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Iranian operatives recently claimed they given Hezbollah militants an EMP weapon.
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A powerful EMP, as Iran claims, could damage Israel’s communications and power grid.
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“It is reasonable to assume that Iran has looked at these types of weapons,” a retired general said.
Amid the tit-for-tat shelling and threat-trading across the Israel-Lebanon border, one recently leveled menace stands out — that Hezbollah has a weapon capable of knocking out Israel’s electrical grid.
Reports have circulated among Arab media that Iran has given the Lebanese militant group it arms and trains a category of weapons that could damage much more than military bases, a type of weapon known as an electromagnetic pulse weapon or EMP. It could be real, or a bluff to get nuclear-armed Israel to think twice.
Sources in the Quds Force — a part of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — allegedly told Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Jarida that “the Lebanese party now possesses bombs and missiles carrying explosive ‘electromagnetic’ warheads.”
The source said that “the bombs delivered to the party [Hezbollah] could be launched from fixed launchers, and some of them could be carried by drones to reach any point deep inside Israel.” These weapons “could destroy all communications systems, including the electrical infrastructure, and thus halt all electronic systems that Israel relies on to coordinate its radars, aircraft, and forces in general.”
Nor would Israel’s allies be immune should Israel attack Lebanon. The Americans, British and “and everyone who might try to cover up Israel’s inability” would be targeted. The story was quickly picked up by Israeli media.
Assessing the credibility of the Iranian EMP threat is difficult. If oil is Iran’s top export, then its number two export is bluster to the world about supposedly cutting-edge military capabilities, including a “stealth fighter” unveiled in both 2013 and 2017 that was likely neither stealthy nor flyable. One reason for the posturing is to conceal the fact that Iran’s conventional military equipment, such as jets, tanks and anti-aircraft missiles, are decrepit Cold War-era systems that would be hopelessly overmatched by US, Israeli and European weapons.
However, Iran has spent years investing in the development of nuclear weapons (whether research has stopped as Iran claims, or continues as Israel and some Americans claim, is a matter of contentious debate). It has demonstrated genuine capabilities in developing a variety of ballistic missiles and drones, with Tehran exporting its Shahed-136 attack drone to Russia. All of which suggests that Iran has the means to hit Israel and Europe, but it doesn’t tell us whether the EMP warheads themselves exist.
Or, what kind of EMP weapons they would be. When electromagnetic pulse weapons are mentioned in the news, or in apocalyptic movies and novels, they tend to be of the nuclear kind, generated either as a byproduct of nuclear weapons aimed at targets such as cities, or deliberately detonating nuclear weapons in space to generate EMP effects. Either way, the result would be the total disruption of the modern lifestyle as the spreading pulse fries circuits in the electrical grid, damages communications and other satellites, and disrupts global cell phone and GPS service.
However, there are also non-nuclear EMP weapons (NNEMP), devices that can be carried in a suitcase or a missile’s warhead, and that use explosives or high-power microwave emitters to generate a destructive pulse is similar that of a nuclear weapon, “except less energetic and of much shorter radius,” explained the US government’s EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security in a 2021 report.
“NNEMP weapons can be built relatively inexpensively using commercially available parts and design information available on the internet. EMP simulators that can be carried and operated by one man, and used as an NNEMP weapon, are available commercially.” Nuclear EMP pulses can travel hundreds of miles depending on their altitude of detonation, while NNEMP devices only have ranges of about 5 miles.
Iran does have a nuclear program, and probably could build a nuclear EMP weapon if it wanted to. The 2015 nuclear deal Iran’s nuclear weapons program in return for lifted sanctions. But the Trump administration withdrew from the agreement amid fears that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action agreement failed to address other issues, such as Iranian ballistic missiles and support for terrorism, and that Iran could have still covertly develop nuclear weapons. Since then, Iran has periodically enriched its uranium stockpile, a necessary step in building nuclear weapons.
However, an Iranian nuclear device — whether intended solely for EMP effects or not — could trigger a host of consequences, especially by inducing Israel to make good on its threat to launch a strike against Iranian nuclear facilities (and with American forces joining in, Jerusalem hopes). But a non-nuclear EMP weapon might enable Iran to sidestep any red lines.
“I think it is reasonable to assume that Iran has looked at these types of weapons, either through their own proliferation efforts or through their growing linkages and relationships with Russia, China and North Korea,” retired Gen. Joseph Votel, former head of US Central Command, told Business Insider.
“I do believe they would look at EMP as a weapon that could be employed in ‘gray zone’ activities below the level of open conflict,” said Votel, now a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, a Washington-based think tank. “Especially if it could be employed with more targeted results, like knocking out electronics in a specific geographic area.”
But this raises another question: would Iran give EMP weapons to Hezbollah, its most important proxy? “Of all members of the so-called Axis of Resistance, Hezbollah would be a likely candidate to receive these types of weapons,” Votel said. “But I have not seen any evidence that this is the case. Like most special capabilities, there is a level of training and sophistication that must accompany its deployment.”
Given the small size of Israel — about the size of New Jersey — it wouldn’t take that many EMP devices to cause serious harm. At the least, a few non-nuclear EMP bombs over Northern Israel would hamper Israeli military and civil communications and facilitate a surprise Hezbollah attack. A large-scale attack, by contrast, could trigger enough outages to dent Israel’s half-trillion-dollar annual economy.
But this would also run the risk that Israel would treat it as an attack by weapons of mass destruction, similar to a nuclear or chemical weapons strike. Israel is believed to have almost 100 nuclear weapons, and Hezbollah EMP weapons could be viewed as a WMD strike by Iran, which already launched hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel in an April 2024 attack. It’s also possible that Israel would reply in kind with its own EMP strikes that blackout southern Lebanon or even Beirut.
The common denominator of Iranian security policy is to use proxies like Hezbollah to expand Iran’s influence and undermine its enemies, but without triggering an attack on the Iranian homeland. Giving EMP weapons to Hezbollah would risk the possibility that Israel and other nations would hold Iran responsible.
Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds an MA in political science from Rutgers Univ. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.
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