During his recent visit to Washington, D.C., Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented President Donald Trump with a unique gift – a gold-plated pager.
The gift was a reference to a controversial incident involving a mass attack reportedly orchestrated by Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency against Hezbollah on September 17, 2024. In this event, thousands of pagers, walkie-talkie-like devices, and radios detonated simultaneously in Lebanon and Syria around 3:30 p.m.
Netanyahu’s office informed Fox News Digital that, “The pager serves as a symbol of the prime minister’s decision that played a pivotal role in the war and marked the start of Hezbollah’s strategic decline.”
Though Israel was immediately suspected of being involved in the reported years-in-the-making operation, Jerusalem had not officially confirmed its role publicly before.
However, by November 2024, Israeli reports revealed comments leaked from a Cabinet meeting in which Netanyahu was quoted as saying, “The pager operation and the elimination of [Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah were carried out despite the opposition of senior officials in the defense establishment and those responsible for them in the political echelon.”
President Donald Trump hosts Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House in Washington, D.C., Feb. 4, 2025. (Avi Ohayon (GPO)/Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images)
The prime minister’s comments were an apparent dig at former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who he fired just weeks prior to the comments over disagreements regarding the war effort against Hamas and Hezbollah.
Neither the White House nor the U.N. immediately responded to Fox News Digital’s requests for comment.
Yael Rotem-Kuriel contributed to this report.
