Psychosis is gripping Lebanon after the deadly explosion of Hezbollah transmission devices, apparently booby-trapped by Israeli secret services. Residents fear that their own electronic devices will also explode.
Removing lithium batteries from solar panels, leaving cell phones in an empty room, avoiding chargers… The Lebanese are taking multiple precautions, living in fear of deadly explosions of Hezbollah transmission devices.
“What happened in the last two days is frightening, it’s surreal. It feels like we’re living a video game,” Lina Ismaïl told AFP from Baalbek, a stronghold of the Shiite Islamist movement in the east of the country.
“I took the external charging battery that my daughter was using, we all put our phones in an isolated room,” she explains.
“The fear was such” that this woman unplugged the solar panels that supply her home with electricity, going so far as to dismantle the electrical adapter necessary for their operation.
Solar panel explosion
In Sidon, in the south of the country, Mustafa Jemaa said he had withdrawn some of the stock from his electronics store. “We had devices here that we thought were 100 percent safe, but as a precaution we withdrew them… because we were worried,” he told Reuters.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, 37 people, mostly Hezbollah members, were killed in explosions of pagers and walkie-talkies used by the movement. Across Lebanon, nearly 3,000 people were injured.
In addition to these devices used by the armed group allied to Hamas, the Lebanese state news agency, cited by the Guardian, reports the explosion of a solar-powered electrical system, injuring a young girl in the south of the country.
Photos of blown-up solar panels, fingerprint readers and other destroyed electronic devices have circulated on social media, fueling panic, with no clear indication whether they exploded on their own or were located near the blasts targeting Hezbollah.
“A lot of rumors”
Internet users are also sharing instructions, encouraging the removal of batteries from electrical equipment. Even if for many experts, security sources or those close to Hezbollah, the devices that exploded were intercepted and hacked before they reached Hezbollah’s hands.
Faced with this frenzy, the Lebanese government is calling for calm. “There are a lot of rumors, an intercom exploded, a solar energy system exploded, a television exploded, a smartphone exploded… (…) There are a lot of lies, a lot of fake news and it doesn’t help at all,” said Ziad Makari, information minister of the Lebanese interim government, quoted by Reuters.
The authorities have also taken measures to ensure the safety of residents. The Lebanese Civil Aviation Authority has announced that it will ban “until further notice” the transport of pagers or walkie-talkies on planes or by air freight.
For its part, the Lebanese army on Thursday called on citizens to report any sightings of suspicious objects, adding that it had carried out controlled explosions of beepers and other devices suspected of being rigged, Reuters also reported.
