Lebanon Says Thousands Injured by Exploding Pagers

Thousands of people in Lebanon have been hurt by pagers exploding in what might be a campaign against Hezbollah.

The country’s health ministry claimed that at least eight people have been killed, while 2,750 people have been injured. Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, was said to have been hurt. About 200 of the injured are in critical condition.

Hezbollah, considered a terrorist organization by the US and other countries, tends to rely on the devices for communication to avoid surveillance on cellphones. It’s not clear how the exploding pagers reached the recipients, but a munitions expert told the BBC that the handhelds might have been stuffed with up to 20g of high explosives.

Hezbollah has blamed Israel for the explosions and alleges that two of its members and an eight-year-old girl were among the dead. Lebanon information minister Ziad Makary has also pinned the explosions on Israel.

Israel hasn’t confirmed or denied its involvement as of this writing. However, the Israel Defence Force is studying the situation and says there’s no change in policy for Israeli civilians’ self-protection measures.

The exploding pagers come after months of rising tensions between Israel, Lebanon, and Hezbollah. There are concerns the war between Israel and Hamas, prompted by Hamas’ attacks and hostage-taking on October 7th last year, might spill into Lebanon.

If Israel is involved, the campaign represents a novel form of large-scale assassination: modifying thousands of personal devices to detonate them on cue. It also suggests that Hezbollah’s security infrastructure wasn’t prepared for compromised devices.

The nature of war has shifted rapidly toward the technological in recent years. Ukraine’s military has been using drones to help fight the Russian invasion, for example, while cyberwarfare is increasingly commonplace. Provided the reports are accurate, though, potential targets may now have to worry about the devices in their pockets.