A Year After the Pager Attacks, Israel’s Assaults on Civilians Continue

By Roqayah Chamseddine | September 30, 2025 | 9:34am

All photos by Roqayah Chamseddine

International Affairs Lebanon

A Year After the Pager Attacks, Israel’s Assaults on Civilians Continue

On Sunday, September 21st, Israel committed a massacre in the southern Lebanese village of Bint Jbeil, killing 3 children and their father from the Sharara family after targeting their vehicle on an open road. As of publication, their eldest daughter, the only survivor, is still in critical condition. From her hospital bed in south Lebanon, the mother, who survived the attack, was given the wrapped bodies of two of her three children, Hadi and Celine. This massacre in broad daylight comes after months of violations against Lebanon’s sovereignty—over 4,600 violations of the so-called ceasefire—resulting in nearly 200 deaths and hundreds of injuries. Every day Israel finds new, more barbaric ways to kill and maim Lebanese citizens, while it continues to carry out crimes against humanity in nearby Gaza. Nothing has changed, and the world continues as it was, our deaths in this part of it rendered as nothing more than background noise in this ongoing catastrophe. The ongoing ceasefire breaches by Israel encompass a range of military actions, including airstrikes, drone surveillance, and incursions into Lebanese territory.

The massacre in Bint Jbeil is not an outlier, but the latest in a continuous pattern of Israel targeting Lebanese citizens. Since the truce went into effect in late November 2024, Israel has carried out over 4,500 raids and strikes across Lebanese territory, mainly south Lebanon and Beqaa. The massacre in Bint Jbeil comes only days after the commemoration of the one-year anniversary marking Israel’s pager and walkie-talkie attacks, as thousands of pagers and communications devices distributed across Lebanon were remotely detonated by Israeli forces last September, killing 42 and injuring at least 3,500 after these rigged devices were detonated in hospitals, public streets, schools, markets and a funeral I reported from. These attacks were unprecedented in scale and also in its calculated cruelty, intentionally blurring the line between the battlefield and public life and traumatizing the city. I returned to Ain Mreisseh in Beirut for the one-year anniversary, and took these photos of the crowd.

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A small girl holds up two signs at a protest

When taken together—the drone strikes, massacres, and communication attacks—we are able to see a continuum of Israeli policy; the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure and daily existence across Lebanon. The killing of members of the Sharara family, and the international community’s deliberate silence, emphasizes that the machinery of death in the region continues to operate with full support from the so-called ‘civilized world.’

In the absence of accountability, it is undeniable that Israel will continue to push the boundaries of warfare, as the entity has done historically by way of assassination campaigns, routine torture, and the targeting of children. Until this very moment, the international community’s inaction on Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran confirms that there has been a normalization of total war against civilian populations. This normalization is the result of decades of U.S. and European-backed impunity, and it has been reinforced by the unashamed indifference of those claiming to be guardians of international law; global institutions have made every red line malleable, and ensured that civilian life in the region is expendable. By allowing Israel’s violence to metastasize unchecked, it is clear that what is happening in Gaza and Lebanon will only expand, and we’ve already seen this in Qatar, Yemen, and Iran. There is no region of the Middle East that Israel considers sovereign except its own.

But this impunity cannot go unchecked forever, and as global sentiment turns against Israel, it is becoming harder for the United States to reign in international outrage. For decades, the United States has shielded Israel from accountability by way of U.N. vetoes, uninterrupted military aid, and targeting local protesters, yet their propaganda efforts have shown cracks over the last two years, even losing sway over corporate giants like Maersk and Microsoft. The sheer scale of Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza has horrified the world and made it increasingly difficult to disguise the reality of Israeli apartheid and exterminatory violence, no matter how often we heard that “Israel has a right to defend itself.”

Despite the escalation in violence, the U.S. will certainly not restrain Israel under Trump, and not because this is an issue of an unruly client, but because Israel acts as a garrison of U.S. interests in the Middle East, whose power is entirely derivative. It is called the petrodollar after all. Israel’s crimes in Gaza, attacks on Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon aren’t aberrations that the U.S. simply tolerates, but part and parcel of the wider imperial campaign in the region with Israel acting as the forward outpost of empire. The crimes we are witnessing in Gaza and Lebanon, while undoubtedly reminders of unbearable loss, also reveal that every act of violence only accelerates the collapse of the occupation’s legitimacy, because as history teaches us: no empire lasts forever.