The airstrike follows a deadly week of attacks that have intensified nearly a year of fighting between Israel and the Iran-backed Lebanese militia Hezbollah.
Gold Apollo denied all involvement with the explosive pagers, telling NPR outside its offices in Taiwan that it was a Budapest-based company called BAC Consulting which manufactured the devices.
Lebanese officials say Israel is to blame for the explosions. Hezbollah members had turned to pagers, believing they were more secure than phones. Israel has declined to comment.
The U.S. and other governments issued Lebanon travel advisories and some airlines stopped flying there, in anticipation of an escalation of fighting after assassinations in Iran and Beirut.
A rocket has hit a sports complex filled with children playing soccer in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights region Saturday afternoon, on the same day that an Israeli strike in Gaza devastated a school building and killed dozens.
“The situation is really quite volatile,” Capt. Alessandro Crepy, with the Italian contingent of the peacekeeping group UNIFIL, says of the fighting between forces in Israel and Lebanon.
Photographer Diego Ibarra Sánchez accompanied mourners in southern Lebanon after Israel stepped up airstrikes that claimed the lives of civilians and Hezbollah fighters.
The pace of attacks across the Lebanon border has quickened since a strike in Beirut killed a Hamas official. Some residents have vowed to stay. Others wonder whether it's time to move away for good.
Wissam al-Tawil is the most senior militant in the secretive armed group Hezbollah killed since Hamas' Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. The killing in southern Lebanon is the latest Gaza-linked escalation.
The Iran-backed Lebanese militia and Israeli forces have been fighting across their border since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, but analysts say they want to avoid a war.
A farming village in southern Lebanon sits on the edge of a parallel conflict to the war in Gaza, with Hezbollah militants fighting with Israel. Some Lebanese hold out hope for a permanent truce.
Hamas is viewed by many Israelis as an existential threat in the south. But in the north, especially in Upper Galilee, many Israelis say Lebanon's Hezbollah militants must also be destroyed.
