‘It Sounded Like Gunfire.’ Lebanese Reel From Deadly Pager and Radio Blasts
First, on Tuesday, there were exploding pagers. On Wednesday, walkie-talkies began detonating, along with other electronic devices. Panic took hold of whole areas across Lebanon—particularly in Shia communities where Hezbollah are present—as devices designed to be held in the hand and close to the face blew fingers off hands and took out eyes.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]“We were confused at first,” Joumana, who was visiting loved ones at a hospital in Lebanon’s capital Beirut on Wednesday, tells TIME. “It sounded like gunfire. Then we saw cars, ambulances, and wounded people.”
The ostensibly targeted devices carried by members of the militant and political group Hezbollah, whose members had been assigned the pagers, and the walkie-talkies pressed into service as back-ups. If the larger goal was fomenting fear, the success of the two-stage attack was palpable across Beirut.
The death toll stands at 37, including children. Of some 3,000 people admitted to 90 hospitals across the country, around 300 remained in critical condition on Thursday, according to Lebanon’s Minister of Public Health Firas Abiad. The Lebanese Red Cross has provided more than 200 units of blood for the wounded; blood banks were flooded with donors.
Read More: 6 Questions About the Deadly Exploding Pager Attacks in Lebanon, Answered
Many likened the twin attacks to “terrorism,” both because of its effect on the Lebanese population, and its profoundly alarming manner. Ever since Al Qaeda announced itself to the world with consecutive bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, “one-two” attacks have been a favored way of amplifying fear and uncertainty. During the U.S. occupation of Iraq, a car bomb was often followed a by a second suicide bombing perhaps a half hour later, intended to boost the death count by claiming the lives of those who had rushed to help.
“There is no world in which the explosion of hundreds, if not thousands, of pagers is not an indiscriminate attack prohibited by international law,” Mai El-Sadany, a human rights lawyer and the executive director of the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, wrote on X. “When those pagers were set off, there was no way to know if they would be in shopping markets, homes, or streets with busy traffic.”
Israel has neither confirmed nor denied involvement, but multiple press accounts and security officials point the finger at Tel Aviv.
In mourning from Tuesday’s attack, nobody seemed to expect Wednesday.
A funeral was underway in Ghobeiry, a predominantly Shia southern suburb of Beirut where Hezbollah enjoys local support, when an exploding electronic device sent the crowd into chaos. “I almost got hit,” says Joao Sousa, a freelance photographer covering the event.
Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health had called all of the country’s available medical workers to head to hospitals on Tuesday to deal with the large number of cases. Adding the injuries from the second wave, the chief medical officer at one of Beirut’s top hospitals says the backlog of operations on Tuesday’s wounded would take until the end of Thursday to clear.
On Wednesday, his hospital admitted two more patients. “One was a casualty from yesterday and one was from the day before because he needed a high level of care,” says Salah Zeineddine, the chief medical officer at the American University of Beirut Medical Center (AUBMC).
“We remain on high alert and are trying to decongest by providing immediate and quick care to the injuries we had two days ago and discharge cases,” Zeineddine says. “We’re still not accepting cold or scheduled elective cases just to save our resources should anything happen.”
The country remains on eggshells. Attacks on back-to-back days left many worried another one may be in the cards. On Thursday, Lebanese authorities banned pagers and walkie-talkies on flights out of Beirut’s international airport. Industries that rely on such electronics are also changing communication strategies in the short term—with one event planning company telling TIME they will replace their walkie-talkies used to talk during weddings with WhatsApp.
Hezbollah was clearly the military target of the attack. But the organization is at once a heavily armed, battle-hardened militia and a political party with a social aid organization attached. It exists to oppose Israel, having come into existence, with the help of Iran, in response to the Israeli invasion of 1982 during the country’s 1975-1990 civil war, and subsequent occupation of southern Lebanon, which lasted until 2000. The two sides also fought a deadly 34-day war in 2006.
Read More: The Coming Israel-Hezbollah War
But the nature of this unprecedented attack has surprised many, and raised questions about how it was executed. The New York Times published a detailed account of a Mossad front company manufacturing the pagers as part of an “elaborate ruse” that many have likened to a modern-day Trojan Horse. The most high profile casualty was the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, who lost one eye and sustained damage to the other.
Israel and Hezbollah have been in a low-grade war for almost a year, regularly trading missile and rocket fire across the border since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, a fellow ally of Iran, that killed 1,200 people. The near-daily fire has killed nearly 600 Lebanese, including more than 100 civilians, according to local health authorities. Attacks from Lebanon in that period have killed 46 Israelis, both civilian and military, according to the Israeli government.
Tens of thousands have also fled their homes on both sides of the border and have not returned.
Hezbollah’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah has said that his group will stop firing rockets and missiles across Lebanon’s southern border when a ceasefire is reached in Gaza, where at least 40,000 people have been killed, according to the Hamas-run Gaza healthy ministry, figures the U.S. and U.N. deem credible. Meanwhile, Israeli officials recently made a war goal to return the displaced Israelis to their homes in the north and have begun discussing plans to widen the war against Hezbollah—which until now has predominantly targeted south Lebanon and parts of the country’s east.
Hezbollah has vowed a strong response. “This strong blow did not and will not bring us down,” Nasrallah said. “We will become stronger, more resilient, and more capable.”
In the meantime, the rattled people in Lebanon are waiting on tenterhooks for Israel’s next move. In the hours following Nasrallah’s speech on Thursday, Israel flew jets over Beirut and carried out airstrikes in southern Lebanon.
Earlier in the day, a medical worker from AUBMC was walking through town in her scrubs even though she was not going to or coming from work. “I wear them at all times now,” she says, “just in case I have to run to the hospital again.”