Hizbollah was reeling on Wednesday from a co-ordinated attack that detonated thousands of pagers carried by members of the militant group, causing mayhem across Lebanon in a humiliating blow to a force once seen as impregnable.
A day after the attack that killed 12 people and injured thousands, the group — also the dominant political force in Lebanon — was still grappling with the implications of the unprecedented assault, while contending with badly reduced access to a key communication channel.
The devices blew up, notably in Hizbollah strongholds, after a coded message was sent to them around 3.30pm on Tuesday, said a Lebanese official with knowledge of the preliminary investigation. There were early indications that the detonations were caused by explosives inserted into the pagers, rather than by a remote cyber attack, the official said.
A person familiar with Hizbollah’s thinking said that “internally, there are big questions being asked about how this was even possible”. “Right now, they are trying to reassert calm after a night of panic and anger,” they said.
Hizbollah has blamed the attack on Israel, which has not commented. Hizbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah was due to speak on Thursday, leaving people in Lebanon and across the region — who already feared an escalation of the country’s conflict with Israel — nervously awaiting his response.
Israel has also hinted at a broadening of the conflict with Hizbollah after adding to the objectives of its war in Gaza the return of displaced residents to Israel’s north, near the border with Lebanon, before the pager blasts.
The head of the Israeli army’s northern command, Ori Gordin, told troops on Wednesday: “The mission is clear — we are determined to change the security reality [in northern Israel] as soon as possible.”
The pager attack left blood-spattered scenes at hundreds of locations across Beirut, including supermarkets, offices, hospitals and homes, as well as striking regional locations and setting off blasts in Syria.
Hizbollah said 10 of its members were killed, including the son of a prominent Hizbollah MP and four health workers. At least two of the dead were children aged 8 and 11, however.
The pager detonations have embarrassed the powerful militant group in front of a base and a nation weary from nearly a year of the war of attrition with Israel.
More than half of the almost 2,800 injured were in Beirut and its southern suburb Dahiyeh, while 750 were scattered throughout the south and about 150 in the Bekaa Valley — all areas where Hizbollah is dominant.
Witnesses spoke of widespread gruesome injuries. “It’s like we were on a battlefield doing wartime triage,” said one nurse at Bahman hospital in Beirut’s southern suburbs, who asked not to be named.
“Hands blown off, holes in people’s thighs, head and eye wounds — you name it, we saw it all day. Every hour there were new ambulances coming in. We had to turn people away and send them to other hospitals.”
Nearly 300 people were in a critical condition, said health minister Firas Abiad, some because of facial injuries, others from massive bleeding. Nearly 500 operations have been performed, including to eyes and faces and amputations of fingers and hands.
Hizbollah has long used pagers, but has increased use of the low-tech devices since the start of the Gaza war, which the Iran-backed militant group joined in support of its ally Hamas on October 8. Israel assassinated one of Hizbollah’s most senior commanders, Fuad Shukr, in Beirut in July, triggering an internal assessment of its communications vulnerabilities.
“But this is worse [than Shukr’s assassination],” said the person familiar with the group’s thinking. “This attack exposed just how vulnerable Hizbollah truly is — this was the back-up communications system, and even this was tampered with. Was this network under surveillance for months before this too?”
Earlier this year, people familiar with the group’s operations told the Financial Times that Hizbollah had switched to lower-grade communications systems in an attempt to evade Israeli surveillance and assassination attempts.
Since October, Israel has conducted targeted killings of field commanders and strikes on weapons depots and munitions factories in Lebanon and Syria, alarming Hizbollah’s leadership about the level of intelligence its enemy possessed, and in effect triggering a ban on fighters carrying smartphones.
The people said the militant group believed Israel was deploying a combination of voice recognition surveillance software, artificial intelligence and spies on the ground to deadly effect, exposing Hizbollah’s vulnerabilities.
Pagers are carried by some of the group’s fighters and military leadership, including near the frontline in Lebanon’s south and in Syria where Hizbollah fighters support President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
But many plain-clothes members, including some political party officers, low-ranking members, informants and couriers, also carry them, the people said. Some members also have regular jobs outside Hizbollah, meaning many civilians were close to the exploding devices.
Tuesday’s attack severely hit morale, and was designed to weaken the group’s resolve, said the person familiar with its thinking, as the assault reached across the group’s base and into the civilian population.
“It’s an attempt to disrupt our stability, create chaos and weaken the welcoming environment for the resistance,” said Assad Ali Baziia, who travelled to a Beirut hospital from the coastal city of Tyre after learning a friend was injured when a pager explosion rocked the restaurant where he was eating.
Deeb Badawi, head of the traders’ union in Tyre, said the blasts deeply affected the civilian population. “Tyre is in a state of shock. It was a big surprise for everyone . . . it’s affected their psyches. There are so many people who were injured who have no party affiliation.”
Hizbollah has vowed to retaliate. “But they have to think very hard and very carefully about how they do it,” said the person familiar with the group’s thinking. “We are at the most dangerous point in the war so far.”
Additional reporting by Neri Zilber in Tel Aviv