Doctors spoke of victims who arrived first in a trickle and then in a flood, their fingers blown off, eyes blinded or faces scarred.
Most of the wounded were young men, Dr Zein-el-Dine said, but some were women and children.
At least two children were killed in the initial attacks, one of them a girl of about nine who brought her father his pinging pager only for it to detonate in her hands.
Some Hezbollah men admitted to their shock as they recalled what they had witnessed on the streets of southern Beirut.
“I heard a commotion and went onto the street,” one said. “There were people lying scattered on the ground, including two of my neighbours who were badly injured in their hands and hips. It was horrific.”
Though the men outside the hospital would never have admitted it, the pager attacks clearly humiliated Hezbollah, sowing consternation and uncertainty through its ranks.
And Wednesday’s attacks would only have doubled the panic and the pain. Rarely, if ever, has a movement been so thoroughly and comprehensively infiltrated, and with such devastating effect, too.