Nine dead and nearly 3,000 wounded. The unprecedented attack on the pagers of Hezbollah members is the larger explosion of a war already underway that could consume the whole Middle East.

Mourners last month in southern Lebanon carry the coffin of a fallen Hezbollah fighter killed by Israeli forces.

-Analysis-

PARIS — Have we witnessed the first salvo in the all-out war between Israel and Lebanon's Hezbollah? Tuesday's events in Lebanon are unprecedented, and mark a major new step in the escalation that everyone has been dreading for months, and which now seems almost inevitable.

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By blowing up Hezbollah's pagers, the Israelis have once again demonstrated their military technological capabilities. The Shiite movement uses this old-fashioned technology because it knows how vulnerable smartphones are.

In February, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah urged his supporters to “throw away” their smartphones. “Bury them, put them in a metal box and keep them away,” he had said, to combat hacking, geolocation and other known shortcomings of smartphones.

But the “low-tech” failed to protect his men, including the Iranian ambassador to Beirut, who was injured in the explosion of his pager. A total of at least nine dead and nearly 3,000 injured, including scores in critical condition.

Why the sudden move? If we stick to the Israeli chronology, it's retaliation for a failed attack, blamed on Hezbollah, against a former official of the Jewish state's security apparatus. But the escalation goes deeper than a simple retaliation.

In recent days, the main subject of political debate in Israel has been Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's efforts to try to fire Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. The reason: Gallant, along with others of the military leadership, are opposed to Netanyahu's plans to finally launch the assault on Hezbollah.

The political scenario on the table is the replacement of Yoav Gallant by Gideon Sa'ar, a right-wing deputy who is Netanyahu's rival, but a supporter of the military hard line.

On Monday, Israel announced that its war aims had been modified to include the return of the 60,000 or so civilians evacuated from the northern region due to the latent confrontation with Hezbollah since the October 7 massacre last year. This announcement means that Netanyahu has decided to destroy the military infrastructure of the pro-Iranian Shiite movement in Lebanon, which has been threatening Israel for years.

Lebanese soldiers securing the area around the American University Hospital after an attack killed 8 people in Beirut, Lebanon.

Marwan Naamani/ZUMA

The regional war is already here, in low intensity. There have been hundreds of deaths in Lebanon, Israeli raids in Syria, operations in Iran and Yemen; while the merciless war in Gaza continues, and violence is escalating in the West Bank.

If this isn't a regional conflict, it sure looks like one.

The question today is the scale of what will happen, and the reaction of the main players. If Israel decides to launch an assault against Hezbollah, it would be against an adversary far more formidable than the Palestinian Hamas, even if the pagers affair shows its vulnerability.

And what will Iran's reaction be? Teheran is Hezbollah's godfather, which it sees as its main source of influence in the Arab world — and cannot stand idly by.

And what will the United States, which is calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, do, whether it likes it or not, if it finds itself embroiled in this regional conflict? We haven't reached that point yet, but all these questions are coming to a head as events accelerate, with these pagers exploding like in a TV series screenplay. You can sum up the plot in one word: war.