Israel carried out dozens of strikes on Thursday across southern Lebanon, three Lebanese security sources told Reuters, saying it was some of the most intense bombing since the start of the war in October.
Deadly Israeli attacks that blew up Hezbollah radios and pagers crossed all red lines, the leader of the heavily armed Iran-backed Lebanese movement said on Thursday, as the US called for restraint and urgent de-escalation.
Bulgaria and Norway became new focal points on Thursday in a global hunt for who supplied Hezbollah with the thousands of pagers that exploded in Lebanon this week in a deadly blow to the militant group.
Israel conducts dozens of strikes in South Lebanon
Israel carried out dozens of strikes on Thursday across southern Lebanon, three Lebanese security sources told Reuters, saying it was some of the most intense bombing since the start of the war in October.
The Israeli military confirmed late on Thursday that it struck dozens of Hezbollah targets, including rocket launchers and weapon depots in southern Lebanon.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened his close circle of ministers for consultations, Israel’s Channel 13 News reported.
Hezbollah chief denounces Israeli attacks
Deadly Israeli attacks that blew up Hezbollah radios and pagers crossed all red lines, the leader of the heavily armed Iran-backed Lebanese movement said on Thursday, as the US called for restraint and urgent de-escalation.
Lebanon and Hezbollah have blamed Israel for attacks on Hezbollah's communications equipment that killed 37 people and wounded around 3,000, overwhelming Lebanese hospitals and wreaking bloody havoc on the militant group.
Israel has not directly commented on the attacks, which security sources say were probably carried out by its Mossad spy agency, which has a long history of carrying out sophisticated attacks on foreign soil.
“There is no doubt that we have been subjected to a major security and military blow that is unprecedented in the history of the resistance and unprecedented in the history of Lebanon,” Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said in his TV address, filmed at an undisclosed location.
“This type of killing, targeting and crime may be unprecedented in the world,” he said, appearing in front of a featureless red background in his customary black turban.
The attacks “crossed all red lines”, he said. “The enemy went beyond all controls, laws and morals,” he said, adding the attacks “could be considered war crimes or a declaration of war”.
As the broadcast was aired, deafening sonic booms from Israeli warplanes shook Beirut, a sound that has become common in recent months but has taken on a greater significance as the threat of all-out war has steadily ramped up. Hezbollah reported that air strikes resumed in the border area in the afternoon.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said late on Thursday that Israel would keep up military action against Hezbollah.
“In the new phase of the war, there are significant opportunities but also significant risks. Hezbollah feels that it is being persecuted and the sequence of military actions will continue,” said Gallant.
“Our goal is to ensure the safe return of Israel’s northern communities to their homes. As time goes by, Hezbollah will pay an increasing price.”
Nasrallah said Hezbollah hoped Israeli troops would enter southern Lebanon because that would create a “historic opportunity” for the Iran-backed group.
No military escalation, killing, assassinations or all-out war would return Israeli residents to the border area, he added.
Whilst Nasrallah described the attacks as unprecedented, accusing Israel of trying to kill 5,000 people, he also played down the impact on Hezbollah, saying the group’s structure had not been shaken.
“Yes, we received a big and harsh blow, but this is also the nature of war,” said Nasrallah. “We know that our enemy has superiority on the technological level and we have never said otherwise.”
Israel would face “a crushing response from the axis of resistance”, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Commander Hossein Salami told Nasrallah on Thursday, according to state media.
Speaking in Paris, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged restraint, adding he did not want to see any escalatory actions by any party that make a Gaza ceasefire deal even more difficult.
The attacks on Hezbollah communications equipment sowed fear across Lebanon, with people abandoning electronic devices for fear of carrying bombs in their pockets.
Nasrallah said thousands of pagers had been targeted simultaneously, with some of the explosions happening in hospitals, pharmacies, markets, shops and streets busy with civilians, women and children. “With this operation, the enemy violated all laws and red lines,” he said.
Hezbollah fired missiles at Israel on the day after the 7 October cross-border attack by the Palestinian militant group Hamas which triggered the Gaza war, and since then constant exchanges of fire have occurred. Although neither side has allowed this to escalate into a full-scale war, it has led to the evacuation of tens of thousands of people from the border area on both sides.
Hand-held radios used by Hezbollah detonated on Wednesday across Lebanon, killing 25 people and wounding hundreds.
The previous day, hundreds of pagers — used by Hezbollah to evade mobile phone surveillance — exploded simultaneously, killing 12 people including at least two children, and injuring more than 2,300.
Hunt for origins of pager attack widens to Bulgaria, Norway
Bulgaria and Norway became new focal points on Thursday in a global hunt for who supplied Hezbollah with the thousands of pagers that exploded in Lebanon this week in a deadly blow to the militant group.
How and with whose help the pager attack was carried out was not yet known, although so far there were possible leads in Taiwan, Hungary and Bulgaria.
It is not clear how and when the pagers were weaponised so they could be remotely detonated. The same question remained for the hundreds of hand-held radios used by Hezbollah that exploded on Wednesday in a second wave of attacks.
One theory is that the pagers were intercepted and hooked up with explosives after they left factories. Another is that Israel orchestrated the whole deadly supply chain.
Bulgarian authorities said on Thursday that its interior ministry and state security services had opened an investigation into a company’s possible ties. They did not name the company they were investigating.
Local media reports said Sofia-based Norta Global Ltd had facilitated the sale of the pagers to Hezbollah. Citing security sources, national broadcaster bTV reported that a sum of €1.6-million related to the transaction passed through Bulgaria and was sent to Hungary.
Reuters could not immediately confirm the claim.
Emails sent to a Norta email listed on Bulgarian company registration records were returned as undeliverable. The firm’s founder declined to comment.
Images of destroyed pagers analysed by Reuters showed a format consistent with devices made by Taiwan’s Gold Apollo. Gold Apollo said on Wednesday that the pagers were made by BAC Consulting, a company based in the Hungarian capital, Budapest.
The owner and CEO of BAC Consulting, Cristiana Barsony-Arcidiacono, did not return multiple requests for comment by phone and text message.
On Wednesday, she told NBC News that her company worked with Gold Apollo but that she had nothing to do with the making of the pagers. “I am just the intermediate [sic]. I think you got it wrong,” she told NBC.
Hungarian news site Telex reported that the sale was facilitated by Norta Global Ltd, citing sources.
Norta’s Bulgarian headquarters are registered at an apartment building in the capital, Sofia, that is also home to nearly 200 other companies, according to a local company registry. There was no sign of Norta.
Content on Norta Global’s website, globalnorta.com, was deleted on Thursday. The website previously had English, Bulgarian and Norwegian language versions, and advertised services including consulting, technology integration, recruitment and outsourcing.
Norta’s founder, Rinson Jose, is based in Norway. He declined to comment on the pagers when reached by phone and hung up when asked about the Bulgarian business.
Amund Djuve, the CEO of DN Media, where Jose currently works, told Reuters he was aware of the reports and had alerted the police and security services. He said that Jose was travelling to the US.
“We are taking these matters very seriously,” said Djuve.
Oslo police said they had initiated “preliminary inquiries into the information that had come to light”.
Norway’s domestic intelligence agency, PST, said it was aware of the situation and declined to comment further.
There was no evidence of a link between DN Media and Norta.
Barsony-Arcidiacono of BAC Consulting, the Budapest-based company that was also linked to the sale of the pagers, vacated her apartment in Budapest on Wednesday, a neighbour told Reuters. Her door was ajar on Wednesday but closed on Thursday morning, said a Reuters reporter at the scene. No one answered the doorbell.
A Lebanese security source told Reuters that Hezbollah believed it was ordering the pagers from Gold Apollo and that they were produced in Asia, not Europe.
The source said Hezbollah considered it much easier for Israel’s Mossad spy agency to operate in Hungary.
“It is possible that the Mossad created a European company,” said the source.
Israel violated global child rights treaty in Gaza, says UN committee
A UN committee on Thursday accused Israel of severe breaches of a global treaty protecting children’s rights, saying its military actions in Gaza had a catastrophic impact on them and were among the worst violations in recent history.
Palestinian health authorities say 41,000 people have been killed in Gaza since Israel launched its military campaign in response to cross-border attacks by Hamas on 7 October where 1,200 were killed and 250 taken hostage, according to Israeli tallies.
Of those killed in Gaza, at least 11,355 were children, Palestinian data show, and thousands more were injured.
“The outrageous death of children is almost historically unique. This is an extremely dark place in history,” Bragi Gudbrandsson, vice-chair of the committee, told reporters.
“I don’t think we have seen before, a violation that is so massive, as we are seeing in Gaza now… These are extremely grave violations that we do not often see,” he said.
Israel accused the committee of having a “politically driven agenda”, in a statement sent by its diplomatic mission in Geneva.
US defence secretary ‘postpones Israel trip’
US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has postponed a planned trip next week to Israel amid the escalation on the Israeli-Lebanese border, a source familiar with the issue said on Thursday.
The source did not give a reason for the postponement.
The trip would have come at a time of heightened tensions in the region after attacks that blew up Hezbollah radios and pagers, which Lebanon and Hezbollah have blamed on Israel.
US warns all parties against escalation in the Middle East
The US on Thursday warned all parties in the Middle East against escalation as tensions between Iran-backed Lebanese movement Hezbollah and Israel remained high, saying Washington’s priority was to find a diplomatic solution.
“We will continue to stand by Israel’s right to defend itself, but we don’t want to see any party escalate this conflict, period,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told a regular briefing.
While calling for calm, Miller acknowledged the limits of US diplomacy.
“We have been engaged in the region for some time, and of course, since October 7th we have been engaged to try to bring down tensions. But ultimately, yes, every country is responsible, and every entity is responsible for the actions that they take.”
Japanese company denies making exploding walkie-talkies
The Japanese maker of the brand of walkie-talkies linked to explosions targeting the Hezbollah armed group that killed 25 people in Lebanon and injured hundreds of others said it could not have made the exploding devices.
“There’s no way a bomb could have been integrated into one of our devices during manufacturing. The process is highly automated and fast-paced, so there’s no time for such things,” Yoshiki Enomoto a director at Icom told Reuters outside the company’s headquarters in Osaka, Japan on Thursday.
Icom has said it halted production a decade ago of the radio models identified in the attack, and that most of those still on sale were counterfeit.
“If it turns out to be counterfeit, then we’ll have to investigate how someone created a bomb that looks like our product. If it’s genuine, we’ll have to trace its distribution to figure out how it ended up there,” said Enomoto.
A company representative for Power Group in Lebanon, which says it is the sole official distributor of Icom in the country, said it did not import the model that detonated on Wednesday and that there were no detonations in its stores or warehouses.
The representative, who declined to be identified, said the model that detonated on Wednesday was discontinued by Icom in 2014 and that Power Group only imports models still in production.
Macron urges restraint in Lebanon after wave of explosions
French President Emmanuel Macron held phone calls with top political and military leaders from Lebanon as well as a separate call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, urging restraint after a wave of explosions of pagers and radio devices.
Macron asked Lebanese leaders to pass on messages to local groups including Hezbollah to avoid further escalation, the Elysee said, amid fears of a wider war. DM
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