Beirut – Hundreds of pagers blew up at the same time across Lebanon on Tuesday in an apparently coordinated Israeli attack on Hezbollah that killed nine people and injured nearly 3000.
The attack came a day after Israel had warned it was considering stepping up its military campaign against Hezbollah.
Lebanon’s health minister, Firass Abiad, said the blasts on Tuesday killed a 9-year-old girl, among others. “About 2,750 people were injured … more than 200 of them critically,” with injuries mostly reported to the face, hands and stomach, Abiad told a press conference.
Hezbollah said in a statement that two of its fighters were among the dead. Later media reports said the son of the Hezbollah MP Ali Ammar also died in the explosions.
Lebanon’s information minister called the explosions an act of “Israeli aggression”.
Hezbollah said it held Israel “fully responsible” for Tuesday’s attack and that a “just punishment” was coming.
Hezbollah fighters in Syria were also injured in the attack, with several being treated in hospitals in Damascus, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards-affiliated Saberin News reported that some guards had also been killed.
The incident further ratcheted up tensions between Israel and Hezbollah, interrupting an uneasy calm which had prevailed over the last three weeks. Both parties seemed to have stepped back from the brink of a regional war on 25 August, after a limited Hezbollah response to Israel’s assassination of its top military commander, Fouad Shukur, in Beirut.
Hebrew media reports said Benjamin Netanyahu, Yoav Gallant and other security chiefs had been huddling at the defence ministry headquarters at the Kirya base in Tel Aviv since the blasts. The Israel Defense Force’s home front command told local authorities there was a possibility of an escalation after the incident.
A Hezbollah source told the Guardian they believed the attack was in response to the alleged assassination attempt by the Shia militia on a former top Israeli defence official, revealed on Tuesday by the Israeli Shin Bet security agency.
The Shin Bet accused Hezbollah of attempting to kill a former security official using a claymore anti-personnel mine that could be detonated remotely. The agency published photos of a dismantled bomb and wiring wrapped in tape, claiming the attack was prevented in its “final stages”. Hezbollah has not commented on the alleged assassination attempt.
Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, was one of those injured in the explosions, according to Iran’s Mehr news agency.
Some of the top Hezbollah leaders and their advisers were also injured, the Saudi-owned Al-Hadath news channel reported, quoting unnamed sources.
The attack was the third time Beirut had been targeted since the beginning of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah on 8 October, after the latter launched rockets at Israel “in solidarity” with Hamas’s attack on southern Israel the day before, which began the current Gaza war.
Hospitals across Lebanon were overwhelmed with an influx of patients, and a field hospital was set up in the southern city of Tyre to accommodate the wounded. The sound of ambulance sirens were constant in Lebanon’s capital city more than three hours after the initial attack.
Videos of patients, including children, with mangled hands, gaping wounds in their sides and bandaged heads circulated on Lebanese social media. A doctor in Beirut’s Geitawi hospital said the emergency room was tending to “several critical patients”.
A senior security source said pagers all over the country exploded, primarily wounding members of Hezbollah. They added that security agencies would investigate how the sophisticated attack was carried out, but that forces were currently occupied ensuring wounded people could reach hospitals.
A Hezbollah official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters the detonation of the pagers was the “biggest security breach” the group had been subjected to in nearly a year of war with Israel.
Lebanon’s health ministry put hospitals across the country on “maximum alert” and asked all healthcare workers to head to their stations. It instructed citizens to distance themselves from wireless communication devices.
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.
Israel has yet to comment on the attack.
Yossi Melman, a co-author of Spies Against Armageddon and other books on Israeli intelligence, said: “This absolutely has all the hallmarks of a Mossad operation. Somebody has planted minor explosives or malware from inside the pagers. I understand they were recently supplied as well.”
Melman said he understood that “a lot of people in Hezbollah carried these pagers, not just top echelon commanders”. They were used by the Lebanese group because they feared their mobile phones were being monitored by Israeli intelligence to surveil their communications and to pinpoint missile attacks.
The exercise showed, he said, that “Mossad is able to penetrate and infiltrate Hezbollah time and time again” but he questioned whether there was any strategic gain to the co-ordinated explosions. “It won’t change the situation on the ground, and I don’t see any advance in it.”
The incident came as the Israeli prime minister was holding a series of high-level security consultations with the heads of the security forces amid rising tensions with Hezbollah, according to Israeli media reports.
The Times of Israel and Ynet news described the meetings as “dramatic”.
Follow this link to join our WhatsApp group: Join Now
Be Part of Quality Journalism |
Quality journalism takes a lot of time, money and hard work to produce and despite all the hardships we still do it. Our reporters and editors are working overtime in Kashmir and beyond to cover what you care about, break big stories, and expose injustices that can change lives. Today more people are reading Kashmir Observer than ever, but only a handful are paying while advertising revenues are falling fast. |
| ACT NOW |
| MONTHLY | Rs 100 |  |
| YEARLY | Rs 1000 | |
| LIFETIME | Rs 10000 | |
