Fewer devices detonated in today’s attacks, but more explosives and larger impacts — leading Israeli reporter

Veteran Israeli investigative reporter and analyst Ronen Bergman, who works for the New York Times and Yedioth Ahronoth, tells Channel 12 that fewer Hezbollah communications devices were blown up today than yesterday, but that today’s targeted devices, which were larger, were primed with more explosives and thus the blasts caused stronger impacts.

“Anyone who was close to these devices would have had a much smaller chance of surviving,” Bergman says.

He says the devices targeted today were walkie-talkies used for military communications, and other components of these devices, and that the attacks were designed to underline the vulnerability of Hezbollah’s entire military communications networks.

He also suggests that whoever “pressed the buttons” to detonate today’s explosions may have assessed that, after yesterday, Hezbollah would be checking everything it bought from the same supplier, or indeed all supplies it ever purchased from external suppliers. Detonating the explosives in the devices now, therefore, might have been considered “the last chance” to do so.

Bergman says that these kinds of attacks are usually “last resort” efforts, of the kind that would be used in accompaniment with an initiated attack or to prevent a surprise attack by Hezbollah that cannot be stopped by other means. He notes that Israel, though blamed by Hezbollah for the attacks, has not acknowledged responsibility.

“The fact that someone pressed those buttons shows that whoever did so feels a great need to prove the deep damage [that is being done to Hezbollah],” he adds, somewhat ambiguously.

He also recalls that, late on Monday, he wrote an article in Yedioth quoting senior Israeli security sources warning of a misstep that could bring about an escalation on the northern front.

Putting it all together, Bergman says, it may be that senior Israeli security figures were worried that an imminent planned attack on Hezbollah, though richly deserved by the terror group, might not necessarily serve the newly designated formal war goal of enabling the secure return of residents of the north.