Mossad chief David Barnea waded into a public fight between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister on Tuesday, defending the former’s decision to hold off on the invasion of Lebanon and the infamous “beeper” operation against Hezbollah until almost a year into the war.

Speaking at the INSS International Conference in Tel Aviv,  Barnea praised Netanyahu for ordering last September’s exploding beeper and walkie-talkie operations against Hezbollah, and pushed back on claims made by former defense minister Yoav Gallant over the ideal timing of the attack.

Contradicting what Gallant – who pushed for a major operation in Lebanon days after its ally Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023 – has said in recent interviews, Barnea argued that the operation would not have had the same effect if launched earlier in the fighting against the Lebanese terror group.

There were “ten times as many beepers” in Hezbollah hands when they were detonated on September 17 than at the beginning of the war, he said, “and two times as many walkie-talkies were detonated.”

He also lauded Netanyahu, who decided to move ahead with the pager operation “in the face of the majority opinion in the room.”

On September 17, 2024, thousands of pagers used by Hezbollah across Lebanon suddenly exploded, killing dozens of operatives and maiming thousands, marking the beginning of Israel’s escalation against the terror group, after almost a year of persistent Hezbollah rocket fire that displaced some 60,000 residents of the north.

The pagers, laced with explosives, were detonated via an encrypted message that required users to hold the devices with both hands, maximizing the likelihood of the subsequent blast causing debilitating injuries.

Barnea went into detail about the operation, which he calls a “turning point” in the fight in Lebanon. Preparation for the walkie-talkie operation began over 10 years ago, he said. When Mossad staff understood that booby-trapped walkie-talkies wouldn’t be used in all situations, they began working on the pagers in late 2022.

Some 500 beepers arrived in Lebanon weeks before the October 7 attacks, according to Barnea, who said more arrived as the war went on, allowing the attack to cause greater damage.

Earlier this month, Gallant — who was fired by Netanyahu in November — told Channel 12 that Netanyahu was too cautious at the beginning of the war, and missed a key opportunity to take out Hezbollah on October 11, 2023, just four days after Hamas launched its invasion from the Gaza Strip.

The ex-defense minister called the Netanyahu-led government’s failure to heed his advice on that day “the State of Israel’s greatest missed opportunity, security-wise, since its founding.”

“We knew that senior officials from Hezbollah were going to convene. We could have attacked from the sky and taken out [censored] heads of Hezbollah, and also Iranians, [Hezbollah chief Hassan] Nasrallah, all the rest. The entire top echelon of Hezbollah,” Gallant said, adding that Israel could have followed up with a strike on Hezbollah’s missiles and rockets.

He believes that the attack would have taken out over 90% of their arsenal.

At the same time, he said, Israel could have carried out the walkie-talkie and pager operation, killing thousands of enemy fighters. “Hezbollah as a military organization would have ceased to exist — no leadership, no missiles or rockets, most of its operatives killed in the field,” Gallant asserted.

He said on a recent podcast that an Israeli push into southern Lebanon would have allowed the country to take out 15,000 Hezbollah fighters by detonating their walkie-talkies.

“Once we start to maneuver into the battlefield, as we did the next year,” he told Dan Senor, “15,000 terrorists would have put their vest with a walkie-talkie on their chest. In this walkie-talkie, there was three times more explosives that we had in the beepers later on. And it wasn’t 4,000, it was 15,000. Once you initiate it, you kill 15,000 terrorists in one strike.”

Netanyahu defended his decision to block Gallant’s October 11 proposal, telling the friendly Channel 14 network that it would have been “a horrible mistake” to open a two-front war so soon after the Hamas attacks of October 7.

The premier also claimed there were only around 150 booby-trapped beepers in Hezbollah hands in October 2023 “as opposed to thousands that we accumulated” in the ensuing months.

That assertion drew a swift response from Gallant, who wrote on X that “the pager operation was prepared years before the war and was ready for activation on October 11.”

“Contrary to what was said, thousands of pagers were in the hands of the terrorists by the time I suggested attacking Hezbollah,” Gallant said.