Israel has confirmed for the first time that it was behind the pager and radio attacks that killed or wounded thousands of members of the Hezbollah terrorist group in September, as Israel prepared for a ground war against the group.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally approved the attacks, his office’s spokesperson said on Nov. 11.
“Netanyahu confirmed Sunday [Nov. 10] that he greenlighted the pager operation in Lebanon,” his spokesperson Omer Dostri said.
Netanyahu discussed the attack during a closed-door cabinet meeting, saying senior defense officials and political figures opposed the pagers’ detonations but that he went ahead with it.
Israeli media interpreted it as tied to Netanyahu’s firing of Defense Minister Yoav Gallant the previous week.
Netanyahu fired Gallant on Nov. 5. The two had long differed on, among other things, how Israel should handle its wars in Gaza and Lebanon.
Gallant was close to U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Netanyahu fired him on Election Day, as former President Donald Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris.
Netanyahu appointed Foreign Minister Israel Katz to replace Gallant.
On Sept. 17, thousands of pagers simultaneously exploded in Beirut’s southern suburbs and other Hezbollah strongholds, in most cases after the devices beeped to indicate an incoming message.
In a second wave of the attack, handheld radios exploded the next day.
The attack killed 39 people but wounded more than 3,400. Many lost fingers or hands, had eye injuries, or suffered severe wounds to their abdomens.
Among the wounded was Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon. The Iranian regime backs and bankrolls Hezbollah.
Hezbollah operatives had been using pagers instead of phones as a low-tech means of communication in an attempt to avoid Israeli location tracking.
Israel followed the attack with the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in an air strike on Sept. 27 on the Beirut suburb of Dahieh, the site of Hezbollah’s headquarters.
The pager attack took place just hours after Israel announced it was broadening the aims of the war sparked by Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks to include Israel’s fight against the group’s ally Hezbollah along the country’s border with Lebanon.
Hezbollah joined Hamas on Oct. 8, 2023, in attacking Israel.
But while Israeli military strategists say the terror group had initially planned to send terrorists over the border to attack communities, it was deterred by the Israel Defense Forces’ immediate bolstering of its northern forces.
Instead, it limited itself to rocket attacks, often launching 100 or more daily. The barrages forced the evacuation of about 45 border communities to which residents, more than a year later, have not yet returned.
On Sept. 30, the IDF began a long-awaited ground offensive into Lebanon’s border towns to uproot Hezbollah there and restore security to Israel’s border communities.
