At least nine were killed and 2,800 others including Hezbollah fighters, medics and Iran’s envoy to Beirut were wounded on Tuesday.
When the pagers they use to communicate exploded across Lebanon, security sources and the Lebanese health minister said. Lebanon’s information minister Ziad Makary said the government condemned the detonation of the pagers as an “Israeli aggression”. Hezbollah also blamed Israel for the pager blasts and said it would receive “its fair punishment”.
A Hezbollah official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the detonation of the pagers was the “biggest security breach” the group had been subjected to in nearly a year of conflict with Israel.
Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah have been engaged in cross-border warfare since the Gaza war erupted last October, in the worst such escalation in years.
Hezbollah confirmed in a statement the deaths of at least three people, including two of its fighters. The third person killed was a girl, it said, adding that an investigation was being conducted into the causes of the blasts.
Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah was not hurt in the explosions, the group said.
The wave of explosions lasted around an hour after the initial detonations, which took place about 3:45pm local time. It was not immediately clear how the devices were detonated.
The Lebanese foreign ministry described the explosions as a “dangerous and deliberate Israeli escalation” which it said had been “accompanied by Israeli threats to expand the war towards Lebanon on a large scale”.
Lebanese internal security forces said a number of wireless communication devices were detonated across Lebanon, especially in Beirut’s southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold. The pagers that detonated were the latest model brought in by Hezbollah in recent months, three security sources said.
AFP journalists saw dozens of wounded being rushed to hospital in Beirut and in the south, where dozens of ambulances rushed between the cities of Tyre and Sidon in both directions.