Lebanon’s Health Minister has confirmed that 12 people – including two children, a boy and a girl – were killed after paging devices that had been distributed to Hezbollah members exploded across the country yesterday.
Four health workers from private hospitals in Beirut’s southern suburbs who had pagers were also killed, he said.
The pagers reportedly received messages that appeared to be coming from Hezbollah’s leadership before detonating, with the New York Times saying the messages appeared to trigger the devices.
Minister Firass Abiad that the death toll today had reached 12 people, including two children, adding that the number of wounded was between 2,750 and 2,800.
Reuters say that sources have told them that Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, had planted explosives inside pagers imported by Hezbollah months before previously.
It has led to threats of retaliation from Hezbollah, and fears that the war in Gaza may spill over into a wider conflict that may drag in Iran and the US.
Hezbollah said in a statement that “the resistance will continue today, like any other day, its operations to support Gaza, its people and its resistance which is a separate path from the harsh punishment that the criminal enemy (Israel) should await in response to Tuesday’s massacre”.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said that Western backers of Israel should feel “shame” after the number of those killed and wounded by the paging devices explosions became known.
Lebanon’s state national news agency reports that the country’s Minister or Information, Ziad Makary, described the explosions as “a blatant attack on the Lebanese sovereignty, that targeted civilians, not only Hezbollah members”.
“What we fear is not Hezbollah, but Israel’s criminality, whether in Gaza or Lebanon. Lebanon is preparing a complaint to submit to the UN security council, and the ambassadors of certain states concerned with this never-ending conflict between Lebanon and the Israeli enemy will be summoned.”
“The enemy does not care about anybody, not even about the constant and public US pressures. US diplomacy must intensify its pressures on Israel before it does on Hezbollah and Lebanon,” the minister added.
However, Israel has refused to comment on the incident.
The pagers were supplied by a Taiwanese company, Gold Apollo, who say they were not involved in their manufacture, and that they were made by a company in Europe that Gold Apollo named in a statement as BAC.
“The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it,” Mr Hsu told reporters at the company’s offices in the northern Taiwanese city of New Taipei.
A senior Lebanese source told Reuters that: “Mossad injected a board inside of the device that has explosive material that receives a code. It’s very hard to detect it through any means.”