Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant are publicly sparring on the timing of the infamous pager operation that decimated Hezbollah.
The spat began on Thursday when Gallant said in an interview with Israeli Channel 12 that the government did not green-light the operation in the days after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack, and he called that decision “the State of Israel’s greatest missed opportunity, security-wise, since its founding.”
Israel declined to carry out the attack then, instead focusing the military’s attention on Hamas in Gaza, though the country did evacuate tens of thousands of civilians who lived along the Israel-Lebanon border due to concerns that Hezbollah could carry out a similar attack to the one Hamas conducted.
Gallant argued in the interview that officials declined to pursue the operation despite his opinion. They ultimately carried out the operation about a year later, in September 2024. In back-to-back days, Israel’s military detonated Hezbollah’s walkie-talkies and then their beepers, killing thousands of fighters with limited civilian casualties.
“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 added. “In accordance with his request, I spoke with [US National Security Adviser] Jake Sullivan. After a few minutes, [Strategic Affairs Minister] Ron Dermer joined the conversation, and I received an absolute ‘no.’”
“I went back to the prime minister, and I told him, ‘We have to do this.’ He pointed out the window at all the buildings and told me: ‘You see these buildings? All of this will be destroyed by Hezbollah’s leftover capacity. After we hit them, they’ll destroy everything you see,’” he explained.
Netanyahu subsequently denied Gallant’s claims that the operation was ready to go in the aftermath of Hamas’s attack.
The prime minister told Channel 14 network that it would have been “a horrible mistake” to open up a two-front war so soon after the attack. He also claimed that Hezbollah was only using about 150 of the booby-trapped beepers “as opposed to thousands that we accumulate” in the months after.
Gallant disputed Netanyahu’s remarks on social media, where he maintained that the pieces were in place to conduct the operation in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack.
The former defense minister also said the Israeli government did not do everything it could to get the roughly 250 people taken hostage during Hamas’s attack home as quickly as possible.
“We could have brought [home] more hostages earlier and at a lower cost. The proposal in early July that Hamas agreed to is identical to the deal now just [the current one] is worse in several ways,” Gallant said.
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Netanyahu traveled to Washington, D.C. this week to meet with Trump administration leaders. He gifted President Donald Trump a golden beeper, a reference to the operation.
During the Trump-Netanyahu press conference, the U.S. leader floated the idea that the U.S. would take over Gaza, relocate the Palestinians living there, and lead the reconstruction effort.
The plan was widely condemned by Arab nations in the region.