Netanyahu displays pager at UN, references 2024 Hezbollah attack

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has displayed a pager at the UN General Assembly, invoking a deadly 2024 covert sabotage operation targeting Hezbollah in Lebanon that killed dozens and severely wounded thousands, including women and children.

Thousands of pagers carried by Hezbollah members exploded across Lebanon on September 17, 2024, followed by hundreds of weaponized walkie-talkies the next day. The attacks killed dozens and injured up to 4,000 people, including numerous civilian bystanders, healthcare workers and their families. Israel later acknowledged responsibility for the operation.

Speaking at the General Assembly on Thursday, Netanyahu held up a pager, saying: “You remember the beepers? Remember these?” He added: “Hezbollah certainly remembers them.”

Scores of delegates walked out as Netanyahu took the podium, leaving much of the hall empty. The Palestinian mission had urged other delegations to join the protest.

Netanyahu struck a confrontational tone throughout the speech, branding delegates who walked out “moral cowards” and lashing out at several of Israel’s regional and international critics. He called Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan a “tyrant,” accused Qatar of trying to “brainwash” young Americans, and predicted that Iran’s government would eventually fall.

He also held up a Starlink terminal, saying he would leave it for the Iranian delegation to use when its members “inevitably defect.”

Netanyahu publicly confirmed Israel’s role in in the pager attack in November 2024, while his spokesman said the prime minister had personally approved it. Two former senior Mossad agents later told CBS that the Israeli intelligence agency had spent years preparing the operation, using shell companies to secretly insert the explosive devices into Hezbollah’s supply chain.

During a White House meeting in February 2025, Netanyahu presented US President Donald Trump with a gold-plated pager and a regular one in reference to the attack. Trump reportedly called it “a great operation.”

The pager attack marked what Israeli officials described as a “new phase” of Israel’s war with Hezbollah and was followed by an intensified military campaign in Lebanon. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Beirut later that month, before Israeli forces launched ground incursions into southern Lebanon.

Fighting flared again in March 2026, when Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel following the outbreak of the US-Israeli war on Iran. A US-brokered ceasefire in June largely halted major Israeli strikes on Beirut, although Israeli forces continue to occupy parts of southern Lebanon and carry out attacks elsewhere in the country. More than 4,000 people have been killed and over 12,000 wounded in Israeli attacks on Lebanon since March, according to the country’s Health Ministry.