On the afternoon of Sept. 17, my phone buzzed with dozens of messages from friends in Beirut, who described the surreal scenes they had just witnessed. One friend saw a man’s face blow up while he was on a motorbike. Another said his sister was with her 2-year-old when she heard a loud bang, followed by a rush of people running toward them in terror. A third sent a clip of security camera footage from a grocery store, where a man reaches to grab his beeping pager before it explodes in his hand.
Although no one has officially claimed responsibility for the attack, everyone understood very well what had happened: Israel found a way to detonate simultaneously thousands of pagers used by Hezbollah members. In our text exchanges, my friends and I began to wonder how the Israelis pulled this off — and if this meant that all electronic devices in Lebanon were now at risk. …..more