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.
