Day: September 18, 2024

BEIRUT (AP) — Pagers used by hundreds of members of the militant group Hezbollah exploded near-simultaneously Tuesday in Lebanon and Syria, killing at least nine people, including an 8-year-old girl, and wounding several thousand, officials said. Hezbollah and the Lebanese government blamed Israel for what appeared to be a sophisticated remote attack.

An American official said Israel briefed the United States on Tuesday after the conclusion of the operation, in which small amounts of explosive secreted in the pagers were detonated. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the information publicly.

The Israeli military declined to comment.

Among those wounded was Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon. The mysterious explosions came amid rising tensions between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah, which have exchanged fire across the Israel-Lebanon border since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas that sparked the war in Gaza.

The pagers that blew up were apparently acquired by Hezbollah after the group’s leader ordered members in February to stop using cellphones, warning they could be tracked by Israeli intelligence. A Hezbollah official told The Associated Press the pagers were a new brand, but declined to say how long they had been in use.

Taiwanese company Gold Apollo said Wednesday that it authorized its brand on the AR-924 pagers used by the Hezbollah militant group, but the devices were produced and sold by a company called BAC.

At about 3:30 p.m. local time on Tuesday, as people shopped for groceries, sat in cafes or drove cars and motorcycles in the afternoon traffic, the pagers in their hands or pockets started heating up and then exploding — leaving blood-splattered scenes and panicking bystanders.

It appeared that many of those hit were members of Hezbollah, but it was not immediately clear if non-Hezbollah members also carried any of the exploding pagers.

The blasts were mainly in areas where the group has a strong presence, particularly a southern Beirut suburb and in the Beqaa region of eastern Lebanon, as well as in Damascus, according to Lebanese security officials and a Hezbollah official. The Hezbollah official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press.

The explosions came hours after Israel’s internal security agency said it had foiled an attempt by Hezbollah to kill a former senior Israeli security official using a planted explosive device that could be remotely detonated.

The United States “was not aware of this incident in advance” and was not involved, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said. “At this point, we’re gathering information.”

Experts said the pager explosions pointed to a long-planned operation, possibly carried out by infiltrating the supply chain and rigging the devices with explosives before they were delivered to Lebanon.

Whatever the means, it targeted an extraordinary breadth of people with hundreds of small explosions — wherever the pager carrier happened to be — that left some maimed.

One online video showed a man picking through produce at a grocery store when the bag he was carrying at his hip explodes, sending him sprawling to the ground and bystanders running.

At overwhelmed hospitals, wounded were rushed in on stretchers, some with missing hands, faces partly blown away or gaping holes at their hips and legs, according to AP photographers. On a main road in central Beirut, a car door was splattered with blood and the windshield cracked.

Lebanon Health Minister Firas Abiad told Qatar’s Al Jazeera network at least nine people were killed, including an 8-year-old girl, and some 2,750 were wounded — 200 of them critically — by the explosions. Most had injuries in the face, hand, or around the abdomen.

It appeared eight of the dead belonged to Hezbollah. The group issued a statement confirming at least two members were killed in the pager bombings. One of them was the son of a Hezbollah member in Parliament, according to the Hezbollah official who spoke anonymously. The group later issued announcements that six other members were killed Tuesday, though it did not specify how.

“We hold the Israeli enemy fully responsible for this criminal aggression that also targeted civilians,” Hezbollah said, adding that Israel will “for sure get its just punishment.”

Iranian state-run IRNA news agency said that the country’s ambassador, Mojtaba Amani, was superficially wounded by an exploding pager and was being treated at a hospital.

Previously, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had warned the group’s members not to carry cellphones, saying they could be used by Israel to track and target them.

Sean Moorhouse, a former British Army officer and explosive ordnance disposal expert, said videos of the blasts suggested a small explosive charge — as small as a pencil eraser — had been placed into the devices. They would have had to have been rigged prior to delivery, very likely by Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, he said.

Elijah J. Magnier, a Brussels-based senior political risk analyst, said he spoke with Hezbollah members who had examined pagers that failed to explode. What triggered the blasts, he said, appeared to be an error message sent to all the devices that caused them to vibrate, forcing the user to click on the buttons to stop the vibration. The combination detonated a small amount of explosives hidden inside and ensured that the user was present when the blast went off, he said.

Israel has a long history of carrying out deadly operations well beyond its borders. This year, separate Israeli airstrikes in Beirut killed senior Hamas official Saleh Arouri and a top Hezbollah commander. A mysterious explosion in Iran, also blamed on Israel, killed Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ supreme leader.

Israel has killed Hamas militants in the past with booby-trapped cellphones and it’s widely believed to have been behind the Stuxnet computer virus attack on Iran’s nuclear program in 2010.

The pager bombings are likely to stoke Hezbollah’s worries about vulnerabilities in security and communications as Israeli officials are threaten to escalate their monthslong conflict. The near-daily exchanges of fire between Israel and Hezbollah have killed hundreds in Lebanon and several dozen in Israel, and have displaced tens of thousands on both sides of the border.

Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, the U.N. special coordinator for Lebanon, deplored the attack and warned that it marks “an extremely concerning escalation in what is an already unacceptably volatile context.”

On Tuesday, Israel said that halting Hezbollah’s attacks in the north to allow residents to return to their homes is now an official war goal. Israeli Defense Minister Gallant said the focus of the conflict is shifting from Gaza to Israel’s north and that time is running out for a diplomatic solution with Hezbollah.

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This story has been updated to correct the name of the Hezbollah lawmaker’s son killed by a pager blast.

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Associated Press writers Hussein Malla, Hassan Ammar, Fadi Tawil and Sarah El Deeb in Beirut; Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Amir Vahdat in Tehran, Iran; Michael Biesecker in Washington; Josef Federman in Jerusalem; Zeke Miller in Washington; and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.

CNN
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Ex-President Donald Trump responded to a second apparent assassination attempt that he blames on incendiary political rhetoric by inflaming the situation even more.

When a bullet grazed his ear in a horrific shooting that killed a rally goer in July, Trump initially acted like a changed man, telling The Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito he had a chance to bring the country and the world together — although that aspiration did not last any longer than the opening paragraphs of his convention speech.

After the Secret Service thwarted a gunman who had apparently lain in wait for the ex-president at one of his Florida golf courses Sunday, Trump’s reaction was different. He accused President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris of inviting assassins to target him when they warn that he is a threat to democracy.

He told Fox News Digital on Monday without evidence that the alleged would-be shooter “believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it.” Trump went on: “Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out.”

“It is called the enemy from within,” he said using a familiar trope of totalitarian leaders. Trump warned that “dangerous fools” like the suspect in Sunday’s incident listen to what Democratic leaders say and react to what he has claimed, falsely, is an orchestrated attempt by the White House to use the justice system to persecute him.

Trump’s running mate advanced an even blunter argument.

“The big difference between conservatives and liberals is that … no one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months, and two people now have tried to kill Donald Trump in the last couple of months,” Ohio Sen. JD Vance said.

“I’d say that’s pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric and needs to cut this crap out.”

The Republican vice-presidential nominee has recently denied he is guilty of incitement after his perpetuation of baseless claims that Haitian refugees have been eating pet dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio, was followed by bomb threats to hospitals and schools.

Democratic Rep. Nikema Williams condemned Vance’s remarks about assassinations and the difference between liberals and conservatives.

“Would he want that? Why would you say that at a time when we’re talking about bringing down the temperature and changing the rhetoric and bringing the country together – unity – moving forward?” the Georgia Democrat said on “CNN This Morning” with Kasie Hunt. “We can disagree on policies, but we don’t want anyone to have an assassination attempt.”

Williams said it was “no secret” that she’s not a Trump supporter, but that she doesn’t want anyone to face a threat on their life. She added that she’s had to arrange personal security measures since becoming a member of Congress to protect herself and her family after facing threats.

The experience of being singled out for apparent attempted murder twice in two months would weigh on anyone. Trump is also facing an election, less than 50 days away, that is a dead heat between him and the vice president, according to most polls.

Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a Republican, told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Monday that anyone who had been targeted for assassination “might be pretty sensitive, you might be pretty agitated, you might be pretty worried, so I think that is understandable.”

And seeking to decide an election by murdering a candidate for president ought to be repugnant to anyone that believes in democracy and the right of voters to choose their leaders. The exact motives of the suspect, Ryan Wesley Routh, are also not clear, although he was a longtime advocate for doing more to help Ukraine – a position that conflicts with Trump’s vow to end the war with Russia.

And the connection between a politician’s rhetoric and actions taken by isolated individuals is often hard to pin down even if the fear is always that a small minority of people might be motivated by a leader’s comments to provoke violence.

But Trump’s claims that Biden and Harris bear direct culpability underscore the extreme nature of his own political instincts.

His claim that their warnings about his supposed threat to democracy risk getting him killed is particularly stark. By implication, he’s saying that it is illegitimate for his opponents to point out the truth: that his past behavior — in seeking to steal the 2020 election and spreading false claims that this year’s voting will be corrupt — suggests that he poses a danger to America’s democratic system. His position, which looks like an attempt to stifle free speech, may also be a dark harbinger of how he would behave if he won a second term.

Trump played a similar political card at last week’s presidential debate when Harris raised his threat to terminate the Constitution and to weaponize the Justice Department against his political enemies. She said that since the Supreme Court and Vance wouldn’t stop Trump if he was back in the White House, “It’s up to the American people to stop him.” The vice president was clearly speaking in a political context, but Trump replied: “I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me.”

Despite the fierce political exchanges, there was one moment that recalled lost political normality on Monday. Biden and Trump had a telephone conversation, and the president conveyed his relief that his erstwhile rival was safe. The Republican nominee said in a statement to CNN that it was “a very nice call.”

Incitement and inflammatory rhetoric are often in the eye of the beholder. Republicans were angered, for instance, by Biden’s claim in August 2022 that the philosophical underpinning of the MAGA movement was like “semi-fascism.” (The charge did not become a staple of the president’s rhetoric). New York Rep. Daniel Goldman, a Democrat, said last year in an interview that Trump needed to be “eliminated” — a comment that Vance referenced on Monday. Goldman quickly apologized for his “poor choice of words” and said that he wished no harm to Trump.

But if Democrats are to blame for sometimes going over the top, Trump has made a political brand out of the most outlandish rhetoric uttered by a president or ex-president in the modern history of the United States. The scale and intensity of his invective dwarf anything that the Democrats have flung at him. He calls Harris a “fascist” in almost every public appearance — for instance, he said on August 26 in Virginia that “we have a fascist person running who’s incompetent.” He used similar rhetoric on August 23, August 17, and August 3 in campaign appearances.

Earlier this year, he claimed Biden was running a “Gestapo administration” referring to the genocidal Nazi secret police. He parroted the language of some of history’s worst tyrants by calling his political opponents “vermin” and by warning that immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of the United States.

And when he refused to concede that he lost the 2020 election, Trump called supporters to Washington, DC, and told them to “fight like hell” or they wouldn’t have a country anymore. Then his supporters smashed their way into the US Capitol, to try to thwart the certification of Biden’s victory. Trump has since called those arrested over the events of January 6, 2021, political prisoners and said he’d look at pardoning them if he wins back the White House in November.

Even now Trump is warning he will only accept the result of this year’s election if he deems it fair and has warned he will seek to jail officials and political opponents if he wins back power.

“He plays to people’s fear, he plays to people’s anxiety. He defines us with hate and fear,” Michigan Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell said Monday at a canvassing event for Harris. “This violence has to stop, but we also need to understand who and what he is and how much he is contributing to it,” she said, adding, “He has not said he’ll accept the election results.”

Social media has often helped Trump inject bile into political life. After Sunday’s incident, one of his most prominent supporters — Elon Musk, who owns X — questioned why Trump had faced two apparent assassination attempts and his rivals had not encountered any. “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” Musk wrote in the post that he later deleted. He later argued the post had been a joke, although given America’s violent political history and assassinations of four US presidents, it’s hard to see how people might find such quips funny.

The rhetoric of Trump and his allies has also made life dangerous for others. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s former infectious diseases expert, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins this year that when he is assailed, for instance, by Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene in congressional hearings, the pace of death threats against him rises. “(There is) a segment of the population out there that believe that kind of nonsense,” Fauci said.

Media organizations and election workers have also faced threats when on the wrong end of Trump’s baseless attacks. Prosecutors and judges need extra security while assigned to Trump cases and targeted by his daily screeds.

And even as the shocking aftermath of another apparent attempt on Trump’s life plays out, the impact of his and Vance’s rhetoric is evident in Springfield, Ohio.

After Trump amplified the false claims in the debate, Ohio’s Republican Gov. Mike DeWine deployed the state highway patrol to monitor city schools that faced bomb threats. Elsewhere in Springfield, classes at Wittenberg University were held remotely Monday while campus police and local law enforcement assessed emailed threats of a bombing and a campus shooting that targeted “members of the Haitian community,” the university said.

In his interview on “State of the Union,” Vance said that any suggestion that he or Trump had acted in a way that caused such threats was “disgusting.”

It’s also disgusting that anyone would consider assassinating a former president running in a democratic election. Yet the historical record shows that while Trump has become a victim of a toxic political culture, he’s also one of its primary instigators.