The Israeli pager attack on the Hizbullah was perhaps the most impressive and effective clandestine attack against a country’s enemies in modern history.
The entire State of Israel and especially the northern residents of the State of Israel have always known that at some point, Israel would have to deal with the impossible threat of the Hizbullah gathering more than 100,000+ short and long-range missiles all pointed at Israel from the North.
When Israel was attacked by Hamas in the South, the first thing that every major leader in Israel was thinking was about the North. Is this a coordinated attack with the Hizbullah in the North? Is Iran showing signs of joining in? Had Israel been facing a two or three front war right from the get-go, it would have had to make some super difficult decisions. Luckily for Israel, the northern border did not erupt immediately. The Hizbullah only began to bomb Israel as a show of “solidarity” with the Hamas.
Israel absorbed the bombardments, but focused on the Hamas tunnels down South. When things reached a point of relative stability down south, Israel began to focus on the inevitable, an attack of Lebanon. The opening shot was heard all over the clandestine agencies of the world.
The pager operation was beyond the imagination of anybody thinking about how to confront the enemy of Israel sitting on it’s Northern border. In one fell swoop, the entire leadership of a terrorist organization was either maimed, severely wounded, and labeled for the next few decades in order to instill fear in all that see them wherever they live. The genius operation seems so simple from the vantage point of hindsight. But nobody had ever thought of such an operation until it happened.
Perhaps the greatest miracle of all is the ingenuity that G-d brought into the minds of the Israeli secret service.