Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has admitted Israeli responsibility for the Hezbollah pager explosion operation that kicked off the war on the north along the Lebanese border.
At today’s government meeting, Netanyahu acknowledged responsibility for the pager operation against Hezbollah for the first time, reported Amir Tsarfati.
“Senior security officials and the political leadership overseeing them opposed both the pager operation and Nasrallah’s elimination,” he said.
At least three GOP congressional seats are being counted in Orange County, California. On Friday, we reported that the GOP needs help at a counting facility in the county.
On Friday night, there was a bomb threat at this same very important vote-counting facility. The winner of the three US House seats being counted will determine which party runs the House for the next two years.
It’s feared that if the corrupt Democrat Party steals the House, they will not certify President Trump’s win on Jan 6 – the same act they claim that President Trump did that was an insurrection.
The Orange County ballot counting facility is important and the Democrats know it.
On Friday, it was reported that everyone was told to leave the premises when the bomb threat occurred. According to reports from those onsite, the Sheriff made everyone leave the facility calling it an active crime scene.
The family of a man accused of attempting to detonate what he believed was an explosives-laden van outside an Oklahoma bank says he is a paranoid schizophrenic and that the FBI knew it.
Clifford and Melonie Varnell, of Sayre, Oklahoma, issued a statement late Tuesday that questions the tactics undercover FBI agents used to arrest 23-year-old Jerry Drake Varnell. He was taken into custody early Saturday for the alleged plot to detonate a vehicle bomb in an alley adjacent to BancFirst in downtown Oklahoma City.
Varnell, who lives with his mother and stepfather in Sayre, about 130 miles west of Oklahoma City, is jobless due to his schizophrenia and does not have the resources to carry out such an act alone, according to the family’s statement.
“The FBI came and picked him up from our home, they gave him a vehicle, gave him a fake bomb, and every means to make this happen,” the statement said, adding that authorities “should not have aided and abetted a paranoid schizophrenic to commit this act.”
FBI spokeswoman Jessica Rice in Oklahoma City and Assistant U.S. Attorney Scott Williams declined comment Wednesday.
Varnell “has suffered through countless serious full-blown schizophrenic delusional episodes and he has been put in numerous mental hospitals since he was 16 years old,” the family’s statement said. It added that his parents are his legal guardians and do all they can “to keep him safe and functional.”
“The mental health system has consistently failed us due to the lack of establishments and health care coverage for a person like him,” the statement said. Varnell takes medication “but he will never be completely functional in life,” it said.
The Varnells say their son is easily influenced and they believe a confidential informant who tipped FBI agents off to the alleged plot may have helped inspire it.
Palestinian journalist Wafa Aludaini was killed alongside her family on 30 September in an Israeli airstrike targeting their home in central Gaza.
Aludaini’s family home was bombed by Israel on Monday, killing her with her husband and two children, according to several Palestinian media reports.
Gaza’s Government Media Office identified her as the 174th Palestinian journalist to be killed by Israel since the start of the war in Gaza on 7 October.
She worked “with several English-speaking media outlets,” the media office said, urging the international community to hold Israel accountable for its “crimes against journalists.”
“Through her words and actions, she stood as both a storyteller and a symbol of the Palestinian struggle for freedom,” wrote the Palestine Chronicle, with who Aludaini worked as a contributor, on 30 September.
Israeli airstrikes continue to pound the entirety of the Gaza Strip on a daily basis.
A woman and her child were killed in Deir al-Balah on Monday after an Israeli airstrike targeted a home in the Hakr al-Jami area of the city.
“Israeli occupation forces committed two massacres against families in the Gaza Strip over the last 24 hours, resulting in the killing of at least 20 Palestinians and the injury of 108 others,” WAFA news agency reported.
Since 7 October, at least 41,615 people have been reported killed and another 96,359 injured.
The alleged Israeli plot to target senior members of Hezbollah through their pagers relied on explosives hidden in the devices’ batteries in a way that was nearly impossible to detect, CNN reported Friday, citing sources.
Earlier this month, a series of powerful pager explosions swept through the Middle East, killing 12 people and injuring around 3,000. The victims included numerous officials of the Lebanese-based Islamist movement. The attack was followed a day later by portable radio explosions that killed at least 20 others. Iran and Lebanon accused Israel of orchestrating the attack, a charge denied by West Jerusalem.
An unnamed Lebanese official familiar with the investigation told CNN that the explosives in the pagers were hidden inside the device in a way “so sophisticated that it could not be detected.”
Another official told the network that the materials were “laced” into the pager’s lithium battery and were virtually undetectable, adding that he had “never seen anything like it.” Lebanese officials also witnessed controlled explosions of the pagers and observed how devastating they must have been to their owners, according to the article.
There has recently been an alarming escalation of the Israel-Hezbollah conflict. On 23 September, Lebanon experienced its deadliest day since the end of its civil war (1975-90), with more than 560 people killed and another 1,800 injured in a single day by Israeli airstrikes in the country’s south and east.
Hezbollah maintains that it will continue fighting Israel until there is a ceasefire in Gaza. Israeli strikes against Lebanon continuing at this level of intensity will soon constitute a full-scale war.
This scenario would inevitably devastate Lebanon, with Hezbollah’s missiles and drones striking cities and many other targets across Israel. Such a conflict would add new layers of chaotic instability to the Middle East.
The nearly one-year-old Israel-Hezbollah conflict entered a new and dangerous phase with the explosion of thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies in Beirut, elsewhere in Lebanon, and Syria on 17 and 18 September.
Israel did not officially claim responsibility for this operation but was undoubtedly behind it. The explosions resulted in dozens of deaths and thousands of injuries of Hezbollah members and civilians, including two children.
Days later, an Israeli airstrike destroyed a high-rise building in the Dahiyeh district south of Beirut, killing 31 people, including senior Hezbollah officials Ibrahim Aqil and Ahmed Mahmoud Wahbi.
Hezbollah responded by attacking northern Israel with dozens of rockets.
The Israeli government had “no connection” to widespread pager attacks that left dozens of people dead and thousands injured in Lebanon, the Israeli president said in a Sunday interview.
In an interview with Sky News, Israeli President Isaac Herzog denied claims made by Iran and the Hezbollah terrorist group that Israel was behind the widespread attacks carried out via exploding pagers and walkie-talkies that left dozens dead and thousands injured.
“First of all, I reject out of hand any connection to this or that source of operation,” Herzog responded to a reporter’s question about whether Israel was involved.
Two waves of explosions erupted across Lebanon last week, reportedly targeting members of Hezbollah, which runs Lebanon’s government.
In the first attack, which primarily impacted pagers, some 12 people died and thousands were injured, officials said. In the second, 25 people died and 600 were injured.
During his Sky News interview, Herzog sought to focus on actions that were carried out by Hezbollah earlier this summer. The group is accused of launching a rocket at a civilian area in the Golan Heights, leaving 12 children dead, which prompted separate counter-strikes against Hezbollah inside Lebanon.
The death toll has risen to 12 from Israel’s terror attack in Lebanon on Tuesday which detonated explosive materials hidden in thousands of pagers. Another 20 people were then killed in another attack on Wednesday with a second wave of explosions, this time using walkie talkies and home solar energy systems.
The total death toll now sits at 32. Two children and four healthcare workers are among the dead. Thousands have been injured.
As you would expect, western empire managers are getting really squirmy about this. White House spokesman John Kirby adamantly refused to answer any questions involving Israel’s responsibility for the attacks during a press conference on Wednesday, despite Israel being widely reported as the responsible party, with outlets like The New York Times citing US officials as their source.
“I’m not gonna speak to the details of these incidents,” Kirby said repeatedly when questioned about Israel’s role and what the US response will be.
It goes without saying that if a government like Russia, China or Iran were even suspected of being responsible for similar attacks, Kirby and his fellow podium people would be not just naming the suspected aggressor but fervently denouncing the attack as an act of terrorism.
UN human rights experts* today condemned the malicious manipulation of thousands of electronic pagers and radios to explode simultaneously across Lebanon and Syria as “terrifying” violations of international law.
The attacks reportedly killed at least 32 people and maimed or injured 3,250, including 200 critically. Among the dead are a boy and a girl, as well as medical personnel. Around 500 people suffered severe eye injuries, including a diplomat. Others suffered grave injuries to their faces, hands and bodies.
“These attacks violate the human right to life, absent any indication that the victims posed an imminent lethal threat to anyone else at the time,” the experts said. “Such attacks require prompt, independent investigation to establish the truth and enable accountability for the crime of murder.
“We express our deepest solidarity to the victims of these attacks,” they said.
The pagers and radios were reportedly distributed mainly among people allegedly associated with the Hezbollah movement, which includes civilian and military personnel and is involved in an armed conflict with Israel along the border.
“To the extent that international humanitarian law applies, at the time of the attacks there was no way of knowing who possessed each device and who was nearby,” the experts said. “Simultaneous attacks by thousands of devices would inevitably violate humanitarian law, by failing to verify each target, and distinguish between protected civilians and those who could potentially be attacked for taking a direct part in hostilities.
“Such attacks could constitute war crimes of murder, attacking civilians, and launching indiscriminate attacks, in addition to violating the right to life,” the experts said.
Humanitarian law additionally prohibits the use of booby-traps disguised as apparently harmless portable objects where specifically designed and constructed with explosives – and this could include a modified civilian pager, the experts said. A booby-trap is a device designed to kill or injure, that functions unexpectedly when a person performs an apparently safe act, such as answering a pager.
Lebanon officials are now reporting that multiple home solar energy systems have reportedly exploded in various neighborhoods across Beirut.
This attack follows closely on the heels of Tuesday’s pager blasts, which claimed the lives of 12 and left nearly 4,000 wounded in what is rapidly becoming an unparalleled security nightmare for the terrorist organization.
On Wednesday, walkie-talkies exploded simultaneously at various Hezbollah-controlled locations across the country.
Now, reports emerged from Lebanon’s Official News Agency detailing how home solar systems—often touted as the solution to climate change—were also going up in flames.
Al Jazeera reported, “Several blasts took place simultaneously, Hashem said, similar to what happened on Tuesday. “But this time, it was mostly walkie-talkies or radios [that exploded],” he said, adding that reports suggested that solar devices and some batteries in cars also exploded. Lebanon’s official news agency reported that home solar energy systems exploded in several areas of Beirut.”
Hellbound and Down 
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