Israel-Hamas War - What happened on day 376?

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on Wednesday in a post on X/Twitter that Macron was a disgrace to his nation in the latest part of the diplomatic spat that began earlier this week.

"French President Macron’s actions are a disgrace to the French nation and the values of the free world, which he claims to uphold," Gallant said.

French President Macron’s actions are a disgrace to the French nation and the values of the free world, which he claims to uphold. The decision to discriminate against Israeli defense industries in France a second time - aids Israel’s enemies during war. This builds on the…

— יואב גלנט - Yoav Gallant (@yoavgallant) October 16, 2024

"France has adopted, and is consistently implementing a hostile policy towards the Jewish people."

British Prime Minister Keir Strammer said during a debate in Parliament on Wednesday that the British government is considering imposing sanctions on Ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Sanctions are being considered due to their positions regarding the war in Gaza and violence by settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank.

"They made disgusting statements," Starmer said.
 

Foreign Minister Israel Katz said on Wednesday that Israel wants UNIFIL to operate in southern Lebanon after the war ends.

"The State of Israel places great importance on the activities of UNIFIL and has no intention of harming the organization or its personnel.," Katz said in a post to X/Twitter.

The State of Israel places great importance on the activities of @UNIFIL_ and has no intention of harming the organization or its personnel.

Furthermore, Israel views UNIFIL as playing an important role in the "day after" following the war against Hezbollah.

It is the Hezbollah…

— ישראל כ”ץ Israel Katz (@Israel_katz) October 16, 2024

"Furthermore, Israel views UNIFIL as playing an important role in the "day after" following the war against Hezbollah."

"It is the Hezbollah terrorist organization that uses UNIFIL personnel as "human shields," deliberately firing at IDF soldiers from locations near UNIFIL positions in order to create friction."

"The State of Israel will continue to do what is necessary to restore the security to the citizens of Israel and the return of the residents of the north safely to their homes, and will continue to make every effort to avoid harming UNIFIL all while coordinating with UNIFIL commanders and in accordance with international law."

The US has issued new Hezbollah-related sanctions, according to a posting on Tuesday on the Treasury Department website.

This is a developing story.

Israel "remains committed to working with our international partners to ensure aid reaches those who need it" in the Gaza Strip, Israel's UN Ambassador Danny Danon said on Wednesday after the United States told its ally it must take steps in the next month to improve the humanitarian situation in the enclave.

One minister and nine MKs in Israel's governing party, the Likud, will hold an event on Monday near the border with Gaza in support of resettling the territory, according to a flyer of the event published online.

The event includes a tour of Kibbutz Nirim led by its civilian security coordinator. The Kibbutz said in a statement that neither it nor the security coordinator had received notice of the tour, and therefore, "it will not happen."

The kibbutz added, "We are still waiting for the government and members of the coalition to take responsibility for the enormous failure and abandonment of the events of October 7 and for the bleeding wound in our hearts. Instead of holding political conferences to form settlement cells, it would be better for the government and its members to deal with bringing back 101 hostages and supporting and building the [Gaza] perimeter area towns and resurrecting them."

The Likud event is part of a larger event called "Preparing for Settlement of Gaza," scheduled for Sunday-Monday, October 20-21, including a "giant Sukkah city" encampment. The event includes "field tours, settlement preparation workshops," and "meeting pioneers of the past."

The larger event is sponsored by a series of groups, including the coalition's two far-right parties, the Religious Zionist Party (RZP) and Otzma Yehudit, as well as other right-wing and settlement groups.

OPPONENTS OF Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s disengagement plan face IDF troops as they secure the fence of Kfar Maimon in July 2005 after police blocked them from marching to the Gush Katif communities to protest against their demolition. (credit: GIL COHEN MAGEN/REUTERS)

The event

According to the flyer, in addition to the supposed tour in Nirim, the Likud event is scheduled to include a meeting with MKs and ministers, a panel with soldiers and family members of hostages, and a Simchat Beit Hashoeva event.

💥Whatever Netanyahu & Gallant tell the @WhiteHouse their @Likud_Party is "preparing for the settlement of Gaza," including a tour of the border area with ministers & legislators. The catch? Kibbutz Nirim, that they planned to use as their launchpad, wants nothing to do with them pic.twitter.com/s04RVTuwZC

— Noga Tarnopolsky נגה טרנופולסקי نوغا ترنوبولسكي (@NTarnopolsky) October 16, 2024

Minister May Golan will host the Likud event. The MKs listed as hosts on the flyer are Avichai Boaron, Sasson Gueta, Tally Gotliv, Eli Dallal, Nissim Vaturi, Hanoch Milvetsky, Ariel Kallner, Keti Sheetrit, and Osher Shkalim.

The flyer was published on the day that Makor Rishon published an interview with Housing Minister Yizhak Goldknopf (UTJ), in which he said that the government was acting to exempt all yeshiva students from IDF service. A number of MKs from the opposition criticized both the Likud event and Goldknopf's comments.

National Unity chairman MK Benny Gantz called the event "hypocritical" since settling Gaza would require increased military resources and manpower, which the coalition is not willing to provide. Gantz also noted that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who leads the Likud party, has said publicly that Israel would not settle Gaza.

MK Gadi Eisenkot (also from National Unity) accused "large parts of the coalition" of acting to "shatter the large national consensus surrounding a just war" by acting to settle Gaza, which Eisenkot wrote was a "controversial topic in Israeli society."

Eisenkot, whose son Gal died in battle in Gaza during the first months of the war, added, "This is not what our sons and daughters sacrificed their lives for, in direct opposition to the goals of the war and the prime minister's statements."

Other MKs who criticized the event included Labor's Merav Michaeli and Gilad Kariv.

Some 21 towns and approximately 8,000 Israeli settlers were removed from the Gaza Strip during the 2005 disengagement.

Several people were wounded by shrapnel following rocket sirens that sounded across the Galilee on Wednesday, Magen David Adom reported.

According to the IDF, approximately 30 rockets were launched from Lebanon, most of which were intercepted.

One rocket directly hit a civilian home in the central Galilee town of Majd el-Kurum, although no one in the home was injured. Several other hits were reported, including one major one at a construction site.

חודשים והצפון נמצא תחת אש. אזעקות, נפילות, ושריפות. מציאות של מלחמה שרק הולכת ומתעצמת, והממשלה מפקירה אותנו שוב ושוב.
אזרחים ללא מקלטים, ללא מיגון - אך את כל זה הממשלה ידעה כבר במלחמה הקודמת עם לבנון ב-2006.

אז נהרגו שני תושבי מג׳ד אלכרום מטיל חיזבאללה. והיום? תראו את הסרטון pic.twitter.com/42MdOlDjSq

— 🟣Rula Daood رُلا داوود רולא דאוד (@DaoodRula) October 16, 2024

Pictures and videos from the scene show serious damage to several buildings and vehicles, with shrapnel damage present across the area.

🚨 במטח אחרון לגליל המערבי יירוטים ונפילות בכפר מג'ד אלכרום ליד כרמיאל. pic.twitter.com/S1UK6eNreB

— Asslan Khalil (@KhalilAsslan) October 16, 2024

Following reports of rocket crashes, MDA teams searched the areas and located several people who were injured by shrapnel from the hits.

Wounded evacuated

MDA located four wounded people with mild shrapnel wounds; all four were evacuated to the Galilee Medical Center in Nahariya, where they were treated for their injuries.

The wounded people were three men and a woman around 50 years old each.

A further ten people were treated for shock at the scene.

"When the sirens started, we began hearing the explosions - the echoes of the explosions. It took a few seconds to realize that there were several falls inside the village," Ali Nasser, a resident of Majd el-Kurum, told Ynet.

"There were two primary hits in the village - one at a house and the other at a school construction site. Thank God there were [only] four minor injuries. It was a miracle, a real miracle, what happened here."

Another resident told Ynet, "We saw death right in front of our eyes. It was very dangerous at the time, and unfortunately, we don't have shelters. This time, miraculously, there were no fatalities; maybe in another attack, there would be fatalities and a severe and shocking disaster."

The batteries inside the weaponized pagers that arrived in Lebanon at the start of the year, part of a plot to decimate Hezbollah, had powerfully deceptive features and an Achilles' heel.

The agents who built the pagers designed a battery that concealed a small but potent charge of plastic explosive and a novel detonator that was invisible to X-ray, according to a Lebanese source with first-hand knowledge of the pagers, and teardown photos of the battery pack seen by Reuters.

To overcome the weakness - the absence of a plausible backstory for the bulky new product - they created fake online stores, pages and posts that could deceive Hezbollah due diligence, a Reuters review of web archives shows.

The stealthy design of the pager bomb and the battery’s carefully constructed cover story, both described here for the first time, shed light on the execution of a years-long operation.

A thin, square sheet with six grams of white pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) plastic explosive was squeezed between two rectangular battery cells, according to the Lebanese source and photos.

Ambulances arrive to American University of Beirut Medical Center (AUBMC) as more than 1,000 people, including Hezbollah fighters and medics, were wounded when the pagers they use to communicate exploded across Lebanon, according to a security source, in Beirut, Lebanon September 17, 2024. (credit: REUTERS/MOHAMED AZAKIR)

The remaining space between the battery cells could not be seen in the photos but was occupied by a strip of highly flammable material that acted as the detonator, the source said.

This three-layer sandwich was inserted in a black plastic sleeve, and encapsulated in a metal casing roughly the size of a match box, the photos showed.

The assembly was unusual because it did not rely on a standard miniaturised detonator, typically a metallic cylinder, the source and two bomb experts said. All three spoke on conditions of anonymity.

Without any metal components, the material used to trigger detonation had an edge: like the plastic explosives, it was not detected by X-ray.

Upon receiving the pagers in February, Hezbollah looked for the presence of explosives, two people familiar with the matter said, putting them through airport security scanners to see if they triggered alarms. Nothing suspicious was reported.

The devices were likely set up to generate a spark within the battery pack, enough to light the detonating material, and trigger the sheet of PETN to explode, said the two bomb experts, to whom Reuters showed the pager-bomb design.

Since explosives and wrapping took about a third of the volume, the battery pack carried a fraction of the power consistent with its 35 gram weight, two battery experts said.

"There is a significant amount of unaccounted-for mass," said Paul Christensen, an expert in lithium batteries at Britain’s Newcastle University.

At some point, Hezbollah noticed the battery was draining faster than expected, the Lebanese source said. However, the issue did not appear to raise major security concerns - the group was still handing its members the pagers hours before the attack.

On September 17, thousands of pagers simultaneously exploded in the southern suburbs of Beirut and other Hezbollah strongholds, in most cases after the devices beeped, indicating an incoming message.

Among the victims rushed to hospital, many had eye injuries, missing fingers or gaping holes in their abdomens, indicating their proximity to the devices at the time of detonation, Reuters witnesses saw. In total, the pager attack, and a second on the following day that activated weaponized walkie-talkies, killed 39 people and wounded more than 3,400.

Two Western security sources said Israeli intelligence agency Mossad spearheaded the pager and walkie-talkie attacks.

Reuters could not establish where the devices were manufactured. The office of Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which has authority over Mossad, did not respond to a request for comment.

Israel has neither denied nor confirmed a role. The day after the attacks, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant praised Mossad's "very impressive" results in comments that were widely interpreted in Israel as a tacit acknowledgment of the agency's participation.

US officials have said they were not informed of the operation in advance.

The weak link

From the outside, the pager’s power source looked like a standard lithium-ion battery pack used in thousands of consumer electronics goods.

And yet, the battery, labelled LI-BT783, had a problem: Like the pager, it did not exist on the market.

So, a backstory was created from scratch.

Hezbollah has serious procurement procedures to check what they buy, a former Israeli intelligence officer, who was not involved in the pager operation, told Reuters.

"You want to make sure that if they look, they find something," the former spy said, requesting not to be named. "Not finding anything is not good.”

Creating backstories, or “legends,” for undercover agents has long been a core skill of spy agencies. What made the pager plot unusual is that those skills appear to have been applied to ubiquitous consumer electronics products.

For the pagers, the agents deceived Hezbollah by selling the custom-created model, AR-924, under an existing, renowned Taiwanese brand, Gold Apollo.

Gold Apollo’s chairman, Hsu Ching-Kuang, told reporters a day after the pager attack that he was approached about three years ago by a former employee, Teresa Wu, and her “big boss, called Tom,” to discuss a license agreement.

Hsu said he had scant information about Wu’s superior, but he granted them the right to design their own products and market them under the widely distributed Gold Apollo brand.

Reuters could not establish the identity of the manager, nor whether the person or Wu knowingly worked with Israeli intelligence.

The chairman said he was not impressed by the AR-924 when he saw it, but still added photos and a description of the product to his company’s website, helping give it both visibility and credibility. There was no way to directly buy the AR-924 from his website.

Hsu said he knew nothing about the pagers’ lethal capabilities or the broader operation to attack Hezbollah. He described his company as a victim of the plot.

Gold Apollo declined to provide further comment. Calls and messages sent to Wu went unanswered. She has not given a statement to the media since the attacks.

'I know this product'

In September 2023, webpages and images featuring the AR-924 and its battery were added to apollosystemshk.com, a website that said it had a licence to distribute Gold Apollo products, as well as the rugged pager and its bulky power source, according to a Reuters review of internet records and metadata.

The website gave an address in Hong Kong for a company called Apollo Systems HK. No company by that name exists at the address or in Hong Kong Corporate records.

However, the website was listed by Wu, the Taiwanese businesswoman, on her Facebook page as well as in public incorporation records when she registered a company called Apollo Systems in Taipei earlier this year.

A section of the apollosystemshk.com site devoted to the LI-BT783 put emphasis on the battery’s outstanding performance. Unlike the disposable batteries that powered older generation pagers, it boasted 85 days of autonomy and could be recharged via a USB cable, according to the website and a 90-second promotional video on YouTube.

In late 2023, two battery stores came online with the LI-BT783 listed in their catalogues, Reuters found. And in two online forums devoted to batteries, participants discussed the power source, despite its lack of commercial availability: "I know this product," a user with the handle Mikevog wrote in April 2023. "It’s got a great datasheet and a great performance."

Reuters could not establish the identity of Mikevog.

The website, the online stores, and the forum discussions bear the hallmark of a deception effort, the former Israeli intelligence officer and two Western security officers told Reuters. The websites have been scrubbed from the web since the pager bombs wreaked havoc in Lebanon, but archived and cached copies are still viewable.

Ruing the day they bought the pagers, Hezbollah leaders said they had launched internal investigations to understand how the security breach could happen and identify possible moles.

The terror group had shifted to pagers at the start of the year after realizing that cellphone communications were compromised by Israeli eavesdropping, Reuters previously reported.

The salesperson who conveyed the offer made a very inexpensive proposition for the pagers, “and kept bringing the price down until he was pulled in,” one of the people familiar with the matter said.

UNRWA is close to a possible breaking point for its operations in the Gaza Strip due to increasingly complicated conditions, said its head on Wednesday.

"I will not hide the fact that we might reach a point that we won't be able anymore to operate," UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini told journalists at a news conference in Berlin.

"We are very near to a possible breaking point. When will it be? I don't know. But we are very near of that," he said.

The IDF reinforced troops operating in the Central Command ahead of the Sukkot holiday, the military said on Wednesday.