What should alarm all of us is that governments worldwide now know there’s an easy and considerably cheap way to kill and maim anybody from afar. And if there’s evil on the planet, it came out in public domain with an explosive low-cost introduction. Thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies have been exploding across Lebanon. The Iran-backed Hezbollah fighters found themselves self-detonating.

Can we call it a massacre? Of course, yes. But not the sort that featured in the medieval age. Of battlegrounds strewn with bloodied bodies; cities and towns and villages where epic battles were fought and won and lost. Human beings with their limbs missing and skulls piled up in mounds, left behind by invaders riding in for the kill.

No, this was another type of massacre. People were blowing up spontaneously! Hezbollah members exploding in markets, homes, thoroughfares, in public transport, in private cars and wherever there were human settlements, killing and wounding as if someone unknown and invisible was cross and angry with the Gods themselves, with humankind itself, the killers plastic and alien, out of this world.

Even children were killed, caught in the maelstrom, children who would have reacted in glee if presented with a pager to play with. Or a walkie-talkie. That would have been fun, but this walkie-talkie went boom like it disliked itself. This was war worse than the one pictured in Arnold Schwarzenegger's futuristic Terminator world!

The blasts didn't come with an identity card. The anti-semitic zeroed in on Israel later though suspicion settled on Netanyahu Benjamin's Mossad even as the ambulances crisscrossed Lebanon with their banshee calls. Beirut couldn't have had a worse day than on Wednesday, and then on Thursday.

Reports spoke of at least 20 killed in apparent retaliation, revenge of the pagers, and walkie-talkies. For, who else could be the enemy, other than these devices. This was an IED nobody would have thought could be engineered, except an evil genius with a 'Dr. No' kind of ill-timed ardour. One of the pagers exploded on September 19 at a funeral of a Hezbollah killed by his pager on Wednesday.

Now, which fool would carry a pager even after knowing the pager was the enemy? Maybe it was a walkie talkie. Next what? Mobiles? An Apple or an android Samsung. Every electronic communication device, handheld or handsfree, could go boom and nobody can do nothing. Thousands of pagers exploded in Lebanon. One count said 12 were killed in Wednesday's explosions and they included two children. As many as 2,800 Hezbollah were wounded.

Yup, that should qualify for a massacre. The Hezbollah were caught with their pants down, which is where pagers are harboured. Gallows humour aside, many of the blasts took place in safe-secure pants. People who kept their pages in back pockets, and front pockets, of their trousers. The Hezbollah called Israel "fully responsible for this criminal aggression" only after the blasts of the first shocks had worn off in the cooling air of the hot-hot Middle East.

The Iran-backed Hezbollah has vowed revenge but Israel is mum as a tomb. As far as Israel is concerned, it was on a different planet. The talk of the Social Media is that Mossad remotely detonated pagers and walkie-talkies in Hezbollah pockets, and on the persons of 5,000 Hezbollah cadres. The low tech pagers killed and maimed, the preferred IEDs. The Hezbollah had chosen the low-cost old-tech pagers to evade Israeli high-tech surveillance and here they were ruing the day they took to the pager and walkie-talkie.

For those who haven't kept track of world events and world citizens, the Hezbollah is Iran's proxy in the never-ending war against Israel and the United States. Hezbollah said on Wednesday that it "attacked Israeli artillery positions with rockets", but the Israelis said "show us the damage and the casualties!"

Did President Joe Biden's administration know of pagers and walkie-talkies set to explode in Lebanon? After all, Israel and the United States can read each other's minds. The United States has now warned both sides to avoid escalating the war in the Middle East. If anybody has noticed, the United States is these days always warning Israel and Iran and Iran's proxies against "escalation of any kind" and yet finding that its warnings were never heeded to.

US National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby should take note of the futility and uselessness of US warnings. The United Nations is another bystander with impotent warnings. News came of United Nations chief Antonio Guterres warning that the exploding pager-attacks on Hezbollah come with "a serious risk of a dramatic escalation in Lebanon and everything must be done to avoid that escalation."

The United Nations Security Council was scheduled to meet on Friday to bang heads on this issue. Israel and Hezbollah have been "at war" since October 7, 2023. Notably, in Gaza, where the Hamas are trying to live on borrowed time, no pager went boom-boom boom in the Hamas pockets and on Hamas persons. These attacks were focused on Hezbollah who are technically-speaking in the tech-wilderness compared to the high-tech Israel.

But the warning is to the world at large. Governments worldwide now know that they have the capability of finishing off enemies with low-tech finesse. That all it takes to kill and maim from far is to remotely set off electronic communication devices. Imagine if a Hezbollah was on an international flight and his pager took off with a command from afar? Then, it would have been an "international incident" with all the collaterals attached.

Governments now know they can kill you with a pager and a walkie-talkie that you bought with your own hard-earned money. What would that be called, suicide or murder? All electronic communication devices are killers, laptop computers and tablets, and internet-connected appliances. Even Elon Musk's and Chinese-manufactured EVs that Prime Minister Narendra Modi dreams big on.

All it needs are cell towers to broadcast "death" from. The entire world is a target, even if only pagers and the walkie-talkies have taken the initial hit. The pager died, in fact, went extinct on Wednesday, September 18. Don't be sure if the walkie-talkie doesn't meet the same fate. Mobile phone makers will have to increase their R&D efforts. The world is on edge right now, wondering at the destructive capabilities of the humble walkie-talkie and the humbler pager in the hands of the unsuspecting human. (IPA Service)