At around 3:30 on Tuesday afternoon, a man was perusing produce at a busy supermarket in Beirut when suddenly the bag he had slung over his shoulder exploded with a loud bang. The man, wounded, collapsed on the floor wailing in pain, as people nearby either scattered in panic or froze, confused by what had just taken place.
Across Lebanon at the same time, a version of that scene was replicated hundreds of times when pagers belonging to Hezbollah members exploded almost simultaneously in an elaborate attack on the Iran-backed militia, which is also a political party in the country. Hospitals across the south of the country were inundated with victims, many missing fingers or with severe wounds to their groins or stomachs. Lebanon’s health minister Firass Abiad said on Tuesday evening that as many as 2,800 people had been injured and nine people killed. Among the injured are Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon and many civilians; among the dead are the son of Hezbollah MP Ali Ammar and an eight-year-old girl.
Hezbollah officials have blamed Israel for the coordinated attack, which took place shortly after Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that he was expanding the goals of his war in Gaza to include making the north of Israel safe for residents to return. Those residents were evacuated nearly a year ago, after Hezbollah launched missile attacks over the border from Lebanon in response to Israel’s post-7 October war in Gaza. (Israel has refused to comment on the attack in Lebanon, and most likely never will.)
Details of how the attack was orchestrated are still emerging. Some initially described the coordinated explosions as a cyberattack, suggesting that the batteries inside the pagers were the source of the explosion. But the New York Times reports that American officials believe that explosives were hidden inside the pagers, along with switches that could be triggered remotely, long before the devices were even imported into Lebanon and distributed among Hezbollah militants. At the time of the explosions, a message was sent to all the pagers, seemingly from a Hezbollah leader; it’s believed it was this message that triggered their en masse detonation.
It’s still unclear at exactly what point the pagers were tampered with. Hezbollah only began using pagers as a matter of protocol a few months ago, over fears that Israel could too easily hack members’ iPhones and other smart devices. The laughably low-tech pagers were thought to be a safer alternative for communication. The wider motivation behind the attack is also unclear. Many fear that the explosions could be a precursor to a wider assault on southern Lebanon from Israeli forces, now that thousands of Hezbollah militants are hospitalised. Yet escalation isn’t certain: some speculate that the detonations could have been ordered now out of fear of the explosives being discovered, or that it was intended as a standalone attack, a muscle flex sending the message to Hezbollah and other enemies that Israel could target them anywhere, anytime.
If that is the case, the message doesn’t seem to have been received. In a statement on Wednesday, Hezbollah said it would continue its “operations in support of Gaza”, which was a “continuous path separate from the hard price that awaits the enemy in response to its massacre on Tuesday”.
