Until the third week of September, the Shiite militia Hezbollah (“Party of God”) enjoyed the reputation of being the most numerous, best trained, and most well-armed and organized military force overtly dedicated to the destruction of the State of Israel.

Hezbollah is based in southern Lebanon, in the Bekaa Valley along the border with Syria in the east, and in the southern suburbs of Beirut—the three areas of the country where the Shia enjoy a clear majority. It is estimated 40,000 active and reserve members were supported, supplied, and strategically directed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

On Sept. 23, Israeli airstrikes targeted Hezbollah infrastructure in all three regions, killing at least 558 people, and injuring 2,000. In response, Hezbollah continued to launch rockets into northern Israel, pledging to continue its attacks until Israel ends its offensive in Gaza.

Three days earlier, 14 people were killed and 66 injured after Israel’s “targeted strike” on the suburb of Dahieh in southern Beirut—a stronghold of the militant group. The strike killed Hezbollah’s operations commander Ibrahim Aqil and several senior commanders of an elite unit carrying out attacks on northern Israel. It is noteworthy that Israeli planners apparently had obtained precise information about the location and time of Aqil’s meeting with the officers.

That attack came just days after the operations on Sept. 17 and 18, in which thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies intended for use by Hezbollah were remotely detonated, simultaneously, killing dozens of people and maiming thousands across Lebanon and Syria. The method recalls the demise of Yahya Ayyash, known as “the engineer,” who in 1996 was killed by an explosion caused by a mobile phone packed with explosives—a truly revolutionary technique for the time.

This spectacular operation was Hezbollah’s biggest security breach since the group was founded in 1982 as a reaction to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. It is noteworthy that on Sept. 17—just a couple of hours before the explosions—the Israeli Security Cabinet agreed on the objective of securing the return of displaced residents to the north of the county. They agreed the attacks on Hezbollah were necessary to ensure the safe return of some 60,000 people to their homes in northern Israel who had fled south after months of deadly missile exchanges.

The two attacks reaffirmed the ability of the Jewish state not only to contain the threat but also to conduct offensive actions of the highest level, exploiting cyberspace and electronic manipulation as new battlefields. The operation sent a clear message to the Hezbollah: Israel is not limited to responding to rocket and artillery attacks along the northern border; it is also capable of striking at the heart of its operations, demonstrating overwhelming technological superiority.

The two waves of explosions came seven months after Hezbollah’s top leader, Hassan Nasrallah, instructed the group’s members to use the low-tech pagers—relics of the 1990s—instead of mobile phones. He asserted that Israel had compromised their cell phone network. In April, Hezbollah duly purchased thousands of Taiwanese-designed Gold Apollo AR924 pagers.

At the end of July, Fuad Shukr, military commander of Hezbollah, was assassinated through the interception of a cellphone call from his bodyguard. Following that breach, the order to all the militiamen was additionally clear: discard your smartphones. From that moment on, the group’s key personnel communicated only through couriers. For the senior officers it was decided to purchase a batch of pagers from Taiwan and VHF radio devices from Japan.

One week after the event, it now seems clear that Mossad had secretly intercepted the devices—or else manufactured them under license to a shell company—and integrated small quantities (0.11 ounces) of the powerful explosive PETN into the batteries of the pagers. They were subsequently sold to Hezbollah through a front firm in Hungary, or perhaps through a subsidiary in Bulgaria.

Either way, the fact that the sellers’ credentials were not verified and that the explosives remained undetected until activation was a major blow to Hezbollah’s reputation in the Arab world and beyond. The operation’s objective was both to kill or harm Hezbollah members—and to instill paranoia that would undermine confidence in the leadership. Whether Israel acted preemptively, as claimed, to prevent Hezbollah from discovering the vulnerability is immaterial.

Hezbollah’s technological dependence on foreign suppliers is a fatal, permanent risk factor. The immediate consequences are threefold: 1) the imperative necessity to rebuild somehow a secure communication network, which was thought to have been secured through the use of analog radio wave technologies; 2) to remedy the operational incapacity due to the interruption of its chain of command and control, which makes planning serious counterstrikes impossible; and 3) to prevent the likely unveiling of future operations that its top brass may plan.

As Pierguido Iezzi noted in the Italian geopolitical magazine Limes, in the aftermath of the attacks Israel could gain additional information by intercepting the frenetic communications between operatives and top brass, which were likely chaotic and no longer adherent to adequate security profiles. “Someone in a panic to get information may use the telephone or other standard channels, falling into the cyberespionage network,” Iezzi wrote.

Right now, Hezbollah is in disarray. It has no reliable communication system. No complex organization of any kind—let alone a major military-political force—can function without one. More seriously perhaps, Hezbollah simultaneously faces the problem of the likely penetration of its ranks by Israeli agents, as manifested in the killing of Ibrahim Aqil and his associates.

The morbid atmosphere of mistrust and the climate of treason crippled the Red Army in the late 1930s (with disastrous consequences in 1941) and it plagued the British intelligence in the 1950s. This syndrome may now cripple the Hezbollah for months, if not years, to come. This operation may prove to be the biggest Israeli victory since the Yom Kippur War of 1973.

This is a far cry from my visit to southern Lebanon five years ago, when on Mt. Mleeta, a hilltop overlooking Lebanon’s border with Israel, a retired senior officer of Hezbollah proudly showed me the identification cards of Israeli agents captured inside their ranks during the 2006 Israeli incursion into southern Lebanon. The new crop of spies may be blackmailed, or lured by money, or promised the release of their relatives in Israeli jails, but they are most unlikely to carry their Israeli documents in their wallets. Hezbollah will have a hell of a job sorting this mess out.

The most important political consequence in Israel, in the short to medium term, is that the position of Benjamin Netanyahu is unassailable, once again. He has proven to be an incredible survivor. “Bibi” has been under a great deal of pressure after the carnage caused by Hamas inside Israel last Oct. 7. He has been on the brink many times, including during a bribery scandal seven years ago that nearly destroyed him. He is now unassailable once again.

Netanyahu’s decision to switch the focus from Gaza in the south to the Hezbollah in the north was an operational success of the highest order and a political masterpiece, with meaning and consequences with which the world will have to reckon for years to come. For starters, please forget about the two-state solution and land for peace. It is over.