Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday said that attacking Hezbollah in October 2023 would have been a “horrible mistake,” claiming that there were only around 150 booby-trapped beepers in Hezbollah hands on that date “as opposed to thousands that we accumulated” in the months leading up to the September 2024 pager attack.
Netanyahu told the Israeli Channel 14 network that he blocked then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s October 11 proposal to take out Hezbollah’s rockets and leadership because it would be “a horrible mistake” to open a two-front war so soon after the Hamas attacks of October 7.
In return, Gallant pushed back against Netanyahu’s assertions.
“The pager operation was prepared years before the war and was ready for activation on October 11,” Gallant wrote in a post on X.
“Contrary to what was said, thousands of pagers were in the hands of the terrorists by the time I suggested attacking Hezbollah,” he affirmed.
He then said that had the plan been activated back in October 2023, the damage caused by the pagers would have been secondary to the damage caused by the walkie-talkie devices, which were also rigged with explosives.
While dozens of Hezbollah operatives were killed and thousands more were wounded in the September 16-17, 2024 pager and walkie-talkie attacks, far more were put out of commission by the pager blasts than by the walkie-talkies.
The reason for this, Gallant wrote on X, was because by September 2024, “the vast majority of walkie-talkies were in warehouses, and their explosion caused no damage.”
