Dozens of Hezbollah members were injured Tuesday around 3:30 p.m. (2:30 p.m. in Paris) in Lebanon and Syria by the simultaneous explosion of their pagers, a paging system common before the mobile phone. Nine people were killed and nearly 2,800 injured, according to the Minister of Health in Beirut. The explosions were attributed to Israel by the Lebanese Islamist movement. The Hebrew state had not yet commented on these explosions.
Who are the victims?
In the southern suburbs of Beirut, in southern Lebanon and in the eastern Bekaa plain, “hundreds of members” of Hezbollah “were injured by the simultaneous explosion of their pagers,” announced a source close to the Lebanese Islamist movement. Nine people were killed and nearly 2,800 others injured, said Firass Abiad, Beirut’s health minister. Most of the victims were injured “in the face, hand, stomach and even eyes,” he explained.
Among the dead was a 10-year-old girl killed in the east when her father’s pager exploded, according to her family and a source close to Hezbollah. The sons of two Hezbollah lawmakers, Ali Ammar and Hassan Fadlallah, were also reported dead. Iran’s ambassador to Beirut, Mojtaba Amani, was wounded, Iranian television reported. An AFP correspondent in the Bekaa saw wounded people streaming into hospitals. Another in the southern Lebanese city of Saida reported dozens of ambulances reaching hospitals.
In Syria, 14 members of the pro-Iranian Hezbollah in Syria were also injured by the explosion of their beepers, at the same time as these devices exploded in Lebanon, indicated the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR). A source close to Hezbollah confirmed that members of the pro-Iranian formation, deployed in Syria to support the regime, had been injured without specifying the number.
Israel accused by Hezbollah and Hamas
The Lebanese Islamist movement claimed that Israel was “entirely responsible” for these simultaneous explosions and assured that it would “receive its just punishment” following “this criminal aggression”. “The pagers that exploded concern a shipment recently imported by Hezbollah of 1,000 devices”, which appear to have been “hacked at the source”, a source close to the movement told AFP. Experts, interviewed by Le Parisien, also suggest that the pagers were hacked by sending commands, in order to overheat the batteries and make them explode.
Hamas also pointed the finger at Israel. The Islamist movement ruling the Gaza Strip called the blast a “Zionist terrorist aggression,” saying the attack made no distinction “between resistance fighters and civilians.”
Even as Israel has said nothing about the attack, the United States has said it was “not involved” in Tuesday’s pager explosion and had no advance notice of the attack, which the Lebanese Islamist movement attributed to Israel. “At this point we are gathering information,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters. “We urge Iran not to use any event to try to fuel instability and further escalate tensions in the region,” he continued.
Against a backdrop of tensions
The explosions occurred in several Hezbollah strongholds, hours after Israel announced that it was expanding the objectives of the war against Palestinian Hamas in the Gaza Strip to its northern border with Lebanon. Since the start of the war in Gaza, triggered on October 7, 2023 by Hamas’ bloody attack on Israel, the border area between Israel and Lebanon has been the scene of almost daily exchanges of fire between the Israeli army and Hezbollah, supported by Iran and allied with Hamas, which have led to the displacement of tens of thousands of civilians on both sides.
On Tuesday, an Israeli strike in Blida, on the border in southern Lebanon, left three dead according to Lebanese authorities, with the Israeli army claiming to have killed members of Hezbollah. The Lebanese movement announced shots against military positions in northern Israel.
What is a beeper?
Common in the West in the 1980s and 1990s before the advent of cell phones, pagers or “pagers” allowed to receive short alert messages or texts, and possibly to send some. These small boxes use their own radio frequency and therefore do not go through mobile phone networks, which can experience interruptions and connection problems.
This is also one of the selling points of the Spok company, which still manufactures pagers: “Have peace of mind with pagers whose signal penetrates steel and metal, while that of a smartphone could be blocked,” boasts the American company on its website. Another advantage is that a pager discourages espionage. Hezbollah had asked its members to stop using cell phones to avoid Israeli hacking. The powerful party has set up a pager system by which its members are called to join their units.
“According to the video recordings (…), a small plastic explosive was certainly hidden next to the battery (of the pagers) for remote triggering by sending a message,” estimates Charles Lister, an expert at the Middle East Institute (MEI), on the social network X.
Which means for him that “the Mossad (Israeli foreign secret service, in charge of special operations, editor’s note) has infiltrated the supply chain.”