--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It looks a lot like all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah. Semafor's Sarah Dadouch has the latest from Beirut and CNN's Nick Paton Walsh explains Israel's strategy.
--:-- Sarah Dadouch: It was just under a year ago that Hamas attacked Israel and there was a new war in Gaza. But throughout that war, everyone's been trying to avoid a broader regional conflict. We've heard it a million times. As we've said from day one, we have an intense focus on preventing this conflict from spreading. Now, as we approach the one-year anniversary of those initial attacks in Israel, it looks like we've never been closer to that broader conflict.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thousands of pagers exploded in the hands and pockets of suspected members of Hezbollah. The attacks were aimed at Hezbollah militants, but exploded in civilian areas, even in Beirut living rooms affecting families across the country. It seems the fiery path to all-out war has begun in the hills of southern Lebanon.
--:-- Sarah Dadouch: The Israelis unleashed a massive aerial bombardment. On Today Explained, we are heading to Lebanon.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from BetterHelp. Let me tell you a true story. Last weekend, I got an email from a listener who wanted to discuss their problems with me. And I said, look, I don't think that this is about me personally. At least I hope it's not. Why don't you try BetterHelp.com slash Explained? Absolute truth.
--:-- Sarah Dadouch: As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Find the one with BetterHelp. The one is not me, guys. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at BetterHelp.com slash explain. That's BetterHelp.com slash explain.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: AI agents are getting pretty impressive. You might not even realize you're listening to one right now. We work 24-7 to resolve customer inquiries. No hold music. No canned answers. No frustration. Visit Sierra.ai to learn more.
--:-- Sarah Dadouch: To find out what's going on in Lebanon right now, Today Explained reached out to Sarah Dadouche, a correspondent from Semaphore, because she's in Lebanon right now. Life in Beirut right now is teetering between being on pause and people trying to figure out how they can continue with their day-to-day activity.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The Lebanese health ministry has said that at least about 550 people have lost their lives during the... Israeli airstrikes battering southern and eastern Lebanon. It is the most intense Israeli bombardment of Lebanon since the 2006 war, and the deadliest. Many people in southern Lebanon have chosen to flee.
--:-- Sarah Dadouch: These pictures show a mass exodus of cars heading to Beirut in the north. Schools are closed today and they're going to be closed tomorrow after the attacks on Monday that killed nearly 500 people. And usually that's an indication to people as to whether they should stay at home or not. But there's this sense that this is going to be a long-winded, slow war. And so I think the general sense in Beirut is to what extent do we continue living our day-to-day life while anticipating that at any moment where we are could be struck.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now, starting this morning, the IDF has warned you to get out of harm's way. I urge you, take this warning seriously. Don't let Hezbollah endanger your lives and the lives of your loved ones. Don't let Hezbollah endanger Lebanon. Please, get out of harm's way now.
--:-- Sarah Dadouch: Hmm. It's interesting you say this. There's a sense that this is going to be a long-winded, slow war because it feels like a lot of the conversation around what's happening in Lebanon right now is about whether this is a war. But are you saying that people there have already accepted that they're in a war?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think it depends on who you talk to. But objectively speaking, I think if we step back, Lebanon has been at war with Israel in this new stage of war since October 8th. We have an armed group here. You know, Hezbollah is a paramilitary that is also a political party. And this actor has been striking Israel nearly daily since October 8th.
--:-- Sarah Dadouch: The numbers of casualties, a lot of them have been combatants, but also a lot of those combatants have been killed in their homes or in their villages while not on active duty. But by pure numbers and by pure attacks, Israel and Hezbollah have been at war. I think a big part of the reason why people kept saying when the war comes is because there's this kind of disconnect, this purposeful disconnect that has happened between the South and the Bah Valley and the rest of the country because the war was contained in those areas with the occasional strikes on the outskirts of Beirut.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But the war has definitely, you know, been here. Can you tell us how it's escalated in the past week?
--:-- Sarah Dadouch: So last Tuesday, thousands of pagers exploded around Lebanon. There was 12 people that were killed, two were children, and four were medical workers. So at least half of the people killed were civilians, and thousands were injured. The pagers that were held by Hezbollah members and operatives exploded in not just, you know, in underground tunnels and in meeting rooms, but in offices in Beirut, in supermarkets, just wherever the person, you know, who was holding the pager was at the time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And since that happened, the next day we saw walkie-talkies that exploded. Thousands mourned at a Hezbollah funeral. They had to plan another one. Hezbollah walkie-talkies across the country exploded in Hezbollah members' hands. In response, we saw an escalation of strikes from Hezbollah towards Israel. But really, the brunt of the attacks has been coming from Israel towards Hezbollah.
--:-- Sarah Dadouch: We've been used to like a tit-for-tat match of raising the specter of attacks, and Hezbollah tends to match it. Video showing the moment of a suspected Israeli strike on a building yards away from where a funeral was being held for a Hezbollah soldier. The Iran-backed group saying it retaliated to this with rockets towards Israel's Kiryat Shemona.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is really part of daily exchanges of fire between the IDF and Hezbollah. But what Israel has done in the past week, the pager attacks, the walkie-talkie attacks, and then the strikes, the targeted strikes on Dahi, the suburb of Beirut, to take out Hezbollah commanders some of which were successful you know some of those things Hezbollah has not been able to match.
--:-- Sarah Dadouch: The pager thing was shocking to essentially everyone around the world because it felt like something we had just never seen before. How did they do it? What do we know at this point?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So when it comes to the pager stuff, Reuters actually has had the majority of the scoops on the backstory. Basically, they found from sources that Hezbollah was still handing out its members gold Apollo branded pagers just hours before they blew up on Tuesday. That's a sign that the group was confident, even though they did a sweep of electronic equipment to identify threats, they were confident that these were safe.
--:-- Sarah Dadouch: One member of Hezbollah received a new pager on Monday, so just a day before. That's a big infiltration into Hezbollah's capabilities. I mean, there's Western sources that said that Israel's secretive military intelligence unit 8200 was involved in the planning. And what we do know is that the batteries of the walkie-talkies were laced with a highly explosive compound and that a few grams of explosives were hidden in the pagers. And those had gone undetected for months because when the pagers were brought in, They just went through a very generic routine sweep of equipment.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think that shows that that's a big, big security gap for Hezbollah. But also it shows how unaware and unprepared they were for such an attack from Israel. And the pagers have been delivered starting into 2022. So it's unclear how long these pagers have been bugged and how long they've been sleeper death agents, basically.
--:-- Sarah Dadouch: And now we've got these, I guess, more conventional airstrikes. Who or what is being targeted? The majority of them are landing in the south. There have been a few strikes in different mountainous areas, but a lot of them are falling in residential neighborhoods and in residential villages.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For one man, too late. My siblings and their children were all killed here, he says. There's been, I think, from the nearly 500 or over 500 that have been killed, there's 150 that are women and children. We don't know how many of them were combatants.
--:-- Sarah Dadouch: Yesterday there were videos that were coming out of strikes falling alongside the roads that people were on. OK, there's a lot of panic. People are making their way out of this area. A few minutes ago, there's been another airstrike. You can see the smoke. People were taking a road that usually takes maybe three hours from the south to Beirut. And last night, it was taking, you know, seven to eight, nine hours for people to get to Beirut. A lot of people slept on the road in their cars. And those were families with a lot of children.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We were watching videos of strikes falling not very far from these very jam-packed roads. There's a lot of chaos here. They are worried that there's going to be another strike. So there is definitely this sense that a lot of this is psychological war. There's no sense as to whether all of these strikes are, in fact, hitting strategic Hezbollah locations or if it's also kind of a driver to get people to evacuate the South in order to place pressure on the government and Hezbollah to meet Israel on the negotiating table.
--:-- Sarah Dadouch: So how is Hezbollah responding so far? In the last week, they've escalated the strikes on Israel, but I think yesterday we didn't see any casualties in Israel. So they've just been striking back, but nowhere near at the same level. They're not doing any targeted attacks per se.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We saw the leader of Hezbollah came out and gave a speech that, you know, more or less said we will continue to exist no matter how many of us they take out. It wasn't as inflammatory as it could have been. It wasn't as angry as it could have been. There's a lot of us think that that speech was pre-recorded. But in comparison, it's really paled to what the Israelis are doing in Lebanon, what operations they're executing.
--:-- Sarah Dadouch: Are people in Lebanon right now worried that there might be an all-out ground war? And if so, is Hezbollah ready for that?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think there aren't that many fears that there's going to be an all-out ground war. And if there was, that wouldn't be something that the Lebanese are worried about as much as the Israelis, I think, are worried about. And here we're talking in an official capacity. Hezbollah knows the terrain so much better than the Israelis. They have tunnels everywhere. The Israelis know this. There's a reason why it's been very focused on an aerial assault.
--:-- Sarah Dadouch: And I think the indications we've seen from Israel show that they're going to continue on that path. A ground invasion, I think, especially, I mean, at least right now, might put Hezbollah ahead of Israel. You know, for one year now, Sarah, we've heard that no one in the region wants this war to escalate. We don't want an escalation. We don't want a regional war. And yet, everything we've seen in the past week in Lebanon looks like an escalation. It looks like something akin to a regional war.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How is Israel justifying this escalation?
--:-- Sarah Dadouch: Israel made it very clear from the beginning of the war that the status quo that existed before October 7th will no longer exist after this war is over. And they've made that point very clear both when it comes to Hamas and when it comes to Hezbollah. There's a very, very, very big push to return residents to the north. That's a very big priority for Israel. And so once they added that as a war objective, that was a message being sent to Lebanon that we're turning our eyes towards you now. And that was last Tuesday. And they've kept that promise. But they have said before, repeatedly, the status quo with Hezbollah is not going to continue.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What that looks like, that's what we're going to find out when this war is over. Eradicating Hezbollah as an entity is just not a realistic goal. I think the question to be answered is, what will need to happen in order for Israeli citizens to return to the north? And what does that deal or lack of deal look like with Hezbollah?
--:-- Sarah Dadouche: Sarah Dadouche is Semaphore Saudi correspondent based in Beirut and Riyadh. She spoke to us from Beirut. Find her work at semaphore.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When we're back on Today Explained, we're going to try and understand the strategy here. Support for Today Explained comes from Chime. Nobody likes fees and complicated banking, says Chime. And Chime gets that, says Chime. Chime is a financial technology company that says they understand that every dollar counts.
--:-- Sarah Dadouche: So when you set up direct deposit through Chime, they say you get access to fee-free features, such as free overdraft coverage, getting paid up to two days early with direct deposit, so much more. Chime says with qualifying direct deposits, you can be eligible for free overdraft up to $200 on debit card purchases and cash withdrawals.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Plus, they say you don't need to worry about monthly fees or maintenance fees. You can work on your financial goals through Chime today. You can open an account in two minutes at Chime.com slash explained. That's Chime.com slash explained.
--:-- Sarah Dadouche: Chime feels like progress. Chime is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services and debit card provided by the Bancor Bank N.A. or Stride Bank N.A. Members FDIC.
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--:-- Sarah Dadouche: Support for the show today comes from LifeKit, the podcast from NPR. What's in your life kit? I'm asking, they didn't ask that. Every day you have to make choices that might shape the direction of your life, but you can't flip to the back of the book to find an answer key. Instead, you can listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Life Kit offers real stories about common issues like relationships, finances, parenting, and your career. If you're looking to move with more intention or just need thoughtful guidance on living better, Life Kit delivers strategies to help you make meaningful, sustainable change. From fitness routines to mental resilience, navigating personal goals to tackling burnout, each episode is full of relevant insights and clear takeaways about things we all could use a little help with.
--:-- Sarah Dadouche: LifeKit wants to help you approach your own life with confidence and clarity and walk away with a game plan you can implement right away. Enough from me. Go listen to the show, LifeKit. It's a podcast from NPR. You're listening to Today Explained. My name is Nick Paton Walsh. I'm a chief international security correspondent at CNN. And I lived in Beirut for about six years until about 2017.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We spoke to Nick Monday night after the deadliest day in Lebanon in decades. We asked him if he had any sense of Israel's strategy.
--:-- Nick Paton Walsh: I think it's important to remember here that you can never really tell what somebody's strategy is while it's playing out. The initial act which began all this, the extraordinary assault across Lebanon of these Pager blasts, which should also appear to have been targeted, yet also laden with an indiscriminate nature, which meant that civilians and children too, according to Lebanese health officials, were killed in these explosions as well.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This clearly was designed to shake this very secretive, very proud group, very obsessed with its own operational functionality and security, to shake them to their core. And then that was followed up 24 hours later by bigger blasts that seem to have actually killed more Hezbollah members, as some of the reporting seems to suggest, in walkie-talkies, a yet more low-tech device.
--:-- Nick Paton Walsh: Hassan Nasrallah's speech was to two audiences, the allies shaken by the past days and enemies who've brought such harm to his organisation. The Israeli enemy targeted thousands of pagers. They were detonated at the same time. The enemy crossed all the rules, laws and red lines So you've got to, I think, remember what that's going to do To the ability for Hezbollah to even plot a response And they will be wondering who they can ring Who's safe, who's unharmed And questioning their entire communication network And so I think it's really important to assess this As a moment where potentially despite Israel's kind of callous disregard at times it seems for civilian casualties in Lebanon they have pursued a path here that's sophisticated and able to wreak significant damage on their foe and might be exposing Hezbollah as not quite the hundred foot giant that many in the region felt that they were.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A lot of this standoff has been predicated on the idea that if those two sides really went for each other after 18 years that these two had really built themselves up for a conflict that both sides would find utterly horrific. And here we have it. Here we have this moment where Israel are throwing, it seems, what they have at Hezbollah and all of Lebanon too, it seems, or much of Lebanon. And as yet, we've yet to see the sort of formidable Hezbollah response that made many fear this particular moment.
--:-- Nick Paton Walsh: It may be coming, but we're definitely seeing a Hezbollah not capable at this point of the kind of fiery response that many had feared. What do they have? Hamas has tunnels and hostages. What does Hezbollah have? On the ground, it has an extensive and probably still pretty experienced series of fighters and a trap certainly waiting for Israel in southern Lebanon.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now, you know, be in no doubt about this at all Hezbollah lost a lot of people during Syria civil war when they fought alongside the Assad regime They have rallied to the cause of their patron Iran and ridden to al rescue Hezbollah operations in Syria have been decisive Entire rebel cities recaptured for Assad But Hezbollah, I don't think, have necessarily recovered to their fullest of strengths.
--:-- Nick Paton Walsh: But they also, too, have been on the receiving end of a lot of Iranian rocket technology. You know, we don't have full transparency on the strength and quality of the arsenal, but there appear to be medium-range rockets that can hit key cities in Israel, even longer-range ones that might be able to hit the south of Israel. Whether or not the Iron Dome is fully equipped to handle those, we'll find out probably in the days and weeks ahead.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So they have, if they launch all of these over 100,000 rockets or a significant number in a similar time, the capacity to overwhelm Israel's air defences, it seems. But then you can't make that move too many times. It's sort of a limited trick they can play. And so I think the question we're going to find out in the days ahead is whether Hezbollah feel they're at a point where they have to play that card.
--:-- Nick Paton Walsh: Now, of course, we've seen this story play out before. Rocket strikes are met with airstrikes. Thousands upon thousands have died in Gaza as a result of airstrikes. Do we think Israel has the appetite to go after a similar strategy in Lebanon?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think the Israelis are going to have to end up pursuing a somewhat different strategy in Lebanon. The strategy in Gaza has been at times brutal and horrific for the civilian population there. And I think some of that has been eased for Israel in terms of the lack of media access inside that particular area, because reporters haven't been able or outside reporters haven't been given free access across the area.
--:-- Nick Paton Walsh: That's somewhat limited the amount of information. There have been some extraordinarily brave Palestinian and other reporters based there permanently trying to do that job and doing it very well. But the information flow has been restricted. That's less likely to be the case in Lebanon. And I think that they're going to have to come to a point where they ask for something from Hezbollah or the Lebanese as a way of stopping this wave of airstrikes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And what do you think they may ask for? I imagine they'll ask Hezbollah to pull back up towards the north of the Luritani River. I think that's going to be tough for Hezbollah to agree to, given the extraordinary position they've been put in of weakness over the past week or so.
--:-- Nick Paton Walsh: But look, we're dealing with a time which is going to likely redefine people's perceptions of what both sides are capable of. And so I think it's going to be interesting to see exactly how much restraint Israel feels global opinion puts upon it. Obviously, this is escalating as we approach the one year anniversary of Hamas's attacks on Israel, but also as we approach the United States election.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I imagine neither candidate wants to see this blow up into an all-out war in the weeks before the election or at all. But does the U.S. have a hand to play in this for-the-moment escalating conflict?
--:-- Nick Paton Walsh: I think the shortest answer is increasingly no. We've seen the US just openly, publicly, and I'm sure very vocally, privately, beg the Israelis to back off on a wider confrontation with Hezbollah. There wasn't necessarily an urgent, immediate need for Israel to escalate this in the degree that they have.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They would say they do need to do this because they need to ensure that their tens of thousands of civilians can go back to their homes in northern Israel, which is a legitimate security demand that I'm sure if many countries were facing that threat in the north of their country, they would feel they needed to do something about it.
--:-- Nick Paton Walsh: It may be that they are trying to be harsh fast. So Hezbollah and the Lebanese respond in the way that they wish. But we're clearly seeing a moment where US diplomacy has run its course, has not been able to slow this. We still hear the same talking points from the White House about the need for de-escalation, about how there isn't really a military solution to this. And, you know, they are correct.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And while they may be able to impose some kind of peace through destroying their adversary's capabilities in the immediate future, that doesn't leave you safe in the longer term because, you know, dead men have sons who come back more angry.
--:-- Nick Paton Walsh: The really important thing about conflicts like this is they don't just stop. You don't do damage to your adversary that changes their position. And then often they just say, oh, I'm just going to pack up and go home now. It comes back, they re-equip, they regroup, they have memories, they seek revenge. And I think this is part of the weakness of the Israeli strategy is they may be able to do a lot of damage in the short term. But where does this take them a year from now, two years from now?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Nick Paton Walsh is the chief international security correspondent at CNN. Find them wherever you find your cable news.
--:-- Sarah Dadouch: Our show today was produced by Haleema Shah and Hady Mawajdeh with help from Peter Balonon-Rosen, edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Amanda Lewellyn, engineered by Andi Kristinsdottir and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram, and this is Today Explained. Thank you.
