BEIRUT —
In what appears to be a first-of-its-kind attack, nearly 3,000 people were wounded across Lebanon on Tuesday — including at least nine fatally — after hundreds of electronic pagers used by Hezbollah members and others suddenly and mysteriously exploded.
Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency called it “an unprecedented security incident,” with pagers blowing up in Beirut’s Hezbollah-dominated southern suburbs and several other areas.
More than 2,750 people were wounded, 180 of them critically, according to Firass Abiad, Lebanon’s acting health minister. Most of the injuries were to the face, hands or stomach — near where the pager would be held, Abiad said.
Hezbollah blamed Israel for the attack. “We hold the Israeli enemy fully responsible for this criminal aggression,” the militant group said Tuesday in a statement.
Israeli officials and its military made no comment Tuesday about the exploding pagers. Israel has in the past shown itself capable of mounting sophisticated remote attacks.
Hezbollah said that pagers used by its members, employees and operatives blew up around 3:30 p.m. Among the dead were one child and two of the group’s members, the statement said. Iran’s ambassador was also wounded in the attack, its embassy said.
“Hezbollah’s specialized agencies are currently conducting a wide-ranging security and scientific investigation to determine the reasons that led to these simultaneous explosions,” the militant group’s statement said.
The bizarre and unprecedented attacks came hours after Israel signaled it was weighing an escalation of its military confrontation with the Iran-backed Lebanese Shiite militant group, one of Lebanon’s most powerful political parties.
Hezbollah, which has been engaged in a tit-for-tat fight with Israel since October, had switched to using pagers to communicate in recent months in an attempt to avoid Israeli tracking and surveillance of phones.
The exact trigger of the explosions was uncertain.
Technical experts at SMEX, a Beirut-based internet watchdog group, speculated that a shipment of pagers could have been intercepted and planted with small amounts of explosives that would be triggered either by a timer or a prearranged signal.
A security expert speaking to Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera said the pagers appeared to have been implanted with nearly an ounce of explosives. The person said that the pagers were part of a shipment of about 5,000 units brought in by Hezbollah.
Another possibility was that Israel developed a way to overheat the pager batteries, experts said. Modern pagers utilize lithium-ion batteries, which can ignite and explode if subjected to sufficient heat.
Hundreds of casualties were taken to American University Hospital in central Beirut, where Mohammad Salhab, a burly man whose green shirt was streaked with blood, was waiting for news of his friend.
“He was holding the pager in his hand,” Salhab said. “The doctors had to amputate. They couldn’t save his hand.”
News of the attack caused panic in neighborhoods and areas of the country where Hezbollah officials and operatives are present, with people calling family members and telling them to disconnect routers and other devices that could be vulnerable.
Witnesses passing through Beirut’s southern suburb at the time of the blasts saw a bloodied man lying on the ground with people crowding around.
Pictures on social media claiming to be from the attack depicted one shopper at a fruit market standing near a stall when his bag explodes. Another depicts a man in a shop holding a pager and putting it on a desk before it detonates, throwing him back.
The Times could not independently verify the videos or the images.
Dozens of ambulances crisscrossed Beirut’s streets carrying the wounded amid snarled traffic, while hospitals in the country’s south were inundated with casualties.
The Health Ministry, meanwhile, put all hospitals on alert and called on medical staff across the country to report to their facilities.
Late Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his government’s goals in the war against Hamas militants in Gaza Strip would now include the secure return of residents to northern Israel.
About 60,000 people have been displaced in northern Israel since Oct. 8, when Hezbollah began firing rockets at Israel in solidarity with Hamas.
Analysts said even though Israel has not acknowledged responsibility, the pager attack heightened the risk of a major escalation.
“I think that we are closer than we were before to the scenario of full-scale war,” said Orna Mizrahi, a senior research fellow at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies.
Also Tuesday, Israel’s domestic spy agency, the Shin Bet, announced that it had foiled what it described as an attempt by Hezbollah to assassinate a former senior Israeli security official using a remotely activated device. It said the attack was intended to be carried out in coming days.
Senior Israeli commanders, including chief of staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, met Tuesday evening for talks “on readiness for attack and defense in all arenas,” the military said in a brief statement that did not mention the pager attacks.
The United Nations called Tuesday’s developments “extremely concerning,” particularly given the volatile context of ongoing Israeli-Hezbollah hostilities. Stephane Dujarric, a spokesman for Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, said the world body “cannot underscore enough” the risks of escalation in Lebanon and the region.
Netanyahu met Monday in Tel Aviv with President Biden’s envoy, Amos Hochstein, and an Israeli readout said the prime minister had made it clear that displaced Israelis would not be able to return home without “a fundamental change in the security situation in the north.”
A similar warning came from Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who also met with Hochstein. He told the U.S. envoy that only “military action” could end the cross-border clashes.
The spike in tensions between Israel and Hezbollah coincides with dogged efforts on the part of the Biden administration to help secure a cease-fire deal with Hamas.
The Israel-Hamas war started Oct. 7 after a surprise assault by Hamas-led fighters killed about 1,200 Israelis in a string of rural communities and at a desert music festival. About 250 people were taken hostage.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken traveled Tuesday to Cairo for talks with Egyptian officials. The United States, together with mediators Qatar and Egypt, has tried for months to secure an accord, but efforts have been stymied, most recently by Netanyahu’s demand to keep troops in a narrow strip of land on Gaza’s border with Egypt known as the Philadelphi corridor.
Times staff writer King reported from Tel Aviv.
