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September 17, 2024 | 01:50 PM ET |
At least eight people were killed and more than 2,700 injured, many of them Lebanon-based Hezbollah fighters, when the handheld pagers they use to communicate exploded, Lebanon’s health minister said Tuesday.
The affected pagers were from a new shipment that the group received in recent days, people familiar with the matter said. A Hezbollah official said hundreds of fighters had such devices, speculating that malware may have caused the devices to heat up and explode. The official said some people felt the pagers heat up and disposed of them before they burst.
It couldn’t immediately be determined what caused the blasts, which were spread out across the country in several areas where Hezbollah has a heavy presence. The Israeli military declined to comment.
People gather outside a hospital, as more than 1,000 people, including Hezbollah fighters and medics, were wounded on Tuesday when the pagers they use to communicate exploded across Lebanon, in Beirut on Sept. 17, 2024.
Lebanese Health Minister Firas Abiad said he needed more time to determine the total number of casualties but assessed that the number of emergency room admissions in southern Lebanon, a Hezbollah stronghold, was extremely high.
Clearly the number will be in the hundreds of casualties,” Abiad said. “A lot of patients are in the emergency sections of hospitals in most parts of the country, and the health apparatus is working on triaging these cases.”
He said he didn’t know how and why this happened, adding that many medical staff had got rid of their pagers fearing a second wave of detonations.
This is a developing story…
