The New Yorker:

Rania Abouzeid
Reporting from Beirut

Earlier this summer, I met with a Hezbollah military strategist in a small village in southern Lebanon, a few kilometres from the Israeli border. At one point during our off-the-record conversation, his pager beeped. He decrypted the message using a neatly folded piece of laminated paper. I hadn’t seen a sheet like that since the 2006 war with Israel, when another Hezbollah militant in another southern Lebanese village pulled one out of his pocket to relay a coded message over a walkie-talkie. The group has long used various low-tech methods, including pagers, as part of its strategy to avoid Israeli tracking and surveillance of cell phones. It also has its own landline network.

On Tuesday afternoon, thousands of pagers across Lebanon simultaneously exploded in a significant security breach that Hezbollah and the Lebanese government blamed on Israel. The Times, citing U.S. and other officials, reported that Israel had carried out the operation, which it said entailed hiding explosive material in the pagers. (Israel hasn’t publicly claimed responsibility.) At least twelve people, including two children and a woman, were killed, and some twenty-eight hundred were wounded. Among the dead was the son of a Hezbollah parliamentarian. According to Lebanese TV stations, the sons of several other senior Hezbollah officials were injured. The Iranian Ambassador to Lebanon was hurt, too. The pagers detonated in the hands and pockets of people in their cars, in grocery stores, in restaurants, and in other public places.

Go to link