At least 37 people have been killed and thousands of others injured after a series of explosions in Lebanon on Tuesday and Wednesday. First, thousands of pagers, carried by members of the Lebanese group, Hezbollah, exploded. Then, the following day, several walkie-talkies, again held by Hezbollah members, blew up. No one has claimed responsibility, but Hezbollah and Lebanon have blamed Israel. Most analysts are convinced that no other country could have — or would have — carried out these attacks. The blasts mark a dramatic escalation in the war that began in Israel and Gaza nearly a year ago, on October 7, but that has since spilled over into neighbouring nations, especially Lebanon. Hezbollah and Israel have exchanged fire throughout this period and many villages in southern Lebanon and communities in northern Israel have evacuated amid these attacks. Earlier this week, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, announced that the country was expanding its war goals to include the return of those displaced from the north — in effect, signalling a broadening of the conflict against Hezbollah. The latest attacks appear to indicate that this new phase of the war has begun. While Israel has assassinated senior Hezbollah commanders over the past year, the explosions of pagers and devices represent a scale of attack that has not been seen so far during the war.

But the target of these attacks was not just Hezbollah. Israel’s intelligence agencies have long enjoyed a reputation for technology-enabled killings and espionage operations — from hacking into phones with viruses to turning cell phones into bombs. Assassinations carried out using these tools have, until now, largely been of a targeted nature. Already, the war on Gaza had changed that dynamic within the Palestinian enclave, where Israel claims to have used Artificial Intelligence to identify targets and, yet, has killed more than 41,000 people, most of them women and children. The mass casualties caused by the explosions in Lebanon take that shift in approach to new levels of danger. At least two children are among those who have been killed in the explosions that occurred in public spaces. In most contexts, these would be called acts of terror. It is vital that the global community step in now to lay down red lines for what is unacceptablebehaviour by nations, especially those with sophisticated technology at their disposal. If the blasts in Lebanon are normalised, any country could be the victim next.