Rania Abouzeid
The New Yorker / September 18, 2024
Beirut – Earlier this summer, I met with a Hezbollah military strategist in a small village in southern Lebanon, a few kilometres from the Israeli border. At one point during our off-the-record conversation, his pager beeped. He decrypted the message using a neatly folded piece of laminated paper. I hadn’t seen a sheet like that since the 2006 war with Israel, when another Hezbollah militant in another southern Lebanese village pulled one out of his pocket to relay a coded message over a walkie-talkie. The group has long used various low-tech methods, including pagers, as part of its strategy to avoid Israeli tracking and surveillance of cell phones. It also has its own landline network.
On Tuesday afternoon, thousands of pagers across Lebanon simultaneously exploded in a significant security breach that Hezbollah and the Lebanese government blamed on Israel. The New York Times, citing U.S. and other officials, reported that Israel had carried out the operation, which it said entailed hiding explosive material in the pagers. (Israel hasn’t publicly claimed responsibility.) At least twelve people, including two children and a woman, were killed, and some twenty-eight hundred were wounded. Among the dead was the son of a Hezbollah parliamentarian. According to Lebanese TV stations, the sons of several other senior Hezbollah officials were injured. The Iranian Ambassador to Lebanon was hurt, too. The pagers detonated in the hands and pockets of people in their cars, in grocery stores, in restaurants, and in other public places.
For hours after the attack, Beirut echoed with the wail of ambulances. Some smaller hospitals were overwhelmed with casualties, and issued public pleas to take the wounded elsewhere. Most of the injuries were to the face, eyes, hands, and torso. Throngs of Lebanese heeded calls to donate blood, including in parts of the country that are opposed if not downright hostile to Hezbollah. There was broad condemnation of the attacks from across Lebanon’s usually fiercely divided political spectrum.
Hezbollah’s security and technical teams are investigating the blasts. Today, the Taiwanese company Gold Apollo issued a statement that the reportedly retrofitted AR-924 pagers were made and sold by a Hungary-based company using Gold Apollo’s trademark. This afternoon, as many continued to speculate about how precisely the attack was carried out, there was a second round of explosions, this time from walkie-talkies. At least fourteen people were killed and four hundred and fifty more were wounded, according to the Lebanese health ministry.
Hezbollah has vowed retribution. The exploding communications devices are the latest and most significant escalation in eleven months of conflict. Was Tuesday’s attack and Wednesday’s follow-up Israel’s “big hit” or the prelude to it? When and how will Hezbollah respond? The party’s leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, is set to deliver a speech tomorrow afternoon to address the latest developments. The Lebanese, and no doubt many Israelis, will be listening carefully.
Rania Abouzeid is a Lebanese Australian journalist who has extensively covered the war in Syria
