Witnesses to Lebanon pager attack: ‘We started to hear blasts everywhere around us, one after the other’

Ali Zeaiter and Haidar Hamiye are waiting for news of their two friends admitted to the American University of Beirut hospital. They smoke in front of the door, finding it difficult to believe that just 16 hours earlier they were all together, when suddenly their friends received a message on their pagers, took them out, looked at them and were injured by the exploding devices. “Suddenly, it sounded like a gunshot. Like a small explosion. In the neighborhood, we started to hear blasts everywhere around us, one after the other,” explains Zeaiter.

With their typical Shiite names, their 21 years of age and their black T-shirts, they do not need to specify what they mean by “the neighborhood.” It is Dahiye, the suburb south of Beirut that is a stronghold of Hezbollah and the main target of the almost simultaneous explosion on Tuesday of up to 5,000 pagers, in a massive attack that left at least 12 people dead and nearly 3,000 wounded. On Wednesday, as the neighborhood was burying the dead from the previous day, another massive remote detonation (this time affecting walkie-talkies and solar panels) added 20 corpses and hundreds more wounded.

Women in traditional Shia dress keep arriving at the hospital with bloodshot eyes. Security personnel prevents many from entering: there is no room for the relatives and acquaintances of such a large number of wounded. A few ambulances approach with their sirens blaring, but almost all of the wounded were admitted on Tuesday, when the pager attack brought hospitals to a standstill and drew all eyes to the Mossad, Israel’s secret services abroad. There is little doubt about who was behind both attacks, due to their sophistication and the context in which they took place: a shadow war of attrition between Hezbollah and Israel that has been going on for more than 11 months, in an unequal exchange of missiles, drones, rockets and bombs on the border.

Ziad, 45, at first thought the explosion was one of those Israeli missiles. Only later did he understand what he had seen. He was at the wheel of his car, stuck in a traffic jam near the city of Sidon, when he heard an explosion in the vehicle next to him. “I looked up and saw the driver, a man, with his face covered in blood in front of the steering wheel. He was with his family in the car, his wife and children, who got out and started screaming,” he recalls outside the hospital. Ziad thought it was one of the so-called Israeli targeted killings, partly because they were close to Ein El Hilwe, the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon and a place where Israel has recently killed Hamas members.

The double attack has created a mixture of bewilderment, vulnerability and solidarity that transcends the sectarian lines that weigh down the country. A delegation of doctors and nurses has travelled to Beirut from Tripoli, the city with which it historically competes in importance. Asceal is 28 years old, she is not Shia, and she hates the “obsession” with political and religious affiliation in her country. She is here to donate blood. “We have been suffering a lot for many years, for various reasons, and I feel that it is my obligation as a Lebanese. There are civilians among the wounded. I myself could have been one of them, had I been in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she says. Donations have already ended for the day, but she promises to get up early the next day to get there on time.

There are not only gestures like Asceal’s. There is also anger. A lot of it. Words like “terrorist state” in reference to Israel; “conspiracy” because the maker of the pagers was Taiwanese, but the company claims it did not manufacture them and points to a Hungarian company that it says only acted as an intermediary; or “revenge” are often heard. The feeling is that something very serious has happened and that the world would be condemning it much more sternly if it were the other way around: Hezbollah as the perpetrator and Israel as the victim.

Most of the injuries were to the victims’ hands and faces, because the pagers beeped before they exploded, so they had been picked up or were being looked at, according to witness accounts. Hamiye talks about a different case that he witnessed (“I saw it explode on the side of the belt where he was wearing it, so he is wounded in the side”). And one of his uncles, he says, carried the device in a fanny pack, along with a pistol magazine, which paradoxically protected him from the blast.

In the case of the walkie-talkies, the wounds are mostly to the victims’ stomachs or the hands. As in the case, captured live, during the funeral procession in Dahiye of four of the victims of the previous day’s attack. “There was an explosion, we turned around and saw a man on the ground, wounded in the hand,” said one of the witnesses, who preferred not to give his name, like others, at a moment of high tension and distrust of strangers and electronic devices.

Distrust of technology has been around for a while. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had been making this point in his frequent speeches over the past few months. But it was focused on cellphones. “Each one of them is a spy device,” he said in a speech in February. “It hears everything you do, say, send and photograph. Your location, your home – Israel needs nothing more than that.” Nasrallah told his people what to do with cellphones: “Bury it. Put it in an iron box and lock it.”

Among the wounded in both attacks there are militants and civilians who, in addition to the pager given to them by Hezbollah, also had a mobile phone. Eight of the 12 dead in the first attack belonged to the military wing, as the group has acknowledged by publishing their names with photos dressed as such. They are the ones who only trusted pagers or landlines, after Nasrallah’s constant warnings about the danger of moving around with mobile phones.

Among the civilian casualties there is a 10-year-old girl who took the pager to give it to her father. But not all of these civilians were “collateral damage,” as they are called in the military jargon, nor were they undercover militiamen. Rather, Hezbollah is much more than one of the most powerful and armed militias in the world. It is also a political party with a parliamentary presence (and which the European Union does not include on its list of terrorist organizations) with an entire civilian network, such as a hospital in Beirut (Al Rasul Al Azam), charitable organisations, spies, mosques, NGOs, administrative services and more. A kind of “state within a state” capable of stopping any national decision that does not suit it.

This is what Ghazi Zeaiter, 64, is referring to after visiting a relative who has been moderately injured: a 35-year-old pharmacist who will have to undergo surgery on at least one of his eyes. “He told me that he heard a message, looked to see who it was and what number it was, as he always does. And just as he was about to press the button, it exploded. He was wearing glasses and the lenses stuck in his eyes,” he explains. Zeaiter criticises the fact that his relative now has to pray to preserve his sight, despite the fact that he was not on the front lines of combat: “It is no secret that Hezbollah ordered the pagers and distributed them to its entourage. Some worked directly for them and others did not. How could he think that something like this would happen to him?”

This was the second major security breach in recent months for Hezbollah. The previous one was the assassination by Israel of its number two leader, Fuad Shukr, in the middle of Dahiye. A huge and recent poster today pays tribute to him along with two other great “martyrs”: the powerful Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, assassinated by the U.S. in Iraq in 2020; and the leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniye, presumably by Israel. The U.S. and Israel are, in Tehran’s terminology, the “Great Satan” and “Little Satan.”

On Wednesday, in Dahiye, where almost two-thirds (1,850) of Tuesday’s wounded were at the time of the attack, Shukr’s face crowned the entrance to the martyrs’ cemetery where women were holding vigil for the dead. It can also be seen every few kilometres in other areas of the country where Hezbollah has more influence, such as the south or the Bekaa valley.

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