Around 1,500 Hezbollah fighters were put “out of commission” by Israel’s attack on the terror group’s pagers and handheld receivers.
The number doesn’t include all of Hezbollah’s injured fighters, but only those so severely injured that they’re taken out of the fight. And the claim doesn’t originate with Israel, but rather is an admission by a Hezbollah official, reported today by Reuters.
That the Israeli operation targeted Hezbollah — and found its target with astonishing success and precision — was apparent from the start. On the day of the pager explosions, Hezbollah told the New York Times that of six of the nine people understood at the time to have been killed were “Hezbollah fighters.” Later, the Associated Press reported that out of nine killed, “it appeared eight of the dead belonged to Hezbollah.” Subsequent reporting in the New York Times cited Hezbollah’s admission that “at least eight” of its fighters were among “at least a dozen” dead.
After walkie-talkies similarly exploded the following day, a CNN reporter not known for his sympathy to Israel’s challenges assessed that “Most of the people who carried the devices that exploded were probably field officers, the local linchpins for cells of fighters who make up the backbone of Hezbollah’s forces.” Or as the Washington Post put it, “Most of the 37 people killed are believed to have been fighters, based on death notices posted by the group.”
ביומיים האחרונים 37 הרוגים רסמי בשורות חיזבאללה, רובם בפיצוץ הביפרים ומכשירי הקשר https://t.co/ZqSTk3XKPi pic.twitter.com/t4SxguRiK8
— roi kais • روعي كايس • רועי קייס (@kaisos1987) September 19, 2024
It is no surprise that the casualties were overwhelmingly from Hezbollah. The communications devices were purchased by Hezbollah to be distributed solely to Hezbollah; and so to target the devices was to target Hezbollah. This is self-evident, and it was evident also to those on the ground: The attacks “appear to have targeted Hezbollah’s vast network of reservists and logistical operatives, according to individuals close to the militant group and eyewitness accounts” (Washington Post, 9/19/24).
Obfuscating for Hezbollah
The undisputable nature of the attack on Hezbollah, which initiated hostilities with Israel on October 8 by attacking the country in solidarity with Hamas’s massacre, didn’t stop some journalists and activists from obfuscating on behalf of the terror group.
* An Associated Press report largely about the history of pagers claimed that, while the attack targeted Hezbollah, “the widespread use of pagers in Lebanon meant the detonations cost an enormous number of civilian casualties.” Adding to the impression that anyone using any pager was in the crosshairs, the authors went on to name different professions in which people might carry the devices.
But the widespread use of pagers in Lebanon is irrelevant. Only Hezbollah’s pagers were affected. Anyone else with a pager emerged unscathed. (The piece doesn’t offer any figures or estimates to support its claim that there were “enormous” numbers of civilian casualties.)
AP did not correct is false statement even after being informed of the error.
* New York Times correspondent David Sanger pulled the same stunt, insisting that “while the target was Hezbollah fighters, the victims were anyone standing around, including children.”
The victims were not “anyone” standing around. They were, as the paper acknowledged elsewhere , overwhelmingly Hezbollah operatives. (As noted above, Sanger’s own paper reported on Hezbollah’s admission that most of those killed by pagers were its fighters. And after interviewing officials and relatives, the paper also assessed that that “most of the victims were connected to the group” even if some were civilians or had “noncombat” roles in the terror organization.)
The small amount of explosives in the pagers, moreover, meant that only the operative carrying the device was likely to be hurt, as graphic video of some of the explosions shows.
Sanger’s characterization of victims as essentially random is disingenuous and unconscionable. Although the paper was informed of the distortion, it refused to correct.
* In the New York Times, Lama Fakih, a regional director for Human Rights Watch, told readers regarding the pager and handheld receiver explosions that “Appearing to be affiliated with Hezbollah meant ‘you could be targeted at any time.’”
She should know better. The newspaper certainly does know better than to publish her false claim. After all, as its own reporting makes clear, it wasn’t Israel or some other outside source that handed pagers to people “appearing” suspicious. Hezbollah purchased the pagers for its operatives. It distributed the devices to its operatives. It knows very well who is and isn’t an official with the group. (And it likely distributed the pagers only to those operatives who are relatively important in the group’s battle plans.)
* Without even mentioning the word “Hezbollah,” Amnesty International took to social media to deride the targeted attack as nothing less than a “sinister dystopian nightmare,” while insisting that that explosions which overwhelmingly killed Hezbollah operatives were indiscriminate.
* Heidi Matthews, a Toronto-based professor likewise insisted the targeted attack was “indiscriminate,” falsely calling it “a case of randomly detonated explosives across an entire society with no evidence of any concrete knowledge about who would be in possession of the devices.” (Elsewhere, Mathews charged Israel with “terrorism” for attacking Hezbollah members. She had previously defended Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre as rightful resistance.)
* Alonso Gurmendi, a “Fellow in Human Rights and Politics,” argued that “the amount of injuries seems to indicate that no precautions against indiscriminate targeting were taken.”
Of course, the number of injuries — understood by Gurmendi as fewer than 3,000 — has no bearing of whether the attack was indiscriminate. An indiscriminate attack could cause just just one injury, and a carefully targeted attack could kill or injure many hundreds of combatants. (For the record, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has claimed the group has 100,000 fighters.)
Such attempts to recast a targeted attack on Hezbollah as an indiscriminate attack on random civilians are aimed at Israel. They amount to Hezbollah propaganda for the war in the north that Hezbollah started. But they’re also aimed at history. If factual news reports on the attack — and there were factual reports, as seen at the start of this article — are the first rough draft of history, then the revisionism by less scrupulous journalists are a malicious attempt at a second draft that doesn’t reflect the facts.