At least 9 dead and over 2,000 injured after pager explosions in Lebanon and Syria

BEIRUT (AP) — Pagers used by hundreds of members of the militant group Hezbollah exploded almost simultaneously in Lebanon and Syria on Tuesday, killing at least nine people – including an 8-year-old girl – and wounding several thousand, authorities said. They blamed Israel for what appeared to be a sophisticated, long-range attack.

Among those injured was Iran's ambassador to Lebanon. The mysterious incident came amid growing tensions between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah, which have exchanged gunfire across the Israeli-Lebanese border since the October 7 Hamas attack that sparked the war in Gaza.

The exploded pagers had been newly acquired by Hezbollah after the group's leader ordered members to stop using cell phones and warned that they could be tracked by Israeli intelligence. A Hezbollah official told The Associated Press that the pagers were a new brand that the group had not used before.

At around 3:30 p.m. local time on Tuesday, pagers began heating up and exploding in the pockets and hands of carriers – particularly in a southern Beirut suburb and in the Bekaa region of eastern Lebanon, where Hezbollah has a strong presence, as well as in Damascus, where several Hezbollah members were injured, Lebanese security officials and a Hezbollah official said. The Hezbollah official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.

The AP reached out to the Israeli military, which declined to comment. The explosions came hours after Israel's domestic intelligence agency said it had foiled a Hezbollah attempt to kill a former senior Israeli security official with a planted explosive device that could be detonated remotely.

Experts said the pager explosions suggested it was a long-planned operation – but the means were not immediately known. Investigators had no immediate information on how the pagers were detonated or whether explosives had somehow been hidden in each of them.

Whatever the means, it targeted an extraordinary number of people with hundreds of small explosions – all at once, wherever the pager bearer happened to be – and left some maimed.

A video circulating online shows a man browsing fruits and vegetables in a grocery store when the bag he was carrying on his hip explodes, knocking him to the ground and sending passersby running away. AP photographers at area hospitals said emergency rooms were overflowing with patients. Some had hands or parts of their legs missing near the bag.

Lebanon's Health Minister Firas Abiad said the explosions killed at least nine people, including an eight-year-old girl, and injured 2,750 – 200 of them seriously. Most suffered injuries to their faces, hands or stomachs.

Hezbollah said in a statement that two of its members were among those killed. The Hezbollah official, who asked not to be identified, identified one of the dead as Mahdi Ammar, the son of a member of the group in the Lebanese parliament.

“We hold the Israeli enemy fully responsible for this criminal aggression, which was also directed against civilians,” Hezbollah said, adding that Israel “will certainly receive its just punishment.”

The Iranian state news agency IRNA reported that the country's ambassador, Mojtaba Amani, suffered superficial injuries from an exploding pager and was being treated in a hospital.

The images seen Tuesday showed signs of a detonation, said Alex Plitsas, a weapons expert at the Atlantic Council. “A lithium-ion battery fire is one thing, but I've never seen one explode like that. It looks like a small explosive charge,” Plitsas said.

This raises the possibility that Israel knew about a shipment of pagers to Hezbollah and managed to modify the pagers before delivery, he said.

Another possibility is an electronic pulse “sent remotely that burned the devices and caused them to explode,” said Yehoshua Kalisky, a scientist and senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, a think tank in Tel Aviv. “This was not a random action; it was deliberate and known.”

Israel has a long tradition of deadly operations behind enemy lines.

In January, Saleh Arouri, a senior Hamas official, was killed in an airstrike on a Beirut apartment building that Israel blamed. In July, Israel assassinated Hezbollah's top commander in another airstrike. Hours later, Ismail Haniyeh, the supreme leader of Hamas, died in a mysterious explosion in Iran that was also blamed on Israel.

Israel has previously killed Hamas fighters with explosive-laden cell phones and is widely considered to be the mastermind of the Stuxnet computer virus attack on Iran's nuclear program in 2010.

Tuesday's explosions came at a time of heightened tensions between Lebanon and Israel. Clashes between Hezbollah and Israeli forces have been taking place almost daily for more than 11 months amid the war in the Gaza Strip between Israel and Hamas, a Hezbollah ally that is also backed by Iran.

The clashes left hundreds dead in Lebanon and dozens in Israel, and forced tens of thousands on both sides of the border to flee their homes. On Tuesday, Israel said it was now an official war aim to stop Hezbollah attacks in the north so residents could return to their homes.