Nine dead and thousands injured as Hezbollah pagers explode across Lebanon – latest

Lebanon’s health minister told the BBC that most of the injuries from Tuesday’s pager explosions had been to the hands and face.

Most “appear to be to the face and especially to the eyes, and also the hand with some amputations, whether it’s in the hands or the fingers,” he told the BBC’s Newshour programme.

He added that the “vast majority” presenting to emergency rooms are in civilian clothes, saying this makes it “very difficult to discern whether they belong to a certain entity like Hezbollah or others”.

“But we are seeing among them people who are old or people who are very young, like the child who unfortunately died, and there are some of them who are health care workers.”

Formed in 1982 in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, it is one of the strongest members of the Iran-allied alliance, militarily and organizationally.

A Shiite Muslim group, it took part in repeated attacks against the US through the mid-1990s, including the deadly 1983 bombing of a US Marines barrack in Beirut, Lebanon’s capital.

It has participated in Lebanon’s government since 1992 while its military wing is stronger than the country’s armed forces.

A 2006 war with Israel provoked by Hezbollah’s kidnapping of Israeli soldiers devastated southern Lebanon and Beirut, and many ordinary Lebanese are deeply fearful of a new war with Israel in the wake of the Gaza fighting.

Wary of a repeat of the war itself, Hezbollah has lobbed rockets and missiles across its southern border into Israel since the start of the war in Gaza, losing fighters daily in return fire, but held back from further dramatic escalation.

Air France is suspending services from the French capital’s Charles de Gaulle airport to Beirut and Tel Aviv up to and including 19 September due to escalating security concerns in the Middle East, the airline said on Tuesday.

The operations will resume following an assessment of the situation, Air France added.

Earlier in the day, Lufthansa Group said it is suspending all connections to and from Tel Aviv and Tehran and will bypass Israeli and Iranian airspace up to and including Sept. 19.

The casualties included Hezbollah fighters who are the sons of top officials from the armed group, two security sources told Reuters. One of those killed was the son of a Hezbollah member of the Lebanese parliament, Ali Ammar, they said.

“This is not a security targeting of one, two or three people. This is a targeting of an entire nation,” senior Hezbollah official Hussein Khalil said while paying his condolences for Ammar’s son.

Tuesday’s blasts added to a hefty price paid over the past year by Hezbollah. The group has lost more than 400 fighters in Israeli strikes, including its top commander Fuad Shukr in July. Security sources in Lebanon said two more Hezbollah fighters were killed in an Israeli strike in southern Lebanon on Tuesday.

The airline Lufthansa have announced they are suspending flights to Tel Aviv and Tehran with immediate effect.

In a statement, they said: “Due to the recent change in the security situation, the Lufthansa Group airlines have decided to suspend all connections to and from Tel Aviv (TLV) and Tehran (IKA) with immediate effect. This applies up to and including September 19. During this period, the Israeli and Iranian airspace will also be bypassed by all Lufthansa Group Airlines.

“The Lufthansa Group continues to monitor the situation closely and will assess it further in the coming days.”

Hezbollah and the Lebanese government were quick to blame Israel for the nearly simultaneous detonation of hundreds of pagers used by the militant group’s members in an attack Tuesday that killed at least nine people and wounded nearly 3,000 others, according to officials.

Many of those hit were members of militant group Hezbollah, but it wasn’t immediately clear if others also carried the pagers. Among those killed were the son of a prominent Hezbollah politician and an 8-year-old girl, according to Lebanon’s health minister.

The attack came amid rising tensions between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah, which have exchanged fire across the Israel-Lebanon border since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas that sparked the war in Gaza. Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon was among those injured by the pager explosions.

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The group claimed the attack, which struck at 3.30pm local time, was perpetrated by Israel, an allegation that Israel refused to address, in keeping with its policy on assaults happening outside of its own territory.

The Lebanese health minister Firas al-Abyad said nine people had been killed, including an eight-year-old girl, after the pagers exploded across Lebanon and in the Syrian capital of Damascus, where Hezbollah have stationed some of its members. Another 2,800 were wounded, the minister said, including 400 who were critically injured.

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The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) is braced for a response after Hezbollah accused Israel of being behind the detonation of handheld pagers that has killed at least nine and injured thousands.

Lt Gen Herzi Halevi, the IDF’s chief of staff, insisted that they remain ready “for attack and defence in all arenas”. He declined however to mentioning the pager attacks which occurred across Lebanon and in parts of Syria, and Israel has not responded to accusations they are responsible.

“We will update immediately on any change to [Home Front Command guidelines],” the IDF added.

The UN special coordinator for Lebanon Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert said in a statement late on Tuesday that she deplored the attack across Lebanon hours earlier, warning that it marked an extremely concerning escalation.

In a statement, she urged “all concerned actors to refrain from any further action, or bellicose rhetoric, which could trigger a wider conflagration that nobody can afford”.

On Tuesday afternoon, pagers used by the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah detonated in Beirut and other parts of Lebanon, leaving thousands wounded and killing nine, including a young girl.

It seemed too extraordinary to be real.

At around 3.45pm local time, hundreds of pagers began spontaneously exploding across Lebanon and parts of Syria killing at least eight people, including a child and injuring 2800 others.

Among the wounded are fighters in the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, medics and even Iran’s envoy to Beirut.

The videos – shared online – which purportedly showed the moment these explosions occurred, are even more bizarre and raised further questions. Men in supermarkets, at vegetable stalls and on motorcycles, are seen suddenly being knocked to the ground by the powerful blasts.

Read the full analysis from our chief international correspondent Bel Trew: