In first, Netanyahu said to admit Israel carried out pager attacks on Hezbollah

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.

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.