Israel just hit Hezbollah hard. But too hard, even for them?

In an innovative and brutally successful mass casualty attack that would struggle to make the script for a Bond movie, Israel’s Mossad has shaken Hezbollah and stirred the world’s attention.

Exploding pagers, exploding hand-held radio devices, exploding iPhones — taken all together it has taken things to a whole new level when it comes to elevating war to the status of sophisticated barbarity.

Make no mistake, this was the action of a lawless, terrorist state that has become untethered from any and all constraints, much less restraint. So indiscriminate was this it — injuring, maiming and killing with maniacal abandon — that even Israel’s strongest allies will be dealing with the political and geopolitical aftershock for some time to come.

As for Israel itself, future generations may well pay the price for the extremism of the current one. This was the Arab world’s 9/11, and surely now a regional war has never been more close.

So how did they manage to pull this off, the Israelis — just how? In the murky aftermath of this grisly operation, out of the welter of analyses thus proffered, the one contained in the New York Times on 19 September is most convincing.

Co-authored by Sheera Frenkel, Ronen Bergman, and Hwaida Saad, said article, which…