Beirut (Lebanon): On Tuesday, the pagers used by Hezbollah fighters and medics burst across Lebanon, killing at least nine people and injuring 2,800 others, according to security sources and the Lebanese Health Minister. While Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate against Israel, Hamas described the attack as an “escalation” that would lead to Israel’s defeat, and the UN said the incident marked “an extremely concerning escalation” nearly one year into the Gaza war.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah has issued a statement confirming the deaths of at least three people, including two of its fighters. According to the report, the third person killed was a girl, and an inquiry into the reasons for the bombings is underway.
The explosives did not injure Hezbollah Chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the group confirmed.
The wave of explosions continued around an hour after the initial detonations, which occurred around 3:45 p.m. local time. It wasn’t immediately obvious how the devices were detonated; it is suspected to have been hacked by the Israelis.
Lebanon’s Health Ministry put hospitals across the country on “maximum alert” and instructed citizens to avoid wireless communication devices.
Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad said many of those hurt included Hezbollah fighters who were the sons of top officials from the armed group.
One of the fighters killed was the son of a Hezbollah member of the Lebanese parliament, Ali Ammar, they said. Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, suffered a “superficial injury” in the explosion and was under observation in hospital, Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency said. Israel did not immediately react to the incident.
The Lebanese Foreign Ministry denounced the explosions as a “dangerous and deliberate Israeli escalation” that had been “accompanied by Israeli threats to expand the war towards Lebanon on a large scale”.
Lebanese internal security forces said several wireless communication devices were detonated across Lebanon, especially in Beirut’s southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold. Three security sources said that the detonated pagers were the latest model brought in by Hezbollah in recent months.
Additionally, in neighbouring Syria, 14 people were wounded “after pagers used by Hezbollah exploded,” Britain-based war monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
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The attack was the third time Beirut had been targeted since the beginning of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah on October 8. The Lebanese militia had launched rockets at Israel on October 7, “in solidarity” with Hamas’s attack on southern Israel, which began the current Gaza war.
A Hezbollah official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the detonation of the pagers was the “biggest security breach” the group had been subjected to in nearly a year of conflict with Israel.
Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah have been engaged in cross-border warfare since the Gaza war erupted last October, in the worst such escalation in years.
Hezbollah maintains its own communication network separate from the rest of Lebanon. Suspicions that Israel has managed to penetrate the group’s telecommunications have been held since October, as several Hezbollah commanders have been assassinated in targeted strikes.
The apparent sabotage attack followed months of targeted assassinations by Israel against senior Hezbollah leaders. It came as US officials try to de-escalate tensions between the two sides and remain concerned that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could order a ground invasion of Lebanon.
It also threatens to derail efforts by the US to prevent Iran, which backs the Lebanese Shia militia, from retaliating against Israel for the July bombing in Tehran that killed the Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh.
The blasts appeared to exploit the low-tech pagers that Hezbollah has adopted to prevent the targeted assassinations of its members, who mobile phone signals could track. Those wounded in the attack include Iran’s ambassador to Beirut, Mojtaba Amani, according to reports.
Earlier on Tuesday, Israel announced it was broadening the aims of the war sparked by the Hamas attacks to include its fight against Hezbollah along its border with Lebanon.
To date, Israel’s objectives have been to crush Hamas and bring home the hostages seized by Palestinian militants during the October 7 attacks that sparked the war.
On Tuesday, Israel’s domestic security agency said it had foiled a plot by the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah to assassinate a former senior defence official in the coming days.
The Shin Bet agency, which did not name the official, said in a statement it had seized an explosive device attached to a remote detonation system, using a mobile phone and a camera that Hezbollah had planned to operate from Lebanon.
The United Nations Urges for calm
“The developments today mark an extremely concerning escalation in what is an already unacceptably volatile context,” UN special coordinator for Lebanon Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert said in a statement.
She urged “all concerned actors to refrain from further action, or bellicose rhetoric, which could trigger a wider conflagration that nobody can afford”.
Hennis-Plasschaert “underlines the urgency of restoring calm and calls on all concerned actors to prioritise stability as paramount,” the statement said, concluding that “too much is at stake to do anything less”.
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–IANS
