Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accepted that he had “okayed” the pager attacks in Lebanon, which had killed nearly 40 and wounded 3,000 Iran-backed Hezbollah members in September.
“Netanyahu confirmed Sunday that he greenlighted the pager operation in Lebanon,” his spokesperson Omer Dostri told news agency AFP.
Thousands of pagers exploded in Hezbollah strongholds on September 17 and 18 – which Iran and Hezbollah blamed on Israel. Some of the Hezbollah members who were injured reportedly lost their fingers, while some lost their eyesight.
Hezbollah had called the blasts an “Israeli breach” of its communications network and vowed to avenge the attack.
The pagers were used by Hezbollah members as a low-tech means of communication to evade Israeli location-tracking.
The blasts came just hours after Israel announced it was broadening the aims of the war sparked by Hamas’ October 7 attacks to include its fight against the group’s ally Hezbollah along the country’s border with Lebanon.
This week, Lebanon had filed a complaint with the United Nations Labour Agency over the deadly attack, calling it an “egregious war against humanity”.
Israel and Hezbollah have been fighting across the Lebanese border since the war in Gaza erupted after Hamas attacked Israeli towns on October 7 last year. Since then, several Hezbollah fighters, including former chief of the Iran-backed group Hassan Nasrallah, have been killed. Last month, Israel’s army also confirmed that it “eliminated” Hezbollah’s Hashem Safieddine, an apparent successor of Nasrallah, in a strike in southern Beirut.
On Thursday, Israel conducted airstrikes on Hezbollah’s main bastion in south Beirut, with one raid hitting an area near Lebanon’s only international airport – causing minor damage to some of the airport’s buildings, including flag carrier Middle East Airlines’ premises.
Since October last year, more than 3,000 people have been killed in Israeli strikes on Lebanon.