Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has gifted U.S. Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania) a “silver-plated beeper” — a reference to Israel’s horrific attack on Lebanon and parts of Syria last year in which Israel rigged pagers reportedly used by alleged Hezbollah members to spontaneously explode, killing dozens of people and injuring thousands.
Israel’s September 17 pager attack, which human rights organizations have condemned as a war crime, killed at least 42 people, including two children, and wounded at least 3,500, many with dire injuries to their eyes, faces and limbs. A second round of explosions on September 18 killed at least 25 people and injured hundreds more.
Netanyahu presented the gift to Fetterman during the senator’s trip to Israel earlier this week.
“This is a silver-plated beeper. The real beeper is like one-tenth the weight. It’s nothing, but it changes history,” Netanyahu told Fetterman.
Upon receiving the gift, the Pennsylvania Democrat told Netanyahu that, when he first heard about Israel’s beeper attacks in Lebanon, he “loved it.”
“Thank you,” Fetterman said, shaking Netanyahu’s hand while receiving the beeper.
Earlier this year, Netanyahu gifted a similar beeper to President Donald Trump — except, in Trump’s case, the beeper was a golden one.
Several human rights groups have condemned Israel for the mass explosions, noting that the attacks endangered the lives of countless civilians.
“The evidence indicates that those who planned and carried out these attacks could not verify who else in the immediate vicinity of the devices would be harmed at the time of the explosion, or even whether only fighters had been given the pagers and radios,” Amnesty International said in a statement regarding the beepers. “Therefore, the attacks were carried out indiscriminately, would be unlawful under international humanitarian law and should be investigated as war crimes.”
Fetterman has been a staunch supporter of Israel over the past 17 months of its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Some of Fetterman’s harshest critics have been former campaign staffers who helped get him elected, noting that, as a candidate, he provided a different impression of who he would be once in office.
“On the trail, your overarching promise was to ‘Forgotten Communities’ — people and places that get overlooked, written off, and left behind,” those campaign staffers, collectively calling themselves the Fetterman Alumni for Peace, said in a statement after Israel began its genocidal military campaign in Gaza. “You can’t be a champion of forgotten communities if you cheerlead this war and the consequent destruction of Palestinian communities at home and abroad.”
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