Lebanon pager explosions – latest: Attack on Hezbollah devices kills 32

The Vice-President of the European Commission has joined calls for an independent investigation into the attacks on Lebanon.

In a statement issued on Wednesday, Josep Borrell said: “I firmly condemn today’s new attack via the explosion of a high number of electronic devices across Lebanon, which has caused several casualties and a high number of injuries. Once again, the indiscriminate method used is unacceptable due to the inevitable and heavy collateral damages among civilians, and the broader consequences for the entire population, including fear and terror, and the collapse of hospitals.

“Whoever is behind these attacks aims to spread terror in Lebanon. I join UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk’s assessment of the incident and the call for an independent investigation.

“The risk of military escalation, with devastating consequences for the entire region, requires an urgent mobilisation. The European Union will continue to do its utmost to support the voices of peace and reason.”

Restrictions on UK arms exports to Israel are “fair” and “proportionate”, Business and Trade Secretary Jonathan Reynolds has said.

The UK suspended some arms export licences to Israel earlier this month over concerns the country is violating international humanitarian law in Gaza.

Mr Reynolds said the existing arms rules still allow Israel to “defend itself” against Lebanon.

He said the decision on ending about 30 of some 350 arms export licences to Israel “falls to me” and that he takes “personal responsibility” for explaining the impact.

He told LBC: “The findings that were passed to me from the Foreign Office, from the Foreign Secretary, that there was a risk that Israel was not complying with international humanitarian law in relation to detainees and access to aid, mean that I have to act.

“I set the scope of the limitations, the restrictions that we put in place. I did so to restrict those licences to the conflict in Gaza, making sure that Israel can still be in a position to defend itself against Hezbollah and Lebanon.”

He added: “The decision we took was fair, was proportionate, was consistent with international law, and fundamentally what we need, what everyone needs in the Middle East, is a ceasefire in that conflict.

“That is in Israel’s interest. I think it’s in everyone’s interest to make sure we get there, but we will always comply with international law as a Government, I think you would expect that of the UK Government.

“But I was cognisant of the risk in the north, from Lebanon, from Hezbollah, and made sure the restrictions we put in place reflected that situation.”

Bulgaria will investigate a company linked to the sale of pagers to Lebanon’s militant group Hezbollah that exploded this week in a coordinated attack, the state security agency said on Thursday.

Bulgaria’s state security agency, DANS, said in a statement that it is working with the interior ministry to probe the role of a company registered in Bulgaria, without naming it.

Bulgarian media reports allege that a Sofia-based company called Norta Global Ltd had facilitated the sale of the pagers, which exploded across Lebanon on Tuesday, killing 11 people and wounding 4,000.

Reuters was not immediately able to confirm the link to Norta. Company officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A lawyer that registered the company at an apartment block in Sofia did not respond to Reuters questions.

Images of destroyed pagers analysed by Reuters showed a format consistent with pagers made by Taiwan Gold Apollo. Gold Apollo said on Wednesday that the pagers were made by Budapest-based BAC Consulting.

But Hungarian news site Telex reported that the sale was actually facilitated by Norta, citing sources.

The Bulgarian state security agency said that it did not detect any shipments of the suspected pagers on Bulgarian territory.

Germany has put a hold on new exports of weapons of war to Israel while it deals with legal challenges, according to a Reuters analysis of data and a source close to the Economy Ministry.

A source close to the ministry cited a senior government official as saying it had stopped work on approving export licences for arms to Israel due to legal and political pressure from legal cases arguing that such exports from Germany breached humanitarian law.

The Economy Ministry said on Thursday there was no ban on arms exports to Israel and there would not be one, with decisions made case-by-case after careful review, adding that international law, foreign and security policy were key factors in their assessments.

“There is no German arms export boycott against Israel,” a spokesperson for government said on Wednesday, commenting on the report.

Last year, Germany approved arms exports to Israel worth 326.5 million euros ($363.5 million), including military equipment and war weapons, a 10-fold increase from 2022, according to data from the Economy Ministry, which approves export licences.

However approvals have dropped this year, with only 14.5 million euros’ worth granted from January to Aug. 21, according to data provided by the Economy Ministry in response to a parliamentary question.

Of this, the weapons of war category accounted for only 32,449 euros.

In its defence of two cases, one before the International Court of Justice and one in Berlin brought by the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, the government has said no weapons of war have been exported under any licence issued since the 7 October Hamas attacks on Israel, apart from spares for long-term contracts, the source added.

No case challenging German arms exports to Israel has yet succeeded, including a case brought by Nicaragua at the ICJ.

The Japanese maker of the brand of walkie-talkies linked to explosions targeting the Hezbollah armed group that killed 20 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.

The detonation of hand-held radios used by Hezbollah on Wednesday in Beirut’s suburbs and the Bekaa Valley, followed a series of electronic pager explosions on Tuesday that killed at least 12 people, including two children, and injured 3,000 others.

ICOM has said it halted production of the radio models identified in the attack a decade ago 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,” Enomoto said.

The arrest of an Israeli citizen on suspicion of involvement in an Iranian-backed assassination plot highlights an intelligence war running alongside the escalating conflict on Israel’s border with southern Lebanon.

The arrest over the alleged plot targeting prominent people, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, took place last month, according to a joint statement by Shin Bet and the Israeli police issued on Thursday.

It comes after Shin Bet last week uncovered what it said was a plot by Lebanese militant group Hezbollah to assassinate a former senior defence official, who was subsequently identified as the former army Chief of Staff and Defence Minister Moshe Ya’alon.

Meanwhile, Israel has a long history of intelligence operations in Iran, allegedly including the assassination in July of Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of the Palestinian militant group Hamas in a Tehran state guesthouse.

Shin Bet said the latest arrest showed the efforts Iran was making to recruit Israelis to gather intelligence and carry out terrorist missions in Israel, including by using individuals with criminal backgrounds.

According to the Shin Bet statement, the plot went back to April this year when the Israeli, who has not been identified, agreed to meet a wealthy businessman living in Iran for business purposes.

After being told by representatives that the businessman, identified only as Adi, could not leave Iran, the Israeli man was smuggled into Iran from eastern Turkey, where he met Adi and others, including a man identified as an Iranian security official, the statement said.

The Iranians proposed that he carry out tasks for Iran including transferring money or a gun, photographing crowded places or threatening other Israeli civilians operating on behalf of Iran who did not carry out the requested missions, it continued.

He returned to Israel but went back to Iran for a second time in August, smuggled in a truck, the statement said.

On the second visit, it said Iranian officials asked him to carry out terrorist attacks for Iran and made proposals for assassinating Netanyahu or Gallant or Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar as well as other operations.

It added that the Israeli man asked for a payment of $1 million, but Iranian officials refused the request, saying however they would remain in touch and paying him 5,000 euros ($5,570.50) for joining the meetings.

Benjamin Netanyahu has accused Labour of “sending mixed messages” over the UK’s support for Israel and of “undermining” his country’s right to self-defence.

The Israeli prime minister also told the Daily Mail that Sir Keir Starmer’s administration has been making “misguided” decisions and is “sending a horrible message” to Hamas.

It comes after the British government suspended around 30 of its 350 arms export licences to Israel amid fears they could be used to breach international humanitarian law relating to the treatment of Palestinian detainees and the supply of aid to Gaza.

Handheld radios used by Hezbollah exploded across Lebanon on Wednesday in a second wave of deadly blasts as Israel’s defence minister declared his country was entering a “new phase of war” on its northern border.

At least 20 people were killed and 450 injured by the detonations, Lebanon’s health ministry said.

Chief international correspondent Bel Trew and Chris Stevenson report:

Israeli security services said they had arrested an Israeli citizen on suspicion of involvement in an Iranian-backed assassination plot targeting prominent people including the prime minister.

It said the person was a businessman with connections in Turkey who had attended at least two meetings in Iran to discuss the possibility of assassinating Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant or the head of the Shin Bet intelligence agency.