Qatari official condemns international inaction over wireless attacks in Lebanon

ISTANBUL

A top Qatari official has criticized the international community's inaction over recent deadly attacks in Lebanon involving wireless devices, calling the global silence "terrifying."

On Tuesday and Wednesday, 37 people were killed and more than 3,250 others, including women and children, injured in a series of explosions involving wireless communication devices, including pagers and two-way radios. Beirut and Hezbollah have blamed Israel for the attacks.

Lolwah Al-Khater, Qatar’s minister of state for international cooperation, wrote on X Thursday evening in English: “The ‘cold’ reaction or even inaction towards the pager attack in Lebanon by the international community is terrifying.”

“This is now not about Lebanon or Israel or Gaza, but it is about the new dimension that contemporary warfare has just entered,” she added.

She said “the use of everyday devices in people’s hands as ticking bombs is a horrible nightmare, and what is more horrific is this silence about it.”

“These mobile ticking bombs indiscriminately injure and kill people in public and civilian spaces, when did this become acceptable?” she asked.

She stressed that “wars must still be governed by a set of laws and ground rules,” as “otherwise this becomes a very dangerous slippery slope, where there are no limits. And then not only state actors will resort to these methods, but also supranational actors.”

Multiple media outlets reported that Israel placed small explosive charges inside imported pager devices before they reached Lebanon and then this week detonated them remotely.

Israel has remained silent on the deadly attacks. The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu distanced itself from a post on X by his advisor, Topaz Luk, which hinted at Tel Aviv’s responsibility for the explosions before it was deleted.

Numerous countries have condemned the pager explosions and expressed solidarity with Lebanon, while international human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, warned that such attacks endanger civilian lives and violate the laws of war.

The mass explosion of pagers came amid an exchange of cross-border attacks between Hezbollah and Israel against the backdrop of a brutal Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip, which has killed over 41,000 people, mostly women and children, following a Hamas attack last October.

* Writing by Ikram Kouachi