Hizbollah promised to retaliate against Israel after accusing it of detonating pagers across Lebanon yesterday, killing at least nine people and wounding nearly 2,750 others who included fighters and Iran’s envoy to Beirut.
Lebanese Information Minister Ziad Makary condemned the late afternoon detonation of the pagers - handheld devices that Hizbollah and others in Lebanon use to send messages - as an “Israeli aggression”. Hizbollah said Israel would receive “its fair punishment” for the blasts.
The Israeli military declined to respond to questions about the detonations.
Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad said yesterday that nine people were killed and 2,750 wounded in the pager explosions, 200 of them critically.
Hizbollah in an earlier statement confirmed the deaths included at least two of its fighters and a little girl.
The pagers exploded in southern Lebanon, the southern suburbs of Beirut known as Dahiyeh and the eastern Bekaa Valley - all Hizbollah strongholds.
In one instance, closed-circuit surveillance video carried by regional broadcasters showed a person paying at a grocery store as what appeared to be a small handheld device placed next to the cashier exploded.
A Hizbollah official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the detonation of the pagers was the “biggest security breach” for the group in nearly a year of conflict with Israel.
The US State Department said it was too early to say how the pager attacks in Lebanon might impact efforts to secure a ceasefire in Gaza.
It urged Iran - which with its allies Hizbollah, Yemen’s Houthis and armed groups in Iraq has formed an “Axis of Resistance” against Israeli and US influence - not to take advantage of any incident to raise instability.
Without commenting directly on the explosions in Lebanon, an Israeli military spokesman said the chief of staff, Major General Herzi Halevi, met with senior officers yesterday evening to assess the situation. No policy change was announced but “vigilance must continue to be maintained”, he said.
Hizbollah fighters have been using pagers as a low-tech means of communication in the belief they could evade Israeli location tracking, two sources familiar with the group’s operations told Reuters earlier this year. A pager is a wireless telecommunications device that receives and displays messages.
Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, suffered a “superficial injury” in yesterday’s pager blasts and was under observation in hospital, Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency said. Reuters could not immediately confirm the report.
The casualties included Hizbollah fighters who are the sons of top officials from the armed group, two security sources told Reuters. One of those killed was the son of a Hizbollah member of the Lebanese parliament, Ali Ammar, they said. “This is not a security targeting of one, two or three people. This is a targeting of an entire nation,” senior Hizbollah official Hussein Khalil said while paying his condolences for Ammar’s son.
Lebanese broadcaster Al Jadeed cited Ammar as promising consequences. “We will deal with the enemy in the language it understands,” he added.
Yesterday’s blasts added to a hefty price paid over the past year by Hizbollah. The group has lost more than 400 fighters in Israeli strikes, including its top commander Fuad Shukr in July. Security sources in Lebanon said two more Hizbollah fighters were killed in an Israeli strike in southern Lebanon yesterday.
Earlier in the day, Israel’s domestic security agency said it had foiled a plot by Hizbollah 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 Hizbollah had planned to operate from Lebanon.
After the blasts, a Reuters journalist saw ambulances rushing through the southern suburbs of Beirut, a Hizbollah stronghold, amid widespread panic. At Mount Lebanon Hospital just outside Beirut, a Reuters reporter saw motorcycles rushing to the emergency room and people with bloodied hands screaming in pain. The head of the Nabatieh public hospital, Hassan Wazni, told Reuters that around 40 wounded people were being treated at his facility.
- Hamas condemned yesterday the series of pager blasts across Lebanon as part of Israel’s “aggression” in the region, saying they were an escalation that would only lead Israel to “failure and defeat”, according to a statement released by the group.
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