Lebanon blasts: impossible to know if walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah were ‘from our company’, says Japanese firm – live

Lorenzo Tondo

Lorenzo Tondo reports from Jerusalem for the Guardian:

The head of the UN relief agency for Palestinians, Unrwa, said in a statement on Thursday that “too many of our staff are being killed as our buildings are attacked’’ in Gaza.

Commissioner general of Unrwa, Phlippe Lazzarini, says that the UN agency “continues to be the target of a barrage of misinformation & disinformation.”

In the statement he said:

This includes attempts to justify the killing of staff by labelling them operatives of armed groups like Hamas. Such horrific claims, made publicly, are not backed by evidence and are dangerous. Most importantly, they instigate fear among our humanitarian frontline workers in Gaza.

Several colleagues told us they no longer feel safe to put on the Unrwa vest. Their children are begging them not to go to work fearing they might be killed while in Unrwa buildings. The misinformation attacks are not about the neutrality of Unrwa or our humanitarian workers.

Lazzarini said these attempts were aimed at

• creation of a distraction from the atrocities of this war

• dehumanisation by rendering the unbearable justifiable

• undermining and eliminating Unrwa

He added “Everyone has a responsibility to control the spread of inaccurate or malicious information. Before sharing, check the facts to avoid the trap of putting the lives of others at risk.”

Last week, Unrwa said six staff members had been killed in two airstrikes that hit al-Jaouni school in Nuseirat, in central Gaza – the highest death toll among its staff in a single incident. The Israel Defense Forces claimed the strikes killed nine Hamas members, three of whom had doubled as Unrwa workers.

Unrwa, one of the UN’s largest agencies, has 13,000 staff working in Gaza and more than 30,000 in the region providing health and educational facilities to Palestinian refugees.

Lazzarini called for an independent investigation, pointing out the total number of Unrwa staff killed in the conflict since 7 October last year had reached 220.

Allegations of the involvement of Unrwa staff in the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel led major donors in January to cut their funding to the agency, the main channel of humanitarian support not only to Palestinians in Gaza but to Palestinian refugee communities across the region.

In August, the UN fired nine staff members from Unrwa, after an internal investigation found they may have been involved in the Hamas-led 7 October attack against Israel.

The UN secretary general’s office announced the move in a brief statement on Monday. It did not elaborate on the Unrwa staffers’ possible role in the attack. It said the nine included seven staffers who were fired previously over the claims.

Heather Stewart

In our First Edition newsletter today, my colleague Heather Stewart has spoken to our defence and security editor Dan Sabbagh. Here is a snippet:

Targeting Hezbollah directly is not new: Benjamin Netanyahu’s government claimed to have killed a Hezbollah leader in an airstrike on Beirut in July, for example. But the widespread and indiscriminate nature of Tuesday’s blasts represented a significant escalation.

Israel’s much-feared intelligence agency, the Mossad, has a long history of meticulously planned assassinations. But as Dan points out, the sophistication required to plant explosives, physically, inside what appears to have been a job lot of deadly devices, is on a different level.

When Hezbollah opted to switch to the low-tech option of pagers, he says, it was “so well penetrated by Israeli intelligence,” that they knew the changeover was happening, and were able to “physically compromise the supply chain,” to put explosives inside the devices.

Add in the reports suggesting the US was tipped off that something was about to happen, says Dan, and “all in all, it looks like a state operation. It looks like Israel. It looks like Mossad”.

It is unclear, Dan says, what strategic aim Israel’s scattergun attacks achieved, unless they were simply intended as a provocation.

“Hezbollah will be under some pressure to respond: and it raises the question, does Israel want Hezbollah to respond? Does Israel want Hezbollah to make a move that will force Israel, in turn, into an even more aggressive move, and perhaps start a war?”

Read more here: Thursday briefing – what the attack on Hezbollah means for a fractious Middle East

Impossible to know if walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah were ‘from our company’, says Japanese firm

Justin McCurry

Justin McCurry is the Guardian’s Tokyo correspondent

Icom, the Japanese communication equipment maker whose walkie-talkies are thought to have been detonated in Lebanon on Wednesday, said the devices may have been a discontinued model containing modified batteries.

“We can’t rule out the possibility that they are fakes, but there is also a chance the products are our IC-V82 model,” Icom’s director, Yoshiki Enomoto, said, according to the Kyodo news agency. The firm sold around 160,000 units of the model in Japan and overseas before ending production and sales in 2014.

Images of the devices used in the Lebanon attacks showing damage to their battery area indicated the power packs may have been replaced with those that had been modified to explode, Enomoto said.

The Osaka-based company said it was not clear how the devices had ended up in the Middle East. “It is difficult to determine the distribution channels without checking the serial numbers,” Kyodo quoted Enomoto as saying.

Icom said the IC-V82 handheld radio had been exported overseas, including to the Middle East, between 2004 and 2014.

“The production of the batteries needed to operate the main unit has also been discontinued, and a hologram seal to distinguish counterfeit products was not attached, so it is not possible to confirm whether the product shipped from our company,” it said in a statement on its website. It added that products for overseas markets are sold exclusively through its authorised distributors, and that its export programme is based on Japanese security trade control regulations.

Icom said all of its radios are manufactured “under a strict management system” at a subsidiary production site in Wakayama prefecture in western Japan. “No parts other than those specified by our company are used in a product,” it said. “In addition, all of our radios are manufactured at the same factory, and we do not manufacture them overseas.”

Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s continuing coverage of crisis in the Middle East.

After a second wave of device explosions suspected to be an Israeli attack targeting Hezbollah members in Lebanon killed 20, focus is now turning to the manufacturer of the walkie-talkies reportedly used in the blasts.

Images of the exploded walkie-talkies examined by Reuters showed an inside panel labeled “ICOM” and “made in Japan.” However Icom has said it stopped producing the model of radios reportedly used in the blasts about 10 years ago.

“The IC-V82 is a handheld radio that was produced and exported, including to the Middle East, from 2004 to October 2014. It was discontinued about 10 years ago, and since then, it has not been shipped from our company,” Icom said in a statement.

Wednesday’s blasts, came a day after the simultaneous explosion of hundreds of paging devices used by Hezbollah killing 12 people, including two children. Hezbollah blamed the unprecedented attack on Israel.

More on this in a moment, first here’s a summary of they day’s other main events.

• Israel has not claimed responsibility for the attacks in Lebanon on Tuesday and Wednesday. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, vowed in a brief statement on Wednesday to return tens of thousands of residents evacuated from northern border areas to their homes.

• Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, declared the start of a “new phase” of the war with a focus on the northern front. Gallant, speaking to Israeli troops on Wednesday, did not mention the explosions of devices in Lebanon but he praised the work of Israel’s army and security agencies, noting that the “results are very impressive”.

• Hezbollah on Tuesday promised a “fair punishment” for the explosions. Lebanon’s Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah is expected to give a speech on Thursday. Reports suggest Israel managed to place explosives in thousands of pagers bought by Hezbollah.

• The US was not involved “in any way” in the wave of explosions that took place in Lebanon on Tuesday and Wednesday, the White House claimed. National security adviser John Kirby told reporters on that it was “too soon to know” if the explosions aimed at Hezbollah across recent days would have an impact on a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas.

• Hezbollah said it had attacked Israeli artillery positions with rockets on Wednesday in the first cross-border attack since the Tuesday pager blasts. An Israeli journalist said a barrage of 10 rockets was fired from Lebanon at western Galilee, causing no injuries.

• The UN secretary general, António Guterres, was “deeply alarmed” by reports that a large number of communication devices exploded across Lebanon and Syria on Tuesday and Wednesday. The UN security council will meet on Friday to discuss the wave of device explosions across Lebanon targeting Hezbollah. The UN’s high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, said those responsible for the explosions “must be held to account”.

• The EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, described the pager detonations in Lebanon as “extremely worrying”, and said they had caused “heavy, indiscriminate collateral damages among civilians”. Irish foreign minister Micheál Martin said the pager detonations showed a “wanton disregard” for the lives of civilians.

• In a symbolic step exposing Israel’s continued international isolation, the UN general assembly has voted overwhelmingly to direct Israel to leave the occupied Palestinian territories within a year. The non-binding vote follows a historic advisory ruling in July by the international court of justice (ICJ) urging Israel to cease “its unlawful presence in the occupied Palestinian territory as soon as possible and stop all settlement activity there immediately”.