Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave President Donald Trump an unusual gift during his most recent trip to Washington, D.C., this week — a gold-plated pager.
The present was a nod to the controversial mass attack believed to have been carried out by Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency against Hezbollah Sept. 17, 2024, in which thousands of pagers, walkie-talkie-like devices and radios simultaneously exploded across Lebanon and Syria around 3:30 p.m.
A statement from Netanyahu’s office to Fox News Digital said, “The pager symbolizes the prime minister’s decision that led to a turning point in the war and marked the beginning of Hezbollah’s strategic collapse.
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“This strategic operation reflects Israel’s strength, technological superiority and tactical ingenuity in confronting its adversaries.”
An image obtained by Fox News Digital showed the pager mounted to a wooden plaque with a message on the device that said, “Press with both hands,” accompanied by a double downward arrow sign, the same message that reportedly showed moments before the devices detonated.
The plaque also came with a message to Trump calling him Israel’s “greatest friend and ally.”
The statement appears to be the first time Netanyahu’s office has publicly commented on the strike against the terrorist network in the summer.
Though the attacks were intended to target Hezbollah terrorists, the explosions also injured, maimed and killed civilians, including at least two children. In total, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) reported that 32 people were killed and 3,250 others were injured.
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U.N. Human Rights experts condemned the operation and said the indiscriminate nature of the attacks amounted to “war crimes.”
“These attacks violate the human right to life, absent any indication that the victims posed an imminent lethal threat to anyone else at the time,” one expert told the OHCHR. “Such attacks require prompt, independent investigation to establish the truth and enable accountability for the crime of murder.”
Despite the limited number of terrorists killed in the widespread attacks, Israeli officials have championed the operation as a successful psychological blow to Hezbollah.
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Though Israel was immediately suspected of being involved in the reported years-in-the-making operation, Jerusalem had not officially confirmed its role publicly before.
However, by November 2024, Israeli reports revealed comments leaked from a Cabinet meeting in which Netanyahu was quoted as saying, “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.”
The prime minister’s comments were an apparent dig at former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who he fired just weeks prior to the comments over disagreements regarding the war effort against Hamas and Hezbollah.
Neither the White House nor the U.N. immediately responded to Fox News Digital’s requests for comment.
Yael Rotem-Kuriel contributed to this report.
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