More than a dozen photos, but no mention of Hezbollah: Reuters revisits Israel's pager strike

Reuters on Thursday published a photo article bemoaning the injuries to a teenager who was wounded when his father’s pager exploded during Israel’s targeted attack on Hezbollah terrorists.

In the article, titled “Two years after Israel's pager attacks in Lebanon, teenage survivor rebuilds his life,” Reuters never mentioned why Israel conducted the attack, nor did it mention Hezbollah or terrorism once in any of the 15 pictures it used to garner sympathy for 14-year-old Lebanese Ali Abbas. In one photo, Reuters explained how Abbas received his injuries, saying only that “his father’s pager” detonated when young Abbas went to pick it up after it began “vibrating intensely,” according to his mother.

Abbas’ father is not named, nor is his connection to Hezbollah – which has been designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. since 1997. In April 2026, Hezbollah senior commander Ali Rida Abbas was positively identified by IDF and killed in an Israeli strike. It is unclear whether the man, who is credited with rebuilding Hezbollah’s special forces unit Radwan Force, is the father who avoided death by pager on September 17, 2024.

The Reuters article instead focuses on the teen’s activities while living with the injuries caused by the beeper explosion. The outlet failed to point out serious facts, such as why his father had one of the pagers designed to explode in the hands (or pocket) of known Hezbollah operatives.

Reuters did not respond to a Just the News inquiry.

Ignoring the critical facts about the exploding pagers 

Reuters used a similar angle in 2025, focusing on someone who was maimed in the explosions and putting them in a sympathetic light. As Just the News reported at the time of the pagers’ detonation, the explosions occurred in Beirut and elsewhere in Lebanon, killing at least 12 people, including two children, and wounding around 3,000 in the most targeted attack Israel has ever produced.

The Hudson Institute’s Michael Doran called the operation “one of the most astonishing intelligence operations in history,” and a “reworking of the story of the Trojan Horse for the digital age.” Doran explained that Israeli intelligence officials thoroughly mapped Hezbollah’s supply chain, then invented an explosive charge small enough to fit in a pager and be remotely activated, cause significant damage, and all while not easily identified as the source. 

Israel also had to insert themselves into Hezbollah’s procurement network to be able to provide the pagers, which they detonated all at once.

“If any one of these sub-operations had been botched, the operation as a whole would have fizzled. Who else in the world could pull off such an imaginative, technically sophisticated, and audacious plot?” Doran wrote.

He explained that nearly all of the casualties or maiming was restricted to Hezbollah members, making it possible for Israel to thwart Hezbollah’s practice of using human shields to gain sympathy.

“Whereas Israel places itself between its enemies and its public, Hezbollah, like Hamas, places the public between it and the Israel Defense Forces. These terror groups are secure in the knowledge that confused or corrupt Westerners will blame civilian deaths not on the terrorists but on Israel,” he wrote.

Reuters' history of miscaptioning, running fake photos, or falling for hoaxes in the Middle East

Thanks to Reuters, a new term was coined for the media’s manipulation of photographs – “fauxtography.” 

Camera.org reported that as far back as 2006, during the Israel-Lebanon war, Reuters photographers were actually altering photos to support the image of a cruel Israeli aggressor against innocent Arab civilians. As a result, Reuters was forced to withdraw over 900 of its pictures after blogger Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs demonstrated how the news agency’s photographer had doctored images taken of the Israeli/Hezbollah war. 

The 2013 dealt of death of Molhem Barakat — a Syrian freelance photographer for Reuters who was underage and had previously sought to be a suicide bomber — continues to raise questions about the integrity of the wire service’s images HonestReporting.com reported. The outlet also called into question Reuters staging photographs, a clear break from the ethical rules of journalism violating the National Press Photographers Association Code of Ethics and major news guidelines because photojournalism must faithfully report the unedited truth.

In what may be the most egregious example of Reuters failing to question the bona fides of photographs showing the IDF in a bad light, The Guardian reported that in 2006, Reuters, the international news agency, dispensed with the services of Adnan Hajj, a freelance photographer, after discovering that he had doctored a picture of the aftermath of an Israeli air attack on Beirut and other events in the conflict. 

Of course, by then the photos had already been distributed worldwide and Reuters eventually decided to withdraw all photos taken by Hajj after discovering that he also altered a photo of an Israeli F-16 warplane in action over Lebanon and supposedly firing missiles on August 2. The Guardian said Hajj had supplied pictures to Reuters for more than 10 years — without question by editors in London. 

Some purported social workers in the region have admitted to using the bodies of children to stage and manipulate wire service. Alam Daher, dubbed "the Green Helmet Guy" for the color of his civil defense headgear, admitted to the Magnolia Tribune that "he shows dead children to photographers to make clear that Israeli airstrikes killed young Lebanese during the months long conflict." Some Internet bloggers have accused him of setting up photos and of treating the dead insensitively.