Pagers used by hundreds of
members of the militant group Hezbollah exploded
near-simultaneously Tuesday in Lebanon and Syria, killing at least nine people,
including an 8-year-old girl, and wounding several thousand, officials said.
Hezbollah and the Lebanese government blamed Israel for what appeared to be a
sophisticated remote attack.
An American official said Israel briefed the United States on Tuesday after the conclusion of the operation, in which small amounts of explosive secreted in the pagers were detonated. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the information publicly.
The Israeli military declined to comment.
Among those wounded was Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon. The mysterious explosions came amid rising tensions between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah, which have exchanged fire across the Israel-Lebanon border since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas that sparked the war in Gaza.
The pagers that blew up were
apparently acquired by Hezbollah after the group’s leader ordered members in
February to stop using cellphones, warning they could be tracked by Israeli
intelligence. A Hezbollah official told The Associated Press the pagers were a
new brand, but declined to say how long they had been in use.
Taiwanese company Gold
Apollo said Wednesday that it authorized its brand on the AR-924 pagers used by
the Hezbollah militant group, but the devices were produced and sold by a
company called BAC.
At about 3:30 p.m. local
time on Tuesday, as people shopped for groceries, sat in cafes or drove cars and
motorcycles in the afternoon traffic, the pagers in their hands or pockets
started heating up and then exploding — leaving blood-splattered scenes and
panicking bystanders.
It
appeared that many of those hit were members of Hezbollah,
but it was not immediately clear if non-Hezbollah members also carried any of
the exploding pagers.
The
blasts were mainly in areas where the group has a strong presence, particularly
a southern Beirut suburb and in the Beqaa region of eastern Lebanon, as well as
in Damascus, according to Lebanese security officials and a Hezbollah official.
The Hezbollah official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not
authorized to talk to the press.
The
explosions came hours after Israel’s internal security agency said it had
foiled an attempt by Hezbollah to kill a former senior Israeli security
official using a planted explosive device that could be remotely detonated.
The
United States “was not aware of this incident in advance” and was not involved,
State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said. “At this point, we’re
gathering information.”
Experts
said the pager explosions pointed to a long-planned operation, possibly carried
out by infiltrating the supply chain and rigging the devices with explosives
before they were delivered to Lebanon.
Whatever
the means, it targeted an extraordinary breadth of people with hundreds of
small explosions — wherever the pager carrier happened to be — that left some
maimed.
One
online video showed a man picking through produce at a grocery store when the
bag he was carrying at his hip explodes, sending him sprawling to the ground
and bystanders running.
At
overwhelmed hospitals, wounded were rushed in on stretchers, some with missing
hands, faces partly blown away or gaping holes at their hips and legs,
according to AP photographers. On a main road in central Beirut, a car door was
splattered with blood and the windshield cracked.
Lebanon
Health Minister Firas Abiad told Qatar’s Al Jazeera network at least nine
people were killed, including an 8-year-old girl, and some 2,750 were wounded —
200 of them critically — by the explosions. Most had injuries in the face,
hand, or around the abdomen.
It
appeared eight of the dead belonged to Hezbollah. The group issued a statement
confirming at least two members were killed in the pager bombings. One of them
was the son of a Hezbollah member in Parliament, according to the Hezbollah
official who spoke anonymously. The group later issued announcements that six
other members were killed Tuesday, though it did not specify how.
“We
hold the Israeli enemy fully responsible for this criminal aggression that also
targeted civilians,” Hezbollah said, adding that Israel will “for sure get its
just punishment.”
Iranian
state-run IRNA news agency said that the country’s ambassador, Mojtaba Amani,
was superficially wounded by an exploding pager and was being treated at a
hospital.
Previously, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had
warned the group’s members not to carry cellphones, saying they could be used
by Israel to track and target them.
Sean
Moorhouse, a former British Army officer and explosive ordnance disposal
expert, said videos of the blasts suggested a small explosive charge — as small
as a pencil eraser — had been placed into the devices. They would have had to
have been rigged prior to delivery, very likely by Mossad, Israel’s foreign
intelligence agency, he said.
Elijah
J. Magnier, a Brussels-based senior political risk analyst, said he spoke with
Hezbollah members who had examined pagers that failed to explode. What
triggered the blasts, he said, appeared to be an error message sent to all the
devices that caused them to vibrate, forcing the user to click on the buttons
to stop the vibration. The combination detonated a small amount of explosives
hidden inside and ensured that the user was present when the blast went off, he
said.
Israel
has a long history of carrying out deadly operations well beyond its borders.
This year, separate Israeli airstrikes in Beirut killed senior Hamas official Saleh Arouri and a top Hezbollah commander.
A mysterious explosion in Iran, also blamed on Israel, killed Ismail Haniyeh,
Hamas’ supreme leader.
Israel
has killed Hamas militants in the past with booby-trapped cellphones and it’s
widely believed to have been behind the Stuxnet computer virus attack on Iran’s
nuclear program in 2010.
The
pager bombings are likely to stoke Hezbollah’s worries about vulnerabilities in
security and communications as Israeli officials are threaten to escalate their
monthslong conflict. The near-daily exchanges of fire between Israel and
Hezbollah have killed hundreds in Lebanon and several dozen in Israel, and have
displaced tens of thousands on both sides of the border.
Jeanine
Hennis-Plasschaert, the U.N. special coordinator for Lebanon, deplored the
attack and warned that it marks “an extremely concerning escalation in what is
an already unacceptably volatile context.”
On
Tuesday, Israel said that halting Hezbollah’s attacks in the north to allow
residents to return to their homes is now an official war goal.
Israeli Defense Minister Gallant said the focus of the conflict is shifting
from Gaza to Israel’s north and that time is running out for a diplomatic
solution with Hezbollah.