No More Walkie-Talkie for Terrorists

Apple’s iPhone 16 went on sale Friday and received an unexpected boost in demand from Islamic terrorists around the world. As Hezbollah disastrously discovered earlier in the week, trying to outsmart Israel by using pagers and walkie-talkies from the Stone Age (their favorite epoch, by the way), believing that such outdated technology made them impervious to Israeli intelligence, was a mistake.

There is AI, and then there is II. When it comes to Mossad, intelligence is not artificial, but lethal. Nearly 40 Hezbollah terrorists were killed when those primitive devices simultaneously detonated (the beepers blasted on Tuesday, and the walkie-talkies on Wednesday). As many as 3,000 survived the attacks, but will forever be missing an ear, eye or hand.

A people that so very much enjoys severing limbs and chopping off heads now knows what it feels like. And a real tragedy, too. Hezbollah terrorists are well known for their humanitarian work and global innovations in medicine and technology. Just imagine what they could accomplish if Israelis simply left them in peace.

I say this because almost instantly, the Western media, not unlike what they do with their worst-practices reporting in Gaza, accepted the Lebanon Health Ministry’s claim that women and children were among the injured, too. We will never know for sure because mainstream media never checks for confirmation. They don’t report directly from those war zones, either. And it is well known, although no one seems to care, that the “Health” Ministries in Gaza and Lebanon are notorious liars. According to them, Israel rarely kills a terrorist. All they do is murder children and their mothers.

How many children, do you suppose, were walking about Beirut with pagers and walkie-talkies planning their next terror strike?

Even experts in the field, like Michael Walzer, who can’t seem to temper his blind spot when it comes to the Jewish state, wrote an absolutely ludicrous Op Ed in the New York Times, referring to these precise explosions in the hands of terrorists as possible war crimes.

Neither he, nor so many others who purport to be experts in international law, are willing to accept that Israel is fighting an existential war on several fronts—against terrorists, not distinct armies. These lawless barbarians, by definition, are not following any of the rules of armed conflict—most especially, by surrounding themselves among human shields.

Antisemites with doctorates, and many in the Biden White House and State Department, begrudgingly concede that Israel has a right to defend itself, but not if it means killing anyone. Israel may be engaged in a just war, but, according to Walzer and the like, the IDF is fighting unjustly—simply because Israel is forced to fight in urban areas, or humanitarian zones, where the terrorists insist on staying put among generally amenable civilians, which invariably results in collateral damage.

Yes, the term of art that is always forgotten when it comes to Israel is: “casualties of war.” Women and children are often counted among the dead. Until this recent war in Gaza, however, “experts” didn’t trivialize actual genocides by attributing the same charge against a tiny nation defending itself against enemies who launch rockets indiscriminately, behead infants and gang-rape teenage girls. Targeting a terrorist who may be conveniently, and grotesquely, standing next to a child, is not genocide.

Targeting a terrorist who may be conveniently, and grotesquely, standing next to a child, is not genocide.

Israel did not stop with Operation Radio Shack. It followed up with airstrikes in the suburbs of Beirut, killing two Hezbollah senior commanders and 16 terrorists (along with 37 civilians, if that number is accurate).

The ratio of 37 civilians to 18 combatants, roughly 2:1, roughly approximates what Israel has reported as the casualty ratio in Gaza. That ratio, statistically speaking, is historically low in the annals of modern and ancient warfare. For instance, when United States Coalition Forces fought in the Battle of Mosul to vanquish ISIS, the ratio was 10:1. That means there were tens of thousands of Iraqi civilian causalities of that war.

And all was quiet on the university front. Not a single keffiyeh, poster or barricade, or death chants by brainwashed, brainless students.

In a moral universe, civilized nations would be rejoicing that Israel managed to unburden the world of a few more terrorists without having to drop any bombs. One of those Hezbollah commanders carried a $7 million bounty, offered by the United States. He was responsible for a 1983 truck bombing in Beirut that killed 300 American civilian diplomats and military personnel.

Why is President Joe Biden, or presidential candidate Kamala Harris, not publicly thanking Israel for handling this matter—and handing Israel a check for $7 million, while they’re at it?

And the Lebanese people should be throwing a parade in celebration. Hezbollah is not their government. It is a fringe group of Shiite invaders who take their directions from Iran and have turned Lebanon into a war zone. Most Lebanese, many of whom are Maronite Christians and Druze, couldn’t care less about Israel, and care even less about the Palestinians.

There is yet another reason to celebrate. The humiliation to Israel’s intelligence agencies that was October 7 is in desperate need of a reversal. What happened to their vaunted spy craft? How did they allow Israeli sovereignty to be invaded by people riding motor scooters and soaring into Israel on hang gliders? Israel once laughed at the crudeness of those enflamed kites and tires, which seemed to stretch the limits of Hamas’ advanced weaponry.

These exploding beepers and walkie-talkies did more than blow the heads off some terrorists. The sound was heard around the world, symbolizing the return of Israel’s derring-do. Remember the Stuxnet computer virus that infected Iran’s nuclear enrichment facility in 2007; the bombing of Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981; the 1976 rescue of 250 Israelis who had been hijacked and held as hostages by the PLO in Entebbe, Uganda; the assassinations that took place throughout Europe, and in Beirut, after the murder of Israel’s Olympic team at the 1972 Munich games; and, of course, Mossad’s signature triumph: its kidnapping of Nazi mass murderer Adolf Eichmann from Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1960?

This war in Gaza has not been without some dramatic, improbable capers, the envy of the CIA and MI6. Israel did manage to kill Hamas’ leader, Ismail Haniyah, with a covert explosive device while he was in a “safehouse” in Tehran.

Outwitted by clever Jewish infidels yet again, Islamic terrorists sheepishly shopped for iPhone 16s all weekend. What happened to Hezbollah has given new meaning to “handsfree.”

But this was a good week for Israel’s notoriety in counterespionage—no matter what naysaying antisemites think. Outwitted by clever Jewish infidels yet again, Islamic terrorists sheepishly shopped for iPhone 16s all weekend. What happened to Hezbollah has given new meaning to “handsfree.”

Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, essayist, law professor and Distinguished University Professor at Touro University, where he directs the Forum on Life, Culture & Society. He is the legal analyst for CBS News Radio. His most recent book is titled “Saving Free Speech … From Itself,” and his forthcoming book is titled, “Beyond Proportionality: Is Israel Fighting a Just War in Gaza?”