Gallant: Israel killed Hezbollah man who suspected pagers

New details were cleared for publication Monday evening by the military censor regarding the tense days that preceded the September 17, 2024 detonation of Hezbollah operatives' pagers. The details emerged in an interview former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant gave to Yonit Levy and Amit Segal a year and a half ago, but the censor blocked their release until now.

According to the report on Channel 12's main evening newscast, in the first week of August 2024 Israel's security establishment learned that a Hezbollah operative had begun to suspect or examine the pagers. Israel then eliminated him, but staged the hit to appear as though he was killed incidentally, and that the actual target was someone else, in order to obscure the fact that he was eliminated specifically because of his suspicion of the devices.

The report further disclosed that Iran subsequently sent testing and scanning equipment intended to examine the pagers. In response, Israel destroyed the scanning machines while creating incidents that led Hezbollah to conclude once again that the explosions were unrelated to the pagers.

This situation placed Israeli decision-makers in a sharp strategic dilemma: whether to activate the operation immediately out of fear the secret would be exposed at any moment, or to wait in order to reach the full implementation of the plan, which included detonating the walkie-talkies, an event that could have been far more dramatic.

"In the first week of August it becomes clear to us that there is someone who suspects the pagers, go to the elimination list and we eliminated him," Gallant said in the interview. "Afterwards it becomes clear to us that testing devices are arriving that could examine these devices along with other things. And then during the process it becomes clear that somewhere there are pagers being tested."

Beirut after the pager attack (Photo: Social media – used under Section 27a copyright exemption)

"The result is that you enter a situation, either you activate or it's exposed within a short time," Gallant added. "What is at stake is only one question, if you play it can you reach the full operation of walkie-talkies first. From constraint was born the strategic event."

It was also reported Monday evening that the inscription "M-tech" (Mossad-tech) was affixed to Hezbollah's pager devices, and Mossad operatives even filmed mocking videos around the fact that the enemy received these devices directly.

The pager attack in Lebanon on September 17, 2024 involved a coordinated series of explosions of thousands of pagers and hundreds of walkie-talkies belonging to Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon and Syria. At least 59 people were killed in the attack and approximately 4,500 were wounded, hundreds of them critically. Hezbollah's then-secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah described the attack as "an unprecedented blow in the history of the resistance in Lebanon."