LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Israel told the U.S. it was behind yesterday's mass pager attack in Lebanon. That's what a U.S. official tells NPR. Israel apparently rigged hundreds of pagers carried by Hezbollah members to explode across Lebanon. Videos show the blasts as people went about their daily lives - at desks, grocery shopping, in crowded streets. The explosions killed at least a dozen people, including two children, and injured nearly 3,000. Among the wounded is Iran's ambassador to Beirut. Joining me now from Beirut to discuss what this means and what's at stake is journalist and author Kim Ghattas. Good morning.
KIM GHATTAS: Great to be with you, Leila.
FADEL: Thanks for being here, Kim. I want to start with what the city is like this morning after these explosions across the capitol and in the south.
GHATTAS: Very quiet - schools are off. A lot of businesses have closed. There's a sense of not panic, but what we used to call during the Civil War in Lebanon in the '80s cautious calm, wondering what happens next after yesterday's rather shocking real-life science fiction movie. You know, no matter what your politics are, this was a traumatic event at a national level. These pagers went off a little bit everywhere. At first, nobody really understood what was going on. And then for hours, sirens of ambulances wailing, hospitals overwhelmed, doctors talking about what they'd seen - limbs coming off, eyes bloodied from the attacks. And you know, this is happening in a country that has been through so much already over the last few years that this adds...
FADEL: Yeah.
GHATTAS: ...To a sense of despair, almost.
FADEL: And you said that people are just quiet, waiting for what comes next. Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate. I know we've talked about this a lot over the last few months with Hezbollah and Israel trading fire in the south of Lebanon, Israel's north. But there is concern that this may lead to all-out regional war. At this point, how real is that possibility?
GHATTAS: We'll have to see how Hezbollah responds. This was a very targeted operation - to some extent, also indiscriminate, because as I said, these pagers went off everywhere in grocery stores, et cetera, but very targeted, and it shows that there was a real intelligence breach. It shows that Hezbollah is not in control of its intelligence, of its ability to deter Israel, and it is also affecting morale of its rank and file and its commanders. Iran and Hezbollah have made very clear they don't want to go to all-out war, but they will feel they will have to respond to this. We're expecting the secretary general of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, to speak tomorrow, Thursday. But we've heard from some members of Hezbollah already saying, the retaliation will take its time, which is a way of saying, in essence, that they're going to do what they've done over the last ten months and choose most probably for some pragmatic, restrained response. That's certainly what the Lebanese are hoping for.
FADEL: Now, you point out that this attack seems like something straight out of a movie, science fiction, you said. Hezbollah was using pagers to evade Israel intelligence, worried their smartphones were infiltrated, and these pagers then became weapons against them and civilians around them. How unusual is an attack like this from Israel? And what does it say about Hezbollah's security, frankly, and whether they've been breached?
GHATTAS: It's not unusual for Israel to use technology like this. Even, you know, in the old times in the '80s, they would use telephones that they would rig and would blow up when people would answer. But this is just at another scale. You know, hundreds of these pagers from a batch of new pagers that Hezbollah had ordered over the last few months, which were apparently produced in Hungary. That's the latest details. That we're getting, and they had been ordered precisely because Hezbollah had ordered its rank and file to ditch their, more advanced telephone. So it's an intelligence breach, and like I said, it shows that Hezbollah cannot even protect its own members.
FADEL: Kim Ghattas is a journalist and author based in Beirut. Thank you for joining us.
GHATTAS: Thanks for having me Leila. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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