Nine killed, 2,750 wounded across Lebanon as Hezbollah pagers explode
Hezbollah official calls it the group’s ‘biggest security breach’ in nearly a year of cross-border fire with Israel.
At least nine people were killed and about 2,750 were wounded by exploding handheld pagers across Lebanon, the country’s health minister has said.
Firass Abiad said that an eight-year-old girl was among those killed and that more than 200 people are in critical condition after the communication devices exploded on Tuesday, with injuries mostly reported to the face, hands and stomach.
Lebanon’s Hezbollah blamed Israel for the spree of pager blasts, saying it will get “its fair punishment”, according to a statement released by the Iran-backed group which has been exchanging almost daily cross-border fire with Israel for almost a year.
There was no comment on the blasts from the Israeli military.
Hezbollah said in an earlier statement on Tuesday that two of its fighters and a girl were killed as “pagers belonging to employees of various Hezbollah units and institutions exploded”.
A Hezbollah official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the explosion of the pagers was the “biggest security breach” the group has experienced since October 7, when Israel’s war on Gaza began following the Hamas-led attacks on Israel.
Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, was among those injured by the pager explosions on Tuesday, Iran’s Mehr news agency reported.
US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told a regular news briefing the United States was not involved in the incidents and did not know who was responsible.
“We are gathering information on this incident,” Miller said. “I can tell you that the US was not involved in it. The US was not aware of this incident in advance.”
Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr, reporting from Beirut, said it appears the devices were detonated in a coordinated attack, which represented a “major development” in the hostilities between Israel and the Iran-backed Lebanese group.
“This is a major security breach. Hezbollah’s communication devices have been compromised. We have seen pictures from across Lebanon of men lying on the floor wounded, bleeding. We have seen reports of hospitals asking for blood,” she said.
She said “near-simultaneous explosions” were reported in southern Lebanon, in the east of the country and in Beirut’s southern suburbs, where there was widespread panic.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had called on his fighters a few months ago to stop using smartphones because Israel has the technology to infiltrate those devices, Khodr said.
“So now they’ve resorted to this different communications system using pagers, and it seems they have been penetrated,” she said.
Elijah Magnier, an independent military and political analyst, said Hezbollah relies heavily on pagers to prevent Israel from intercepting its communications, and he speculated that the pagers would have had to have been tampered with before being distributed to Hezbollah members.
“This is not a new system. It has been used in the past … so in this case, there has been involvement of a third party … to allow access …to remotely activate the explosions,” he told Al Jazeera.
“These explosions … are powerful enough to [severely] hit the psychology of Hezbollah.”
Earlier on Tuesday, Israel announced the expansion of its official war aims to include enabling Israelis who have fled areas near the Lebanese border to return to their homes, widening its nearly yearlong fight against Hamas in Gaza to focus on Hezbollah.
The exchanges of fire between the Israeli military and Hamas ally Hezbollah in Lebanon have forced tens of thousands of people on both sides of the border to flee their homes.
“The political-security cabinet updated the goals of the war this evening, so that they include the following section: the safe return of the residents of the north to their homes,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement early on Tuesday.
The exchanges of fire between Israeli soldiers and Hezbollah have killed hundreds of people, mostly fighters, in Lebanon and dozens of civilians and soldiers on the Israeli side.
On Monday, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said “military action” was the “only way left to ensure the return of Israel’s northern communities”.
Hezbollah claimed a dozen attacks on Israeli positions on Monday and three more on Tuesday.
How did Hezbollah’s pagers explode in Lebanon?
Hundreds of pagers belonging to the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah have simultaneously exploded across Lebanon.
At the time of publishing, at least nine people have been killed and 2,750 wounded, according to security services and the Lebanese health minister.
What’s a pager? Why use them?
Pagers are small communication devices used commonly before mobile phones became widespread.
The devices display a short text message for the user, relayed by telephone through a central operator.
Unlike mobile phones, pagers work on radio waves, the operator sending a message by radio frequency – rather than the internet – unique to the recipient’s device.
It is thought that the basic technology used in pagers as well as their reliance upon physical hardware means they are harder to monitor, making them popular with groups such as Hezbollah where both mobility and security are paramount.
What happened?
The series of explosions began at about 15:30 local time and lasted for around an hour.
Casualty numbers are still being confirmed.
One eight-year-old girl has been confirmed among the dead.
Mohammad Mahdi Ammar, the son of Hezbollah MP Ali Ammar, has also been reported killed.
Hezbollah confirmed that two of its fighters had been killed.
Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad told Al Jazeera: “About 2,750 people were injured, … more than 200 of them critically” with injuries mostly reported to the face, hands and stomach.
Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, was also injured in the explosions.
Who carried out the attack?
Many people, including Hezbollah, are pointing to Israel.
Israel and Hezbollah have been engaged in a mostly low-level exchange of fire over the Lebanon-Israel border since October 8, the day after Hamas-led attacks on Israel killed 1,139 people, saw about 240 taken captive and set off Israel’s war on Gaza.
Recently, Israeli politicians and media have increasingly talked of military action against Lebanon to drive Hezbollah back from the border to allow for the return of about 60,000 Israelis evacuated right after the attacks began.
“We hold the Israeli enemy fully responsible for this criminal aggression,” Hezbollah said in a statement, adding that Israel “will certainly receive its just punishment for this sinful aggression”.
Despite a similar condemnation from Lebanese Information Minister Ziad Makary, Israel itself – in keeping with previous situations – remains tight-lipped.
Why didn’t similar blasts occur in Gaza?
According to Hamze Attar, a defence analyst based in Luxemburg, “They cannot use the same method in Gaza because Hamas is very cyber-aware compared to Hezbollah.
“They are very capable when it comes to telecommunications,” he said of Hamas, stressing the efforts the group goes to to encrypt communications.
“They don’t use phones or cellphones. They have their own network and internet and communication and don’t need anything above ground,” he said.
How did the pagers explode?
We still don’t know.
Some speculation has focused on the radio network that pagers rely on, suggesting that it may have been hacked, causing the system to emit a signal that triggered a response within the already doctored pagers.
“What I think happened [is that] every Hezbollah [member] who was at a specific level was attacked,” data analyst Ralph Baydoun told Al Jazeera.
He also suggested that Israel would not need to know the names of whoever received the corrupted signal but it could gather valuable intelligence after the detonations.
“If they had the satellites on, … they would know the names and locations of all operatives who were attacked … immediately when [they asked] for help. They would disclose [their] locations,” he speculated.
Other analysts, such as former British army officer and chemical weapons expert Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, suggested that Hezbollah’s pagers may have been tampered with along the supply chain and “wired to explode on command”.
OK, but how could a pager blow up?
If the pager’s lithium battery was triggered to overheat, this would kick-start a process called thermal runaway.
Essentially, a chemical chain reaction would occur, leading to an increase in temperature and eventually the battery’s violent explosion.
However, triggering that chain reaction within multiple devices that have never been connected to the internet is far from straightforward.
“You have to have a bug in the pager itself [so that] it will overheat as a result of certain circumstances,” Baydoun said, speculating that those circumstances would most likely be a trigger introduced into the pager through doctored code.
Source: Al Jazeera and news agencies
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