After the research, the walkie-talkies. The second day of explosions of electronic devices ordered months ago by Hezbollah left 20 dead and more than 450 injured on Wednesday, and plunged the Lebanese militia party into paranoia, faced with a new example of unprecedented massive infiltration that is happening almost without clashes. It is doubtful that they reached the Israeli secret services abroad, the dreaded Mossad. The detonations, once again triggered remotely, occurred in the middle of the afternoon in Hezbollah's main strongholds in the country, including in the middle of a funeral procession in the suburbs of Beirut for four of the 12 deaths it had caused the day before. a near-simultaneous attack on thousands of searcheswith nearly 3,000 wounded. Without explicitly claiming responsibility, as is his custom, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant congratulated the country's security forces for their “excellent achievements” and stressed that they were already in a “new phase of the war,” while General Staff Chief Herzi Halevi warned that they still had “much more capacity” reserved for the fight against Hezbollah.
The explosions on Wednesday were not caused by a search, like those on Tuesday, but by walkie talkies and in the solar panels. There are fewer of them, but they are more powerful. “It was a loud noise, but not an explosion, an explosion like a missile. There were a few screams, but the funeral procession continued,” said Ayya, a young witness dressed in a abaya, during the funeral procession in Dahiye, south of the capital, as those present chanted “We will answer your call, O Hussein!” in tribute to the grandson of Muhammad revered in the Shiite Islam professed by Hezbollah members. Children and adults pointed to the Israeli drones flying overhead.
The victims suffered injuries mainly to the stomach and hands. A video captured the explosion in Dahiye and how a member of the security services fell to the ground, injured. A burning car in Zahle, in the Beka Valley; the explosion of a solar panel; a blackened sofa and table near Tyre… Images of the result of the rest of the attacks have been circulating since the first minutes, also in Israeli Telegram groups, which shows the level of infiltration.
Hezbollah has acquired the walkie talkies five months ago, around the same time he bought the pagers, according to a security source cited by Reuters. Images of the explosive devices reviewed by the agency showed an interior panel labeled “ICOM” and “made in Japan.” ICOM is a radio and telephone company based in Japan, according to its website.
Two tanks and an armored vehicle of the Lebanese army were stationed at the site of the procession, which is very unusual. Young people from the neighborhood, some armed with rifles, nervously closed the entrances with fences, which they removed only to let in ambulances or familiar faces. The yellow flags of Hezbollah and images of Iranian leaders accompanied the march with raised coffins, amid tears, expressions of mourning, prayers and beatings on the chest. The bodies were carried into a room decorated with images of Iranian and Hezbollah leaders, assassinated by Israel or the United States, and dozens of graves of militiamen who fell “on the road to Jerusalem,” as the tombstones indicate.
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If the first attack was already a humiliation and exposed Hezbollah's biggest security breach since its creation in the 1980s, the second turned almost any electronic device into a suspect. Al Shabab (the youth, in Arabic), As everyone calls those who form the soul of Hezbollah and move at full speed on motorcycles from one place to another, they anxiously prevented the presence of computers, were wary of iPhones and forced the deletion of cell phone records.
More tension
The new attack takes to another level the war of attrition between Hezbollah and Israel, both open, on the border, with hundreds of deaths in almost 11 months, and underground, with unprecedented sabotage, such as those of the last two days. “If the enemy believes that with this new form of attack he will achieve his goal, he does not know that in our culture, when our left hand is cut off, we take the sword with the right,” said one of Hezbollah's top leaders, Hashem Safi, in an attempt to raise morale in the face of the obvious strategic combination. “Yeah [el primer ministro israelí, Benjamín] Netanyahu believes that this will help settlers in northern Palestine [los habitantes del norte de Israel] They will be able to go home, I tell you that you will not achieve this objective and you will see how it will happen in the coming months,” he added.
The leader insisted that the launch of rockets and drones against Israel this Wednesday, as every day, shows that the attack has not diminished the organization's combat capability and that, in any case, it is not the answer to the detonation of your search for them, who will receive “a different answer” later.
The temperature of the statements, meanwhile, has continued to rise on both sides of the Middle East’s hottest border. Netanyahu has been cryptic, casting a tough image in a single sentence: “We will bring the northerners home safely.” And his defense minister told air force personnel: “The center of gravity is shifting to the north. We are diverting forces, resources and energy to the north.” On Thursday, Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah will deliver his most anticipated speech in nearly a year since the Hamas attack and Israeli invasion of Gaza set the region ablaze.
The United Nations Security Council will meet on Friday, at the request of Algeria. UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that the explosions pose “a serious risk of a dramatic escalation in Lebanon and that everything must be done to prevent such an escalation.” “Clearly, the logic of detonating all these devices is to do it as a preventive measure before a major military operation,” he told reporters ahead of the annual meeting of world leaders at the UN General Assembly.