Three people, including the sons of Hezbollah MPs Ali Ammar and Hassan Fadlallah, were killed and more than two thousand Hezbollah members, as well as the Iranian ambassador to Beirut, Mojtaba Amani, were simultaneously injured on Tuesday, across Lebanon, in an unprecedented technological Israeli attack, which targeted their Pagers.
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Hundreds of Hezbollah fighters were injured on Tuesday in Dahiye, in the Bekaa and in southern Lebanon. The cause: the explosion of their pagers, after having been apparently hacked by Israel.
Mobile Recursive Pagers
A pager is a mobile communications device widely used before the advent of cell phones. Its primary purpose is to receive short messages, usually phone numbers or emergency notifications, which it displays in text form. According to MTV, citing Syrian media, similar attacks targeting Hezbollah elements have also occurred in Syria.
The pro-Iranian party has called for blood donations, as some of the injured are in critical condition. It has also asked the media and Internet users not to publish photos of the victims in order to protect them from further Israeli attacks.
Outgoing Health Minister Firas Abiad rushed out of the Serail, where a Council of Ministers was being held, to monitor the rescue operations. He asked all employees of health hospitals to return to their respective workplaces to help the wounded. A similar call was made by the president of the Order of Physicians, Youssef Bakhache, to all medical staff in private hospitals.
A Wind of Panic
The roads in the southern suburbs of Beirut have been closed to traffic to facilitate the evacuation of the wounded, many of whom have been transported to private hospitals in the capital. In one of these establishments, more than 500 people have been admitted to the emergency room, a doctor who operates there told Ici Beyrouth. He said that the wounded continue to arrive and that many of them have eye injuries.
A wave of panic blew in the afternoon in the southern suburbs of Beirut as well as in several regions of the Bekaa and South Lebanon, where Hezbollah is strongly established, when, for no apparent reason, dozens of people were thrown to the ground, covered in blood, following small explosions of unknown origin.
Local media initially reported “unspecified security incidents.” It later emerged that all the victims had one thing in common: they were carrying pagers, small wireless communication devices used primarily by emergency personnel.
According to the Wall Street Journal, some pager users quickly discarded their devices when they felt they were overheating.
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