Ali Zeaiter and Haidar Hamiye are waiting for news of their two friends admitted to the American University of Beirut hospital. They smoke in front of the door, not believing that just 16 hours earlier they were all together, when their friends received a message on their pagers, took them out, looked at them and exploded. “Suddenly, it sounded like a gunshot. Like a small explosion. In the neighbourhood, they started to hear them everywhere around us, one after the other,” recalls Zeaiter. With their typical Shiite names, their 21 years and their black T-shirts, they do not need to specify what they mean by “the neighbourhood”. It is Dahiye, the suburb (as it literally means) south of Beirut, a stronghold of Hezbollah and the main target of the almost simultaneous explosion on Tuesday of up to 5,000 pagers in Lebanon, in a massive attack that left at least 12 dead and nearly 3,000 wounded. This Wednesday, when the neighborhood was burying the dead of the previous day, another massive detonation at a distance (this time from walkie-talkies and solar panels) added 20 corpses and hundreds of wounded.
Women in traditional Shia dress kept arriving at the hospital with bloodshot eyes. Security prevented everyone from entering: there is no room for the relatives and acquaintances of such a large number of wounded. Although some ambulances approached with their sirens blaring, almost all of the wounded had been admitted since Tuesday, when their simultaneous transfer (the attack lasted barely an hour) brought hospitals to a standstill and drew all eyes to the Mossad, Israel’s secret services abroad. There is little doubt about who was behind both attacks, due to their sophistication and the context, in the midst of a shadow war of attrition between Hezbollah and Israel for more than 11 months, in an unequal exchange of missiles, drones, rockets and bombs on the border.
Ziad, 45, thought the explosion was one of those Israeli missiles. Only later did he understand what he had seen. He was driving his car, stuck in a traffic jam near the city of Sidon, when he heard the explosion in the vehicle next to him. “I looked up and saw the driver, a man, with his face covered in blood in front of the steering wheel. He was with his family in the car, his wife and children, who got out and started screaming,” he recalls outside the hospital. Ziad thought it was one of the so-called targeted killings Israelis, in part because they were close to Ein El Hilwe, the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon and where Israel has recently killed Hamas members.
The double attack has left a mixture of bewilderment, vulnerability and solidarity that transcends the sectarian lines that weigh down the country. A delegation of doctors and nurses has travelled to Beirut to help from Tripoli, the city with which it historically competes in importance. Asceal, for example, is 28 years old, is not Shia and hates the “obsession” with political and religious affiliation in her country, but she has just arrived to donate blood. “We have been suffering a lot for many years, for various reasons, and I feel that it is my obligation as a Lebanese. There are civilians among the wounded. I myself could have been one of them, had I been in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she says. Donations have already closed, but she promises to get up early the next day to get there on time.
There are not only gestures like Asceal’s. There is also anger. A lot of it. Words like “terrorist state” in reference to Israel; “conspiracy” because the make of the pagers was Taiwanese, but the company claims it did not manufacture them and points to a Hungarian company that it says only acted as intermediary; or “revenge” are often heard. The feeling is that something very serious has happened and that the world would condemn it much more if it were the other way around: Hezbollah as the perpetrator and Israel as the victim.
Most of the injuries were to the hand or face, because the pagers went off before they exploded, so they had been picked up or were watching, according to the accounts. Hamiye tells of a different case that he witnessed (“I saw it explode on the side of the belt where he was wearing it, so he is wounded in the side”) and another, of one of his uncles. He says that he carried the device in a fanny pack, along with a pistol magazine, which paradoxically protected him from the detonation. His relatives, on the other hand, were slightly injured.
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In the case of the walkie-talkiesthe wounds are focused on the stomach or the hands. As in the case, captured live, during the funeral procession in Dahiye of four of the martyrs the day before. “The explosion rang out, we turned around and saw a man on the ground, wounded in the hand,” said one of the witnesses, who preferred not to give his name, like others, at a time of high tension and distrust of strangers and electronic devices amid yellow Hezbollah flags and gestures of mourning.
Distrust of technology has been around for a while. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had been making this point in his frequent speeches over the past few months. But it was focused on smartphones. “Each one of them is a spy device,” he said in a speech in February. “It hears everything you do, say, send and photograph. Your location, your home – Israel needs nothing more than that.” Nasrallah told his people what to do with smartphones: “Throw them away, bury them, put them in a metal box and put them away.”
Among the wounded in both attacks are militants and civilians who, in addition to the pager ordered and given to them by Hezbollah, also had a mobile phone. Eight of the twelve dead in the first attack belonged to the military wing, as the group has acknowledged, by publishing their names with photos dressed as such. They are the ones who only trusted pagers or landlines, after Nasrallah’s constant warnings about the danger of moving around with mobile phones.
Among the civilian dead is a ten-year-old girl who took the pager to give it to her father. But not all of them are “collateral damage”, as they are called in military jargon, nor are they undercover militiamen. Rather, Hezbollah is much more than one of the most powerful and armed militias in the world. It is also a political party with a parliamentary presence (and which the European Union does not include on its list of terrorist organisations) and a whole civil network, such as a hospital in Beirut (Al Rasul Al Azam), charitable organisations, spies, mosques, NGOs, administrative services, etc. A kind of “state within a state” capable of stopping any national decision that does not suit it.
This is what Ghazi Zeaiter, 64, is referring to after visiting a moderately wounded relative: a 35-year-old pharmacist who will have to undergo surgery on at least one of his eyes. “He told me that he heard a message, looked to see who it was and what number it was, as always. And just as he was about to press the button, it exploded. He was wearing glasses and the lenses stuck in his eyes,” he explains. Zeaiter criticises the fact that his relative now has to pray to preserve his sight, despite the fact that he was not on the front line of combat: “It is no secret that Hezbollah ordered the pagers and distributed them to his entourage. Some worked directly for them and others did not. How could he be suspicious and think that something like this would happen to him?” he protests.
This was the second major security breach in recent months for Hezbollah. The previous one was the assassination by Israel of its number two, Fuad Shukr, in the middle of Dahiye. A huge and recent poster pays tribute to him today, along with two other large ones. martyrs: the powerful Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, assassinated by the US in Iraq in 2020; and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, presumably by Israel. They are, respectively, in Tehran’s terminology, “the great and the little Satan”.
This Wednesday, in Dahiye – where almost two thirds (1,850) of Tuesday’s wounded were – Shukr’s face crowned the entrance to the cemetery of the martyrs where women kept vigil for the dead. It can also be seen every few kilometres in other parts of the country where Hezbollah has more influence, such as the south or the Bekaa Valley.
