to a warehouse and buys a random crate of a different brand of pager they're suddenly safe again.
If Israel doesn't immediately invade during the couple days of chaos this buys them, all they've done is shit the bed. All of their enemies now know they can do this and they probably instantly changed up whatever tech they're using. With that goes anything else Israel has done in terms of surveilling or sabotaging that tech. A week from now their enemies will have more robust comms and fresh replacements to use them. The escalation to wholesale terrorism against random civilians risks being matched and Israeli losses are disproportionately felt/destabilising. The potential for more severe blowback seems much higher than whatever gain they could hope for outside of an immediate battlefield advantage.
To clarify: they had two waves. My line of logic is that if a third wave exists the attack comes then. The absence of an attack after the first and second either means a) this is desperation : they had a means to draw blood and took it because in absence of a means to kill causing injury is the next best b) it’s a multi stage softening
My most optimistic take, c) is that they have no follow through. Softening as a delay action. They can’t/ don’t see a path to victory as of now and see hurting the organizational structure as a means of buying time to fix that.
Edit: forgot to tie-in that every comm device is suspect rn. The one-two of making multiple comms potentially lethal harms every device. If your pager lows up, if your walkie blows up, you might not keep the other devices attached to your person. A third attack on the second backup shortly followed by invasion would maximize lack of comms. Nothing would be trusted in that temporary period.
Anti-doomer counterattack on the line of thought: they are super dedicated and I bet a ton of the resistance has a line along “my comms might kill me, their missiles too. Without the comms I am unable to coordinate the fight, so fuck it I keep the radio”.
I'm curious to see if there's a third attack. It could be a prolonged softening but I think they'd have to hit something different. By now surely every electronic device Hezbollah has is either being stored away from people, dismantled and inspected, or thrown away for fresh ones. If Israel blows up laptops or cars next it's probably going to either cause less damage or more random collateral damage. If Hezbollah finds a single odd thing in any of their devices, that attack and any subsequent ones go out the window. The next couple days are going to be such a critical period.
Agreed, to try and definitely speculate further is an act of augury. We can only hope the entrails are optimistic.