Several people were killed and thousands were wounded across Lebanon Tuesday when pagers used by Hezbollah members — including fighters and medics — detonated simultaneously.
Hezbollah blamed Israel for the pager blasts that Lebanese officials said killed nine people and wounded nearly 3,000 others. Hezbollah said an investigation was being conducted into the causes of the explosions.
Here’s what we know so far about the pager blasts.
When and where did the blasts take place?
The detonations began at around 3:30 p.m. local time in Dahiyeh and the eastern Bekaa valley, both southern suburbs of Beirut that are considered Hezbollah strongholds.
After the initial detonation, the wave of explosions lasted about an hour, with Reuters witnesses and residents of Dahiyeh saying they could still hear explosions at 4:30 p.m. local time.
According to security sources and footage reviewed by Reuters, some of the detonations took place after the pagers rang, causing the fighter to put their hands on them or bring them up to their faces to check the screen.
How big were the explosions?
The blasts were relatively contained, according to footage reviewed by Reuters. In two separate clips from security footage of supermarkets, the blasts appeared to wound the person wearing the pager or the person closest to it.
Footage shot at hospitals and shared on social media appeared to show individuals with injuries of varying degrees, including to the face, missing fingers and gaping wounds at the hip where the pager was likely worn.
The blasts did not appear to cause major damage or start any fires.
What type of pager exploded?
Images of destroyed pagers analyzed by Reuters showed a format and stickers on the back that were consistent with pagers made by Gold Apollo, a Taiwan-based pager manufacturer.
The firm did not immediately reply to questions from Reuters. Hezbollah did not reply to questions from Reuters on the make of the pagers.
At least three people were killed and more than 1,000 others, including Hezbollah fighters and medics, were wounded when their pagers exploded across Lebanon, security sources told Reuters.
Hezbollah fighters had begun using pagers as a low-tech means to try to avoid Israeli tracking of their locations, two sources familiar with the group’s operations told Reuters earlier this year.
Three security sources told Reuters that the pagers that detonated were the latest model brought in by Hezbollah in recent months.
What caused the pagers to explode?
Iran-backed Hezbollah said it was carrying out a “security and scientific investigation” into the causes of the blasts and said Israel would receive “its fair punishment.”
Diplomatic and security sources speculated that the explosions could have been caused by the devices’ batteries detonating, possibly through overheating.
Some experts speculated that Israel had infiltrated the supply chain for Hezbollah’s pagers.
Experts were mystified by the explosions but several who spoke to Reuters said they doubted the battery alone would have been enough to cause the blasts.
Paul Christensen, an expert in lithium ion battery safety at Newcastle University said the level of damage caused by the pager explosions seemed inconsistent with known cases of such batteries failing in the past.
“What we’re talking about is a relatively small battery bursting into flames. We’re not talking of a fatal explosion here. I’d need to know more about the energy density of the batteries, but my intuition is telling me that it’s highly unlikely,” he said.
SMEX, a Lebanese digital rights organization, told Reuters that Israel could have exploited a weakness in the device to cause it to explode. It said the pagers could also have been intercepted before reaching Hezbollah and either tampered with electronically or implanted with an explosive device.
Israeli intelligence forces have previously placed explosives in personal phones to target enemies, according to prior reporting in the book Rise and Kill First. Hackers have also demonstrated the ability to inject malicious code into personal devices, causing them to overheat and explode in some instances.
William Banks, professor emeritus of law at Syracuse University told CBC News he was surprised by the unconventional warfare methods and hadn’t seen this particular tactic of exploding pagers before.
“It’s out of James Bond or it’s out of science fiction,” he said. “But on the other hand, the fact that it’s Israel and Hezbollah makes it less surprising because they’ve been playing this kind of high stakes, lethal cat and mouse game for decades.”
William Banks, an expert in laws of war and asymmetric warfare, spoke to CBC’s Cameron MacIntosh on the tactic of exploding pagers being used in Lebanon and what this means for the ongoing Israel-Hezbollah conflict.
What have authorities said about the blasts?
Lebanon’s foreign ministry called the explosions an “Israeli cyber attack,” but did not provide details on how it had reached that conclusion.
Lebanon’s information minister said the attack was an assault on Lebanon’s sovereignty.
Israel’s military declined to comment to Reuters questions on the pager blasts.
The U.S. State Department said Washington was gathering information and was not involved. The Pentagon said there’s been no change in military actions in the Middle East in the wake of the incident.
What implications will this have in the Middle East?
Analysts say there is the threat of escalation between Israel and Hezbollah, which have been exchanging cross-border fire since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza last October.
But experts are more skeptical, for now, about the potential for triggering an imminent all-out Israel-Hezbollah war, which the U.S. has sought to prevent and which it believes neither side wants.
Matthew Levitt, former deputy director of the U.S. Treasury’s intelligence office and author of a book on Hezbollah, said the pager explosions could disrupt its operations for some time.
Jonathan Panikoff, the U.S. government’s former deputy national intelligence officer on the Middle East, said Hezbollah might downplay its “biggest counterintelligence failure in decades,” but that rising tensions could eventually erupt into full-scale war if diplomacy continues to fall short.
“There’s no kind of a road map that tells us who can do what, who can get away with what, where this might end, how an agreement might be reached,” Banks told CBC News. “This is, of course, the broader Middle East dilemma that we are all witnessing all the time.”
While he said UN charters or NATO treaties may help regulate conflicts between states, Banks noted they don’t exist between Israel and Iran, or Israel, Hezbollah and Hamas, and therefore, “the traditional rules of armed conflict simply aren’t going to do us any good. They aren’t going to even apply in a situation like this.”
