Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accepted that he “approved” the pager attacks in Lebanon that killed nearly 40 Iranian-backed Hezbollah members in September.
“Netanyahu confirmed on Sunday that he gave the green light for the pager operation in Lebanon,” his spokesman Omer Dostri told the AFP news agency.
On September 17 and 18, thousands of pagers exploded in Hezbollah strongholds, which Iran and Hezbollah blamed on Israel. Some of the injured Hezbollah members reportedly lost their fingers, while some lost their eyesight.
Hezbollah called the blasts an “Israeli intrusion” into its communications network and vowed to avenge the attack.
The pagers were used by Hezbollah members as a low-tech communications tool to evade tracking of Israeli locations.
The blasts came just hours after Israel announced it would expand the aims of the war, sparked by the October 7 Hamas attacks, to include the 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 Labor Organization over the deadly attack, calling it a “blatant war against humanity.”
Israel and Hezbollah have been fighting over the Lebanese border since war broke out in Gaza after Hamas attacked Israeli cities on October 7 last year. Since then, several Hezbollah fighters have been killed, including the former leader of the Iran-backed group Hassan Nasrallah. Last month, the Israeli military also confirmed that it “eliminated” Hezbollah’s Hashem Safieddine, an apparent successor to Nasrallah, in an attack in southern Beirut.
On Thursday, Israel carried out airstrikes on Hezbollah’s main bastion in southern Beirut, with one strike hitting an area near Lebanon’s only international airport and causing minor damage to some of the airport’s buildings, including those of the national carrier Middle East Airlines.
More than 3,000 people have been killed in Israeli attacks on Lebanon since October last year.