U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Auburn) said on Wednesday that the recent actions taken by Israel to detonate electronic communication devices in Lebanon are cause for concern for other's capabilities that could reach the United States.
Walkie-talkies and other equipment exploded across multiple parts of Lebanon in a days-long assault targeting Hezbollah operatives in the area. On Tuesday, reports came in of pagers similarly exploding, killing and injuring hundreds.
Israel has yet to officially claim responsibility for the concerted operation, though their involvement seems likely.
Tuberville, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters on Wednesday that he feared escalation in the region between Israel and Lebanon in light of the recent operation. He also re-voiced his criticism of the continued U.S. funding of the war in Ukraine.
"We know that the IDF, the military for Israel, is probably running on fumes with what they've done and had to do for almost a year now in Gaza," Tuberville said. "Now they're having to fight a war on their Northern border, which they've been fighting for the last few months. Yesterday, we saw a pretty unique situation. Again, I don't know the particulars about the pagers going off and who really was responsible for that."
He continued, "I am very concerned of escalation in the Middle East. I am very concerned of us fighting this proxy war in Ukraine, of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris giving Ukraine the authority to shoot long-range missiles all the way to Moscow. It makes no sense to me. They can't win this war. This is a proxy war that, really now, we're more involved than ever. It's a shame that we can't negotiate out of this."
Tuberville went on to say that seeing the capabilities to rig hundreds of mobile devices to explode, regardless of the methods used, is cause for concern for domestic security.
"I don't think there's any doubt," he continued. "You know, there's people [who] find out something worked, they'll use it to their favor. Again, we don't know who caused this, how they did it. I understand it was obviously hacking through a system. Any time you have technology, you can do things to it that probably could harm a lot of people. And it's not just pagers; it's not walkie-talkies, but there's a lot of things that could happen. We have to be very concerned. We have to keep our eye on this. We need to have our intel agencies very involved. Again, this is a dangerous world we live in. It's becoming more dangerous every day, but not just outside our borders, also inside our borders. That's the reason we need a change in this government."
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