Israel-Gaza-Lebanon live updates: Hezbollah confirms media chief’s death

(LONDON) — Julian Assange made his first public appearance since his release from prison, telling European lawmakers the United States had forced him to “plead guilty to journalism” to put an end to his years of captivity and that his case still set a dangerous precedent.

Assange addressed the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, an international rights body, in the French city of Strasbourg on Tuesday.

He said he had eventually chosen “freedom over unrealizable justice” in agreeing to the deal that allowed him to walk free after 14 years spent in detention.

“I am not free today because the system worked. I am free today after years of incarceration because I pled guilty to journalism,” Assange said at the hearing, which was broadcast live.

Assange was released from Britain’s Belmarsh prison in June and flown to a U.S.-district court on the Pacific island of Saipan after accepting the deal. There he pleaded guilty to conspiring to obtain and disclose classified U.S. documents and a judge sentenced him to 62 weeks in prison, the equivalent to his time spent in Belmarsh. The U.S. had been seeking to prosecute Assange on 18 counts under the Espionage Act.

The agreement ended the more than decade-long effort by the U.S. to prosecute Assange for his role in publishing thousands of classified materials, including diplomatic cables and some materials showing possible war crimes by American troops.

“I pled guilty to seeking information from a source. I pled guilty to obtaining information from a source and I pled guilty to informing the public what that information was. I did not plead guilty to anything else,” Assange said.

Assange was imprisoned in Belmarsh for five years while fighting extradition to the U.S. Prior to that, he spent seven years confined to the Ecuadorian embassy in London, facing arrest if he went outside.

“The experience of isolation for years in a small cell is difficult to convey,” Assange said on Tuesday. “It strips away one’s sense of self, leaving only the raw essence of existence. I am yet not fully equipped to speak about what I have endured.”

Since his release, Assange has been living with his wife Stella and their two young sons in his native Australia.

“I think everyone can tell that he is exhausted, that he is still very much in the process of recovering,” Stella Assange told reporters at the hearing. “And at the moment, the only concrete plan in the foreseeable future is that he will continue his recovery.”

Assange and his supporters have warned that the plea deal still sets a dangerous precedent for media freedom, making him the first journalist to be convicted under the Espionage Act. At the hearing, Assange said he was precluded from seeking justice over his detention, saying the U.S. had required the plea agreement to include a prohibition on his filing cases at the European Court of Human Rights.

He and his team are campaigning for a U.S. presidential pardon.

Kristinn Hrafnsson, WikiLeaks’ editor-in-chief, who also attended Tuesday’s hearing, addressed the precedent of Assange’s pardon with ABC News.

“You need to take away that dagger. It has now been bloodied once. And if there is no reaction and no push and no political desire to take that weapon out of any politician’s hand, it will be used again,” said Hrafnsson.

Asked if Assange had plans for work with WikiLeaks now that he was free, Hrafnsson said he had nothing to disclose for now.

“I’m certain there will be a role,” Hrafnsson said. “And of course there is a role for Julian. And of course there’s a role for the recognition of the work and the past and the legacy of Julian Assange’s and how he contributed in this massive manner to the history of journalism in this century.”

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(LONDON) — The unassuming pager took its place in the annals of Israeli covert operations history in September, when thousands of the credit card-sized devices served as tiny Trojan horses for explosive charges as they were held by likely Hezbollah operatives.

The pager detonations in Lebanon and Syria on Sept. 17 were followed by the explosion — around 24 hours later — of walkie-talkies, used by Hezbollah as a communications network after its beepers were compromised.

The attacks, which killed 37 people and wounded 2,931 according to Lebanese authorities, were several years in the making, a source told ABC News. 

“The disruption and damage they wrought was unprecedented in the history of the resistance in Lebanon,” Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah — himself killed in an Israeli airstrike in Beirut on Sept. 27 — said.

Sources confirmed to ABC News that Israel was responsible for the pager explosions.

Israel — which rarely confirms or denies responsibility for covert operations or attacks on foreign soil — offered no confirmation of responsibility for the attacks. President Isaac Herzog even told Sky News he “rejects out of hand any connection to this or that source of operation.”

Orna Mizrahi of the Institute for National Security Studies think tank in Israel told ABC News that the communication devices operations stand out due to “the amount of people that were eliminated.”

“We don’t call it assassination; we call it elimination,” said Mizrahi, who previously served in the Israel Defense Forces’ Military Intelligence Research Division and in the prime minister’s office as deputy national security adviser for foreign policy.

The attacks represent a world-first, Mizrahi said. 

“It’s a real invention,” she said.

As to the criticism of the mass detonation of the devices, Mizrahi responded: “The terrorists are the only ones that used them. So, it is like a bullet in the hand of your enemy. But it wasn’t a bullet. It was something that was exploding in their hands.”

The operation drew on a long history of audacious — though not always successful or discriminate — covert Israeli targeted killings all over the Middle East. Though Israel generally does not confirm involvement in such operations, top Israeli officials have made clear their position against what they deem to be threats to national security.

As Israel’s outgoing spy chief Yossi Cohen said in 2021 regarding reported targeted killings in Iran: “If the man constitutes a capability that endangers the citizens of Israel, he must stop existing.”

Mizrahi said those conducting such “elimination” operations usually do so based on one or more of three criteria. The target might be a “very important terrorist” with significant influence and capabilities, she said.

The target may be a long-standing one, with plans put in place and those executing them waiting for the right moment to strike, Mizrahi added.

Or, the eventual target may be identified as part of an imminent attack “and you want to intercept it and to stop it,” she added.

“It’s always people that are from what we understand is a terror organization, that are threatening Israel or in the midst of launching some kind of attack against Israel,” Mizrahi said.

“We don’t eliminate people just like that,” she added, noting that Israeli forces will “usually” want to ensure “there is very little collateral damage, not too many civilians.”

Past operations have been abandoned due to the likelihood of civilian casualties, Mizrahi said. 

“When you are in a war, you cannot be so cautious,” she added.

A bloody history

Within years of the country’s bloody, but ultimately successful, War of Independence in 1948, Israel’s clandestine services were waging assassination campaigns against the many surrounding forces and states deemed threats to the young nation’s survival.

Its military and intelligence services were staffed by many who participated in the Jewish insurgency against the entity known as Mandatory Palestine, the British-run territory designated by the League of Nations in the aftermath of World War II.

In 1956, for example, parcel bombs were used to kill Egyptian military officials Col. Mustafa Hafez and Lt. Col. Salah Mustafa in Egypt and Jordan, respectively, both of whom organized Palestinian militant raids into Israel.

As Israeli identity and policy were forged in the crucible of war, insurgency and terrorism, the country’s clandestine operations took on greater ingenuity and complexity — though direct methods of killing have remained in regular use through the nation’s 76 years, spanning the technological spectrum from shootings to airstrikes.

September’s explosions in Lebanon will go down as one of the most unusual attacks in Israeli — or wider international covert operations — history, given the delivery method of the explosives, the number of those killed or wounded and the intimate access to Hezbollah it demonstrated.

But it was not the first time Israel sought to turn everyday items into weapons. In 1972, for example, Palestine Liberation Organization cadre Bassam Abu Sharif — a former senior advisor to PLO chief Yasser Arafat — lost four fingers plus the use of one ear and one eye when a book sent to him by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, exploded in his hands in Beirut. Israel never officially took responsibility.

The killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics by the Palestinian Black September militant group set in motion a brutal and sprawling revenge campaign — known as Operation Wrath of God — that would see Mossad operatives turn unassuming items into weapons.

Mossad’s long-established policy of public silence meant it never claimed even the most sophisticated assassinations credited to the agency. But David Kimche, the former deputy head of Mossad, explained of the retaliation campaign: “The aim was not so much revenge but mainly to make them frightened.”

“We wanted to make them look over their shoulders and feel that we are upon them. And therefore, we tried not to do things by just shooting a guy in the street — that’s easy,” he said.

Mahmoud Hamshari — the PLO’s representative in Paris — for example, died of wounds sustained in his Paris apartment in December 1972, when Mossad agents detonated explosives packed into the base of his telephone.

Hussein Al Bashir, a representative of Palestinian group Fatah, was killed the following month in Cyprus by a bomb concealed in his hotel bed.

Death by communication device was a common theme in the years after Hamshari’s killing.

In 1996, for example, internal security agency Shin Bet tricked Yahya Ayyash — an infamous Hamas bombmaker accused of killing dozens of Israelis — into accepting a call using a cellphone given to him by a Palestinian collaborator. The phone detonated as he held it to his head, killing him instantly.

Samih Malabi, a member of Fatah’s Tanzim militant wing, was also killed by an exploding cellphone in 2000.

Another three Palestinians and alleged militants — Osama Fatih al-Jawabra, Iyad Mohammed Hardan and Muhammad Ishteiwi Abayat — were killed by explosions in phone booths in 2001 and 2002.

Among one of the highest profile assassinations was a joint Mossad-CIA operation targeting Imad Mughniyah — Hezbollah’s international operations chief — who was killed in a suburb of Damascus in 2008. Neither Mossad nor the CIA ever took credit publicly.

A bomb concealed in a car’s spare tire exploded as Mughniyah walked past. It was detonated remotely by agents in Tel Aviv, using operatives on the ground in the Syrian capital to guide the plot’s final execution, according to a Washington Post report citing five former U.S. intelligence officials.

In Iran, too, the hand of Israeli intelligence is credited with several high-profile killings. Israel was behind a rash of assassinations of nuclear scientists between 2007 and 2012 — often using magnetic car bombs or via drive-by shootings, according to Iran.

So, too, was it responsible for the killing of the alleged head of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, reportedly assassinated on a highway outside Tehran by a remote-controlled machine gun in 2020.

Israel’s highest-profile recent killing — that of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July — reportedly relied not on an innocuous item but on deep penetration of enemy security networks.

Haniyeh was killed by a bomb planted in a guesthouse he often used when visiting the Iranian capital.

The operation bypassed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ protection of the building, emplacing the device two months before Haniyeh’s visit, according to reporting in the The New York Times citing five anonymous Middle Eastern officials.

Blowback and civilian casualties

For all their ingenuity, Israel’s targeted killings also brought civilian casualties, political embarrassment and diplomatic blowback.

It remains unclear how many civilians were among the thousands injured in the recent device explosions in Lebanon and Syria. At least two children were among the dead. Additional civilians were killed in the subsequent Beirut airstrike that assassinated Hezbollah operations chief Ibrahim Aqil and 14 other members, Lebanese authorities said.

Among the most infamous bungled efforts was Israel’s attempted assassination of Hamas political leader Khaled Mashaal in Jordan in 1997. Mossad agents using fake Canadian passports poisoned Mashaal outside of Hamas’ office in the capital Amman by holding a device to his ear.

Several agents were subsequently captured and, as Mashaal’s condition deteriorated, Jordan’s King Hussein — with the backing of then President Bill Clinton — pressured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into providing the antidote and saving Mashaal’s life.

Israel’s Wrath of God operations from 1972 onwards caused several notable civilian casualties. The commando squads hunting Palestinian militant leaders in Beirut in April 1973 killed two Lebanese police officers and one Italian citizen in their search for targets. Among them was Black September operations leader Muhammad Youssef al-Najjar, whose wife was also killed.

In July 1973, Mossad brought chaos to the small Norwegian town of Lillehammer in their search for Black September operations chief Ali Hassan Salameh.

Ahmed Bouchiki, a Moroccan waiter, was shot dead after agents falsely identified him as Salameh. Five Mossad agents were eventually convicted of the killing, and not returned to Israel until 1975.

A follow-up effort took place at a house in the southern Spanish city of Tarifa. Mossad agents reportedly killed a security guard but did not locate Salameh.

Israel finally killed Salameh in Beirut in 1979, detonating a bomb attached to a parked car as his convoy passed. Salameh died shortly after in hospital.

As well as his four bodyguards, the blast killed four bystanders and injured 16 more. Among the dead were a British student and a German nun.

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(NEW YORK) — Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who owns Tesla and SpaceX, has allegedly been in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin since 2022, a new report claims.

The allegations arose in an article published Thursday night in The Wall Street Journal, which said “several current and former U.S., European and Russian officials” had confirmed that the discussions between Musk and Putin touched on everything from business and geopolitics to personal topics.

“At one point, Putin asked the billionaire to avoid activating his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping,” according to the report from the Journal. It is not known if Musk agreed to the request, the report said.

The report arrived on the same day that Musk announced he would be resuming his America PAC town halls, where he has previously handed out awards for his controversial $1 million sweepstakes giveaway for registered voters who sign his political action committee’s petition pledging to uphold free speech and the right to bear arms in swing states.

The appearances had paused briefly this week, with some speculation that the timing was tied to a warning letter that was sent to the PAC this week from the Justice Department.

Trump stated earlier this month, that he would tap Musk to lead a government efficiency commission if elected.

Trump’s team previously denied that the former president continued speaking with Putin after he left office, refuting an account in journalist Bob Woodward’s new book, “War,” that Trump had sent Russia’s president a COVID-19 testing kit during the height of the pandemic.

When interviewed by Bloomberg Editor-In-Chief John Micklethwait at the Chicago Economic Club, Trump said that if he had talked to Putin, it would have been a “smart thing.”

“While the U.S. and its allies have isolated Putin in recent years, Musk’s dialogue could signal re-engagement with the Russian leader, and reinforce Trump’s expressed desire to cut a deal over major fault lines such as the war in Ukraine,” The Wall Street Journal wrote.

The Journal reported that Musk did not comment for their story. Musk did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment.

Through SpaceX, Musk has earned a national security clearance that gives him access to certain classified information. The Journal cited a person who was reportedly aware of the conversations between Musk and Putin who said no alerts have been raised by the administration about any possible security breaches by Musk.

At a campaign appearance last week, Musk commented, “I do have a top-secret clearance, but, I’d have to say, like most of the stuff that I’m aware of…the reason they keep it top secret is because it’s so boring.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in the report that the only communication the Kremlin has had with Musk was one telephone call in which he and Putin discussed “space as well as current and future technologies.”

Peskov denied the claims that Musk and Putin were in regular contact, saying after the report was published, “This is absolutely false information published in The Wall Street Journal newspaper.”

On Musk’s part, he said in 2022, in a post on X, that he had spoken to Putin only once. In the post, he claimed that the conversation took place in 2021 and was about “space.”

He did, however, give Putin airtime through his social media platform, X, which aired the Russian president’s interview with Tucker Carlson in February 2024. In the interview, Putin called Musk a “smart person.”

In the same interview, Putin said, “There’s no stopping Elon Musk. He’s going to do what he thinks he needs to do.”

According to The Wall Street Journal report, Musk was having regular conversations with “high-level Russians” by late 2022, a person familiar with the interactions told the paper. That source told the Journal that there was pressure from the Kremlin on Musk’s businesses and “implicit threats against [Musk].”

The Journal suggested the impetus for these alleged threats were months of Musk’s public proclamations of support for Ukraine, as well as granting Ukrainians access to SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet.

In October 2022, even as his followers on X began to question where his allegiances lie in the conflict, Musk posted a poll on X inquiring as to how Ukraine and Russia could resolve their conflict, echoing some propositions that Russia had put forth to Ukraine at the time.

That month, Ian Bremmer, the founder of political risk consulting firm Eurasia Group, wrote in a newsletter to subscribers that he spoke to Musk two weeks prior about his conversation with Putin.

According to Bremmer’s Oct. 10 newsletter obtained by ABC News, Musk told him he had a direct conversation with Putin about how Russia was “prepared to negotiate” and had outlined the minimum Putin would require to end the war. Putin told Musk that this would include: Crimea remaining Russian; Ukraine accepting a formal status of neutrality; and recognition of Russia’s annexations of Luhansk and Donetsk, Kherson control for the water supply to Crimea and Zaporizhzhia for the land bridge “no matter what – the alternative being major escalation.”

Putin also told Musk that if Zelenskyy invaded Crimea, Russia would retaliate with a nuclear strike on Ukraine, the newsletter said.

Musk told Bremmer that the Ukrainians asked him to activate Starlink in Crimea and that he refused given the potential for escalation.

“Musk also appeared concerned about more direct threats from Putin. While he didn’t surface anything explicit with me, he did talk about Russian cyber capabilities and Russia’s potential to disrupt his satellites,” Bremmer wrote. “My response was to not take Putin at face value and that there was zero chance Ukraine could or the west would go for Putin’s “deal.”

Yet shortly after Musk’s conversation with both Putin and Bremmer, Musk posted on X essentially the same points that Putin had allegedly spoken to Musk about, labeling the points as “Ukraine-Russia Peace.”

At the time, Musk publicly denied in a tweet that he said any of this to Bremmer.

The Wall Street Journal reports, “One current and one former intelligence source said that Musk and Putin have continued to have contact since then, and into this year, as Musk began stepping up his criticism of the U.S. military aid to Ukraine and became involved in Trump’s election campaign.”

In a statement to ABC News on Friday, U.S. Department of Defense spokesperson Sue Gough said, “We have seen the reporting from Wall Street Journal but cannot corroborate the veracity of those reports and would refer you to Mr. Musk to speak to his private communications.”

“We expect everyone who has been granted a security clearance, including contractors, to follow the prescribed procedures for reporting foreign contacts,” Gough added.

-ABC News’ Will Steakin and Luis Martinez contributed to this report.

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