Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted to having triggered the attack which killed and injured hundreds of people in possession of a Hezbollah pager, reveals AFP, echoed by BFMTV.
On September 17, hundreds of pagers, radio messaging systems allowing members or relatives of Lebanese Hezbollah to communicate with each other, imploded at the same time in the pockets of their owners. This action, which left 39 dead and around 3,000 injured according to the Lebanese authorities, has just been claimed, Sunday November 10, 2024, by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He claims to have himself given the green light to the launch of this attack, before the weekly Council of Ministers in Israel, specifies AFP, echoed by BFMTV.
The information, which had been put forward by the Israeli media, therefore turns out to be accurate. If the suspicions about the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, were supported, never until now had an official source confirmed that Tel Aviv was at the origin. The Lebanese armed group was already speaking of “Israeli hacking” the day after these numerous explosions.
A new escalation in the Middle East
Iranian state television announced that Iran’s ambassador to Beirut, Mojtaba Amani, had also been injured in the explosion of a pager. “He told us a few minutes ago that he was fine, that he was conscious and that there was no danger for him”added the media, which specifies that “the ambassador’s wound is superficial“. For the National Information Agency (ANI), it was a “unprecedented security incident that occurred in the southern suburbs of Beirut as well as in many Lebanese regions”. She directly attributed these attacks to “the enemy” Israeli, who allegedly hacked the pager system “via high technology”. The Lebanese government also condemned this “Israeli aggression”.
In retaliation, Hezbollah promised a “terrible punishment” to Israel and launched strikes in the Jewish state, which responded on September 23 with a bombing campaign in southern Lebanon. The day before, as the UN General Assembly opened, its Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, was concerned about this new escalation in the region and to see southern Lebanon becoming “another Gaza”.
