Device blasts kill 26 over two days in Lebanon

BEIRUT: Fourteen people were killed and over 450 wounded Wednesday when walkie-talkies exploded across Lebanon, the government said, a day after pagers used by Hezbollah blew up, killing 9 and wounding up to 2,800.

The Iran-backed group blamed Israel for the first wave of blasts on Tuesday, vowing revenge and stoking fears of all-out war in the region.

A source close to the Iran-backed group said walkie-talkies used by its members exploded in its Beirut stronghold during the funerals of Hezbollah members killed in Tuesday’s blasts. “A number of walkie-talkies exploded in Beirut’s southern suburbs,” the source said, with Hezbollah-affiliated rescuers confirming devices had exploded inside two cars in the area. The explosions caused panic, according to an AFP photographer covering the funerals.

Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency reported “pagers” and “devices” had also exploded in Hezbollah strongholds in the east and south, with AFP correspondents hearing explosions in those regions. A hospital source in the eastern city of Baalbek told AFP 25 people had been wounded after walkie-talkies exploded.

There was no comment from Israel on the explosions that killed 9 people, including two children, and wounded up to 2,800 others.

Only hours before the blasts, Israel said it was broadening the aims of the Gaza war, sparked by Hamas’s October 7 attack, to include its fight against the Palestinian armed group’s ally Hezbollah. Hezbollah said Israel was “fully responsible for this criminal aggression” and on Wednesday reiterated it would avenge the attack, while vowing to continue its fight against Israel in support of Hamas in the Gaza war.

Cross-border exchanges with Israeli forces were “ongoing and separate from the difficult reckoning that the criminal enemy must await for its massacre,” Hezbollah, which is backed by Israel’s regional foe Iran, said on Telegram.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah is due to give a televised address on Thursday.

The blasts killed two children and 10 other people, Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad said, putting the number of wounded at between 2,750 and 2,800 with some taken to Syria or Iran for treatment. The influx of so many casualties all at once overwhelmed hospitals in Hezbollah strongholds.

At a Beirut hospital, Doctor Joelle Khadra said “the injuries were mainly to the eyes and hands, with finger amputations, shrapnel in the eyes -- some people lost their sight.”

A doctor at another hospital in Beirut, requesting anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the media, said he had worked through the night and that the injuries were “out of this world -- never seen anything like it”.

Experts said Israeli operatives had likely planted explosives on the paging devices before they were delivered to Hezbollah. “This was more than lithium batteries being forced into override,” said Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute. “A small plastic explosive was almost certainly concealed alongside the battery, for remote detonation via a call or page,” the analyst said, adding Israel’s spy agency “Mossad infiltrated the supply chain”.

Among the dead was the 10-year-old daughter of a Hezbollah member, killed in east Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley when her father’s pager exploded, the family and a source close to the group said.

Tehran’s ambassador in Beirut was hurt but his injuries were not serious, Iranian state media reported.

Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian condemned the attack, decrying Western support for Israeli “crimes, killings and indiscriminate assassinations”. A source close to Hezbollah, asking not to be identified, told AFP the pagers were “recently imported” and appeared to have been “sabotaged at source”.

After The New York Times reported the pagers had been ordered from Taiwanese manufacturer Gold Apollo, the company said they had been produced by its Hungarian partner BAC Consulting KFT.

BAC Consulting CEO Cristiana Barsony-Arcidiacono told US broadcaster NBC they “don’t make the pagers. I am just the intermediate.”

As fears again surged of a regional conflagration nearly a year into the Gaza war, Lufthansa and Air France announced the suspension of flights to Tel Aviv, Tehran and Beirut until Thursday.

UN rights chief Volker Turk said Tuesday’s attack had come at an “extremely volatile time”, calling the blasts “shocking” and their impact on civilians “unacceptable”.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Cairo on Wednesday to try to salvage ceasefire talks for the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. In a meeting with the US envoy, Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi vowed to intensify peace talks.

US officials have expressed increasing frustration with Israel, which has rejected US assessments that a deal is nearly complete and insisted on an Israeli military presence on the Egypt-Gaza border.

In Gaza, the civil defence agency said an Israeli air strike on a school-turned-shelter killed five people, while the Israeli military said it targeted Hamas militants.