Scenes like those out of a horror film unfolded in Lebanon this week. Randa Najdi, a 35-year-old Arabic teacher, was meandering through a crowded market in southern Beirut on 17 September when an explosion sounded and chaos erupted as shoppers ran in panic around her. A man in the crowd fell to the ground, screaming in agony.
He was just one of thousands of people carrying handheld pagers, which almost simultaneously exploded in homes, cars, and shops across the country. Israel is widely believed to have carried out the attack, which targeted the Lebanese militant group, Hezbollah, but also killed two children and health workers. A second round of explosions erupted the next day, bringing the death toll to 37 and leaving over 3,600 wounded in total.
Randa told me that minutes after the first attack, dozens of frantic calls and texts poured in from friends. “There’s a guy in a jeep whose thigh got blown up” or “Someone’s intestines are out!” were among those messages she received.
Hezbollah and Israel have been engaged in near-daily clashes at Lebanon’s southern border, which have been escalating since Hezbollah joined the fight against Israel on 8 October, working under the umbrella of the Iran-led “axis of resistance”. The Lebanese armed group emerged in the early 1980s, during Israel’s occupation of the south of the country, and today has become Iran’s most powerful proxy in the region and an influential political actor in Lebanon. Though the cross-border strikes have taken place regularly over the past year, the mass explosion of communication devices and other technologies used by Hezbollah members reflects a notable and escalatory shift in the conflict.
Sirens roared through Beirut as ambulances rushed victims, many with missing eyes and hands, to hospitals in the Lebanese capital. While the pagers were owned by Hezbollah members, there were no guarantees who was holding the device at the time it was detonated. The Associated Press reported that some who used the pagers were also members of the group’s civilian operations, including doctors, nurses, teachers, and charity workers.
Nour el-Osta, a 30-year-old doctor at Hotel Dieu hospital in Beirut, treated over 120 victims of the blasts who arrived at the hospital after the first attack. “Most had eye and hand injuries, many had lost their fingers. Some had brain damage, which we think is due to the high impact of the explosion,” she told me.
Operations were carried out on 60 patients, the majority of whom lost “at least” one eye, Dr. Osta said. According to the Lebanese television channel, MTV Lebanon, over 500 individuals suffered from eye injuries and 300 are now blind.
The following day, schools were closed in Lebanon as the country processed the bloody scenes they had witnessed. But the period of mourning was cut short when another round of explosions went off – this time, walkie-talkies, electronic appliances and even solar panels .
Some in Lebanon placed their phones or other electronics far away from them, fearful they might combust at any moment. “I don’t feel safe at all,” Najdi told me. “Now, everyone is targeted, all areas are targeted… I am scared to hold my phone, and I am scared to hold my laptop.” (“Be careful of your phone,” a young woman at a Beirut café warned me after the walkie-talkie explosions.)
On 19 September, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah gave a televised speech, saying that the “unprecedented” attacks on communication devices are a “declaration of war” by Israel and would be met with “fair punishment”.
Nasrallah’s speech rolled on in Hassan’s family home, in Beirut’s southern suburbs, commonly known as Dahiyeh. The Shia Muslim-majority neighbourhoods are home to many Hezbollah fighters and became scenes of chaos this week as devices blew up in busy streets. In the living room, 23-year-old Hassan sat on the sofa in front of the television, wedged alongside his younger sister between their parents. (Hassan and his family requested to be identified by their first names only, to avoid any issues Hassan might face at his job in the tech field for speaking on politically sensitive issues.) He told me about a relative, who severely injured his hand and one of his eyes after his pager exploded. The device burst inside his home, the bloody explosion unfolding in front of his young son. “His son can’t even step into their house anymore,” Hassan said. “He’s scared another explosion can happen.”
In the middle of Nasrallah’s speech, a loud boom shook the window panes of the home. Seconds later another reverberated around the room, causing Hassan’s two 15-year-old sisters to jump from their seats in fright. One of the girls screamed at her mother, “Don’t go near the windows!”
After the boom, Hassan, noticing my hands were shaking, offered me a cigarette. I accepted, but they became more noticeable as I tried to light it. The thunderous noise was caused by Israeli warplanes flying low over the capital and breaking the sound barrier in an apparent effort by Israel to terrify the population, which human rights experts have said is a form of psychological warfare. Israel has been carrying out these sonic booms over the past eleven months in Lebanon, but they intensified in Beirut following the assassination of Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in July.
While Hassan’s sisters panicked, his father, 58-year-old Ali, remained calm. “We are experiencing a psychological crisis, especially affecting the youth, who are all new to this,” he explained to me. “For the older generation, however, war has shaped and roughened us to make us immune to what is happening right now.”
Ali was born and raised in a village near Lebanon’s southern city of Tyre, although he used to travel back and forth to Beirut. “I still remember the days in the south, when Israel used to target our fields. Israeli pilots used to test their skills on our land,” he recounted. Israel occupied the south of Lebanon for 22 years during Ali’s youth, from 1978 until 2000. In 1982, Israeli forces invaded Beirut, laying siege to the Western part of the capital.
Climbing to his feet, Ali imitated himself as a young man in 1982, holding up his ID to Israeli soldiers stationed at checkpoints around the capital. “Hezbollah, or the resistance, is the outcome of Israel’s assaults, like in 1982,” Ali said.
The family turned to television, where the speech had concluded and was followed by a series of patriotic music videos featuring Hezbollah supporters. One Hezbollah fighter flashed on the screen, wearing the black-and-white Keffiyeh, an emblem of solidarity with Palestine, and stretched out his arms, both of which had been amputated.
Two days before the pager explosions, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security council made the safe return of residents to the north of the country an “official war goal”. On Tuesday morning before the explosions, Netanyahu announced the expanded war goals to include Lebanon’s border. On 19 September, following the device explosions, Israeli warplanes carried out the most intense strikes on southern Lebanon since the start of the cross-border fighting last year.
“Israel is clearly not going for a ceasefire in Gaza anytime soon,” Mairav Zonszein, a Tel-Aviv based analyst at the International Crisis Group, told me. Nasrallah has announced on multiple occasions that Hezbollah’s fight against Israel from Lebanon would only stop upon a ceasefire in Gaza.
So, “Israel is trying to change the situation on [its] northern border” without a ceasefire, Zonszein said, noting that Israel “feels confident pushing the limits” to “chip away at Hezbollah’s abilities and confidence” and develop “the leverage for some kind of understanding or agreement for de-escalation in the north”.
N.R. Jenzen Jones, the director of Armament Research Services, a weapons research firm, told me that “a complex attack of this type is unprecedented”, referencing both the scale and relative precision of the communication device explosions. He said that Hezbollah will likely now have to fall back on other forms of communication, such as word of mouth and encrypted messaging, which have limitations or are easier for Israel to monitor. Also, Jenzen-Jones added, “beyond the obvious physical impacts, the attack sends a strong message to Hezbollah: ‘we have penetrated your networks and can strike you in novel ways without warning’”.
On 20 September, Israel conducted a targeted strike in Dahiyeh killing a top Hezbollah commander, according to the IDF. Videos from the scene shared on social media show extensive damage. At least nine people were killed and 59 wounded in the strike, according to Lebanese health ministry. (“We’re okay, but everyone’s afraid,” Hassan told me just after the attack.)
Analysts believe that Hezbollah will be able to regroup militarily from the explosions of communication device explosions, but the “psychological effects will likely run deep”.
Hassan said that although many Lebanese continue to support Hezbollah, he has noticed more of his friends criticising the group, particularly as they “lose hope” after almost a year into the war. He explained that he doesn’t personally support them, but at the same time believes the Lebanese army, suffering after years of economic crisis, would not be able to defend the country from Israel on its own. Yet the events of the past week haven’t bolstered this idea. He said: “Although there is solidarity with [Hezbollah], a lot are criticising the way Israel managed to penetrate [their communications networks] and pull a move like this, which seemed careless on Hezbollah’s side.”
The same day I visited Hassan, hundreds gathered just outside Dahiyeh to mourn Fadel Abbas Bazzi and Ahmad Ali Hassan, two Hezbollah fighters who were killed when their walkie-talkies exploded. I stood nearby, watching the crowds carry the two coffins above toward the cemetery, where the men would be laid to rest next to dozens of Hezbollah fighters. The procession lasted no more than half an hour, shorter than most memorials for members of the group. The day before, a funeral for three Hezbollah members and a child was violently interrupted by the second round of device explosions.
After the procession concluded, a few mourners lingered. Two teary-eyed women embraced underneath a large photo of Fuad Shukr, propped up in the centre of the gravestones. A few others sat beside their loved ones’ graves and read the Quran in silence. One young man’s shoulders shook as he let out heavy sobs. He remained there for over an hour, with his face buried in his palms.
The scene made me recall something that Hassan’s mother, Imane, had said to me earlier that day. “We are humans, we have feelings, and we get scared for our children,” she said. “We cannot tolerate this anymore.”
[See also: Israel’s two-front war]
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