“Is your pager hot? Because my pager’s hot.”

We talk a lot about how dangerous it is to be a card-carrying Jew in the Middle East. And it is. Israel’s surrounded by antagonists and nemeses, all hell-bent on the destruction of the Zionist project and in many cases on the annihilation of the Jewish people. But as dangerous as it is to be an Israeli Jew, it’s equally, if not more, dangerous to be an enemy of the Israeli state. To sign up for membership in Iran’s regional “Axis of Resistance” is to accept a high likelihood that sooner or later, the IDF or Mossad will cut you down.

Several hundred, and possibly more than 1,000, Hezbollah members were reminded on Tuesday that their line of work is inherently hazardous when Mossad remotely detonated scores of pagers possibly infected with malware across Lebanon and parts of Syria, maiming dozens and killing several, including an eight-year-old girl.

Notwithstanding civilian collateral damage (which is always a tragedy, by definition), the operation was as grimly amusing as it was audacious. This is quintessential gallows humor: Hundreds of Hassan Nasrallah’s foot soldiers all feeling their pagers heat up at once and then, a few mocking beeps later, “BOOM!”

According to various reports, the pagers all blew up at the same time — 3:30 PM — either as a result of overheating batteries or embedded explosives. They bleeped for a few seconds first, a ruse seemingly designed to take as many hands and eyes as possible.

For context, Hezbollah uses pagers on the (not irrational) assumption that primitive devices are safer than cell phones. That protocol was expanded following Hamas’s attack on Israel a year ago next month. Fearing Israeli intelligence had compromised the group’s cell network, Nasrallah mandated the pagers after October 7. There was some indication Tuesday that the group recently received a new batch of the devices. Some how, some way, Mossad turned the entire shipment into miniature bombs.

A video circulated on social media and verified by Reuters and The New York Times showed one of the pagers exploding in a shoulder bag worn by a man casually picking through produce at a local market. The same fate befell innumerable Hezbollah members and affiliates, at least 200 of whom were critically injured. All told, nearly 3,000 people were injured by the tiny blasts.

The Israeli military offered no comment, in line with standard operating procedure. The attack came less than two months after high-level Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr was killed in an IDF airstrike on Beirut. Just hours later, Hamas’s political chief Ismail Haniyeh was killed by explosives hidden by Mossad in his heavily-guarded Tehran pied-à-terre.

While editorializing around recent events last month, I noted that the circumstances around Haniyeh’s death were “another reminder that this fight is far from fair.” Iran is by now risking total humiliation by continuing to insist on open hostilities. Tuesday’s events underscored the point.

Among the dead: The son of prominent Hezbollah politician Ali Ammar. Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amini, nearly lost a hand. And on and on. The Wall Street Journal, citing an Illinois-schooled education worker in Beirut, noted that “many of those who carry pagers aren’t militants in the traditional sense but rather working professionals who you may not even know are Hezbollah members.”

Guess what? Israel makes no such distinction. If you’re carrying a Hezbollah pager, you take your chances. The man quoted by the Journal was waiting outside a local emergency room for a friend who’d “been shopping in a supermarket when his pager exploded, blowing off his hand.”

The international media was full of such first-hand (sorry) accounts. Suffice to say Israel did a lot of damage on Tuesday, and not just of the physical variety. Locals are scared to death. The Times described pervasive dread in Lebanon, where residents exhorted their friends and relatives to “Please hang up, hang up!” fearing Mossad might’ve somehow rigged all the phones to explode.

Earlier this week, the IDF said it would soon take a harder line on Hezbollah as part of an effort to resettle northern Israel, where tens of thousands remain displaced after 12 months of near daily rocket exchanges. Threats like that — i.e., threats of stepped-up military action — from the IDF are never (never) idle. They mean what they say, and by the time they say it, someone’s already handing out brand new pagers.

Meanwhile, Benjamin Netanyahu is likely to fire Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in the coming days. Gallant and Netanyahu have a history of tension, but the situation’s now viewed as wholly untenable. Gallant disagrees emphatically with Netanyahu on war strategy in Gaza, and particularly on matters related to the Philadelphi Corridor, where Netanyahu’s refusal to withdraw Israeli troops impeded a hostage deal in July.

In remarks to the Times, Lebanon’s foreign minister Abdallah Bou Habib said the pager party would surely escalate the conflict. “If Israel thinks by this that they’re going to return their displaced people from the north of Israel, they are mistaken,” he said, after speaking with Hezbollah officials, presumably not on a cell phone.

Nasrallah was uninjured on Tuesday.

… You can run on for a long time
Run on for a long time
Run on for a long time…