Just because we are suddenly now hearing about exploding pagers does not mean that this is the first time Israel has done thing kind of thing in Lebanon. It turns out that since the start of the most recent conflict between Israel and Hezbollah back in 2006, Israel has laced all kinds of consumer products with explosives, including children's toys.
Israel has deployed all sorts of internationally banned weaponry against its neighbor to the north, so much so that the Lebanese people and their children are threatened by actual landmines as they go about their daily business.
"They seem innocuous, especially to the curious mind of a child," said Chris Clark of the United Nations Mine Action Coordination Centre (UNMACC) in Lebanon back in 2006 when the current Israel-Lebanon conflict began.
"They're small, they easily conceal themselves amongst all the rubble or the debris of the bombing. We find that children unwittingly pick them up and then, sadly, suffer injuries from them."
(Related: Did you catch the news that Israel just launched a second attack on Lebanon with exploding handheld radios?)
Israel's bloodlust against Lebanese children
Over the years, Israel has dropped an unfathomable number of bombs on southern Lebanon. Reports point to more than one million bomb clusters that Israel has rained on southern Lebanon, many of them still unexploded and hiding throughout the territory.
The threat of these undetonated ordinance is so severe, especially for children in the region, that authorities in Lebanon have created clown troops to teach little ones to avoid going near unexploded ordinance.
For years, Lebanon has painstakingly tried to clear its land of all Israeli mines, but the most recent outbreak of hostilities between Israel and Lebanon since Oct. 7, 2023, has put the operation on pause for the time being.
"As a result, Lebanon is not on track to meet its extended Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) Article 4 clearance deadline of 1 May 2026, and at current capacity predicts it will not meet its obligations until 2030," says the Mine Action Review.
Concerning Israel's alleged use of bombs deliberately disguised as toys, Lebanon first reported this back in 1997 in the L'Orient-Le Jour newspaper. A number of people at that time claimed that a nine-year-old girl had her hand shredded after finding a "big apple-green plastic jeep with six big black wheels" that blew up in her hand after she spotted it in her village.
Another child was reportedly left with severe burns after finding a booby-trapped flashlight. And even worse was a young girl who was killed after yelling in excitement, "I found a doll!" before the doll blew up in her face, ending her life instantly.
These bomb-laced children's toys were determined to have been dropped by Israel via helicopter.
"It can be a toy or have the shape of an ordinary stone," an officer from the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) confirmed at the time to the AFP, withholding his identity due to fears of retaliation.
The Permanent Mission of Lebanon to the United Nations also confirmed in a 1998 letter addressed to the secretary-general that Israeli fighter planes had "attempted to kill children by dropping thousands of booby-trapped toys on Lebanese villages and towns."
"The Israeli occupying forces have used this method through the years and continue to do so, the most recent example being when booby-trapped toys were dropped on the town of Nabatiyah, killing and injuring children and permanently disfiguring others," the letter states.
Hezbollah at that time claims to have identified among the bomb-laced children's toys from Israel a golden egg, various fluorescent yellow cones, a Snoopy dog, and a talking doll that was designed to blow up when the cord was pulled.
The latest news about the situation in the Middle East can be found at WWIII.news.
Sources for this article include:
Please contact us for more information.