05-02-2025
Benjamin Netanyahu gives Donald Trump a golden pager to celebrate ‘amazing' Hezbollah attack
Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly gifted Donald Trump a golden pager, a symbolic reference to the covert operation that turned Hezbollah devices into lethal explosives in a bloody attack last year.
'That was a great operation,' the US president responded, according to Israel's Channel 12 news.
Trump then gave Mr Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, a photo of the two of them from the visit with the inscription: 'To Bibi, a great leader.'
The synchronised detonation of thousands of low-tech electronic pagers on Sept 18 killed at least 12 people – including two children and two healthcare workers – and injured more than 3,000 across Lebanon and Syria.
Thousands of Taiwan-built Gold Apollo pagers exploded across Hezbollah strongholds when device owners responded to a text saying they had received an encrypted message by attempting to decode it.
Two thirds of those wounded in the wide-ranging attack needed hospitalisation. Doctors described 'apocalyptic' scenes inside emergency rooms as a near-constant flow of young men, women and children poured in for hours after the attack.
The sophisticated ambush, swiftly attributed to Israel, was followed by another attack where hundreds of Hezbollah walkie-talkies laced with a highly explosive compound known as PETN simultaneously erupted the following day.
It was reported that up to three grams of explosives hidden in the devices had gone undetected for months by Hezbollah.
The assault heightened tensions between the two forces which had been locked in intensifying border clashes for nearly a year.
'You had to push two buttons to read the message,' said one Israeli intelligence official, adding that the intention was that the blast would 'wound both their hands' in a ploy to maximise their wounds.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) warned that the attack could be a violation of international humanitarian law through its use of pagers as booby traps that could be 'associated with normal civilian daily use'.
Lama Fakih, the Middle East and North Africa director at HRW, said: 'The use of an explosive device whose exact location could not be reliably known would be unlawfully indiscriminate… and as a result would strike military targets and civilians without distinction.'
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