The perpetrators must be held accountable for the apparent attempt to trigger a major war, Russian officials have said
The mass detonation of pagers which killed several people and left thousands of others injured in Lebanon on Tuesday was an act of “monstrous terrorism,” Russian officials have said.
Beirut and the militant group Hezbollah, which was the apparent target of the attack, have blamed Israel for the incident. The Jewish state has neither confirmed nor denied responsibility. Media reports have claimed that the Israeli secret service, Mossad, rigged thousands of pager devices with small explosive charges, which were simultaneously triggered via a remote signal.
“This was a monstrous act of terrorism, monstrous in its cynicism and its scale, considering the large number of victims,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Wednesday.
A separate statement by the ministry said that Moscow considers the mass detonations to be “the latest act of hybrid warfare against Lebanon,” adding that “the masterminds of this high-tech attack were seeking to ignite large-scale armed confrontation with the goal of triggering a major war in the Middle East.”
The ministry did not assign blame to any particular party, but called for a thorough investigation. “All people responsible… must be held accountable, so that this new act of terrorism is not ‘swept under the rug’ the way the Western nations want to steer the investigation of the explosions at the Nord Stream gas pipelines,” it added.
The ministry was referring to the sabotage in September 2022 of undersea routes built to deliver Russian natural gas to Germany. The perpetrators have yet to be formally identified, although leaks to the media have suggested the attack was a privately-funded Ukrainian operation.
Commenting on the Lebanon incident, the Kremlin expressed concern about its consequences.
“The region is already in an explosive state. Certainly, incidents like this one – any such incident – can trigger events that would spin the situation out of control,” spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the media.
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