Claim: Arab citizens and singers released a song celebrating Israel’s recent pager attacks in Lebanon.
Fact: The album ‘Pager’ by a Saudi Arabian singer Saleh Khayri, was released in 1995. The song has nothing to do with the recent wave of deadly pager attacks in Lebanon.
On 17 September, X user @EYakoby posted (archive) a video montage showing an artist allegedly singing a celebratory “pager” song after Israel carried out the pager attacks in Lebanon on the same day.
“Breaking: Arab citizens and singers have started creating songs and music videos with the hashtag “pager,” celebrating Israel’s successful targeting of Hezbollah terrorists,” the user wrote in the caption of the post.
The lyrics of the song include the word “pager” in Arabic, which can mislead people into thinking the song is linked to the recent deadly pager attacks in Lebanon. Unconfirmed footage of these attacks is interspersed between clips depicting the singer.
However, it is important to note that this fact-check aims to verify the origin of the song and not the footage of the pager attacks.
On 17 September 2024, hundreds of pager devices exploded in an attempt to target members of the Iran-backed group Hezbollah. Widely believed to be carried out by Israel, the explosions were the deadliest attack Lebanon has witnessed in recent times as it left approximately 3,000 people wounded, and killed at least 12 out of which two were children.
The second wave of attacks on 18 September involved explosions of walkie-talkies, wounding 600 people and killing 25, according to AP’s report which cited Lebanon’s Health Ministry.
Another report by the news agency added that while the attacks targeted Hezbollah, “there was no guarantee who was holding the device at the time it was detonated. Also, many of the casualties were not Hezbollah fighters, but members of the group’s extensive civilian operations mainly serving Lebanon’s Shiite community.”
According to Al Jazeera, the exploding devices were meant to target Hezbollah which had switched to radio communication to avoid mobile phone hacking. Israel has not commented on the attacks, but news reports say it likely planned and carried out the attack.
Fact or Fiction?
In the comments (archive) of the claim, a user had pointed out that the music video is from the mid-90s and that it was aired on Kuwaiti state television, whose logo was cropped out. However, the identity of the singer was not clear, and more details for verification were needed.
Soch Fact Check consequently reached out to the Arab Fact-Checkers Network (AFCN) for verification.
The singer in the video is Saleh Khayri, a Saudi-Arabian singer, AFCN told Soch Fact Check. Links here and here confirm the identity of Khayri, whose photo matches the singer’s identity in the video from the claim.
Moreover, we found an X post from 2022 (archive) which shared a 13-second video of the song playing over a poster of Khayri that shows the album “Pager” [translated from Arabic] was released in 1995. AFCN shared a similar poster, confirming the song was released nearly 30 years ago.
On the left is a poster shared by AFCN. On the right, a screen grab from the X post Soch Fact Check found.
On the top left corner of both the posters, we can see a symbol of conjoined horses, which is the logo for Stallion for Artistic Production and Distribution, a recording company headquartered in Saudi Arabia, that produced the Pager song in 1995.
AFCN also shared a complete YouTube video of the song with us, which was uploaded to the platform in 2020. The scenes from the timestamp 0:19 till 0:30 and then again from 1:24 till 1:36 from the YouTube video match the video in the claim from 0:04 till 0:14 and 0:53 till 1:10, respectively.
Moreover, the lyrics of the song are about a “person waiting for his lover to contact him using a pager,” AFCN added. Therefore, it has no connection with Israel, and the recent pager attacks in Lebanon.
Additionally, the logo at the bottom right “jalili 99” in the music video from the claim, matches the name of the YouTube Channel “jalili99” that uploaded the complete song in 2020. Therefore, the footage of the music video in the claim evidently predates the recent pager attacks by Israel. As one user in the comments pointed out, the logo at the upper right corner that was allegedly cropped out of the video’s frame is of “Qurain TV,” a Kuwaiti TV channel, AFCN told Soch Fact Check.
Virality
The X post garnered 3.8 million views.
It was shared on X here, here, here, here, here, here, here.
On Instagram here.
Conclusion: The song in the claim was not recently released to celebrate Israel’s deadly pager attacks in Lebanon. It is from an album, released in 1995, by a Saudi Arabian artist Saleh Khayri.
Background image in cover photo: Vecteezy
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