Explosive Response
I know I’m supposed to temper my reaction to the news that the Israeli intelligence folks blew up a bunch of pagers and walkie-talkies belonging to Hezbollah members. The explosions in many cases happened in public places and that led to true innocents being injured.
But it’s hard to temper reaction when you know that known terrorists were the ones targeted…the same terrorists who thought nothing of lobbing explosives into neighborhoods in northern Israel. Not military targets, but neighborhoods, with every expectation of killing innocents.
It’s especially hard when you consider the operation itself. First, Israel had to learn that true card-carrying members of the terror group carried these pagers or walkie-talkies. It was sort of like your employee badge. Then they had to know what companies sold the devices to the terrorists. Then it had to work with the manufacturer to create knock offs of the pager-of-choice for sale to the terrorists. Finally, they had to work with the manufacturer to put a form of explosive, like gunpowder, next to the lithium battery in the device.
And all that was before programming the pagers with codes so that when that special message was transmitted, it would lead to a spark detonating the gunpowder.
This is the stuff of fanciful motion pictures or spy novels. But there it was in real life. Absolutely stunning.
And not only did it kill or maim some terrorists…anyone who had one that blew up and was injured is now confirmed to be a terrorist–because again, you only got one of the devices if you were on the team.
It’s war over there, and not just war–a battle with terrorists, for whom the normal rules of combat do not apply. Given that, with respect for any true innocents harmed, the Israeli action will go down with the Trojan Horse in the annals of great wartime actions.
