President Donald Trump was reportedly “fascinated” with the gory details regarding Israel’s Operation Grim Beeper, the 2024 attack that saw thousands of pagers explode simultaneously and brutally maim thousands of Lebanese Hezbollah members and civilians alike, including children, according to a new book.
“Trump ‘regaled’ his guests with horror stories of the destruction that the explosions had wrought,” reads an excerpt from the new book “Regime Change” by New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, as flagged by Zeteo in its report Wednesday.
“He had seen pictures, he said. Mutilated genitals and missing hands. He was horrified by the injuries, but fascinated as well, lingering on the scenes and the details. One survivor, he said, ‘looked like a great white came and just took a chunk out of him. It was like a shark bite. It was horrible.’ He grew voluble, repeating, ‘It’s horrible, horrible!’”
The pager attack was planned far in advance, with Israeli intelligence secretly selling Hezbollah, the militant Lebanese group formed in the wake of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, thousands of pagers with hidden explosive devices that could be remotely detonated.
Israel carried out its attack on Sept. 17 and 18 of 2024, indiscriminately detonating thousands of pagers at once and reportedly killing at least 42 – including two children – and injuring more than 3,200. United Nations experts widely condemned the attack as a potential war crime.
“And there was something else that captivated him,” reads the excerpt from Haberman and Swan’s book.
“Many of the devices had detonated in public, and it was hard to know who was holding a pager when it exploded. The indiscriminate nature of the killing and maiming had shocked Trump, and while he was taken by the ingenuity, he showed a measure of disbelief at its recklessness. He seemed at once enthralled and horrified.”