Exploding pagers, major strike: Israel turns its war aims north in ‘new phase’

JERUSALEM — Four days in September have transformed Israel’s northern front with Hezbollah.

For 11 months since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, the Israel Defense Forces and the Lebanese group have traded strikes, a slow drumbeat of occasionally deadly violence that has terrorized locals on both sides of the border but largely played out in the background of Israel’s offensive in Gaza.

But then this week Israel is believed to have executed an unprecedented bombing attack against Hezbollah using hundreds of boobytrapped pagers, with walkie-talkies exploding the day after that, killing several people. And today the IDF said it killed a top Hezbollah commander — along with more than a dozen of others in senior command.

“I can now confirm that Ibrahim Aqil was eliminated together with other senior terrorists in Hezbollah’s Radwan Forces,” IDF Spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said in a statement.

In the meantime Hezbollah launched 120 rockets and missiles towards Israel today, according to the IDF, after killing two Israeli soldiers in barrages earlier this week.

Though the pager operation happened three days ago, a formal change in Israel’s strategy can be traced to a day before that on Monday, especially in retrospect, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant held separate meetings with US special envoy Amos Hochstein, during which both emphasized that Israel was intent on altering the situation on the northern front. (US officials said the Israelis warned US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin the same day as the pager operation that Israel was going to take some kind of military action, but wasn’t given details, according to The Associated Press.)

The new focus on the north comes with an official new war goal: the return and safeguarding of Israelis who had evacuated the north. Today Gallant repeated his prior description of the current fighting as a “new phase.”

“In the new phase of the war there are significant opportunities but also significant risks. Hezbollah feels persecuted. The sequence of our military actions will continue,” he said.

As military operations continue in Gaza and the West Bank, the overall posture of the Israeli military appears to have shifted north. Israel has shifted its 98th Division, which contains the Commando and Paratroop Brigade, to the north. This is a key division that played a major role in Gaza fighting between November 2023 and July 2024. It is joining a number of IDF divisions already deployed there.

But beyond the new war goal, Israeli leadership has not detailed exactly how it plans to ensure Hezbollah does not threaten citizens in the north — and Hezbollah has vowed to respond to the pager attack. (A French official told Breaking Defense this summer that Paris would support a deployment of Lebanese military forces to the south, though developments since then, especially this week’s, are likely to have changed the calculus on what was already a preliminary idea.)

Whatever the plan, today US President Joe Biden said the US, too, is working on a strategy to allow Israeli citizens to return to their homes, and for Lebanese citizens in southern Lebanon to do the same.