Waves of Small Explosions Cause Chaos Inside Hezbollah

by · NY Times

Waves of Small Explosions Cause Chaos Inside Hezbollah

Two series of coordinated attacks targeting the group’s wireless devices caused thousands of injuries, piercing the group’s rank and file and raising questions about how it will respond.

  • Share full article
Outside the American University of Beirut Hospital on Tuesday, where many people injured in Tuesday’s attack were taken.
Credit...Mohamed Azakir/Reuters

By Ben Hubbard

Reporting from Istanbul

First, hundreds of pagers blew up, killing and injuring members of Lebanon’s most effective military organization and filling the country’s hospitals with wounded patients.

Next, during mass funerals on Wednesday for people killed in the previous day’s blasts, more wireless devices exploded, adding to the human toll and spreading terror that any portable gadget in people’s hands or pockets could suddenly become a weapon.

Lebanese and American officials said Israel had remotely detonated devices carried by Hezbollah members. The attacks marked one of the largest security failures in Hezbollah’s history and sowed chaos inside one of the Middle East’s most sophisticated anti-Israel forces.

“This operation is basically Hezbollah’s Oct. 7,” said Mohanad Hage Ali, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, comparing the group’s security failures to those that allowed its ally, Hamas, to strike Israel last year, starting the war in Gaza. “It is a huge slap.”

The attacks, carried out in two waves of simultaneous explosions, blew off fingers, bloodied faces and damaged eyes. The target was clearly Hezbollah, although many of the victims were civilians, including a medic killed in the hospital where he worked and a girl who picked up her father’s beeping pager to take it to him.

The Lebanese health authorities said that the first wave of explosions, on Tuesday, killed 12 people, including two children, and wounded more than 2,700. The second wave of blasts on Wednesday killed 20 and injured more than 450 others, the authorities said.

Israel has not confirmed or denied involvement in the attacks.

For Hezbollah, experts said, the blows were both physical and psychological.

“It is a serious attack,” Mr. Hage Ali said, adding that during 11 months of aerial attacks across the Lebanon-Israel border, Hezbollah had lost many leaders and cadres, some in targeted assassinations.

“And now this blow cuts through the rank and file of the organization,” he said. “It is a kind of sword stabbed deep into the organization’s body, and it will take it time to heal from that.”

Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate, but its members appeared to be in shock on Wednesday, especially after the second wave of explosions, which appeared to focus on hand-held radios. The group’s leaders have given no indication of how this attack could change conflict with Israel. The group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, is expected to speak on Thursday.

Hezbollah was formed in the 1980s, with Iranian help, to fight the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, which ended in 2000. In the years since, it has grown into Lebanon’s most effective political party and fighting force, and expanded its operations into Syria, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East.

In Lebanon, it has deep roots in parts of society, as well an extensive apparatus to support its mission that includes offices dedicated to social services, communications and internal security.

The group has not said how many of its members and fighters were affected, but the wounded in the first wave were overwhelmingly in areas where the group holds sway: the south, near the border with Israel; the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon; and the capital Beirut and its southern suburbs, Lebanon’s health minister, Firass Abiad, told reporters on Wednesday before the second wave of explosions.

Dr. Abiad said Tuesday’s blasts had come with no warning and that thousands of patients had suddenly arrived in emergency rooms. Nearly 10 percent of the cases were critical, and many patients remain in intensive care. Medics performed 460 operations, mostly on hands, faces and eyes.

Not all of the wounded were men of fighting age, he said.

“We saw that there were children, there were elderly people,” he said. “That shows that there were a lot of the pagers that were in houses. Maybe there was one whose children were playing with it.”

Hezbollah did not announce that any senior figures were among the dead, who included the son of a Hezbollah lawmaker. The Iranian ambassador to Lebanon, a key liaison between Hezbollah and its key sponsor, was wounded. Blasts were reported in shops, open markets and buildings where Hezbollah functionaries work.

Hezbollah goes to great lengths to keep the identities of its fighters secret, so much so that they often become known to their neighbors only when their deaths are announced. A secondary effect of the attack could be to blow that cover, leaving operatives with visible wounds that indicate their links to the group.

Speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to journalists, three Lebanese with knowledge of the matter said the pagers had arrived in Lebanon recently and were distributed because they were presumed to offer more secure communications than cellphones.

The group abandoned many devices after the first attack, likely disrupting its members’ ability to communicate. The second took out the hand-held radios that some had resorted to as a backup.

The attacks likely incapacitates some members, but Hezbollah has a long history of adaptability. It lost many fighters in its last major war with Israel, in 2006, but emerged stronger in the following years, building a vast arsenal that is believed to include more than 100,000 rockets and sophisticated weapons like precision-guided missiles that can hit sensitive sites inside Israel.

There is nothing in Hezbollah’s history or ideology that suggests that the attacks will cause it to seek an accommodation with Israel. But experts on the group said it is stuck between feeling the need to respond and wanting to avoid an all-out war with Israel that could be catastrophic for both sides.

Complicating its decision is that Hezbollah has linked its cross-border strikes on Israel to the war in Gaza, leading officials in Washington and elsewhere to hope that a cease-fire there between Israel and Hamas would bring quiet to the Lebanese border as well. The attacks could change that calculation.

“Hezbollah is in a trap of its own making,” said Randa Slim, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “Having tied their confrontation with Israel to the ongoing war on Gaza limits their options to de-escalate. This attack makes it even harder for them to do so.”

Hezbollah could decide that the new attacks necessitate its own retaliation, regardless of what happens in Gaza. The group could choose to deploy new weapons to strike military bases or civilian infrastructure inside Israel or seek to surprise Israel by targeting its interests elsewhere in the world.

Inside Lebanon, Hezbollah relies on a deeply loyal community to support its operations and provide it with fighters. It remains unclear how the blasts will affect this community, Ms. Slim said.

“This will also add to fatigue and weariness already developing inside Hezbollah’s constituency,” she said. “On the other hand, it might increase demands inside the constituency for Hezbollah to strike back hard.”

Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut.

Our Coverage of the Middle East Crisis