For the second day in a row, electronic devices across Lebanon, including walkie talkies, exploded on Wednesday, killing 14 people and injuring over 450, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.

The attack came one day after thousands of pagers across the country exploded at the same time, killing eleven people—including a 9-year-old child—and wounding nearly 3,000, including many civilians and government and hospital workers. Hezbollah and the Lebanese government blamed Israel for the attacks.

“Everyone's scared to send text messages, to make calls, and they're afraid to open laptops. It's definitely led to some level of complete disorientation, fear, confusion, paranoia. It has huge psychological effects,” said Amal Saad, a leading expert on Hezbollah. “People have started to say, ‘Okay, this is going to be the new type of warfare. This is going to be how they're going to fight. It's going to be terrorism warfare. So this is the new normal now.’ People are preparing themselves for more of this.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a brief video statement on Wednesday after the second round of attacks. “I have said it before: We will return the citizens of the north to their homes in security, and that’s exactly what we are going to do.”

“We have many capabilities that we have not yet activated,” Israeli lieutenant general Herzi Halevi said, regarding Israel’s plans for military operations at the northern border with Lebanon. 

The second attack appeared timed to cause total panic among the civilian population and to undermine confidence in Hezbollah’s ability to control and contain Israel’s assault. On Wednesday, multiple explosions went off at a funeral for some of those killed on Tuesday, according to the AP whose reporters witnessed the attack. 

"I'm starting to realize,” Saad said, “the objective behind this was to terrorize and paralyze and demoralize.”

Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah is scheduled to give a public speech Thursday where he is expected to address how these attacks were conducted and to lay out the group's plans for a military response. “Hezbollah has to respond and will respond,” Saad said. Israel, she said, has at times denied or downplayed the effectiveness of Hezbollah’s attacks. To restore morale, "you need it to be indisputable that Hezbollah did this," she said. "If it's a different type of response that Israel can conceal and hide, I'm not sure how effective that's going to be."

At approximately 3:30 p.m. local time on Tuesday, thousands of pagers across Lebanon sprang to life, beeping and vibrating. The message on the screen indicated an error. “The message was: Fault. Fault. And it continued to beep and heat up before the explosion of the pager,” said Ali Jezzini, a security analyst and journalist in Lebanon who has been speaking to hospital workers treating the wounded. 

Many victims, he said, lifted the devices to examine the pagers and as they did so, they exploded, causing injuries to their faces and hands. “It did give a code and it continued to ring and vibrate. So that's why they had to hold it in their hands to check what's happening. It was faulty, it was not responding, so that's why they kept it in front of their faces and the palms of their hands, because they're trying to figure out what's wrong with it. That's why most of the injuries are like that. It didn't explode right away.”

The widespread physical injuries are intended to have a larger psychological effect, according to Jezzini. "I would compare it to an operation made by the Americans in Vietnam where they actually planted faulty ammunition that made the guns explode for the Viet Cong on the NVA and during the Vietnam war,” said Jezzini, referring to an operation called Project Eldest Son.

“Psychologically, it does actually help to, you know, make the fighter lose confidence in his equipment. That's the aim." He compared it to a psyop, intended to "alter the perception of Hezbollah's leadership" and perhaps force it into a ceasefire.

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Speaking to Israeli troops at the Ramat David Airbase on Wednesday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant made no mention of the explosions but he did declare “the start of a new phase in the war” saying, “the center of gravity is moving north. We are diverting forces, resources, and energy toward the north.”

The United Nations Security Council will meet on Friday over the attacks following a request by Algeria on behalf of Arab states.

Experts are still searching for the precise mechanism that triggered the explosions in the pagers yesterday. The most likely scenario, based on available evidence, is that the pagers were rigged with some form of explosive material or mechanism before being delivered to Lebanon. That would mean Israeli agents were able to access the devices at the point of manufacture or to interdict the supply chain. Officials in Lebanon have said they believe the pagers contained 10-20 grams of explosive material. The devices were then detonated through a message, code, or pulse pushed to the devices, which triggered whatever mechanism had been installed.

“I have to give credit to those that fabricated those pagers, very ingenious,” said Mike Vining, a legend in the world of U.S. covert operations, one of the first members of Delta Force and an expert on explosives. “When I was in the military at my old job we developed a lot of tricks. I am saddened about the fact that innocent people were injured. The goal is never to hurt the innocent.” 

Vining told Drop Site News that he had no inside knowledge of the operation in Lebanon, but offered some plausible theories on how the pagers were rigged and detonated. “Probably had some pure PETN explosives in the pagers,” he said, referring to pentaerythritol tetranitrate, a highly explosive substance. “I believe from what I see, first the lithium battery is shorted and explodes and that causes the PETN to detonate. What makes me think this is that the pager got hot and smoked first. A single signal must have been what triggered the reaction.” 

 “Sources today in Lebanon were saying that the [pagers] have passed the inspections on multiple airports, such as X-rays,” said Jezzini, making it difficult to place blame on one single agency for allowing the attack to happen.

Reporting by Al-Monitor and Axios has suggested that Israel decided to move forward with the attack out of concerns that Hezbollah was on the brink of discovering the rigged pagers, but this remains unconfirmed. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also echoed the point at a briefing at UN headquarters: “What has happened is particularly serious, not only because of the number of victims that it caused, but because of the indications that exist that this was triggered, I would say, in advance of a normal way to trigger these things, because there was a risk of this being discovered.”

Multiple news outlets have reported that Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant informed U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin that Israel was going to carry out an operation in Lebanon, but offered no specifics. The U.S. has officially denied any involvement or foreknowledge of the plot. "We were not aware of this operation and we were not involved in it," said U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller on Tuesday. 

The model of the pagers matches that of a model manufactured by a Taiwanese company called Gold Apollo. Images of damaged devices shared online after the blasts showed labeling matching the AR-924 model built by the company, along with the company name. 

The AR-924 was listed on the company’s website prior to its removal this week. In statements issued by the company after the attacks, Gold Apollo denied manufacturing the product and said the model in question is produced and sold by BAC Consulting KFT, a Hungarian company that had been authorized to use its branding. In public comments, Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs said that its records showed no direct exports to Lebanon by Gold Apollo.

The president of Gold Apollo, Hsu Ching-Kuang, told the press that a year after signing their partnership, BAC made the unusual request to design its own products but with Gold Apollo’s trademark. According to Hsu, payments to Gold Apollo from BAC reportedly came from a bank account registered to an unnamed country in the Middle East, causing occasional delays and freezes in payment, despite BAC being based in Hungary, an arrangement he called “strange.”

BAC is based in Budapest and was established in 2022, publicly available information shows. A company website, since taken offline, describes the role of BAC in developing, “international technology cooperation among countries for the sale of telecommunication products,” and “scaling up a business from Asia to new markets.” 

Business records listed for the company in Hungary show around $584,000 in revenue for the company in 2023 along with only $320 in fixed assets. Reporters from the Associated Press who visited the building listed as the headquarters of BAC in a residential neighborhood of Budapest found a building used as a site for headquarter addresses of multiple companies. 

The CEO of the company is listed as Cristiana Bársony-Arcidiacono. A LinkedIn page for Bársony-Arcidiacono indicates that, prior to her role at BAC she had previously worked for the European Commission, as well as a “strategic advisor” for consulting firms in various countries. (The EU Commission denied she was ever a staff member, but could not rule out the possibility she worked as a contractor.) After the attacks, Bársony-Arcidiacono was quoted in press reports confirming her company’s licensing arrangement with Gold Apollo, but stating, “I don’t make the pagers. I am just the intermediate. I think you got it wrong.”

In a statement posted on Twitter on Wednesday, Zoltan Kovacs, a spokesperson for the government of Hungary, also called BAC “a trading intermediary, with no manufacturing or operational site” in the country. “The referenced devices have never been in Hungary,”  he added.

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Globally, many condemned Israel’s use of such a widespread tactic that, by design, would clearly harm and kill civilians. "It's not just fighters" being maimed, Saad said. "Hezbollah is such a huge grassroots organization, there are so many people who work [in its civil institutions]. My friend's cousin lost his eyes and his fingers yesterday because he's a nurse in Al Rassoul Al Azam Hospital. He's a part time nurse in that hospital, but he's a student. And there are many, many people who are connected to Hezbollah in this way just through part time work."

"Customary international humanitarian law prohibits the use of booby traps – objects that civilians are likely to be attracted to or are associated with normal civilian daily use – precisely to avoid putting civilians at grave risk and produce the devastating scenes that continue to unfold across Lebanon,” Lama Fakih, Middle East and North Africa Director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. 

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for information from the U.S. State Department as to whether any funding from the U.S. went into the attack. “This attack clearly and unequivocally violates international humanitarian law and undermines US efforts to prevent a wider conflict,” she posted on Twitter. “Congress needs a full accounting of the attack, including an answer from the State Department as to whether any US assistance went into the development or deployment of this technology.”

“It's the only way to wage war for the Israelis, the dirty war,” said Jezzini. “They are aiming to change the whole perspective of the world on how to wage war and what is legitimate or not to survive. So instead of complying with international law, they are trying to change the whole concept of international law. That is real danger here.”

Read Drop Site’s coverage of Israel’s war on Palestine.

By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost

I know you. I met you in the dense canopies in the war in El Salvador. It was there that I first heard the single, high-pitched crack of the sniper bullet. Distinct. Ominous. A sound that spreads terror. Army units I traveled with, enraged by the lethal accuracy of rebel snipers, set up heavy .50 caliber machine guns and sprayed the foliage overhead until your body, a bloodied and mangled pulp, dropped to the ground.

I saw you at work in Basra in Iraq and of course Gaza, where on a fall afternoon at the Netzarim Junction, you shot dead a young man a few feet away from me. We carried his limp body up the road.

I lived with you in Sarajevo during the war. You were only a few hundred yards away, perched in high rises that looked down on the city. I witnessed your daily carnage. At dusk, I saw you fire a round in the gloom at an old man and his wife bent over their tiny vegetable plot. You missed. She ran, haltingly, for cover. He did not. You fired again. I concede the light was fading. It was hard to see. Then, the third time, you killed him. This is one of those memories of war I see in my head over and over and over and never talk about. I watched it from the back of the Holiday Inn, but by now I have seen it, or the shadows of it, hundreds of times.

You targeted me, too. You struck down colleagues and friends. I was in your sights traveling from northern Albania into Kosovo with 600 fighters from the Kosovo Liberation Army, each insurgent carrying an extra AK-47 to hand off to a comrade. Three shots. That crisp crack, too familiar. You must have been far away. Or maybe you were a bad shot, although you came close. I scrambled for cover behind a rock. My two bodyguards bent over me, panting, the green pouches strapped to their chests packed full of grenades.

I know how you talk. The black humor. “Pint sized terrorists” you say of the children you kill. You are proud of your skills. It gives you cachet. You cradle your weapon as if it is an extension of your body. You admire its despicable beauty. This is who you are. A killer. 

In your society of killers, you are respected, rewarded, promoted. You are numb to the suffering you inflict. Maybe you enjoy it. Maybe you think you are protecting yourself, your identity, your comrades, your nation. Maybe you believe the killing is a necessary evil, a way to make sure Palestinians die before they can strike. Maybe you have surrendered your morality to the blind obedience of the military, subsumed yourself into the industrial machinery of death. Maybe you are scared to die. Maybe you want to prove to yourself and others that you are tough, you can kill. Maybe your mind is so warped that you believe killing is righteous.

You are intoxicated by the god-like power to revoke another person’s charter to live on this earth. You revel in the intimacy of it. You see in fine detail through the telescopic sight, the nose and mouth of your victim. The triangle of death. You hold your breath. You pull slowly, gently on the trigger. And then the pink puff. Severed spinal cord. Death. It is over.

You were the last person to see Aysenur alive. You were the first person to see her dead. 

This is you now. And now no one can reach you. You are death’s angel. You are numb and cold. But, I suspect, this will not last. I covered war for a long time. I know, even if you do not, the next chapter of your life. I know what happens when you leave the embrace of the military, when you are no longer a cog in these factories of death. I know the hell you are about to enter.

It starts like this. All the skills you acquired as a killer on the outside are useless. Maybe you go back. Maybe you become a gun for hire. But this will only delay the inevitable. You can run, for a while, but you cannot run forever. There will be reckoning. And it is the reckoning I will tell you about. 

You will face a choice. Live the rest of your life, stunted, numb, cut off from yourself, cut off from those around you. Descend into a psychopathic fog, trapped in the absurd, interdependent lies that justify mass murder. There are killers, years later, who say they are proud of their work, who claim not a moment’s regret. But I have not been inside their nightmares. If this is you then you will never again truly live.

Of course, you do not talk about what you did to those around you, certainly not to your family. They think you are a good person. You know this is a lie. The numbness, usually, wears off. You look in the mirror, and if you have any shred of conscience left, your reflection disturbs you. But you repress the bitterness. You escape down the rabbit hole of opioids and alcohol. Your intimate relationships, because you cannot feel, because you bury your self-loathing, disintegrate. This escape works. For a while. But then you go into such darkness that the stimulants you use to blunt your pain begin to destroy you. And maybe that is how you die. I have known many who died like that. And I have known those who ended it quickly. A gun to the head. 

Between 1973 and 2024, 1,227 Israeli soldiers committed suicide according to official statistics, but the actual number is believed to be far higher. In the U.S. an average of 16 veterans commit suicide every day.

I have trauma from war. But the worst trauma I do not have. The worst trauma from war is not what you saw. It is not what you experienced. The worst trauma is what you did. They have names for it. Moral injury. Perpetrator Induced Traumatic Stress. But that seems tepid given the hot, burning coals of rage, the night terrors, the despair. Those around you know something is terribly, terribly wrong. They fear your darkness. But you do not let them into your labyrinth of pain.

And then, one day, you reach out for love. Love is the opposite of war. War is about smut. It is about pornography. It is about turning other human beings into objects, maybe sexual objects, but I also mean this literally, for war turns people into corpses. Corpses are the end product of war, what comes off its assembly line. So, you will want love, but the angel of death has made a Faustian bargain. It is this. It is the hell of not being able to love. You will carry this death inside you for the rest of your life. It corrodes your soul. Yes. We have souls. You sold yours. And the cost is very, very high. It means that what you want, what you most desperately need in life, you cannot attain.

Then one day, maybe you are a father or a mother or an uncle or an aunt, and a young woman you love, or want to love as a daughter, comes into your life. You see in her, it will come in a flash, Aysenur’s face. The young woman you murdered. Come back to life. Israeli now. Speaking Hebrew. Innocent. Good. Full of hope. The full force of what you did, who you were, who you are, will hit you like an avalanche.

You will spend days wanting to cry and not knowing why. You will be consumed by guilt. You will believe that because of what you did the life of this other young woman is in danger. Divine retribution. You will tell yourself this is absurd, but you will believe it anyway. Your life will start to include little offerings of goodness to others as if these offerings will appease a vengeful god, as if these offerings will save her from harm, from death. But nothing can wipe away the stain of murder. 

Yes. You killed Aysenur. You killed others. Palestinians who you dehumanized and taught yourself to hate. Human animals. Terrorists. Barbarians. But it is harder to dehumanize her. You know, you saw it through your scope, she was no threat. She did not throw rocks, the paltry justification the Israeli army uses to shoot live rounds at Palestinians, including children. 

You will be overwhelmed with sorrow. Regret. Shame. Grief. Despair. Alienation. You will have an existential crisis. You will know that all the values you were taught to honor in school, at worship, in your home, are not the values you upheld. You will hate yourself. You will not say this out loud. You may, one way or another, extinguish yourself.

There is a part of me that says you deserve this torment. There is a part of me that wants you to suffer for the loss you inflicted on Aysenur’s family and friends, to pay for taking the life of this courageous and gifted woman.

Shooting unarmed people is not bravery. It is not courage. It is not even war. It is a crime. It is murder. You are a murderer. I am sure you were not ordered to kill Aysenur. You shot Aysenur in the head because you could, because you felt like it. Israel runs an open-air shooting gallery in Gaza and the West Bank. Total impunity. Murder as sport.

You will, one day, not be the killer you are now. You will exhaust yourself trying to ward off demons. You will desperately want to be human. You will want to love and be loved. Maybe you will make it. Being human again. But that will mean a life of contrition. It will mean making your crime public. It will mean begging, on your knees, for forgiveness. It will mean forgiving yourself. This is very hard. It will mean orientating every aspect of your life to nurturing life rather than extinguishing it. This will be your only hope for salvation. If you do not take it, you are damned.

NOTE TO SCHEERPOST READERS FROM CHRIS HEDGES: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my now weekly Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.

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Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.

He was a member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for The New York Times coverage of global terrorism, and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. Hedges, who holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, is the author of the bestsellers American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist for his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He writes an online column for the website ScheerPost. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and the University of Toronto.

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By Brett Wilkins / Common Dreams

After years of working with Iraqis whose relatives were killed by U.S. Marines in the 2005 Haditha massacre, American journalists finally obtained and released photos showing the grisly aftermath of the bloody rampage—whose perpetrators never spent a day behind bars.

On Tuesday, The New Yorker published 10 of the massacre photos—part of a collaboration with the “In the Dark” podcast that joined the magazine last year.

The podcast’s reporting team had filed its public records request four years ago, then sued the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Central Command over their failure to hand over the images. “In the Dark” host Madeleine Baran also traveled with a colleague to Iraq’s remote Anbar Province to meet relatives of some of the 24 Iraqi civilians—who ranged in age from 1 to 76—slaughtered by U.S. troops.

Baran explained that she sought the relatives’ help partly because “we anticipated that the government would claim that the release of the photos would harm the surviving family members of the dead,” as “military prosecutors had already made this argument after the trial of the final accused Marine.”

Khalid Salman Raseef, an attorney who lost 15 members of his family in the massacre, told Baran that “I believe this is our duty to tell the truth.”

The graphic photos show dead Iraqi men, women, and children, many of them shot in the head at close range. One 5-year-old girl, Zainab Younis Salim, is shown with the number 11 written on her back in red marker by a U.S. Marine who wanted to differentiate the victims in photos.

On November 19, 2005, a convoy of Humvees carrying Marines of Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, First Marine Division was traveling through Haditha when a roadside bomb believed to have been placed by Iraqis resisting the U.S. invasion killed Miguel Terrazas, a popular lance corporal, and wounded two other Marines.

In retaliation, Marines forced a nearby taxicab to stop and ordered the driver and his four student passengers out of the vehicle. Sgt. Frank Wuterich then executed the five men in cold blood. Another Marine then desecrated their bodies, including by urinating on them.

Wuterich then ordered his men to “shoot first and ask questions later,” and they went house to house killing everyone they saw. They killed seven people in the Walid family home, including a toddler and an elderly couple.

“I watched them shoot my grandfather, first in the chest and then in the head. Then they killed my granny,” Iman Walid, a survivor who was 8 years old when her family was slain, toldTime in 2006.

Next, the Marines killed eight people in the Salim family home, six of them children. Finally, the troops executed four brothers in a closet in the Ahmad family home.

The Marines subsequently conspired to cover up what a military probe would deem a case of “collateral damage.” The military initially claimed that 15 Iraqi civilians were killed by the same explosion that took Terrazas’ life. However, a local doctor who examined the victims’ bodies said they “were shot in the chest and head from close range.”

Eight Marines were eventually charged in connection with the massacre. Six defendants were found not guilty and one had their case dismissed. Initially charged with murder, Wuterich pleaded guilty and was convicted of dereliction of duty. He was punished with a reduction in rank and was later honorably discharged from service.

Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis—who earned his “Mad Dog” moniker during one of the atrocity-laden battles for the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004—intervened on behalf of the Haditha defendants and personally dismissed charges against one of them.

Later, while serving as former President Donald Trump’s defense secretary, Mattis oversaw an escalation in what he called the U.S. war of “annihilation” against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The general warned that “civilian casualties are a fact of life in this sort of situation,” and thousands of men, women, and children were subsequently slaughtered as cities including Mosul and Raqqa were leveled.

The Haditha massacre was part of countless U.S. war crimes and atrocities committed during the ongoing so-called War on Terror, which has claimed hundreds of thousands of civilian lives in at least half a dozen countries since 2001. One of the reasons why the Haditha massacre is relatively unknown compared with the torture and killings at the U.S. military prison in Abu Ghraib, Iraq is that photos of the former crime have been kept hidden for decades.

“The impact of an alleged war crime is often directly related to the horror of the images that end up in the hands of the public,” Baran wrote in the New Yorker article. She noted that Gen. Michael Hagee, who commanded the Marines at the time of the Haditha massacre, later boasted how “proud” he was about keeping photos of the killings secret.

“This,” journalist Murtaza Hussain reminded the world on Tuesday, “is what the U.S. military was doing in Iraq.”

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Brett Wilkins

Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

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