Hundreds of Hezbollah pagers explode across Lebanon injuring thousands

At least eight people were killed and more than 2,700 injured, many of them Hezbollah fighters , when the handheld pagers they use to communicate exploded, Lebanon's health minister said Tuesday.

Firass Abiad said the blasts took place in several suburbs of Beirut, according to Lebanon's National News Agency . He said many of the victims had injuries to their faces, hands and stomachs.

He said one of those killed was an 8-year-old girl.

The direct cause of the explosions, which appeared to take place simultaneously at 3:30 p.m., was not immediately clear, though Hezbollah quickly blamed Israel for what it called its "sinful aggression."

The Shia militant movement said Israel would get "its fair punishment."

A Hezbollah official told the Reuters news agency that the detonation of the pagers was the "biggest security breach" the group had been subjected to in nearly a year of war with Israel.

Mojtaba Amani, Iran's ambassador in Lebanon, was also injured in the incident, though not seriously, according to Iran's semi-official Mehr News Agency. Hezbollah is materially and financially backed by Iran.

There was no immediate comment from Israel's military.

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Still, the incident comes just hours after Israel's security Cabinet released a statement vowing to return tens of thousands of displaced residents of Israel's northern areas to their homes. Hezbollah, long Israel's enemy, has repeatedly fired missiles at Israeli territory since Hamas' Oct. 7 attacks, causing many residents to flee south.

A pager is a small electronic device that can be worn or fit in a pocket that beeps or vibrates when someone is trying to contact you. It displays the phone number or sometimes a short message. Pagers can usually only receive information, not transmit it, making their location hard to track.

Small bombs on both pagers and cellphones can be detonated remotely.

Israel has for months warned that it could launch a military operation to drive Hezbollah away from its border.

Orna Mizrachi, a former Israeli national security official, said in a call with reporters that the pager attack could signal that Israel is about to change its war strategy, in which it has been fighting Hamas in Gaza for almost a year, and move its main front to the north to fight Hezbollah.

"I think we are closer than we were before to a full-scale war" with Hezbollah, said Mizrachi, now a senior research fellow at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies.

Still, hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, are not new. They have been clashing and exchanging fire along their shared border since the mid-1980s. They fought a major war in 2006.

Hezbollah says it has upped its attacks on Israel as part of its support for Hamas in Gaza. But they are also connected to a broader regional commitment to oppose and pressure Israel. Lina Khatib, an expert on the Middle East at London think tank Chatham House, noted recently that Hezbollah’s fight with Israel may not ultimately be about helping Palestinians, or even Hamas, but about self-preservation.

"The group could have intervened on a large scale in October before Israel significantly weakened Hamas’ military capability, but it did not," Khatib said. "Hezbollah would only engage in all-out war with Israel if the group felt it was facing an existential threat of its own (which, currently, it does not). It will not sacrifice itself for Palestine."

Rose Kelanic, who runs the Middle East program at Defense Priorities, a Washington think tank, said that if it's confirmed the operation was carried out by Israel, the message is clear: "The Israelis just told Hezbollah that they've got their number, quite literally, by exploding these pagers."

Kelanic said the pagers could have been detonated through purely cyber means by a computer virus or "worm." The Israelis are believed to have done similarly when Iranian nuclear centrifuges were destroyed by making them spin so fast, they broke. Or the pagers could have been physically sabotaged at some point along the supply chain.

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.

The New York Times reported that Israel hid explosive material in the Taiwan-made Gold Apollo pagers before they were imported to Lebanon, citing American and other officials briefed on the operation. The material was implanted next to the battery with a switch that could be triggered remotely to detonate.

The Palestinian militant group Hamas, which is waging war with Israel in Gaza, said the pager blasts were an "escalation" that will only lead Israel to "failure and defeat."

Contributing: Reuters

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Hundreds of Hezbollah pagers explode across Lebanon injuring thousands