புதிய ஜனாதிபதியாக நியமனம் பெற்றதன் பின்னர் நாட்டின் பாதுகாப்பு படைகளின் பிரதானிகள் சம்பிரதாயபூர்வமாக இன்று (04) ஜனாதிபதி அலுவலகத்தில் முப்படைத் தளபதி ஜனாதிபதி அநுரகுமார திசாநாயக்கவை சந்தித்து கலந்துரையாடினர்.
அதன்படி பாதுகாப்பு பதவி நிலை பிரதானி ஜெனரல் ஷவேந்திர சில்வா, இராணுவ தளபதி லெப்டினன் ஜெனரல் விக்கும் லியனகே, விமானப்படைத் தளபதி எயார் மார்ஷல் உதேனி ராஜபக்ஷ மற்றும் கடற்படைத் தளபதி வைஸ் அட்மிரல் பிரியந்த பெரேரா ஆகியோர் ஜனாதிபதியை சந்தித்து சினேகபூர்வமாக கலந்துரையாடினர்.
இதன்போது நினைவுச் சின்னங்களும் பரிமாறிக்கொள்ளப்பட்டன.
Following his appointment to office, Sri Lanka’s new President Anura Kumara Dissanayake met with Sri Lanka’s Chiefs of Defence Forces, including the alleged war criminal, and Chief of Defence Staff, General Shavendra Silva.
Chiefs of Defence Forces Pay Traditional Courtesy Call on President Anura Kumara Dissanayake
Following the appointment as the new President, the Chiefs of Defence Forces paid a traditional courtesy call on President Anura Kumara Dissanayake today (04) at the Presidential Secretariat.
Accordingly, Chief of Defence Staff General Shavendra Silva, Army Commander Lieutenant General Vikum Liyanage, Air Force Commander Air Marshal Udeni Rajapaksa and Navy Commander Vice Admiral Priyantha Perera met with the President and engaged in a cordial conversation.
To mark the occasion, commemorative tokens were also presented.
War Criminal Silva:
Silva led the notorious 58 Division as the government launched a massive military assault. That culminated in the massacre of tens of thousands of Tamils during the 2009 Mullivaikkal Eelam genocide. They oversaw the repeated bombing of hospitals, widespread sexual violence, torture and the execution of surrendering Tamils.
On the campaign trail, Dissanayake vowed that he would “not seek to punish” the perpetrators of war crimes during the genocidal conflict. However, his ascendancy to the presidency comes as there is growing international pressure to advance accountability for mass atrocities in Sri Lanka.
Rather than reducing the risk of future debt trouble, Sri Lanka’s macro-linked bonds set up the risk that Sri Lanka will fall back into debt trouble in 2029 or 2030.
Sri Lanka’smacro-linked bonds(MLBs) are, in fact, not really macro-linked bonds.
After 2027, they are standard fixed-income instruments which provide no help in the event of future shocks. The final restructuring terms are just left open until just after Sri Lanka’s IMF program ends, and the creditors and Sri Lanka have agreed that the final terms will largely be a function of Sri Lanka's dollar GDP between 2025 and 2027.
The new bonds thus aren’t true state-contingent instruments.
Payments after 2027 aren’t linked to real GDP growth, tourism inflows, or the price of Sri Lanka’s oil imports. Theorists who extol the advantages of state-contingent instruments shouldn’t be fooled. Bond traders still need to worry about the risk that the payments will reset up based on Sri Lanka’s economic performance between 2025 and 2027—a period when risks are low because Sri Lanka is more or less fully funded by the official sector. Good performance over the next few years thus creates more risk of trouble after 2028, as external debt service ratchets up during a period when Sri Lanka is expected to be back financing in the international bond market with a debt to GDP ratio of around 100%.
The new bonds are thus structured to game the IMF's fiscal targets and increase the return bondholders get out of Sri Lanka’s debt exchange rather than to insulate Sri Lanka against future risks (details of the proposed bonds are here).
The innovation in the macro-linked bonds is that the terms of the exchange aren’t fixed until after Sri Lanka’s current IMF program has expired.
a) If all follows the IMF’s (relatively conservative) macroeconomic and exchange rate forecasts, the bondholders get the base case bond—so $12.5 billion in bonds with an average coupon of around 6.5 percent are swapped into $9 billion of new bonds with an average coupon of around 6 percent, and past-due interest (PDI) is settled with a modest discount. In the base case—with GDP averaging $89 billion over the next year—there is a little bit of true debt reduction, as the coupon on the new bonds is below the coupon on the old bonds.
b) If GDP averages $92 billion over the next three years (as seems likely with dollar GDP at $94 billion in the first quarter of 2024), the stock of the new bonds rises to $10 billion and the average post-2027 coupon increases to 6.6 percent.
In the latest proposal, there is also a bit of downside protection for Sri Lanka. The bonds reset only if the real economy has in fact grown from 2024 to 2027. If GDP falls to $85 billion (well below the IMF’s conservative forecast), the stock of new bonds falls from $9 billion to $7.5 billion.
The risk here should be obvious—a strong Sri Lankan currency could drive nominal dollar GDP higher during the program period (when official inflows and limited debt service provide a stable source of foreign exchange on top of exports) even in the absence of any true increase in Sri Lanka’s external payment capacity. Conceptually, dollar GDP isn’t even the actual source of increased external debt service capacity, as a high calculated dollar GDP can reflect an overvalued exchange rate that makes it harder to generate the actual foreign exchange needed to service external debt, a classic consideration that was left out of the IMF’s “fiscal only” market-access debt sustainability framework.*
The targets are set exclusively in fiscal terms, so they define limits on overall government debt rather than external government debt.
The targets also allow a quite high level of debt-to-GDP and foreign currency debt service (the foreign currency debt service limit is a component of the broader limit on Sri Lanka’s forecast gross fiscal financing need): specifically, public debt needs to be under 105 percent of GDP in 2027 and under 95 percent of GDP in 2032, the gross financing need needs to be under 13 percent of GDP on average between 2028 and 2032, and foreign currency debt service needs to be under 4.5 percent of GDP between 2028 and 2032. Given how the targets have been defined, a higher dollar GDP mechanically translates into a higher permitted level of foreign currency debt service (to state the obvious, foreign exchange debt service capacity rises with dollar GDP not with exports or foreign currency reserves).
Broadly speaking, the IMF set extremely generous targets for overall debt to GDP in the program—a low-income country would be expected to get general government debt under 55 percent of GDP by the end of the program, and external debt to GDP down to 30 or 40 percent of GDP. At the end of the program, in 2027, Sri Lanka’s public debt-to-GDP is estimated to be over 105 percent; the binding 95 percent target was set for five years later in 2032.
But the IMF’s initial GDP forecast was as conservative as debt to GDP target was generous. Sri Lanka wasn’t forecast to return to its pre-crisis level of dollar GDP even by the end of its IMF program. The bondholders argued, unsurprisingly, that the low level of GDP in the IMF baseline unfairly limited the available debt service for foreign creditors. The GDP forecast has subsequently been adjusted up (to around $90 billion over the next three years, on average) without any downward adjustment in the debt to GDP targets—which has the effect of reducing the amount of debt relief that Sri Lanka needs from all its external creditors in the baseline.
There seems to be a strong desire from all parties involved to declare victory, collect some fees (the consent fee for the bonds is $225 million), start collecting past-due interest, and move on. The IMF is arguing that the current debt restructuring process is now starting to work.** The Paris Club, India, and the Export-Import Bank of China (Exim) have done their separate deals (on undisclosed terms, and yes, that is a problem, see my paper with Sean Hagan). Market analysts think the bonds should trade at around 60 cents on the dollar, even at a relatively high 11 percent exit yield.
So, my guess is that there will be a lot of pressure to let this deal sail through.
But there are two reasons for concern.
The first is obvious: the macro-linked bonds structure essentially makes a generous debt-to-GDP target even more generous. The structure of the IMF’s debt targets set completely aside what I consider to be the core issue, namely whether $45 billion of debt is too much for an economy that struggles to generate foreign exchange and has no history of collecting tax revenues. In the upside scenario, the coupon on the $10.5 billion in new bonds is approximately $870 million per year, which is higher than the $770 million contractual coupon on Sri Lanka’s defaulted bonds. Sri Lanka’s difficulties are thus being treated by both the IMF and its creditors as problems of extended illiquidity, not a problem of fundamental solvency—a judgment that I question given the rise in Sri Lanka’s gross (and net) external debt over between 2012 and 2022.***
The IMF’s market access framework through doesn’t look at the absolute size of external debt relative to measures of external payment capacity. It only looks at the size of the gross financing need, or more precisely, the size of the gross financing need relative to the size of the domestic banking system. That is a pretty narrow basis for assessing fiscal solvency as, for example, it leaves out interest payments relative to tax revenues, and Sri Lanka’s Achilles’ heel, as Theo Maret has emphasized, has long been its low levels of tax collection. Government revenue was around 10 percent of GDP before the COVID-19 Pandemic, and it fell to ridiculously low levels thereafter, thanks to a poorly timed tax cut and even with the IMF program adjustments was still just under 10 percent of GDP in 2023. The stock of high coupon bonded debt after 2027—and the need to refinance that debt at high debt-to-GDP levels—thus pose a set of classic fiscal risks.
The second issue is one of symmetry. In the upside scenarios, both the stock of bonds and coupon increase. In the downside scenario, the coupon is constant. As a result, the $570 million coupon in the base case (the one used in the IMF debt sustainability analysis) rises to $870 million in the upside scenario and falls only to $470 million in the downside scenario. Looking at all debt service, the upside in 2028 for the bonds is over $500 million (0.45 percent of estimated GDP) while the maximum downside adjustment is less than $200 million (0.2 percent of estimated GDP).
Moreover, the probability distribution for a payout is skewed toward the upside. The bondholders are correct in arguing that the IMF’s forecast for dollar GDP during the program period are a bit conservative. The problem is what happens after the program ends and Sri Lanka, in theory, has to survive on its own in the market with high levels of public external debt and overall public debt.
Absent disclosure of the terms of the China Exim restructuring and the Paris Club/India deal, it is hard to know whether there will be concerns about comparability. The NPV relief provided by the bonds may be significantly higher than the NPV relief provided by the official creditors in the base case.
But the asymmetry in the bondholder deal could still be an issue—as the bonds almost certainly will get a lot more in both the near and medium term if GDP hits the $100 billion threshold. The bonds are also getting most of the near-term cash flow (over $700 million a year) out of a total external debt service envelope for bonds, the China Development Bank (CDB), and bilateral claims of $900-975 million; bilateral creditors and the CDB have more of the restructuring stock—at least $16 billion relative to the $14.5 billion of bonds including PDI—so there is, as usual, a big tilt toward the bonds in the near-term cash flows.
Put simply, “comparability” under the current formula requires more NPV effort from the bonds given the cash flow tilt toward the bonds, which may or may not be the case. We don’t know the NPV relief in the official deal, or how the official sector will assess the greater upside provided in the private deal.
But the most important issue is a broader one. A rise in GDP—if it isn’t just a function of an overvalued exchange rate—frees up additional resources for a host of uses. Under the IMF’s framework, higher dollar GDP increases Sri Lanka’s calculated capacity to service foreign currency debt in a linear way—$10 billion more in GDP means $450 million more in estimated debt service capacity.*** The proposed macro linked bonds give all of that upside to one group of external creditors, at least between 2029 and 2032. The bondholders get something like 80 percent of the notional upside from higher dollar GDP while being at most one third of the overall external debt stock ($14.5 billion of $43 billion).
Put differently, if Sri Lanka’s (dollar) GDP increases by 10 percent (versus the baseline), debt service on external bonded debt rises by 50 percent, not by a more reasonable linear 10 percent.
That raises one final point:
Sri Lanka has a relatively high level of external debt: $43 billion, which will rise to at least $45 billion in the IMF program period, as future Fund disbursements, $2.5 billion in multilateral development bank (MDB) fiscal financing, and the recognition of past-due interest offset the reduction in the bond’s face value. Sri Lanka also has an exceptionally low level of reserves. A $100 billion economy should have around $15 billion of reserves—Sri Lanka now has $5 billion, $3 billion of which are borrowed. Sri Lanka actually defaulted back in 2022 because it ran out of reserves, a fact that is glossed over in the IMF’s fiscally-focused debt sustainability framework.****
Net external debt—a concept that the IMF’s market access framework doesn’t incorporate—is thus high. Sri Lanka has certain inelastic import needs (fuel) together with a modest export base (goods exports are only $10 billion or so; total foreign exchange proceeds are around 20 percent of GDP).*****
Sri Lanka is thus an economy that cannot—in my view—easily support a lot of expensive external debt.
So, I do worry that the IMF assumes a return to external market access in 2027 with a debt-to-GDP level that will be over 100 percent in the IMF’s base case and could be over 90 percent even in an optimistic case. The potential spike in debt service in 2029 also stands out as an obvious source of risk. The macro-linked bonds could easily become high-rate, relatively rapidly-amortizing bonds just when Sri Lanka loses the lifeline from its IMF program.
State-contingent instruments were originally viewed as a mechanism to reduce risk by aligning payments to payment capacity. Lots of academics still find them appealing for that reason. But in practice, they have generally become instruments that add to, rather than reduce, the risk of future default.
To borrow a phrase from Michael Pettis, the macro-linked bonds create a “volatility machine” just as Sri Lanka (in theory) is set to exit from its IMF program.
That is a problem.
* IMF staff have resisted suggestions that they should review their current debt framework and do a better job of of incorporating external debt variables into the medium-term module of the new market access debt sustainability framework. External variables actually enter into the confidential short-term assessment of risk, but the medium-term assessment defines parameters for a debt restructuring—the long-term module appears to have little substantive value. I also worry, more generally, that the IMF staff has lost interest in balance of payments issues, in part because the balance of payments has dropped out of a lot of PhD programs.
** Much of the debate on the debt restructuring architecture has focused on the G-20’s “Common Framework” which only applies to low-income/IDA eligible countries. Sri Lanka was just a bit too wealthy to qualify for the Common Framework. This has two concrete implications:
a) China’s official creditors were not required to participate in a single official creditors’ committee with the traditional bilateral creditors (i.e., the Paris Club; in Sri Lanka’s case, the biggest traditional creditor is Japan). The Export-Import Bank of China negotiated separately in this case, and the China Development Bank is part of the commercial rather than the official restructuring.
b) Countries outside the Common Framework aren’t assessed using the IMF’s low-income country debt sustainability framework. The “retro” low-income country framework focuses on external debt and generally is more constraining; the “modern” market access country framework doesn’t have the cliff effects of the low-income country framework but also entirely drops balance of payments-based measures of debt.
*** The general government’s external debt table includes the central bank’s swap liabilities, which is commendable.
**** Ecuador, interestingly, has a very similar external debt profile to Sri Lanka despite a very different overall public debt profile. Both Sri Lanka and Ecuador have relatively large stocks of external debt and very few reserves, and a reasonably high share of each countries’ debt is relatively expensive commercial debt. Both countries are examples of why looking more holistically at debt-payment capacity matters. The issue for Sri Lanka should be whether its relatively high level of domestic debt makes it too risky to also carry a relatively high level of external debt; the issue for Ecuador is whether its lack of a domestic buffer (thanks to dollarization) makes it too risky to carry its current stock of foreign external debt even with a low level of domestic public debt. I am not convinced that the IMF's current framework draws out these questions in an effective way, as it (intentionally) blurs the line between domestic and external debt.
***** The macro-linked bonds have a high risk of being viewed as a sophisticated version of the initial bank flow rescheduling that marked the first phase of the 1980s emerging market debt crisis. That rescheduling was defined by a belief on the part of creditors that the country only faced a liquidity problem, and thus an unwillingness to give up on principal (the banks also needed time to rebuild their own capital). The actual resolution of the crisis required a truly fixed payment schedule that the country could meet, which created a realistic upside for both creditors and the country⍐.
Blog Post by Brad W. Setser July 16, 2024 1:10 pm (EST)
Mossad’s pager operation: Inside Israel’s penetration of Hezbollah
New details emerge of Israel’s elaborate plan to sabotage Hezbollah communications devices
to kill or maim thousands of its operatives.
By Souad Mekhennet
and
Joby Warrick
TEL AVIV — In the initial sales pitch to Hezbollah two years ago, the new line of Apollo pagers seemed precisely suited to the needs of a militia group with a sprawling network of fighters and a hard-earned reputation for paranoia.
The AR924 pager was slightly bulky but rugged, built to survive battlefield conditions. It boasted a waterproof Taiwanese design and an oversized battery that could operate for months without charging. Best of all, there was no risk that the pagers could ever be tracked by Israel’s intelligence services. Hezbollah’s leaders were so impressed they bought 5,000 of them and began handing them out to mid-level fighters and support personnel in February.
None of the users suspected they were wearing an ingeniously crafted Israeli bomb. And even after thousands of the devices exploded in Lebanon and Syria, few appreciated the pagers’ most sinister feature: a two-step de-encryption procedure that ensured most users would be holding the pager with both hands when it detonated.
As many as 3,000 Hezbollah officers and members — most of them rear-echelon figures — were killed or maimed, along with an unknown number of civilians, according to Israeli, U.S. and Middle Eastern officials, when Israel’s Mossad intelligence service triggered the devices remotely on Sept. 17.
Hezbollah members carry the coffin of a fighter who was killed on Sept. 17, in the southern suburbs of Beirut. (Bilal Hussein/AP)
As an act of spy craft, it is without parallel, one of the most successful and inventive penetrations of an enemy by an intelligence service in recent history. But key details of the operation — including how it was planned and carried out, and the controversy it engendered within Israel’s security establishment and among allies — are only now coming to light.
This account, including numerous new details about the operation, was pieced together from interviews with Israeli, Arab and U.S. security officials, politicians and diplomats briefed on the events, as well as Lebanese officials and people close to Hezbollah. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence. They describe a years-long plan that originated at Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv and ultimately involved a cast of operatives and unwitting accomplices in multiple countries. The Washington Post account reveals how the attack not only devastated Hezbollah’s leadership ranks but also emboldened Israel to target and kill Hezbollah’s top leader, Hasan Nasrallah, raising the risk of a wider Middle East war.
Iran launched around 180 missiles against Israel on Tuesday in retaliation for Israeli attacks on Hezbollah’s leadership and warned of harsher consequences if the conflict escalates.
“The resistance in the region will not back down even with the killing of its leaders,” Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said during a Friday sermon in Tehran.
But in Israel, the strike convinced the country’s political leaders that Hezbollah could be put on the ropes, susceptible to a systematic dismantling using airstrikes and, eventually, a ground invasion. Yet while marveling at the plot’s success, some officials continue to worry aboutthe broader ripples of the strike, in a conflict that continues to spiral.
One Israeli political official, referring to the pager plot, summed up the anxieties in a quip at a meeting with Mossad officials.
“We cannot make a strategic decision such as an escalation in Lebanon while counting on a toy,” the official said.
Designed by Mossad, assembled in Israel
A photo taken on Sept. 18 in Beirut's southern suburbs shows the remnants of exploded Hezbollah pagers. (AFP/Getty Images)
The idea for the pager operation originated in 2022, according to the Israeli, Middle Eastern and U.S. officials familiar with the events. Parts of the plan began falling into place more than a year before Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack that put the region on a path to war. It was a time of relative quiet on Israel’s war-scarred northern border with Lebanon.
Among the half dozen Iranian-backed militia groups with weapons aimed at Israel, Hezbollah is by far the strongest. Israeli officials had watched with increasing anxiety as the Lebanese group added new weapons to an arsenal already capable of striking Israeli cities with tens of thousands of precision-guided missiles.
Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service responsible for combating foreign threats to the Jewish state, had worked foryears to penetrate the group with electronic monitoring and human informants. Over time, Hezbollah leaders learned to worry about the group’s vulnerability to Israeli surveillance and hacking, fearing that even ordinary cellphones could be turned into Israeli-controlled eavesdropping and tracking devices.
Thus was born the idea of creating a kind of communications Trojan horse, the officials said. Hezbollah was looking for hack-proof electronic networks for relaying messages, and Mossad came up with a pair of ruses that would lead the militia group to purchase devices that seemed perfect for the job — equipment that Mossad designed and had assembled in Israel.
The first part of the plan, booby-trapped walkie-talkies, began being inserted into Lebanon by Mossad nearly a decade ago, in 2015. The mobile two-way radios contained oversized battery packs, a hidden explosive and a transmission system that gave Israel complete access to Hezbollah communications.
For nine years, the Israelis contented themselves with eavesdropping on Hezbollah, the officials said, while reserving the option to turn the walkie-talkies into bombs in a future crisis. But then came a new opportunity and a glitzy new product: a small pager equipped with a powerful explosive. In an irony that would not become clear for many months, Hezbollah would end up indirectly paying the Israelis for the tiny bombs that would kill or wound many of its operatives.
Because Hezbollah leaders were alert to possible sabotage, the pagers could not originate in Israel, the United States or any other Israeli ally. So, in 2023, the group began receiving solicitations for the bulk purchase of Taiwanese-branded Apollo pagers, a well-recognized trademark and product line with worldwide distribution and no discernible links to Israeli or Jewish interests. The Taiwanese company had no knowledge of the plan, officials said.
The sales pitch came from a marketing official trusted by Hezbollah with links to Apollo. The marketing official, a woman whose identity and nationality officials declined to reveal, was a former Middle East sales representative for the Taiwanese firm who had established her own company and acquired a license to sell a line of pagers that bore the Apollo brand. Sometime in 2023, she offered Hezbollah a deal on one of the products her firm sold: the rugged and reliable AR924.
“She was the one in touch with Hezbollah, and explained to them why the bigger pager with the larger battery was better than the original model,” said an Israeli official briefed on details of the operation. One of the main selling points about the AR924 was that it was “possible to charge with a cable. And the batteries were longer lasting,” the official said.
As it turned out, the actual production of the devices was outsourced and the marketing official had no knowledge of the operation and was unaware that the pagers were physically assembled in Israel under Mossad oversight, officials said. Mossad’s pagers, each weighing less than three ounces, included a unique feature: a battery pack that concealed a tiny amount of a powerful explosive, according to the officials familiar with the plot.
In a feat of engineering, the bomb component was so carefully hidden as to be virtually undetectable, even if the device was taken apart, the officials said. Israeli officials believe that Hezbollah did disassemble some of the pagers and may have even X-rayed them.
Also invisible was Mossad’s remote access to the devices. An electronic signal from the intelligence service could trigger the explosion of thousands of the devices at once. But, to ensure maximum damage, the blast could also be triggered by a special two-step procedure required for viewing secure messages that had been encrypted.
“You had to push two buttons to read the message,” an official said. In practice, that meant using both hands.
In the ensuing explosion, the users would almost certainly “wound both their hands,” the official said, and thus “would be incapable to fight.”
An encrypted message
In a speech at the United Nations on Sept. 27, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking to Hezbollah, said “Enough is enough.” (Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)
Most top elected officials in Israel were unaware of the capability until Sept. 12. That’s the day Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu summoned his intelligence advisers for a meeting to discuss potential action against Hezbollah, Israeli officials said.
According to a summary of the meeting weeks later by officials briefed on the event, Mossad officials offered a first glimpse into what had been one of the agency’s most secretive operations. By then, the Israelis had placed booby-trapped pagers in the hands and pockets of thousands of Hezbollah operatives.
Intelligence officials also talked about a long-held anxiety: With the escalating crisis in southern Lebanon, there was a growing risk the explosives would be discovered. Years of careful planning and deception could quickly come to naught.
Across Israel’s security establishment, an intense debate erupted, officials said. Everyone, including Netanyahu, recognized that the thousands of exploding pagers could do untold damage to Hezbollah, but could also trigger a fierce response, including a massive retaliatory missile strike by surviving Hezbollah leaders, with Iran possibly joining in the fray.
“It was clear that there were some risks,” an Israeli official said. Some, including senior Israel Defense Forces officials, warned of the potential for a full-fledged escalation with Hezbollah, even as Israeli soldiers were continuing operations against Hamas in Gaza. But others, chiefly Mossad, saw an opportunity to disrupt the status quo with “something more intense.”
The United States, Israel’s closest ally, was not informed of the booby-trapped pagers or the internal debate over whether to trigger them, U.S. officials said.
Ultimately, Netanyahu approved triggering the devices while they could inflict maximum damage. Over the following week, Mossad began preparations for detonating both the pagers and walkie-talkies already in circulation.
In Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, meanwhile, the debate over the Hezbollah campaign expanded to include another profoundly consequential target: Nasrallah himself.
A mourner holds up a poster of slain Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah in Tehran on Monday. (Vahid Salemi/AP)
Mossad had known of the leader’s whereabouts in Lebanon for years and tracked his movements closely, officials said. Yet the Israelis held their fire, certain that an assassination would lead to all-out war with the militia group, and perhaps with Iran as well. American diplomats had been pressing Nasrallah to agree to a separate cease-fire with Israel, without links to the fighting in Gaza, hoping for a deal that could lead to the withdrawal of Hezbollah fighters from the southern Lebanese bases that threatened Israeli citizens in communities near the border.
Senior Israeli officials said they voiced support for the cease-fire proposal, but Nasrallah withheld his consent, insisting on a cease-fire for Gaza first, U.S. and Middle Eastern officials said. Some senior political and military officials in Israel remained deeply uncertain about targeting Nasrallah, fearing the fallout in the region.
On Sept. 17, even as the debate in Israel’s highest national security circles about whether to strike the Hezbollah leader raged on, thousands of Apollo-branded pagers rang or vibrated at once, all across Lebanon and Syria. A short sentence in Arabic appeared on the screen: “You received an encrypted message,” it said.
Hezbollah operatives dutifully followed the instructions for checking coded messages, pressing two buttons. In houses and shops, in cars and on sidewalks, explosions ripped apart hands and blew away fingers. Less than a minute later, thousands of other pagers exploded by remote command, regardless of whether the user ever touched his device.
The following day, on Sept. 18, hundreds of walkie-talkies blew up in the same way, killing and maiming users and bystanders.
It was the first of a series of blows aimed at the heart of one of Israel’s most ardent foes. As Hezbollah reeled, Israel struck again, pounding the group’s headquarters, arsenals and logistic centers with 2,000-poundbombs.
The largest series of airstrikes occurred on Sept. 27, 10 days after the pagers exploded. The attack, targeting a deeply buried command center in Beirut, was ordered by Netanyahu as he traveled to New York for a United Nations speech in which he declared, speaking to Hezbollah, “Enough is enough.”
“We will not accept a terror army perched on our northern border, able to perpetrate another Oct. 7-style massacre,” Netanyahu said in the speech.
The next day, Sept. 28, Hezbollah confirmed what most of the world already knew: Nasrallah, the group’s fiery leader and sworn enemy of Israel, was dead⍐.
Mekhennet reported from Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Dubai and Amman, Jordan. Warrick reported from Washington and Amman.
