Dozens of Hezbollah members wounded after pagers explode in Lebanon

Dozens of members of Hezbollah have been seriously wounded on Tuesday in southern Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut when the pagers they use to communicate exploded, the National News Agency has reported.

“Tens of injuries have been taken to hospital after pagers exploded through the use of high technology,” the NNA said.

Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr, reporting from Beirut, said it was a “major development” in the war between Israel and the Iran-backed group and said it appears that the devices were penetrated and hacked in a coordinated attack.

“This is a major security breach – Hezbollah’s communications device has been compromised. We have seen pictures from across Lebanon of men lying on the floor wounded, bleeding. We have seen reports of hospitals asking for blood,” she said.

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 war with Israel.

Khodr said that Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah called on his fighters a few months ago to stop using smartphones because Israel has the technology to infiltrate and penetrate those devices.

“So now they’ve resorted to this different communications system using pagers and it seems they have been penetrated,” she said.

“We are getting reports that there were near simultaneous explosions in southern Lebanon, in east of the country and in Beirut’s southern suburbs.”

Khodr reported that there was widespread panic in Beirut and ambulances were rushing through the southern suburbs of the capital. Reuters reported residents as saying that explosions were taking place even 30 minutes after the initial blasts.

There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military, which has been exchanging fire with Hezbollah since last October in parallel with its war on Gaza.

Elijah Magnier, a military analyst, told Al Jazeera that Hezbollah relies heavily on pagers to prevent Israel intercepting their communications and he speculated that the pagers would had to have been tampered with before being distributed to Hezbollah members.

Earlier on Tuesday, Israel announced the expansion of its official war aims, widening its nearly year-long fight against Hamas in Gaza to focus on Hezbollah along its northern border with Lebanon.

While the focus of the war has been on Gaza, the unabating exchanges of fire between Israeli troops and Hamas ally Hezbollah in Lebanon have forced tens of thousands of people on both sides of the border to flee their homes.

“The political-security cabinet updated the goals of the war this evening, so that they include the following section: the safe return of the residents of the north to their homes,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement early on Tuesday.

Not formally declared as a war, the exchanges of fire between Israeli troops and Hezbollah have killed hundreds of mostly fighters in Lebanon, and dozens of civilians and soldiers on the Israeli side.

On Monday, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said “military action” was the “only way left to ensure the return of Israel’s northern communities”.

Hezbollah, which like Hamas is backed by Israel’s regional arch-foe Iran, claimed a dozen attacks on Israeli positions on Monday and three more on Tuesday.