Hundreds of Hezbollah pagers explode in apparent attack across Lebanon

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

Firass Abiad said in a news conference that 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 was not immediately clear, though Hezbollah quickly blamed Israel for what it called its "sinful aggression." It said it 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 Defense Forces.

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Still, the incident comes just hours after Israel's security cabinet released a statement vowing to return 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 denoted remotely.

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

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’s military capability, but it did not. 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 deploying a computer virus or "worm." The Israelis are believed to have similarly done 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.

However, she said even if it's "just" cyber, there is probably an on-the-ground component. In the case of the worm, known as "Stuxnet," believed to have been implanted in the Iranian centrifuge software, for example, it was likely uploaded by someone with a thumb drive because the centrifuges were not connected to the internet.

"If I'm Hezbollah, I'm now looking around at everyone in the organization and wondering who the saboteur is."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Hundreds of Hezbollah pagers explode in apparent attack across Lebanon