Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted for the first time during Sunday's weekly cabinet meeting that Israel was behind the pager and walkie-talkie attacks on Hezbollah in September, according to quotes leaked to Hebrew media.

Thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies containing explosives detonated on their Hezbollah owners across Lebanon and parts of Syria on September 16 and 17.

The pager explosions occurred after almost a year of incessant rocket and drone attacks on Israel by the Hezbollah terror group, which began a day after Hamas's October 7 massacre and led to the evacuation of some 60,000 residents from northern Israel towns on the border with Lebanon.


"The pager operation and the elimination of [Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah were carried out despite the opposition of senior officials in the defense establishment and those responsible for them in the political echelon," Netanyahu reportedly said, in a clear dig at recently fired defense minister Yoav Gallant.

In the lead-up to the explosions, Gallant said the focus of Israel's military activities would be shifting to the northern front.

Netanyahu and Gallant have clashed repeatedly over the course of their time in government together. In March 2023, Netanyahu fired Gallant a day after the then-defense minister called for pausing the legislation process of the government's contentious judicial overhaul plans, which he said caused divisions that posed a threat to national security.

He was reinstated less than a month later, however, and was at the helm of the Defense Ministry when Hamas committed its deadly terror assault in southern Israel on October 7 last year. He remained in his post throughout the subsequent war in the Gaza Strip, the fighting on the northern border, and the ground operation in southern Lebanon.

Gallant said in a press conference Tuesday he was ultimately fired due to his positions on the need to draft Haredi men to the IDF, the imperative to bring back the hostages from Gaza, and the need for a state commission of inquiry in the October 7 Hamas terror onslaught and ensuing war.

In an apparent attempt to avoid being held responsible for the country's security oversights, Netanyahu has blamed Israel's security forces for failure to foresee Hamas's October 7 massacre and resisted calls for a public commission of inquiry to be established into events leading up to it.

Israel has not publicly taken responsibility for the attack targeting Hezbollah that saw the pagers and walkie-talkies explode in two waves on September 17 and 18, killing at least 39 people.

Lebanon said nearly 3,000 others were wounded in the attack. The tolls did not differentiate between civilians and members of the terror group, and among the wounded was Tehran's ambassador to Lebanon Mojtaba Amani. A Hezbollah official told Reuters a week later that the attacks put 1,500 of the group's fighters out of commission due to their injuries, with many having been blinded or had their hands blown off.

In the aftermath, various media outlets reported that the attack was a highly sophisticated Israeli intelligence operation years in the making in which Hezbollah was fooled into purchasing the compromised devices.

The explosions were followed up by a series of Israeli airstrikes that took out much of Hezbollah's command structure, including Nasrallah, and an ongoing limited ground operation in southern Lebanon to eliminate the immediate threats posed by the terror group to Israel's northern border communities.

The attacks on northern Israel since October 2023 have resulted in the deaths of 40 civilians. In addition, 61 IDF soldiers and reservists have died in cross-border skirmishes and in the ground operation launched in southern Lebanon in late September. Two soldiers were killed in a drone attack from Iraq, and there have been several attacks from Syria, as well, without any injuries.

The Lebanese health ministry announced on Monday that the country's death toll in the Israel-Hezbollah war had crossed 3,000. The figure does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. The IDF estimates that some 3,000 Hezbollah operatives have been killed in the conflict. Around 100 members of other terror groups have also been reported killed in Lebanon.
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