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.

Hezbollah fighters carry the coffins of a person killed after hundreds of paging devices exploded in a deadly wave across Lebanon the previous day, during their funeral procession in Beirut’s southern suburbs on September 18, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AFP

Japanese firm Icom said Thursday (September 19, 2024) that it had stopped producing the model of radios reportedly used in recent blasts in Lebanon around 10 years ago.

“The IC-V82 is a handheld radio that was produced and exported, including to the Middle East, from 2004 to October 2014. It was discontinued about 10 years ago, and since then, it has not been shipped from our company,” Icom said in a statement.

“The production of the batteries needed to operate the main unit has also been discontinued, and a hologram seal to distinguish counterfeit products was not attached, so it is not possible to confirm whether the product shipped from our company,” it said.

It added that products for overseas markets are sold exclusively through its authorized distributors, and that its export programme is based on Japanese security trade control regulations.

“All of our radios are manufactured at our production subsidiary, Wakayama Icom Inc., in Wakayama Prefecture, under a strict management system… so no parts other than those specified by our company are used in a product. In addition, all of our radios are manufactured at the same factory, and we do not manufacture them overseas,” the statement said.

In the second wave of device explosions in as many days, 20 people died and more than 450 were wounded on Wednesday (September 19, 2024) in Hezbollah strongholds in Lebanon, officials said.

A source close to Hezbollah said walkie-talkies used by its members blew up in its Beirut stronghold, with state media reporting similar blasts in south and east Lebanon.

They came a day after the simultaneous explosion of hundreds of paging devices used by Hezbollah killed 12 people, including two children, and wounded up to 2,800 others across Lebanon, in an unprecedented attack blamed on Israel.

There was no comment from Israel. The White House warned all sides against “an escalation of any kind”.