Pager Attacks in Lebanon Puncture Hezbollah’s Image as Powerful Anti-Israel Force (original) (raw)
Advertisement
You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.
Waves of Small Explosions Cause Chaos Inside Hezbollah
Two series of coordinated attacks targeting the group’s wireless devices caused thousands of injuries, piercing the group’s rank and file and raising questions about how it will respond.
Outside the American University of Beirut Hospital on Tuesday, where many people injured in Tuesday’s attack were taken.Credit...Mohamed Azakir/Reuters
- Sept. 18, 2024
First, hundreds of pagers blew up, killing and injuring members of Lebanon’s most effective military organization and filling the country’s hospitals with wounded patients.
Next, during mass funerals on Wednesday for people killed in the previous day’s blasts, more wireless devices exploded, adding to the human toll and spreading terror that any portable gadget in people’s hands or pockets could suddenly become a weapon.
Lebanese and American officials said Israel had remotely detonated devices carried by Hezbollah members. The attacks marked one of the largest security failures in Hezbollah’s history and sowed chaos inside one of the Middle East’s most sophisticated anti-Israel forces.
“This operation is basically Hezbollah’s Oct. 7,” said Mohanad Hage Ali, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, comparing the group’s security failures to those that allowed its ally, Hamas, to strike Israel last year, starting the war in Gaza. “It is a huge slap.”
The attacks, carried out in two waves of simultaneous explosions, blew off fingers, bloodied faces and damaged eyes. The target was clearly Hezbollah, although many of the victims were civilians, including a medic killed in the hospital where he worked and a girl who picked up her father’s beeping pager to take it to him.
The Lebanese health authorities said that the first wave of explosions, on Tuesday, killed 12 people, including two children, and wounded more than 2,700. The second wave of blasts on Wednesday killed 20 and injured more than 450 others, the authorities said.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Advertisement