President Trump has sensationally suggested that he was involved in the pager attacks in Lebanon that killed dozens of people, including children.
Trump, 79, said in an interview with TIME that, despite not being president at the time, he supported the clandestine operation, which was carried out by Israeli operatives on September 17 and 18 last year.
TIME sat down with the president in the Oval Office to discuss his Gaza peace deal, which has brought about a shaky ceasefire between Hamas and the Israeli Defense Forces. In the course of the interview, the magazine’s reporter “brought up Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah and regime change in Syria,” causing the president to blurt out the previously unknown details.
“All of those attacks were done under my auspices, you know, with Israel doing the attacks—with the pagers and all that stuff,” Trump, who was a presidential candidate challenging the incumbent Joe Biden at the time, told TIME. “They let me know everything,” he added. “And sometimes I’d say no—and they’d be respectful of that.”
It appeared that Trump was referring to the attack on the Lebanese Shia militant group Hezbollah that used booby-trapped pagers loaded with explosives to kill dozens of people and injure thousands more in September last year. Death estimates range from 35 to 42.
Two ex-Mossad agents told CBS News that the Islamist group was duped into buying thousands of the rigged devices, which blew up in unison on September 17, 2024. Israel claimed responsibility for the attack two months later.
The strength of the blasts was compared to that of hand grenades. The explosions caused severe injuries to the face, eyes and hands of many people. Many victims were innocent bystanders taking money from cash machines or shopping at food markets.
More devices, including walkie-talkies, exploded the day after, in what United Nations experts dubbed a “terrifying” violation of international law. One walkie-talkie detonated at a crowded funeral for four victims of the previous day’s pager attack, including an 11-year-old child and a nurse.
Despite Trump’s claims of involvement, the White House clarified that he got mixed up. A spokesperson told TIME that the 79-year-old was supposed to refer to Israel’s September 2025 strike on Doha, Qatar, when warplanes bombed a compound that Hamas operatives had met at to discuss a potential ceasefire.
But in a follow-up statement, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung stated that the president did indeed support the Lebanon attack. “The definition of auspices is support and approval. President Trump supported the action,” he told the Daily Beast.
A spokesperson for Biden did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.
Qatar was a key mediator in the eventual Gaza peace deal, and its leaders, who gifted the president a $400 million jet earlier this year, are Trump allies. “That was terrible,” Trump told TIME of the attack, once he’d figured out which one was which. He said it was “a tactical mistake” by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
It comes after psychologist Dr. John Gartner told The Daily Beast Podcast that the president’s nonsensical speeches, repeated confusion, and frequent lapses in memory are signs of his “immense cognitive decline.”
Last week, Trump claimed that he had halted a “nuclear” war between Iran and Pakistan, repeatedly mixing up Iran and India without noticing the mistake.
Trump, the oldest person ever inaugurated as president, has conjured up several other fake conflicts. In his self-absorbed and ultimately fruitless bid for the Nobel Peace Prize, he insisted he had “solved” an imaginary conflict between Cambodia and Armenia—two nations 4,000 miles apart, just days after bragging he’d stopped a showdown between Azerbaijan and Albania, apparently meaning Armenia.
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