Gallant contradicts Netanyahu on pager attacks as rift widens
Former Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant has contradicted Prime Minister Netanyahu’s account of Israel’s pager attack against Hezbollah in Lebanon, as a rift between the two plays out in Israeli media.
In an interview with Channel 14, Netanyahu discussed his decision to overrule a push by Gallant to carry out the pager attack in October 2023. Netanyahu said it would have been a “horrible mistake” to detonate them then as there were only around 150 pagers in the hands of Hezbollah members at the time, “as opposed to thousands” accumulated in the months leading up to the September 2024 attacks.
Around 37 people were killed and some 3,000 wounded across Lebanon as Israel remotely detonated booby trapped pagers and then communications devices in two attacks targeting Hezbollah members.
Gallant denied Netanyahu’s account of events, saying the operation had been “prepared years before the war” and that by October 2023, it was “ready for operation”.
“If we had launched the operation on October 11, the explosion of the pagers would have been secondary to the explosion of the radios, which would have eliminated thousands of Hezbollah terrorists,” Gallant said in a post on X.
“Unfortunately, when we were forced to launch the operation, the vast majority of the radios were in warehouses and their explosion caused no damage.”
Both Netanyahu and Gallant are subject to arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court, as they stand accused of carrying out war crimes in Gaza.
Israel’s intelligence chief to be reprimanded for criticising Trump’s Gaza plan
Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz has ordered Israeli army chief Herzi Halevi to reprimand the head of the military intelligence directorate Shlomi Binder, after he warned that Trump’s plans to take over Gaza would result in an escalation of violence in the occupied West Bank.
“There will be no reality in which [Israeli army] officers will speak out against US President Trump’s important plan regarding Gaza, and against the directives of the political echelon,” Katz said in a statement cited by The Times of Israel newspaper.
“I ordered the [army] to prepare to advance the plan for the voluntary departure of Gaza residents who would be interested in leaving to various places in the world, and that is exactly what the [army] is required to do and will do,” he added.
Trump’s Gaza plan may place Egypt-Israel peace deal at risk: Report
We’ve been reporting on Egypt and Jordan’s firm rejection of President Trump’s proposal to displace Gaza’s population, as both countries warn it will wreak havoc in the region and fuel further violence.
The Associated Press news agency, quoting unnamed diplomatic sources, has revealed more details about the backdoor discussions underway in Cairo. It reports that Egyptian officials have told the Trump administration it will resist the plan and it risks jeopardising its peace deal with Israel – which has stood for nearly half a century.
Another anonymous official said this message was conveyed to the Pentagon, the State Department and members of US Congress. A second official said Israel and its allies, Britain, France and Germany, had also been informed.
A unnamed Western diplomat in Cairo said Egypt was very serious about its position and viewed Trump’s proposal as a threat to its national security. They added that the Biden administration had privately approached Egypt with a similar proposal early in the war, which was also rejected.
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